Cooperative edge-caching based transmission with minimum effective delay in heterogeneous cellular networks

In heterogeneous cellular networks (HCNs), neighboring users often request similar contents asynchronously. Based on the content popularity, base stations (BSs) can download and cache contents when the network is idle, and transmit them locally when the network is busy, which can effectively reduce the backhaul burden and the transmission delay. We consider a two-tier HCN, where macro base stations (MBSs) and small base stations (SBSs) can cooperatively and probabilistically cache contents. Each user is associated to the BS with the maximum average received signal power in any tier. With the cooperative content transfer between MBS tier and SBS tier, users can adaptively obtain contents from BSs or remote content servers. We properly model both wired and wireless delays when a user requests an arbitrary content, and propose the concept of effective delay. Content caching probabilities are optimized using the Marine Predators Algorithm via minimizing the average effective delay. Numerical results show that our proposed cooperative caching scheme achieves much shorter delays than the benchmark caching schemes.