Caching Efficiency Maximization for Device-to-Device Communication Networks: A Recommend to Cache Approach

Edge side caching assisted device-to-device (D2D) communication has been acknowledged as a promising technique to alleviate the heavy burden of backhaul transmission link and to reduce the network latency. However, the effectiveness of caching strategies at the network edge is highly dependent on the distribution of individual user’s content preference. To fully attain the benefits of edge caching, some proactive mechanisms shall be considered. Among which, recommendation performs noticeably well due to its capability of reshaping the content request probabilities of different users, which in turn affects the cache decision significantly. In this work, we quantitatively investigate how recommendation can be applied to enhance the caching efficiency of D2D enabled wireless content caching networks. And for that, the cache hit ratio maximization problem for a generic network model is formulated taking into account the requirements of each user’s personalized recommendation quality, recommendation quantity and cache capacity. Then, we show that the optimal recommendation and caching policies which jointly maximize the cache efficiency is NP-hard to compute. Further, a time-efficient sub-optimal algorithm is designed, which works in an iterative manner and has provable convergence guarantee as well as polynomial time complexity. Monte-Carlo simulation results demonstrate the convergence performance of our proposed joint decision algorithm and its cache efficiency improvements compared to extensive benchmarks.