Distributed uplink cache for improved energy and spectral efficiency in B5G small cell network

The advent of content-centric networks and Small Cell Networks (SCN) has resulted in the exponential growth of data for both uplink and downlink transmission. Data caching is considered one of the popular solutions to cater to the resultant challenges of network congestion and bottleneck of backhaul links in B5G networks. Caching for uplink transmission in distributed B5G scenarios has several challenges such as duplicate matching of contents, mobile station's unawareness about the cached contents, and the storage of large content size. This paper proposes a cache framework for uplink transmission in distributed B5G SCNs. Our proposed framework generates comprehensive lists of cache contents from all the Small Base Stations (SBSs) in the network to remove similar contents and assist uplink transmission. In addition, our framework also proposes content matching at a Mobile Station (MS) in contrast to an SBS, which effectively improves the energy and spectrum efficiency. Furthermore, large size contents are segmented and their fractions are stored in the distributed cache to improve the cache hit ratio. Our analysis shows that the proposed framework outperforms the existing schemes by improving the energy and spectrum efficiency of both access and core networks. Compared to the existing state of the art, our proposed framework improves the energy and spectrum efficiency of the access network by 41.28% and 15.58%, respectively. Furthermore, the cache hit ratio and throughput are improved by 9% and 40.00%, respectively.