Caching-as-a-Service: Virtual caching framework in the cloud-based mobile networks

Over recent years, the demand for rich multimedia services over mobile networks has been soaring at a tremendous pace. However, it is envisioned that traditional dedicated networking equipment in mobile network operators (MNOs) cannot support the phenomenal growth of the traffic load and user demand dynamics, but consume unnecessary energy resource inefficiently. The emerging techniques for mobile content caching and delivery become more and more attractive, by which popular content can be cached inside mobile front-haul and back-haul networks, so that demands to the same content from users in proximity can be easily accommodated without redundant transmissions from the remote resource, thereby eliminating duplicated traffic significantly. While the incorporation between advanced cloud computing technologies and network function virtualization (NFV) techniques has become an essential issue in the evolution process of mobile systems, in this article, we propose the concept of “Caching-as-a-Service” (CaaS), a caching virtualization framework along with the development of Cloud-based Radio Access Networks (C-RAN), and the virtualization of Evolved Packet Core (EPC). Then we study the potential techniques related to the cache virtualization, and discuss technical details of caching virtualization and system optimization for CaaS. We carry out numerical evaluation on proposed framework and show significant improvement on the performance of reducing inter-MNO traffic load and intra-MNO traffic load.