A Framework of Cooperative Cell Caching for the Future Mobile Networks

The demand for rich multimedia services over mobile networks has been soaring at a tremendous pace over recent years. However, the wireless link capacity as well as the bandwidth of the radio access networks and the backhaul network cannot practically cope with the explosive growth in mobile traffic load. In this article, we mainly focus on a new novel framework of cooperative cell caching for future mobile cellular networks, where the base station of each cell can have certain capability of caching popular contents. Then we carry out necessary theoretical modeling-based analysis. We also propose to utilize prefix-tree aggregation to improve the caching performance among cells, and discuss potential deployment issues for caching in 5G mobile networks. Based on trace-driven simulations, we evaluate the performance of the proposed framework.