Cache-Aided Cooperative Device-to-Device (D2D) Networks: A Stochastic Geometry View

Caching is a promising technique for 5G networks to reduce the backhual traffic and increase the overall network efficiency. In this paper, we study the caching placement policy with consideration of cooperative transmission for a two-hop relay-enabled device-to-device (D2D) network. In the caching placement phase, the probabilistic caching placement policy is considered, and in the content transmission phase, the hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) scheme with soft information combining [i.e., energy accumulation (EA) and mutual-information accumulation (MIA)] is utilized to improve the content retrieval experience. Cache-aided successful transmission probability (CSTP) is adopted as the main performance metric in this paper. By using tools from stochastic geometry, analytical expressions for the CSTP under different transmission schemes are derived. In moderate or high SIR regime, the optimal caching placement policy is identified based on the analytical expression and the CSTP performance is maximized accordingly. Evaluation results suggest that the MIA-based caching strategy performs better as opposed to existing strategies in most cases, but this outperformance vanishes when the transmission environment becomes severe or when users' requests become concentrated.