Online Digital Twin-Empowered Content Resale Mechanism in Age of Information-Aware Edge Caching Networks

For users requesting popular contents from content providers, edge caching can alleviate backhaul pressure and enhance the quality of experience of users. Recently there is also a growing concern about content freshness that is quantified by age of information (AoI). Therefore, AoI-aware online caching algorithms are required, which is challenging because the content popularity is usually unknown in advance and may vary over time. In this paper, we propose an online digital twin (DT) empowered content resale mechanism in AoI-aware edge caching networks. We aim to design an optimal two-timescale caching strategy to maximize the utility of an edge network service provider (ENSP). The formulated optimization problem is non-convex and NP-hard. To tackle this intractable problem, we propose a DT-assisted Online Caching Algorithm (DT-OCA). In specific, we first decompose our formulated problem into a series of subproblems, each handling a cache period. For each cache period, we use a DT-based prediction method to effectively capture future content popularity, and develop an online caching strategy. Competitive ratio analysis and extensive experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm has promising performance, and outperforms other benchmark algorithms. Insightful observations are also found and discussed.