Joint Scheduling of Communication-Computation-Caching in F-RAN

With the emergence of new services and applications, it becomes indispensable to jointly allocate heterogeneous network resources in face of various quality-of-experience (QoE) requirements. In order to quantitatively characterize the tradeoff between communication, computation and caching (3C), which is still unclear, a typical application of adaptive bitrate (ABR) content streaming is considered in fog radio access networks (F-RAN). For improving the QoE, an optimization problem of minimizing the average delay is first formulated subject to constrained 3C resources. To solve the resulting problem that is NP-hard, it is first relaxed as a linear programming problem, then an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM)-based algorithm is proposed, which has the advantages of relatively low complexity and fast convergence. Simulation results show that with a joint allocation of 3C, significant performance gains are achieved by the proposed ADMM-based algorithm. Furthermore, while the scarcity of one resource can be compensated by other resources to a certain extent, it requires a matched allocation of 3C resources to effectively improve QoE and at the same time avoid resource waste.