A Novel Mobile Edge Network Architecture with Joint Caching-Delivering and Horizontal Cooperation

Mobile edge caching/computing has been emerging as a promising paradigm to provide new services (e.g., ultra-high rate, ultra-reliable, and/or low-latency communications) in future wireless networks. In this paper, we introduce a novel mobile edge caching network architecture that leverages the optimal joint caching-delivering with horizontal cooperation among mobile edge nodes (MENs), namely JOCAD. Under this architecture, MENs cooperate with each other in both caching and delivering contents, aiming to simultaneously minimize the total average delay for the mobile users and mitigate the network traffic on the backhaul link. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed solutions can reduce the total average delay for the whole network up to 40% compared with the most frequency-of-access policy, and up to 25% compared with locally optimal caching policy (i.e., without collaboration). Furthermore, the proposed solutions also increase the cache hit rate for the network by four times, thereby dramatically reducing the traffic load on the backhaul network.