ZTE Communications ›› 2019, Vol. 17 ›› Issue (4): 46-55.DOI: 10.12142/ZTECOM.201904007

• Special Topic • Previous Articles     Next Articles

A Survey on Machine Learning Based Proactive Caching

Stephen ANOKYE1,2, Mohammed SEID1,3, SUN Guolin1()   

  1. 1.University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan 611731, China
    2.University of Mines and Technology, Tarkwa 237, Ghana
    3.Dilla University, Dilla, Ethiopia
  • Received:2019-10-27 Online:2019-12-25 Published:2020-04-16
  • About author:Stephen ANOKYE received his M.Eng. degree in computer science from Hunan University, China in 2009 and his B.Sc. degree in computer science from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana in 2004. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. Between 2010 and 2012, he worked as a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at Garden City University College in Ghana. Since 2012, he has become a lecturer at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, the University of Mines and Technology, Ghana. His research interests are security in wireless sensor networks, mobile and cloud networks with AI, UAV networks, IoT, and 5G wireless networks.|Mohammed SEID received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in computer science from Ambo University, Ethiopia in 2010 and Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia in 2015, respectively. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. degree in computer science and technology at University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. From 2010 to 2016, he worked in Dilla University, Ethiopia as a graduate assistant and lecturer. His interests include mobile edge computing, fog computing, UAV networks, IoT, and 5G wireless networks.|SUN Guolin (guolin.sun@uestc.edu.cn) received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees all in communication and information system from University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC) in 2000, 2003 and 2005, respectively. After his Ph.D. graduation in 2005, he has got eight-year industrial work experience in wireless research and development for LTE, Wi-Fi, IoT, cognitive radio, localization and navigation. Before he joined UESTC as an associate professor in August 2012, he worked in Huawei Technologies Sweden. Dr. SUN has filed over 30 patents and published over 30 scientific conference and journal papers. He acted as TPC member of several conferences. Currently, he serves as a vice-chair of the 5G oriented cognitive radio SIG of the Technical Committee on Cognitive Networks (TCCN) of the IEEE Communication Society. His general research interests are software defined networks, network function virtualization, and radio resource management.

Abstract:

The world today is experiencing an enormous increase in data traffic, coupled with demand for greater quality of experience (QoE) and performance. Increasing mobile traffic leads to congestion of backhaul networks. One promising solution to this problem is the mobile edge network (MEN) and consequently mobile edge caching. In this paper, a survey of mobile edge caching using machine learning is explored. Even though a lot of work and surveys have been conducted on mobile edge caching, our efforts in this paper are rather focused on the survey of machine learning based mobile edge caching. Issues affecting edge caching, such as caching entities, caching policies and caching algorithms, are discussed. The machine learning algorithms applied to edge caching are reviewed followed by a discussion on the challenges and future works in this field. This survey shows that edge caching can reduce delay and subsequently the backhaul traffic of the network; most caching is conducted at the small base stations (SBSs) and caching at unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is recently used to accommodate mobile users who dissociate from SBSs. This survey also demonstrates that machine learning approach is the state of the art and reinforcement learning is predominant.

Key words: mobile edge caching, reinforcement learning, unmanned aerial vehicle