Intelligent Video Caching at Network Edge: A Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach

Today’s explosively growing Internet video traffics and viewers’ ever-increasing quality of experience (QoE) demands for video streaming bring tremendous pressures to the backbone network. As a new network paradigm, mobile edge caching provides a promising alternative by pushing video content closer at the network edge rather than the remote CDN servers so as to reduce both content access latency and redundant network traffic. However, our large-scale trace analysis shows that different from CDN based caching, edge caching environment is much more complicated with massively dynamic and diverse request patterns, which renders that existing rule-based and model-based caching solutions may not well fit such complicated edge environments. Moreover, although cooperative caching has been proposed to better afford limited storage on each individual edge server, our trace analysis also shows that the request similarity among neighboring edges can be highly dynamic and diverse, which is drastically different from CDN based caching environment, and can easily compromise the benefits from traditional cooperative caching mostly designed based on CDN environment. In this paper, we propose MacoCache, an intelligent edge caching framework that is carefully designed to afford the massively diversified and distributed caching environment to minimize both content access latency and traffic cost. Specifically, MacoCache leverages a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) based solution, where each edge is able to adaptively learn its own best policy in conjunction with other edges for intelligent caching. The real trace-driven evaluation further demonstrates that MacoCache is able to reduce an average of 21% latency and 26% cost compared with the state-of-the-art caching solution.