QoE-oriented Soft Caching with Content Recommendation for Edge Computing Networks

Mobile Edge Caching (MEC) can potentially alleviate Internet transmission congestion by delivering content at the network edge. However, current MEC solutions suffer from low resource utilization efficiency and often fail to meet user Quality of Experience (QoE), primarily due to dynamic user requests and obsessive pursuit of direct caching hits. Given the prevalence of recommendation systems, users often lack precise requests when using recommendation-based applications like TikTok and Taobao, insted passively enjoying recommended content. In this paper, we introduce a recommendation-enabled MEC architecture to enhance resource utilization and QoE. We develop a recommendation-enabled soft caching model and formulate the optimization problem as maximizing joint system revenue. To address this, we propose an attention-assisted federated learning deep Q-network algorithm. We conduct the simulations by using the real-world MIND dataset. The results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm outperforms existing baselines, demonstrating its effectiveness in improving resource utilization and QoE.