Sensors, Vol. 19, Pages 1422: Energy-Efficient Nonuniform Content Edge Pre-Caching to Improve Quality of Service in Fog Radio Access Networks (Sensors)

The fog radio access network (F-RAN) equipped with enhanced remote radio heads (eRRHs), which can pre-store some requested files in the edge cache and support mobile edge computing (MEC). To guarantee the quality-of-service (QoS) and energy efficiency of F-RAN, a proper content caching strategy is necessary to avoid coarse content storing locally in the cache or frequent fetching from a centralized baseband signal processing unit (BBU) pool via backhauls. In this paper we investigate the relationships among eRRH/terminal activities and content requesting in F-RANs, and propose an edge content caching strategy for eRRHs by mining out mobile network behavior information. Especially, to attain the inference for appropriate content caching, we establish a pre-mapping containing content preference information and geographical influence by an efficient non-uniformed accelerated matrix completion algorithm. The energy consumption analysis is given in order to discuss the energy saving properties of the proposed edge content caching strategy. Simulation results demonstrate our theoretical analysis on the inference validity of the pre-mapping construction method in static and dynamic cases, and show the energy efficiency achieved by the proposed edge content pre-caching strategy.