Cooperative Caching for Ultra-Dense Fog-RANs: Information Optimality and Hypergraph Coloring

This work considers cache placement for ultra-dense fog radio access networks (F-RANs). In an F-RAN, the fog access points (F-APs) form overlapping clusters based on their geographical locations. A cluster of F-APs then acts as a distributed cache to cooperatively serve user requests. The fronthaul traffic minimization problem is formulated in information-theoretic terms. For the k-association networks, cache placement can be optimized by concatenating an MDS code with a repetition code. By repeating the same packet in some F-APs, multicasting over the fronthaul link can be done in cache placement, which saves energy and bandwidth. Such an idea is applied to both uncoded and coded caching schemes based on hypergraph coloring. Their associated optimization problems are shown to be NP-complete. For the uncoded case, a suboptimal algorithm is proposed, which carefully repeats the subfiles. For the coded case, a heuristic algorithm that minimizes the field size requirement of the MDS repetition scheme is proposed. Simulation results demonstrate the outstanding performance of the proposed uncoded and coded caching schemes during both the cache placement phase and content delivery phase in reducing fronthaul traffic load and energy consumption.