Integration of Networking, Caching, and Computing in Wireless Systems: A Survey, Some Research Issues, and Challenges

Since the recently emerging mobile applications have posed significant demands not only on high data rate but also on high caching and computing capabilities, the growth in communication capability alone is no longer sustainable for wireless networks. The integration of networking, caching, and computing functionalities into one system can provide not only native support for highly scalable and efficient content retrieval, but also powerful capability of data processing, hence reducing duplicate content transmissions and enabling swift executions of computationally intensive tasks. Despite the prospect of integrated networking, caching, and computing systems, a number of significant research challenges remain to be addressed prior to widespread deployment of integrated networking, caching, and computing systems, including latency requirement, interfaces, mobility management, resource and architecture tradeoffs, convergence, etc. In this paper, we provide a brief survey on some of the works that have been done to enable the integrated networking, caching, and computing system, and discuss several research challenges. We identify a number of important aspects of the integration of networking, caching, and computing: motivations, frameworks, performance metrics, enabling technologies, and challenges. At last, some broader perspectives are explored.