Learning Based Content Caching and Sharing for Wireless Networks

Content caching at base stations (BSs) is a promising technique for future wireless networks by reducing network traffic and alleviating server bottleneck. However, in practice, the content popularity distribution may change with spatio-temporal variation but be unknown for BSs, which is an intractable obstacle for efficient caching strategy design. In this paper, considering unknown popularity distribution, we explore the content caching problem by jointly optimizing the content caching in cooperative BSs, content sharing among BSs, and cost of content retrieving. We tackle the problem from a multi-armed bandit learning perspective, where the learning of the popularity distribution is incorporated with the content caching and sharing process. Specifically, we first propose a centralized algorithm by employing a semidefinite relaxation approach, and we prove that this centralized algorithm learns efficient caching by deriving a sub-linear learning regret bound. To further reduce computational complexity, we propose a distributed algorithm based on alternating direction method of multipliers, where each BS only solves their own problems by exchanging local information with neighbor BSs. Extensive simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms in terms of learning content popularity distributions of individual BSs, offloading traffic from the content server, and reducing cost of content retrieving.