A Cooperative Green Content Caching Technique for Next Generation Communication Networks

Proactive content caching at the network-edge is envisioned as a key technique to reduce backhaul congestion and latency in popular content delivery. Data storage units, however, require additional energy, which offers a challenge to researchers who intend to reduce energy consumption up to 90% in next generation networks. The concept of powering data storage units by renewable energy aligns with this energy reduction target. In this article, we introduce a proactive caching strategy, which caches content in helper nodes in a cooperative manner considering intermittent renewable energy and variable content load for various hours of the day. The hypothesis is that the amount of renewable energy available to various helper nodes varies depending on the node location and time of the day. The content load across helper nodes also varies with time. As such, if helper nodes work cooperatively by considering the available renewable energy and content load at each helper node, the aggregate non-renewable energy consumption for content caching can be further reduced. We model the research challenge as an optimization problem. Furthermore, we also present a heuristic solution. Our proposed scheme achieves a significant reduction in non-renewable energy consumption by 23% over the existing green solution.