Social-Aware Proactive Content Caching and Sharing in Multi-Access Edge Networks

The ever-increasing data explosion, particular mobile video traffic, increases the backhaul load and makes it difficult for the centralized cloud to meet the requirements of various services. Accordingly, proactive caching at mobile devices gains more attentions, which is envisioned as a promising technology to relieve the backhaul traffic and cater to diverse quality of service in multi-access edge networks. In this article, we study the problem of proactive caching and content sharing for mobile devices in multi-access edge networks. Since users’ mobility behaviors and social impacts on content preference distort the performance of content requests, a long-term strategy of proactive caching is proposed to minimize the sum of communication costs to get the requested contents. By taking the mutual interaction of devices into account, we design a local cooperative utility function that is used to derive a distributed proactive content caching algorithm using game theory. Theoretical analysis is provided to confirm the stability and optimality of the proposed algorithm. Furthermore, simulation results show that the proposed algorithm converges efficiently and, most importantly, it outperforms compared to no local cooperation caching scheme, non-social aware caching scheme and randomly caching scheme for various kinds of user behaviors and device caching capacity.