Wireless Broadband Services using Smart Caching

Broadband access for all will be a key functionality in future mobile radio networks. Depending on the length and the characteristic of the radio wave propagation the performance of the network is substantially impacted. Especially in urban application scenarios a ubiquitous reachability is hard to achieve. In combination this results in high variations of link quality so that broadband services are hard to realize. This paper discusses a technique, named Smart Caching, which tries to overcome the problems of network performance variations. It focuses herewith on non real time and non interactive services. Smart Caching follows the approach of pre-fetching and buffering data at the edge of the core network and transmitting it whenever the terminal comes into service range of an Access Point. Especially on motorways this technology can provide broadband services even under the conditions of intermittent network coverage. The mutual reaction of Smart Caching enabled and legacy services is shown. Additionally dimensioning aspects and the resulting performance gain is discussed. The performance of the Smart Caching service is evaluated with a sophisticated queuing model based on the Markov Arrival Process. All network characteristics, like arrival and service process are modeled in very detail.