Joint Optimization of Caching and Association in Energy-Harvesting-Powered Small-Cell Networks

The rapidly growing mobile traffic calls for higher quality of service (QoS) and lower on-grid energy cost. Integrating energy harvesting to small-cell networks (SCNs) with caching has been regarded as a promising solution. However, considering the limited resources of the small-cell base stations (SBSs), how to cache contents and serve the mobile users (MUs) is a crucial problem. In this paper, we jointly design a green content caching and mobile user–base station (MU-BS) association mechanism in the SCNs, where the number of MUs’ content requests served by the SBSs is maximized. This mechanism maximizes the number of requests handled by the SBSs under the constraints of the available energy and backhaul capacity of the SBSs, while concurrently ensures the QoS of the MUs. First, the joint optimization problem is formulated, which is NP-hard. To decrease the complexity of the problem, we divide it into two subproblems: MU-BS association and content caching. But when the number of SBSs is large, these two subproblems cannot be efficiently solved by the conventional centralized approaches. Thus, we construct a two-dimensional-action weakly acyclic game to optimize these two subproblems distributedly and iteratively, in which the existence of the two-dimensional-action Nash equilibrium has been proved. Finally, we propose a two-dimensional iteration algorithm to solve the problem. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve better performance when compared with the other existing algorithms.