Implicit Coordination of Caches in Small Cell Networks under Unknown Popularity Profiles

International audienceWe focus on a dense cellular network, in which a limited-size cache is available at every Base Station (BS). In order to optimize the overall performance of the system in such scenario, where a significant fraction of the users is covered by several BSs, a tight coordination among nearby caches is needed. To this end, this paper introduces a class of simple and fully distributed caching policies, which require neither direct communication among BSs, nor a priori knowledge of content popularity. Furthermore, we propose a novel approximate analytical methodology to assess the performance of interacting caches under such policies. Our approach builds upon the well known characteristic time approximation [1] and provides predictions that are surprisingly accurate (hardly distinguishable from the simulations) in most of the scenarios. Both synthetic and trace-driven results show that the our caching policies achieve excellent performance (in some cases provably optimal). They outperform state-of-the-art dynamic policies for interacting caches, and, in some cases, also the greedy content placement, which is known to be the best performing polynomial algorithm under static and perfectly-known content popularity profiles