Energy-aware cache management at the wireless network edge for information-centric operation

Information-centric networking (ICN) promises to overcome the networking challenges of the current Internet, e.g. the explosion of content consumption and the widening gap between traffic and capacity growth, by decoupling the content from the network locations. Simultaneously, the dominant mode of content access in Internet is materializing as IP-based broadband wireless networks with advanced user devices and ubiquitous mobile systems. Current caching-based solutions largely focus on improving the efficiency of content delivery while mostly overlooking energy efficiency aspects. However, the expanding networking infrastructure is expected to be more energy-efficient conforming to “green communications” concept while serving burgeoning traffic demands. Motivated by this concern, we study caching at the edge of an infrastructure-based mobile network supporting ICN with a focus on energy consumption of the considered system. We devise a greedy heuristic for cache management which incorporates energy reward, popularity, Time-To-Live (TTL) and delay (i.e. chunk loss due to delay sensitivity) factors. Our numerical analysis proves the energy savings achieved by the proposed greedy approach with low-complexity operation.