Network Coding For Data Delivery in Caching at Edge: Concept, Model, and Algorithms

To deal with the explosive traffic demand, caching at the edge of mobile networks has been proposed to improve the quality of user experience. Presently, the edge caching systems are based on the direct and simple relay transmission, which is hard to achieve high system throughput and good content service. In such situations, network coding can effectively solve these problems. One problem arises in the application of network coding: how to form X topology network. We formulate the X topology formation problem as a function of system throughput and content service satisfaction degree. Then we propose a coalition game theory based algorithm to solve this NP-hard problem and prove the Nash stability of our coalition formation game. We evaluate our proposed algorithm through extensive simulations in different network environments. The experiment results demonstrate that our algorithm achieves nearly optimal performance and significantly outperforms the four widely-accepted baseline algorithms.