In-Network Caching: An Efficient Content Distribution Strategy for Mobile Networks

The sharp increase in wireless devices yields a huge amount of mobile data traffic, which has made either the radio access network or the core network of current mobile communication systems seriously overloaded. In-network caching arises as a promising solution to this burning issue. By introducing content centric networking infrastructure, popular content files can be intelligently stored in the radio access network so that redundant transmissions through the core network can be significantly reduced, which can substantially alleviate the load of both the core network and the backhauls between the radio access network and the core network. In this article, we discuss what to cache, how to cache and how to evaluate the performance of a cache-enabled mobile network. We first discuss the instructive caching policies, then propose reasonable performance evaluation metrics for these caching policies. We present detailed numerical results demonstrating remarkable gains by the in-network caching technique. Finally, we discuss relate