Cooperation Based Proactive Caching in Multi-Tier Cellular Networks

The limited caching capacity of the local cache enabled Base station (BS) decreases the cache hit ratio (CHR) and user satisfaction ratio (USR). However, Cache enabled multi-tier cellular networks have been presented as a promising candidate for fifth generation networks to achieve higher CHR and USR through densification of networks. In addition to this, the cooperation among the BSs of various tiers for cached data transfer, intensify its significance many folds. Therefore, in this paper, we consider maximization of CHR and USR in a multi-tier cellular network. We formulate a CHR and USR problem for multi-tier cellular networks while putting major constraints on caching space of BSs of each tier. The unsupervised learning algorithms such as K-mean clustering and collaborative filtering have been used for clustering the similar BSs in each tier and estimating the content popularity respectively. A novel scheme such as cluster average popularity based collaborative filtering (CAP-CF) algorithm is employed to cache popular data and hence maximizing the CHR in each tier. Similarly, two novel methods such as intra-tier and cross-tier cooperation (ITCTC) and modified ITCTC algorithms have been employed in order to optimize the USR. Simulations results witness, that the proposed schemes yield significant performance in terms of average cache hit ratio and user satisfaction ratio compared to other conventional approaches.