Content-oriented network slicing optimization based on cache-enabled hybrid radio access network

With the development of smart mobile devices and various mobile applications, content-oriented service has become the most popular service which occupies network resources and results in high traffic load. In order to improve quality of experience in radio access network and reduce the OpEx and CapEx of operators, wireless network virtualization and network slicing come into the vision and are deemed as promising solutions to radio access networks to provide tailored services. Therefore, network slicing and optimization based on content-oriented service become a challenging research direction. In this paper, network slicing and resource optimization on content-oriented application in cache-enabled hybrid radio access network based on complex network are investigated. A Cooperative Network Slicing Framework Based on Content in RAN (CNSC-RAN) is presented. Based on CNSC-RAN, procedures of content-oriented static network slicing and dynamic slicing are proposed. Content-oriented slicing is modeled and analyzed which includes slicing on content cache resources and communication resources. In order to obtain the optimized resources sliced for each content, the optimization problem is formulated to minimize the average system cost to get the contents required by users. The problem is solved by a heuristic algorithm called CCSOA (Content-Centric Slicing Optimization Algorithm) in a dynamic content-oriented network slicing procedure enabling UEs with self-evicting contents. The performance of CCSOA is evaluated by performance metrics including hit rate, average cache occupation, average system cost, and request traffic reduction to macro cell base station comparing with CEE and ProbCache. Simulation results reveal the effectiveness of CCSOA.