Geographically fair in-network caching for mobile data offloading

Data offloading from the cellular network to low-cost WiFi has been the subject of several research works in the last years. In-network caching has also been studied as an efficient means to further reduce cellular network traffic. In this paper we consider a scenario where mobile users can download popular contents (e.g., maps of a city, shopping information, social media, etc.) from WiFi-enabled caches deployed in an urban area. We study the optimal distribution of contents among the caches (i.e., what contents to put in each cache) to minimize users´ access cost in the whole network. We argue that this optimal distribution does not necessarily provide geographic fairness, i.e., users at different locations can experience highly variable performance. In order to mitigate this problem, we propose two different cache coordination algorithms based on gossiping. These algorithms achieve geographic fairness while preserving the minimum access cost for end users.