Profitable cooperative region for distributed online edge caching

© 2019 IEEE. Cooperative caching can unify network storage to improve efficiency, but the effective placement and search of contents are challenging especially in distributed edge clouds with neither a-priori knowledge on content requests nor instantaneous global view. This paper establishes a new profitable cooperative region for every content request admitted at an edge server, within which the content, if cached, can be retrieved with guaranteed profit against a direct retrieval from the network backbone. This narrows down the search for the content. The caching density of the content can also be significantly reduced, e.g., to a cached copy per region. The regions are based on a novel distributed framework which allows individual servers to spontaneously admit/dispatch requests and deliver/forward contents, while asymptotically maximizing the time-average profit of caching. The cooperative region for content is erected at individual servers by comparing the upper and lower bounds for the backlogs of unsatisfied requests of the content. Simulations show the substantially improved profit of the proposed approach over existing solutions. The regions can help automate the placement of contents with reduced density and improved efficiency