Decentralized Caching Strategies for Energy-Efficient Content Delivery

We consider the problem of designing content-caching strategies for the energy-efficient delivery of content such as video, over an internet-style network. We propose a method for the design of decentralized caching strategies that can adapt to real-time changes in regional content popularity. This design method is based on a recently proposed reduced consensus-optimization scheme wherein a number of agents networked over a general mesh topology cooperate in locating the optimum of the sum of their individual, privately known objective functions. The agents ( i.e. network nodes with caching capabilities) achieve the collectively optimal caching configuration via nearest-neighbor interactions and measurements of local content request rates only. The caching behavior of individual nodes, which dynamically trades transport and caching energy costs in response to fluctuations in content demand, is designed to optimize the performance of the network as a whole.