Collaborative Content Distribution in 5G Mobile Networks with Edge Caching

While the fifth-generation (5G) mobile networks are evolving to a content-centric paradigm, the surging traffic demands keep stressing the ever-increasing network capacities. To alleviate the traffic pressure, especially from video content distribution, in-network caching and particularly edge caching offer an effective means to save network bandwidths and balance traffic loads. In this paper, we consider an integrated content distribution framework with universal in-network caching and collaboration across domains. Leveraging this integrated framework, we develop a context-aware solution, which effectively exploits cache collaboration and context information to relieve network congestion. We also conduct simulations with real datasets for the network topology and video library. The results show that the proposed solution outperforms the reference schemes in terms of link bandwidth usage and video delivery quality.