A New Vision of Wireless Edge Caching Networks (WECNs): Issues, Technologies, and Open Research Trends

The future generation of wireless cellular system is expected to accommodate extensive latency-sensitive, tactus-aware, and data-intensive intelligent applications, thereby posing significant challenges on current network architectures. For meeting the challenges, wireless edge caching has been envisioned as a viable enabler. However, the underlying key issues therein, such as reliability, effectiveness, and the joint design, are significantly undervalued. The reliability issue refers to the data-corruption problem incurred by hardware impairments, software upgrades, and network congestion at edges. The effectiveness issue here expresses the unsatisfactory cache hit efficiency. Whilst the joint design aims to acquire the tradeoff among different metrics. In this article, we are dedicated to filling these research gaps. Therewith, we first brief the hierarchical wireless edge caching network architecture with proactive mechanisms. Then, we elaborate on the research roadways towards these critical issues and examine how fault-tolerant coding and bundle recommendation strategies can potentially enhance the reliability and the effectiveness of edge caching in future intelligent communication era. Moreover, the interplay between forgoing mentioned aspects is illuminated as well. A pair of case studies are exemplified to further demonstrate the validity of our devised versatile solutions. At last, the open research opportunities and future trends are identified.