CaaS: Caching as a Service for 5G Networks
Xiuhua Li, Xiaofei Wang, Keqiu Li, Victor C. M. Leung · IEEE Access · 2017
In recent years, demands for rich multimedia services over mobile networks have been soaring at a tremendous pace. Traditional dedicated networking equipment may not be able to efficiently support the phenomenal growth of the traffic load and user demand dynamics while consuming an unnecessarily large amount of energy resources. Recently, mobile content caching, whereby popular contents are cached inside the mobile front-haul and back-haul networks so that demands for these contents from users in proximity can be easily accommodated without redundant transmissions from the remote sources, has emerged as an efficient technique for multimedia content delivery. Mobile content caching is particularly suitable for fifth generation (5G) mobile systems that are being designed to incorporate advanced cloud computing technologies and network function virtualization techniques. Therefore, in this paper, we first propose the concept of “Caching-as-a-Service” (CaaS) based on cloud-based radio access networks, and virtualized evolved packet core, which provides the capability to cache anything at anytime, anywhere in the cloud-based 5G mobile systems to satisfy user demands from any service location with high elasticity and adaptivity, and to empower third-party service providers with flexible controllability and programmability. Then, we study the potential techniques related to the virtualization of caching, and discuss the technical details of virtualization and optimization of CaaS in 5G mobile networks. Some novel schemes for CaaS are proposed to target different mobile applications and services. We also explore new opportunities and challenges for further research.