Competition Analysis of Diverse Request-Aware Packet Caching Policy for D2D Communication

Device-to-device (D2D) based packet caching technologies recently attract increasing attention, thanks to their great potentials to facilitate network traffic offloading. Despite the many popular issues arising in the D2D caching area, one of the new perspectives, namely the competition due to the packet request diversity originating from various D2D user equipment (UE) groups is not sufficiently investigated. In this work, we analyze several key aspects of the competition for packet allocation among diverse packet requests. Firstly, we study the impact from diverse group proportions on the system throughput and the packet allocation fairness. Particularly, the novel group separation index (GSI) is introduced, which helps to reflect the packet allocation fairness. We derive and analyze both the upper and lower bounds of GSI. Secondly, we investigate how the concentration levels of diverse packet requests may affect the system performance, such as the impact from the caching size limit on packet allocation. Thirdly, we derive the average energy consumption metric using the binomial point process based network model, which facilitates a comprehensive evaluation of the competition among UE groups. Finally, simulations validate our proposed analysis method, which may provide important design hints for improving existing D2D caching schemes.