Unified service delivery framework for 5G edge networks

Global mobile traffic pattern is recently experiencing a paradigm shift largely influenced by the exponentially growing social networking services. These services are uniquely characterized by bandwidth-intensive asynchronously accessed multiple-object based popular contents. Traditional mobile networks have not been designed to cater to these new requirements. Consequently, in 5G networks there is a need to bring in novel architectural enhancements directed towards efficient network performance in terms of service delivery. Previous works in literature have proposed edge node caching based approaches. However, the treatment is not pragmatic as it is not linked opportunistically with contents and delivery methods diversity. In this paper, first we present a service-level multi-connectivity approach that leverages the combined potential of multicast and unicast in disseminating contents/sub-contents. Further, we extend the approach to build a unified service delivery framework while incorporating proximal Device-to-Device (D2D) clusters and relay systems. We propose a bandwidth resource effective method of initial spreading of cache-able contents via multicast delivery and provide an algorithm for selecting caching devices directed to maximize the coverage of contents along with optimizing resource cost and latency performance for the network. We show with simulation results the proposed system brings significant performance gains over previous approaches for both synchronous and asynchronous contents.