A Comprehensive Review on Edge Caching from the Perspective of Total Process: Placement, Policy and Delivery

Abstract

With the explosive growth of smart devices and mobile applications, mobile core networks face the challenge of exponential growth in traffic and computing demand. Edge caching is one of the most promising solutions to the problem. The main purpose of edge caching is to place popular content that users need at the edge of the network, borrow free space to reduce user waiting time, and lighten the network load by reducing the amount of duplicate data. Due to the promising advantages of edge caching, there have been many efforts motivated by this topic. In this paper, we have done an extensive survey on the existing work from our own perspectives. Distinguished from the existing review articles, our work not only investigates the latest articles in this area, but more importantly, covers all the researches of the total process of edge caching from caching placement optimization, policy design, to the content delivery process. In particular, we discuss the benefits of caching placement optimization from the perspective of different stakeholders, detail the delivery process, and conduct in-depth discussions from the five phases, i.e., requested content analysis, user model analysis, content retrieval, delivery, and update. Finally, we put forward several challenges and potential future directions, and hope to bring some ideas for the follow-up researches in this area.

Fusion of IoT, AI, Edge–Fog–Cloud, and Blockchain: Challenges, Solutions, and a Case Study in Healthcare and Medicine

“…As a consequence, there are many ongoing research projects focusing on offloading from heuristic methods to Markov decision process, fuzzy logic system, and reinforcement learning, among others [72], [73]. -Edge Caching: It has been shown that idle storage resources can be utilized to tackle a series of challenges (e.g., unnecessary end-to-end (E2E) communication) raised by limited spectrum and bandwidth resources of edge [74]. This promising approach, known as Edge caching, is mainly constructed based on AI technology to address the corresponding questions: where to cache, and when and how to cache [74].…”

“…-Edge Caching: It has been shown that idle storage resources can be utilized to tackle a series of challenges (e.g., unnecessary end-to-end (E2E) communication) raised by limited spectrum and bandwidth resources of edge [74]. This promising approach, known as Edge caching, is mainly constructed based on AI technology to address the corresponding questions: where to cache, and when and how to cache [74]. -Edge Management and Maintenance: To deal with the edge management and maintenance problem, a large of AI techniques have been proposed.…”

Política Cooperativa Orientada à Rede para Posicionamento de Cache e Roteamento de Requisições em Redes de Celulares Heterogêneas

“…Conciliadas, tais tecnologias destacam-se como alternativas promissoras para atender aos requisitos de comunicac ¸ão supracitados. Nesse sentido, atuam especificamente na reduc ¸ão de transmissão de dados replicados nos enlaces de Backhaul (BH), baseadas no princípio de posicionamento de caches próximos aos usuários [Wu et al 2021].…”

“…Os projetos para cache em HCN possuem dois problemas enfatizados na literatura. Primeiramente, o problema de inserc ¸ão de conteúdo, o qual é a fase que determina qual, onde e como o conteúdo deve ser armazenado [Wu et al 2021]. Por sua vez, o problema de entrega de conteúdo, o qual está relacionado à forma como o conteúdo será entregue ao usuário, o qual abarca os problemas de roteamento de requisic ¸ões [Dehghan et al 2017] e associac ¸ão do usuário à BS [Harutyunyan et al 2018].…”

Collaborative Caching in Edge Computing via Federated Learning and Deep Reinforcement Learning

“…Compared to cloud computing, MEC is still constrained by limited storage capacity [2]. Edge servers can cache only part of the content, and video users can retrieve data from nearby edge servers instead of from remote cloud servers if the data are already cached on those edge servers [3].…”