A Swiss Army Knife for Dynamic Caching in Small Cell Networks

Abstract

We consider a dense cellular network, in which a limited-size cache is available at every base station (BS). Coordinating content allocation across the different caches can lead to significant performance gains, but is a difficult problem even when full information about the network and the request process is available. In this paper we present qLRU-$\Delta$, a general-purpose dynamic caching policy that can be tailored to optimize different performance metrics also in presence of coordinated multipoint transmission techniques. The policy requires neither direct communication among BSs, nor a priori knowledge of content popularity and, under stationary request processes, has provable performance guarantees.

Results improved: we discuss how information about content popularity can be exploited (new figure 6 and text at p. 12)