Content Popularity Prediction via Federated Learning in Cache-Enabled Wireless Networks

With the rapid development of networks, users are increasingly seeking richer and high-quality content experience, and there is an urgent need to develop efficient content caching strategies to improve the content distribution efficiency of caching. Therefore, it will be an effective solution to combine content popularity prediction based on machine learning (ML) and content caching to enable the network to predict and analyze popular content. However, the data sets which contain users’private data cause the risk of privacy leakage. In this paper, to address this challenge, we propose a privacy-preserving algorithm based on federated learning (FL) and long short-term memory (LSTM), which is referred to as FL-LSTM, to predict content popularity. Simulation results demonstrate that the performance of the proposed algorithm is close to the centralized LSTM and better than other benchmark algorithms in terms of privacy protection. Meanwhile, the caching policy in this paper raises about 14.3% of the content hit rate.