User-Preference-Learning-Based Proactive Edge Caching for D2D-Assisted Wireless Networks

This work investigates proactive edge caching for device-to-device (D2D)-assisted wireless networks, where user equipment (UE) can be selected as caching nodes to assist content delivery to reduce the content transmission latency. In doing so, there are two challenges: 1) how to precisely get the user’s preference to cache the proper contents at UEs and 2) how to replace the contents cached at UEs when there are new popular contents emerging. To address these, we develop a user preference learning-based proactive edge caching (UPL-PEC) strategy. In the strategy, we first propose a novel context and social-aware user preference learning method to precisely predict user’s dynamic preferences by jointly exploiting the context correlation among different contents, the influence of social relationships and the time-sequential patterns of user’s content requests. Specifically, the bidirectional long short-term memory networks are adopted to capture the time-sequential patterns of the user’s content requests. And, the graph convolutional networks are developed to capture the high-order similarity representation among different contents from the constructed content graph. To learn the social influence representation, an attention mechanism is designed to generate the social influence weights to users with different social relationship. Based on the learned user preference, a proactive edge caching architecture is proposed to integrate the offline caching content placement and the online caching content replacement policy to continuously cache the popular contents at UEs. Simulation results show that the proposed UPL-PEC strategy outperforms the existing similar caching strategies at about 3.13%–4.62% in terms of the average content transmission latency.