Collaborative edge caching through service function chaining: architecture and challenges

Edge caching enables mobile users to fetch contents from cache servers deployed at base stations or even closer to users, with the aim of avoiding latency and improving the overall user experience while reducing backhaul/fronthaul bandwidth use. While sophisticated edge caching policies have been extensively studied in recent works, the practical implementation issues of edge caching are rarely touched. In this article, we first provide an overview of the edge caching policies proposed in the existing literature. Then we present the architecture for edge caching, in which the mobile edge applications can be conveniently provided by chaining the service functions with the aid of edge computing techniques and virtualized resources. Next, we discuss the challenges in implementing the existing caching policies based on the proposed framework. Finally, we build a testbed to evaluate our architecture in a proof of concept and test it with typical caching scenarios. Our experiments show that the proposed framework allows guaranteeing the requirements of the edge caching services