Experimenting with cache peering in multi-tenant 5G networks

The introduction of virtualized compute and storage resources at the edge of 5G mobile networks is expected to facilitate the flexible instantiation and management of services and applications at the network vicinity of the end users, including content caching. At the same time, virtualization fosters the emergence of multiple-tenants of the shared 5G infrastructure, separately operating such services. In this context, this paper examines the potential benefits presented by the cooperation of co-located tenants in the form of cache peering relationships. Building a proof of concept testbed, we experimentally validate these benefits further investigating aspects related to resource allocation and isolation in a sliced networking environment. Our preliminary results show that cache peering can increase cache hit ratio by approximately 15.3%, an increase otherwise achieved by the lease of an additional 33% of storage resources. This comes at the cost of limited CPU utilization overheads (8.7%) due to peering load.