Community oriented in‐network caching and edge caching for over‐the‐top services in adaptive network conditions to improve performance

Over‐the‐top (OTT) services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, and YouTube generate the most dominant form of traffic on the Internet today. There is increasingly high demand for resource intensive 3D contents, interactive media, 360 media, and user‐generated contents. As the amount of contents keep increasing in multiple folds, it is important to cache contents intelligently. Caching algorithm needs to exploit in‐network caching, community‐based pre‐caching, and a combined approach. Hence, we survey CDN‐based edge caching infrastructures including OpenConnect (Netflix) and Google Edge, followed by CCN based in‐network caching. We implement and compare four different approaches for caching contents including (1) in‐network caching, (2) edge caching, (3) community‐based in‐network caching, and (4) community‐based edge caching. We run our algorithms on adaptive network conditions with different topologies, cache size, content popularity, and request arrivals in and compared the delay for all these four approaches. We verify our model by calculating important performance parameters including hop count, redundancy, and hop count variances. Hopcount is an important performance parameter as it influences the processing, queuing, and transmission delays. We focus on determining if an in‐network caching approach is any better than edge caching. We reach several conclusions. First, in most of the scenarios, community‐based in‐network caching performs the best. Second, if the cache size is lesser than 30% of the total content size then community‐based edge caching is better for less popular contents. Finally, our statistical analysis also reveals that a community‐based edge caching mechanism is least affected by varying cache sizes and dynamic user behavior, which makes it a better choice for providing Service Level Agreement.     

Cooperative caching game based on social trust for D2D communication networks

Content sharing via device‐to‐device (D2D) communications has become a promising method to increase system throughput and reduce traffic load. Due to the characteristic of spectrum sharing in D2D network, confidentiality is becoming a key issue in content transmission. Secure communication in D2D networks is generally guaranteed by a physical‐layer security mechanism. However, this method sacrifices the system transmission rate while ensuring security. Since mobile devices are carried by humans, we can leverage their trust relations to enhance the security of communications. As much, considering the psychology structure and social attributes of mobile users, we build a multidimensional trust evaluation mechanism to evaluate the trust relationship between users, and we pick out the trusted users based on the decision‐theoretic rough sets. By sharing content only between trust users, we can enhance the security of content transmissions without relying on physical‐layer security measures. Meanwhile, content caching is now widely used to improve accessing efficiency and reduce traffic load on cellular networks. However, caching content for other users incurs additional cost, which results in selfish and noncooperative behavior in users. Considering such selfishness, we introduce a cooperative caching game based on multidimensional trust relations to motivate users to cache contents for other devices. In this game, the trust relations and physical distance between two users are considered to formulate the cost function. Furthermore, we introduce an incentive caching algorithm based on social trust to minimize the total cost in the D2D network.     

Secure content delivery over device‐to‐device communications underlaying cellular networks

Content delivery via device‐to‐device (D2D) communications is a promising technology for offloading the heavy traffic for future mobile communication networks. As security is a critical concern for the users, we focus on improving the secrecy capacity for content dissemination in D2D communications. In this work, we explore the inherent characteristics of wireless channels to prevent eavesdropping. Firstly, we propose a power control scheme to obtain the optimal transmission powers for the D2D links without violating secrecy requirement of cellular users. Then, we formulate the problem as a stochastic optimization problem, aiming at maximizing the secrecy capacity gain of D2D communications. By solving the expected value model for the stochastic optimization problem, the optimal D2D links are selected to realize maximal ergodic secrecy capacity gain. Specifically, a weighted conflict graph is formulated according to the protocol model. Thus, the optimization problem has been transformed to the maximum weighted independent set problem, which is solved by a greedy weighted minimum degree algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that the content dissemination scheme with power control can bring high secrecy capacity gain to the network. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Analysis of outage probability for in‐band device‐to‐device communications underlaying cellular network

One of the key strategies for jointly increasing throughput and optimum resource allocation in 5G is device‐to‐device (D2D) communications, which can be obtained by minimizing the outage probability considered as an objective function of optimization problem. To minimize this objective function, we found that outage probability should be modeled by jointly considering the effect of interference, noise, and multipath phenomena. In this paper, the exact formulas for outage probability of in‐band D2D communications underlying cellular network are proposed. In the proposed model, additive white Gaussian noise and Rayleigh multipath fading are considered into 2 radio resource reuse scenarios. In the first scenario, each D2D pair is allowed to reuse radio resource block of one cellular user, whereas in the second scenario, 2 resources of 2 cellular users can be reused. The proposed formulas are compared to the approximate (nonexact) ones, which models additive white Gaussian noise by a constant variance. The numerical analysis for the first and second scenarios show that the approximate formulas and respected exact ones are in accordance with simulation results in MATLAB. Moreover, based on nonorthogonal multiple access approach, 2 approximations for the nonexact and the proposed formulas are extracted, which are acceptable for multiple resource reuse scenario. As a remarkable result, simulation results show that when the distance of the D2D pair from the respected cellular user is more than 71 m (2 times greater than average distance between the D2D nodes), multiple‐reuse scenarios offer higher throughput compared to 1‐reuse scenario in an acceptable outage probability.     

Cache‐at‐relay: energy‐efficient content placement for next‐generation wireless relays

Uploading and downloading content have recently become one of the major reasons for the growth of Internet traffic volume. With the increasing popularity of social networking tools and their video upload/download applications, as well as the connectivity enhancements in wireless networks, it has become a second nature for mobile users to access on‐demand content on‐the‐go. Urban hot spots, usually implemented via wireless relays, answer the bandwidth need of those users. On the other hand, the same popular contents are usually acquired by a large number of users at different times, and fetching those from the initial content source each and every time makes inefficient use of network resources. In‐network caching provides a solution to this problem by bringing contents closer to the users. Although in‐network caching has been previously studied from latency and transport energy minimization perspectives, energy‐efficient schemes to prolong user equipment lifetime have not been considered. To address this problem, we propose the cache‐at‐relay (CAR) scheme, which utilizes wireless relays for in‐network caching of popular contents with content access and caching energy minimization objectives. CAR consists of three integer linear programming models, namely, select relay, place content, and place relay, which respectively solve content access energy minimization, joint minimization of content access and caching energy, and joint minimization of content access energy and relay deployment cost problems. We have shown that place relay significantly minimizes the content access energy consumption of user equipments, while place content provides a compromise between the content access and the caching energy budgets of the network. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

DO‐Fast: a round‐robin opportunistic scheduling protocol for device‐to‐device communications

In this paper, we consider the distributed opportunistic scheduling problem for the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing OFDM‐based device‐to‐device (D2D) communications, where D2D links contend for access to the dedicated spectrum with limited assistance from cellular infrastructures. Particularly, a synchronous distributed opportunistic scheduling protocol under fairness constraints (DO‐Fast) is prompted. In DO‐Fast, a round‐robin strategy is integrated with the opportunistic scheduling to tackle the trade‐off between system throughput and access fairness. Moreover, without instantaneous channel state information at receivers, we incorporate a priority allocation scheme, where access priorities are assigned randomly in a local fashion. Consequently, DO‐Fast is robust against imperfect channel estimates and inaccurate channel state information ordering. In addition, the opportunistic strategy in DO‐Fast is distinguished from the existing ones in that efficient spatial reuse is exploited by allowing concurrent transmissions based on the signal‐to‐interference ratio scheduling criterion. Meanwhile, access opportunities are moderately granted for poor quality links by the round‐robin strategy for fairness considerations. We analyze and compare three practical scheduling strategies in terms of the access probability. We also evaluate access fairness through Jain's Index. It is shown via numerical and simulation results that DO‐Fast could achieve efficient spectrum utilization and guarantee the short‐term fairness. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cross‐layer scheduling for multi‐users in cognitive multi‐radio mesh networks

A wireless mesh network has been popularly researched as a wireless backbone for Internet access. However, the deployment of wireless mesh networks in unlicensed bands of urban areas is challenging because of interference from external users such as residential access points. We have proposed Urban‐X, which is a first attempt towards multi‐radio cognitive mesh networks in industrial, scientific, and medical bands. Urban‐X first controls network topology with a distributed channel assignment to avoid interference in large timescale. In such a topology, we develop a new link‐layer transmission‐scheduling algorithm together with source rate control as a small‐timescale approach, which exploits receiver diversity when receivers of multi‐flows can have different channel conditions because of varying interference. For this purpose, mesh nodes probe the channel condition of received mesh nodes using group Request to Send and group Clear to Send. In this study, we establish a mathematical Urban‐X model in a cross‐layer architecture, adopting a well‐known network utility maximization framework. We demonstrate the feasibility of our idea using a simulation on the model. Simulation results show improved network throughput from exploiting receiver diversity and distributed channel assignment under varying external user interference. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Energy‐efficient resource allocation in D2D communications for energy harvesting–enabled NOMA‐based cellular networks

In this paper, we propose an energy‐efficient power control and harvesting time scheduling scheme for resource allocation of the subchannels in a nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA)–based device‐to‐device (D2D) communications in cellular networks. In these networks, D2D users can communicate by sharing the radio resources assigned to cellular users (CUs). Device‐to‐device users harvest energy from the base station (BS) in the downlink and transmit information to their receivers. Using NOMA, more than one user can access the same frequency‐time resource simultaneously, and the signals of the multiusers can be separated successfully using successive interference cancellation (SIC). In fact, NOMA, unlike orthogonal multiple access (OMA) methods, allows sharing the same frequency resources at the same time by implementing adaptive power allocation. Our aim is to maximize the energy efficiency of the D2D pairs, which is the ratio of the achievable throughput of the D2D pairs to their energy consumption by allocating the proper subchannel of each cell to each device user equipment (DUE), managing their transmission power, and setting the harvesting and transmission time. The constraints of the problem are the quality of service of the CUs, minimum required throughput of the subchannels, and energy harvesting of DUEs. We formulate the problem and propose a low‐complexity iterative algorithm on the basis of the convex optimization method and Karush‐Kuhn‐Tucker conditions to obtain the optimal solution of the problem. Simulation results validate the performance of our proposed algorithm for different values of the system parameters.     

D2D协作边缘缓存系统中基于传输时延的缓存策略

为了满足5G系统低时延高可靠的需求,针对单缓存终端直传(D2D)协作边缘缓存系统,提出了一种基于传输时延的缓存策略。运用随机几何理论,将请求用户和空闲用户的动态分布建模为相互独立的齐次泊松点过程,综合考虑内容流行度、用户位置信息、设备传输功率以及干扰,推导出用户的平均传输时延与缓存概率分布的关系式。以平均传输时延为目标函数建立优化问题,提出了一个低复杂度的迭代算法,得到平均传输时延次优的缓存策略。仿真结果表明,该缓存策略在传输时延方面优于常见的几种缓存策略。     

A simple void node and loop‐free three‐dimensional routing protocol for multi‐hop wireless networks

Wireless networks are now very essential part for modern ubiquitous communication systems. The design of efficient routing and scheduling techniques for such networks have gained importance to ensure reliable communication. Most of the currently proposed geographic routing protocols are designed for 2D spatial distribution of user nodes, although in many practical scenarios user nodes may be deployed in 3D space also. In this paper, we propose 3D routing protocols for multihop wireless networks that may be implemented in two different ways depending on how the routing paths are computed. When the routing paths to different user nodes from the base station in the wireless network are computed by the base station, we call it centralized protocol (3DMA‐CS). A distributed routing (3DMA‐DS) protocol is implemented when respective routing path of each user node to the base station is computed by the user node. In both of these protocols, the user (base station) selects the relay node to forward packets in the direction of destination, from the set of its neighbours, which makes minimum angle with the reference line drawn from user (base station) to the base station (user), within its transmission range. The proposed protocols are free from looping problem and can solve the void node problem (VNP) of multihop wireless networks. Performance analysis of the proposed protocol is shown by calculating end‐to‐end throughput, average path length, end‐to‐end delay, and energy consumption of each routing path through extensive simulation under different network densities and transmission ranges.     

A distributed utility‐based scheduling for peer‐to‐peer video streaming over wireless networks

Interactive multimedia applications such as peer‐to‐peer (P2P) video services over the Internet have gained increasing popularity during the past few years. However, the adopted Internet‐based P2P overlay network architecture hides the underlying network topology, assuming that channel quality is always in perfect condition. Because of the time‐varying nature of wireless channels, this hardly meets the user‐perceived video quality requirement when used in wireless environments. Considering the tightly coupled relationship between P2P overlay networks and the underlying networks, we propose a distributed utility‐based scheduling algorithm on the basis of a quality‐driven cross‐layer design framework to jointly optimize the parameters of different network layers to achieve highly improved video quality for P2P video streaming services in wireless networks. In this paper, the quality‐driven P2P scheduling algorithm is formulated into a distributed utility‐based distortion‐delay optimization problem, where the expected video distortion is minimized under the constraint of a given packet playback deadline to select the optimal combination of system parameters residing in different network layers. Specifically, encoding behaviors, network congestion, Automatic Repeat Request/Query (ARQ), and modulation and coding are jointly considered. Then, we provide the algorithmic solution to the formulated problem. The distributed optimization running on each peer node adopted in the proposed scheduling algorithm greatly reduces the computational intensity. Extensive experimental results also demonstrate 4–14 dB quality enhancement in terms of peak signal‐to‐noise ratio by using the proposed scheduling algorithm. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An energy‐efficient utility‐based distributed data routing scheme for heterogenous sensor networks

A utility‐based distributed data routing algorithm is proposed and evaluated for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks. It is energy efficient and is based on a game‐theoretic heuristic load‐balancing approach. It runs on a hierarchical graph arranged as a tree with parents and children. Sensor nodes are considered heterogeneous in terms of their generated traffic, residual energy and data transmission rate and the bandwidth they provide to their children for communication. The proposed method generates a data routing tree in which child nodes are joined to parent nodes in an energy‐efficient way. The principles of the Stackelberg game, in which parents as leaders and children as followers, are used to support the distributive nature of sensor networks. In this context, parents behave cooperatively and help other parents to adjust their loads, while children act selfishly. Simulation results indicate the proposed method can produce on average more load‐balanced trees, resulting in over 30% longer network lifetime compared with the cumulative algorithm proposed in the literature. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A location‐aware peer‐to‐peer overlay network

This work describes a novel location‐aware, self‐organizing, fault‐tolerant peer‐to‐peer (P2P) overlay network, referred to as Laptop. Network locality‐aware considerations are a very important metric for designing a P2P overlay network. Several network proximity schemes have been proposed to enhance the routing efficiency of existing DHT‐based overlay networks. However, these schemes have some drawbacks such as high overlay network and routing table maintenance overhead, or not being completely self‐organizing. As a result, they may result in poor scalability as the number of nodes in the system grows. Laptop constructs a location‐aware overlay network without pre‐determined landmarks and adopts a routing cache scheme to avoid maintaining the routing table periodically. In addition, Laptop significantly reduces the overlay maintenance overhead by making each node maintain only the connectivity between parent and itself. Mathematical analysis and simulations are conducted to evaluate the efficiency, scalability, and robustness of Laptop. Our mathematical analysis shows that the routing path length is bounded by log_d N, and the joining and leaving overhead is bounded by d log_d N, where N is the number of nodes in the system, and d is the maximum degree of each node on the overlay tree. Our simulation results show that the average latency stretch is 1.6 and the average routing path length is only about three in 10 000 Laptop nodes, and the maximum degree of a node is bounded by 32. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Incentive edge caching in software‐defined internet of vehicles: A Stackelberg game approach

In this paper, we investigate an incentive edge caching mechanism for an internet of vehicles (IoV) system based on the paradigm of software‐defined networking (SDN). We start by proposing a distributed SDN‐based IoV architecture. Then, based on this architecture, we focus on the economic side of caching by considering competitive cache‐enablers market composed of one content provider (CP) and multiple mobile network operators (MNOs). Each MNO manages a set of cache‐enabled small base stations (SBS). The CP incites the MNOs to store its popular contents in cache‐enabled SBSs with highest access probability to enhance the satisfaction of its users. By leasing their cache‐enabled SBSs, the MNOs aim to make more monetary profit. We formulate the interaction between the CP and the MNOs, using a Stackelberg game, where the CP acts first as the leader by announcing the popular content quantity that it which to cache and fixing the caching popularity threshold, a minimum access probability under it a content cannot be cached. Then, MNOs act subsequently as followers responding by the content quantity they accept to cache and the corresponding caching price. A noncooperative subgame is formulated to model the competition between the followers on the CP's limited content quantity. We analyze the leader and the follower's optimization problems, and we prove the Stackelberg equilibrium (SE). Simulation results show that our game‐based incentive caching model achieves optimal utilities and outperforms other incentive caching mechanisms with monopoly cache‐enablers whilst enhancing 30% of the user's satisfaction and reducing the caching cost.     

Network‐coding‐based cache policy for loss recovery enhancement in reliable multicast

In local loss recovery schemes, a small number of recovery nodes distributed along the transmission paths save incoming packets temporarily in accordance with a specified cache policy and retransmit these packets if they subsequently receive a request message from a downstream receiver. To reduce the recovery latency, the cache policy should ensure that the recovery nodes are always able to satisfy the retransmission requests of the downstream receivers. However, owing to the limited cache size of the recovery nodes and the behavior of the cache policy, this cannot always be achieved, and thus some of the packets must be retransmitted by the sender. Accordingly, this paper develops a new network‐coding‐based cache policy, designated as network‐coding‐based FIFO (NCFIFO), which extends the caching time of the packets at the recovery nodes without dropping any of the incoming packets. As a result, the lost packets can be always recovered from the nearest recovery nodes and the recovery latency is significantly reduced. The loss recovery performance of the NCFIFO cache policy is compared with that of existing cache policies by performing a series of simulation experiments using both a uniform error model and a burst error model. The simulation results show that the NCFIFO cache policy not only achieves a better recovery performance than existing cache policies, but also provides a more effective solution for managing a small amount of cache size in environments characterized by a high packet arrival rate. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Analysis of tree‐based multicast routing in wireless sensor networks with varying network metrics

Wireless ad hoc and sensor networks are emerging with advances in electronic device technology, wireless communications and mobile computing with flexible and adaptable features. Routing protocols act as an interface between the lower and higher layers of the network protocol stack. Depending on the size of target nodes, routing techniques are classified into unicast, multicast and broadcast protocols. In this article, we give analysis and performance evaluation of tree‐based multicast routing in wireless sensor networks with varying network metrics. Geographic multicast routing (GMR) and its variations are used extensively in sensor networks. Multicast routing protocols considered in the analytical model are GMR, distributed GMR, demand scalable GMR, hierarchical GMR, destination clustering GMR and sink‐initiated GMR. Simulations are given with comparative analysis based on varying network metrics such as multicast group size, number of sink nodes, average multicast latency, number of clusters, packet delivery ratio, energy cost ratio and link failure rate. Analytical results indicate that wireless sensor network multicast routing protocols operate on the node structure (such as hierarchical, clustered, distributed, dense and sparse networks) and application specific parameters. Simulations indicate that hierarchical GMR is used for generic multicast applications and that destination clustering GMR and demand scalable GMR are used for distributed multicast applications. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Energy‐efficient resource allocation for device‐to‐device communication through noncooperative game theory

Wireless network with high data rate applications has seen a rapid growth in recent years. This improved quality of service (QoS) leads to huge energy consumption in wireless network. Therefore, in order to have an energy‐efficient resource allocation in cellular system, a device‐to‐device (D2D) communication is the key component to improve the QoS. In this paper, we propose a noncooperative game (NCG) theory approach for resource allocation to improve energy efficiency (EE) of D2D pair. A three‐tier network with macrocell base station (MBS), femtocell base station (FBS), and D2D pair is considered, which shares the uplink resource block. A resource allocation strategy with constraints is arrived, which maintains minimum throughput for each user in the network. The proposed resource allocation strategy optimizes the EE of D2D pair in the three‐tier network, which achieves Nash equilibrium (NE) and Pareto optimality (PO). Simulation results validate that EE is uniform and optimum for all D2D pair, which converges to NE when channel is static and it converges to PO when the channel is dynamic.     

Analysis of D2D‐pairing scheme based on Voronoi diagram in cellular networks

This paper presents a device‐to‐device (D2D)–pairing scheme based on Voronoi diagram, which establishes D2D links by the relation of transmission powers and link distances. Using the principle of stochastic geometry and channel inversion, the coverage probability is analyzed, we observe that the co‐channel interference caused by cellular networks is stable in theory, and the influence of link distance parameter is highlighted as well. According to the second‐order moment of link distance, the new metric space of D2D terminals set is constructed, in which Voronoi diagram is degenerated into Delaunay triangles set to represent the potential D2D links. In addition, on the basis of the mini‐max length criterion of Delaunay triangle, the D2D communication range–limiting algorithm is designed. Finally, the more intuitive results compared with conventional D2D communications are displayed by simulations. Owing to restraining the D2D communication range, lower co‐channel interference can be obtained. Specially, the D2D‐pairing scheme is approximate local optimal under the D2D communication range–limiting algorithm, and it can provide more fairness than greedy algorithm.     

Energy‐delay‐aware caching strategy in green CCN using markov approximation

One of the basic challenges in content‐centric networking (CCN) is how to optimize the overall energy consumption of content transmission and caching. Furthermore, designing an appropriate caching policy that considers both energy consumption and quality of service (QoS) is a major goal in green CCN. In this paper, the problem of minimizing the total CCN energy consumption while being aware of the end‐to‐end delay is formulated as an integer linear programming model. Since it is an Non‐deterministic Polynomial‐time (NP)‐hard problem, the Markov approximation method for an energy‐delay aware caching strategy (MAEDC) is proposed through a log‐sum‐exp function to find a near‐optimal solution in a distributed manner. The numerical results show that the MAEDC achieves near‐optimal energy consumption with better delay profile compared with the optimal solution. Moreover, due to the possibility of distributed and parallel processing, the proposed method is proper for the online situation where the delay is a crucial issue.     

Quality‐of‐service‐aware cluster‐based service discovery approach for mobile ad hoc networks

This paper presents a quality‐of‐service (QoS) distributed service discovery approach for mobile ad hoc network environments. The approach builds upon a clustered topology, where the clusterhead (CH) is assigned additional roles having to do with maintaining a directory of services in the network and aggregating and computing QoS scores about service providers (SPs) from requesting nodes (RNs) and the providers themselves. To reduce the amount of overhead traffic, the design makes extensive use of piggybacking for relaying and updating the CHs with QoS scores. A mobile device that is interested in a certain service submits a request to its CH, which uses cached QoS data to return a ranked list of SPs that offer the type of requested service. On the basis of its interaction with the SP, the device sends the CH next time it makes a request a score reflecting its perception of the SP's QoS. Over time, the CH develops robust QoS data that it uses to help devices obtain the best available service. Theoretical analysis and experimental evaluation based on simulations prove the advantages of the proposed system and the effectiveness of its operations. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.