Cache Management for 5G Cloud Radio Access Networks

CRAN (Cloud Radio Access Networks) has been proposed for 5G technologies to provide improved scalability, flexibility, and performance for supporting rapid increase of IoT devices. This paper proposes two efficient cache management algorithms for the Baseband Units pool in CRAN. It adopts the Exponential Decay (EXD) scheme to keep recently frequently requested records in cache, and enhances it with Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to support multiple levels of mobility and QoS. Performance evaluation demonstrates that, comparing with existing algorithms, Least Frequently Used and EXD, the two proposed EXD-AHP algorithms successfully increase cache hits while reduce network traffic incurred due to cache misses. They also provide preferential services for high levels of SLA and high mobility users. We believe that this work is significant in 5G networks for supporting IoT services, and is widely applicable to other cache management systems.