Mobility-aware Caching Scheduling for Fog Computing in mmWave Band

Abstract

As an extension of cloud computing, fog computing at the edge of networks provides low latency, location awareness, and real-time interactions. At the same time, millimeter wave (mmWave) communications are able to provide directional multi-gigabit transmission rates with large available bandwidth. Based on the user mobile trajectories in a region, several activity hotspots that users pass by frequently can be obtained. By caching popular content at the edge nodes near the hotspots, users can download the cached content directly at a short distance, and the user experience can be significantly improved. Considering multiple hotspots in a region, how to efficiently schedule the transmission for the caching at edge nodes becomes a key problem. In this paper, we focus on the problem of mobility aware transmission scheduling for caching at edge nodes near hotspots, and utilize multi-hop relaying and concurrent transmissions to achieve better performance. After formulating the optimal scheduling problem as a stochastic nonlinear mixed integer program, we propose a mobility aware caching scheduling scheme, called MHRC (Multi-Hop Relaying based Caching), where multi-hop D2D paths are established for edge nodes, and concurrent transmissions are exploited in the scheduling of caching at edge nodes. Extensive performance evaluation demonstrates MHRC achieves more than 1x higher expected cached data amount compared with state-of-the-art schemes.