The role of cloud computing in content-centric mobile networking

Due to the ever growing popularity of smart handheld devices, the demand for multimedia services has had an upsurge in mobile networks over the past several years, and traditional mobile networking is turning into a content-centric mobile networking (CCMN). To maintain high quality of service for multimedia services, especially video services, caching is regarded as one of the most effective techniques. In this article, we first examine the limitations of caching techniques in conventional CCMN, including the core network and RAN. Then, by leveraging cloud computing into both core network and RAN caching, a cloud CCMN architecture is discussed, which overcomes the limitations of conventional CCMN architecture. Specifically, we elaborate on a cloud content delivery network in the core network and cloud RAN with caching as a service on the RAN side. Furthermore, we review the main problems that have been studied under cloud CCMN architecture. Recent results show that cloud CCMN is a promising architecture to serve the foreseen multimedia traffic. Lastly, we conclude this article by presenting some open challenges in cloud CCMN.