A Chinese Restaurant Game for Distributed Cooperative Caching in Small Cell Networks

Abstract

Wireless content caching in small cell networks has recently been considered as a promising way to alleviate the congestion of the backhaul in emerging heterogenous cellular network. However, how to select files which are cached in SBSs and how to make SBSs work together is an important issue for cooperative cache research for the propose of reducing file download time. In this paper, a Cooperative-Greedy strategy (CGS) among cache-enabled small base stations (SBSs) in small cell network is proposed, in order to minimize the download time of files. This problem is formulated as a Chinese restaurant game.Using this game model, we can configure file caching schemes based on file popularity and the spectrum resources allocated to several adjacent SBSs. Both the existence and uniquencess of a Nash equilibrium are proved. In the theoretical analysis section, SBSs cooperate with each other in order to cache popular files as many as possible near UEs. Simulation results show that the CGS scheme outperforms other schemes in terms of the file-download time.