Transcoding-Enabled Edge Caching Strategy Optimization: A Dual-Timescale Meta-Learning-Based Stackelberg Game Approach

The explosive growth in video services has significantly strained current mobile network infrastructure, leading to spectrum scarcity, backhaul congestion, and degraded quality of experience. While edge caching has emerged as a promising solution to address these challenges and deliver seamless video playback experience, multiversion edge caching for heterogeneous clients remains challenging due to varying client requirements and network conditions. This article proposes a transcoding-enabled edge caching framework for mobile edge-cloud computing networks. Specifically, we combine video transcoding with edge caching to support both “direct cache hits” and “soft cache hits” for reducing transmission latency. We model this joint caching and resource allocation problem as a Stackelberg game to minimize video transmission latency. To solve this problem, we develop a novel dual timescale model agnostic meta-learning (MAML)-based Stackelberg game (DTMSG) optimization approach that determines the delay-optimal Stackelberg equilibrium (SE) and accelerates convergence. Simulation results demonstrate that our DTMSG optimization algorithm efficiently converges to the SE point, maximizing the utility function of the MVNO and BSs while reducing the average video transmission delay.