Energy Efficiency of Downlink Networks with Caching at Base Stations

Caching popular contents at base stations (BSs) can reduce the backhaul cost and improve the network throughput. Yet whether locally caching at the BSs can improve the energy efficiency (EE), a major goal for 5th generation cellular networks, remains unclear. Due to the entangled impact of various factors on EE such as interference level, backhaul capacity, BS density, power consumption parameters, BS sleeping, content popularity and cache capacity, another important question is what are the key factors that contribute more to the EE gain from caching. In this paper, we attempt to explore the potential of EE of the cache-enabled wireless access networks and identify the key factors. By deriving closed-form expression of the approximated EE, we provide the condition when the EE can benefit from caching, find the optimal cache capacity that maximizes the network EE, and analyze the maximal EE gain brought by caching. We show that caching at the BSs can improve the network EE when power efficient cache hardware is used. When local caching has EE gain over not caching, caching more contents at the BSs may not provide higher EE. Numerical and simulation results show that the caching EE gain is large when the backhaul capacity is stringent, interference level is low, content popularity is skewed, and when caching at pico BSs instead of macro BSs.