Joint transmission and caching policy design for energy minimization in the wireless backhaul link

Caching the most popular contents at Small Base Stations (SBSs) is envisioned as a promising solution to reduce both the load and energy consumption of the backhaul link connecting the SBSs to the core network. This paper considers a set of users whose demands are served by an SBS connected through a wireless backhaul link to a Macro Base Station (MBS). The SBS is capable of caching content in its limited cache memory. The transmission policy at the MBS and the caching policy at the SBS are jointly optimized in order to minimize the energy consumption in the backhaul link. The numerical results show significant improvements with respect to prior works.