Reducing backhaul costs for mobile content delivery — An analytical study

Mobile carriers are currently facing the tremendous challenge of coping with the rapid data traffic growth stemming from smart phones and data dongles. Recent studies have shown that caching of high volume content within carrier networks has the potential of substantial cost savings in network resources. This paper analyzes the effectiveness of caching in mobile carrier networks, being enabled by distributed mobility gateways and content caches, and estimates how much cost savings an operator can expect for different cache deployment scenarios. The study considers various backhaul network characteristics and several content replication strategies.