Content Caching and Distribution at Wireless Mobile Edge

Mobile edge computing can provision hierarchical cloud resources at the edge, and efficiently reduce the distance that the remote data need to travel towards the end-users. To empower content delivery at the edge and ultimately transform 'shorter distance' to 'less time', instead of focusing only on the storage aspects (e.g., allocation of limited media caches) of mobile edge, the radio aspects (e.g., interference models caused by sharing limited RBs) should be jointly considered. We hence propose a novel comprehensive analytical content caching and delivery framework for the cloud enhanced mobile edge with hierarchical radio access points. To investigate the impacts of limited radio resources (e.g., power, spectrum, and time) and storage resources, we propose a joint user scheduling and caching (JSC) scheme to optimize the end to end performance in terms of throughput (i.e., the number of successful content requests). By leveraging the backhaul links among multi-tier access points, the proposed algorithm can tap on the potential of the coded multi-casting scheme, which is designed to reduce the traffic load among the network. Simulation results demonstrate that the JSC algorithm can improve the resource utilization efficiency and provide a significant sum throughput gain.