The effect of caching in sustainability of large wireless networks

We study the scalability of multihop wireless communications, a major concern in networking, for the case that users access content cached across the nodes. In contrast to the standard paradigm of randomly selected communicating pairs, content replication is efficient for certain regimes of content volume and popularity, cache and network size. Assuming the Zipf popularity law, and investigating on the relative ways that the number of files, the cache size and the network nodes can all jointly scale to infinity, we derive asymptotic laws about the required link capacity, which range from O(√N) down to O(1), and identify the associated regimes of network operation. © 2012 IFIP