Caching as a Service: Small-Cell Caching Mechanism Design for Service Providers

Wireless network virtualization has been well recognized as a way to improve the flexibility of wireless networks by decoupling the functionality of the system and implementing infrastructure and spectrum as services. Recent studies have shown that caching provides a better performance to serve the content requests from mobile users. In this paper, we propose that caching can be applied as a service in mobile networks, i.e., different service providers (SPs) cache their contents in the storage of wireless facilities that are owned by mobile network operators. Specifically, we focus on the scenario of small-cell networks, where cache-enabled small-cell base stations are the facilities to cache contents. To deal with the competition for storage among multiple SPs, we design a mechanism based on multi-object auctions, where the time-dependent feature of system parameters and the frequency of content replacement are both taken into account. Simulation results show that our solution leads to a satisfactory outcome.