Predictive Caching Framework for Mobile Wireless Networks

Abstract

With increasing popularity of Netflix, Yahoo! Video, etc., interactive multimedia services such as video-on-demand (VoD) provide an interesting and rich field of research. The advent of smarter wireless devices has surged the need for such services through wireless connectivity. However, personalization of individual user needs, reducing latency, coupled with maintaining low operational costs provides a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose an efficient VoD system, for wireless mobile devices, based on a novel caching algorithm, Intelligent Network Caching Algorithm (INCA) using analytics-driven look ahead scheme for both prefetch and replacement policies to deliver higher performance. This enables enhanced Quality Of Experience (QoE) of users with limited infrastructural changes and low operational cost. Alongside, we develop theoretical formulation of the QoE optimization problem that lies at the intersection of MPC (Markov Predictive Control) and MDP (Markov Decision Process). Empirical analysis over realistic user video query logs demonstrate better cache hit rate and QoE with low prefetch bandwidth, compared to existing caching schemes.