A Novel Caching Framework for Mobile Social Networks in 5G and Beyond

The exponential growth of mobile social networks (MSN) catering popular social networking services accompanied with rapid proliferation of smart-phones is bringing a paradigm shift for mobile communication. Service access on these MSNs is mostly asynchronous resulting in unpredictable traffic patterns. Present mobile networks are inherently deficient in catering to these new requirements and suffer from congestion at the network core and the radio access network (RAN), poor utilization of communication resources, low quality of experience for users. Previous works in Literature have provided generic framework for service delivery for MSN, however, they lack in addressing the dynamic scenarios of user mobility and meeting varied quality of service (QoS) requirements imposed by different social networking services. In this paper, we target enhancing the performance for MSN. Particularly, we investigate and exploit the composite multi-content nature of social network services and leverage the combined potential of broadcast and unicast in suitably disseminating contents/sub-contents. Further, we provide an in depth analysis of user mobility and service QoS factors and their efficient handling during cache building and allocation steps for MSN. Multihop communication is considered to better facilitate the proximal device to device link data exchange capitalizing on transferred contents, and its impact over the incurred RAN cost is examined. We show, with simulation results, a substantial saving for RAN cost is achieved with considering these new factors.