Proactive Content Caching by Exploiting Transfer Learning for Mobile Edge Computing

Abstract

To address the vast multimedia traffic volume and requirements of user Quality of Experience (QoE) in the next generation mobile communication system (5G), it is imperative to develop efficient content caching strategy at mobile network edges, which is deemed as a key technique for 5G. Recent advances in edge/cloud computing and machine learning facilitate efficient content caching for 5G, where mobile edge computing (MEC) can be exploited to reduce service latency by equipping computation and storage capacity at the edge network. In this paper, we propose a proactive caching mechanism named Learning based Cooperative Caching (LECC) strategy based on MEC architecture to reduce transmission cost while improving user QoE for future mobile networks. In LECC, we exploit a Transfer Learning (TL)-based approach for estimating content popularity, and then formulate the proactive caching optimization model. As the optimization problem is NP- hard, we resort to a greedy algorithm for solving the cache content placement problem. Performance evaluation reveals that LECC can apparently improve content cache hit rate, decrease content transmission cost in comparison with known existing caching strategies.