Fairness and Transmission-Aware Caching and Delivery Policies in OFDMA-Based HetNets

Recently, wireless edge caching has emerged as a promising technology for future wireless networks to cope with exponentially increasing demands for high data rate and low latency multimedia services by proactively storing contents at the network edge. Here, we aim to design efficient cache placement and delivery strategies for an orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA)-based cache-enabled heterogeneous cellular network (C-HetNet) which operates in two separated phases: caching phase (CP) and delivery phase (DP). Since guaranteeing fairness among mobile users (MUs) is not well investigated in cache-assisted wireless networks, we first propose two delay-based fairness schemes called proportional fairness (PF) and min-max fairness (MMF). The PF scheme deals with minimizing the total weighted latency of MUs while MMF aims at minimizing the maximum latency among them. In the CP, we propose a novel proactive fairness and transmission-aware cache placement strategy (CPS) corresponding to each target fairness scheme by exploiting the flexible wireless access and backhaul transmission opportunities. Specifically, we jointly perform the allocation of physical resources as storage and radio, and user association to improve the flexibility of the CPSs. Moreover, in the DP of each fairness scheme, an efficient delivery policy is proposed based on the arrival requests of MUs, CSI, and caching status. Numerical assessments demonstrate that our proposed CPSs outperform the total latency of MUs up to 27 percent compared to the conventional baseline popular CPSs.