Proactive Video Chunks Caching and Processing for Latency and Cost Minimization in Edge Networks

Recently, the growing demand for rich multimedia content such as Video on Demand (VoD) has made the data transmission from content delivery networks (CDN) to end-users quite challenging. Edge networks have been proposed as an extension to CDN networks to alleviate this excessive data transfer through caching and to delegate the computation tasks to edge servers. To maximize the caching efficiency in the edge networks, different Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) servers assist each others to efficiently select which content to store and the appropriate computation tasks to process. In this paper, we adopt a collaborative caching and transcoding model for VoD in MEC networks. However, unlike other models in the literature, different chunks of the same video are not fetched and cached in the same MEC server. Instead, neighboring servers will collaborate to store and transcode different video chunks and consequently optimize the limited resources usage. Since we are dealing with chunks caching and processing, we propose to maximize the edge efficiency by studying the viewers watching pattern and designing a probabilistic model where chunks popularities are evaluated. Based on this model, popularity-aware policies, namely Proactive caching policy (PcP) and Cache replacement Policy (CrP), are introduced to cache only highest probably requested chunks. In addition to PcP and CrP, an online algorithm (PCCP) is proposed to schedule the collaborative caching and processing. The evaluation results prove that our model and policies give better performance than approaches using conventional replacement policies. This improvement reaches up to 50% in some cases.