Edge content caching strategy for user fairness in edge computing

There exists unfairness of users for accessing to contents in the existing works on content caching, due to unbalance among users in terms of quality of service. Thus, an efficient heuristic algorithm was proposed to cache contents. Specifically, the utility function of users was defined. Then, the priority for combing contents and edge servers was also defined according to minimum utility and total utility for the increasement of a unit budget. The proposed heuristic algorithm updated caching strategy based on the priority of the combination of contents and edge servers. In addition, a simulated annealing algorithm was customized, to refine the solution generated by the heuristic algorithm. Experimental results show that, the proposed algorithms outperform the existing works on caching content, in terms of minimum utility of users and fairness among users. For example, for the cases of different storage capacities, the minimum utility of users for the two proposed algorithms can be improved by 78.5% and 87.3% on average, compared with the existing works. Meanwhile, the fairness indexes of users for two proposed algorithms increase 0.03 and 0.05 on average, compared with the existing works. © 2022, Editorial Board of Journal of Huazhong University of Science and Technology. All right reserved.