Caching With Time-Varying Popularity Profiles: A Learning-Theoretic Perspective

Content caching at the small-cell base stations (sBSs) in a heterogeneous wireless network is considered. A cost function is proposed that captures the backhaul link load called the `offloading loss', which measures the fraction of the requested files that are not available in the sBS caches. As opposed to the previous approaches that consider time-invariant and perfectly known popularity profile, caching with non-stationary and statistically dependent popularity profiles (assumed unknown, and hence, estimated) is studied from a learning-theoretic perspective. A probably approximately correct result is derived, which presents a high probability bound on the offloading loss difference, i.e., the error between the estimated and the optimal offloading loss. The difference is a function of the Rademacher complexity, the $β-$mixing coefficient, the number of time slots, and a measure of discrepancy between the estimated and true popularity profiles. A cache update algorithm is proposed, and simulation results are presented to show its superiority over periodic updates. The performance analyses for Bernoulli and Poisson request models are also presented.