On the Multi-Activation Oriented Design of D2D-Aided Caching Networks

Caching at the wireless edge has proven to be a promising approach for efficient video distribution, especially when aided by device-to-device communication. A widely explored scheme is to sub-divide a cell into clusters, and allow one pair of users within each cluster to communicate in each time slot. As more devices are raising frequent requests for popular videos, activating multiple links simultaneously can potentially improve the throughput. However, allowing multiple links at the same time requires to solve the problems of avoiding request clashes, i.e., multiple users requesting transmission from the same caching node, as well as interference management. To address these issues, this paper proposes new designs of both the caching policy and the transmission policy (i.e., link scheduling and power control). Furthermore, the duration of each time slot is optimized to improve the throughput. Finally, some numerical results demonstrate the performance gain of the proposed designs.