Resource allocation for cache-enabled cloud-based small cell networks

To address the serious challenge of satisfying explosively increasing multimedia content requests from a massive number of users in mobile networks, deploying content caching in base stations to offload network traffic while satisfying content requests locally has been regarded as an effective approach to enhance the network performance. Moreover, content delivery via wireless transmissions in a cache-enabled mobile network needs to be optimized taking the proactive caching policy into consideration. Accordingly, in this paper, we investigate and propose an efficient resource allocation framework for cache-enabled cloud-based small cell networks (C-SCNs) to achieve the benefits of content caching by considering two phases, i.e., content placement and content delivery. In particular, for the content placement phase, we propose a low-complexity distributed popularity-based framework for allocating cache sizes of SBSs to popular contents, in order to offload network traffic and satisfy content requests locally. For the content delivery phase, we propose a low-complexity joint user association and subcarrier-power allocation scheme for min-rate guaranteed content delivery over orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) based downlink transmissions. Trace-based simulations and numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes in the cache-enabled C-SCNs.