Consistent User-Traffic Allocation and Load Balancing in Mobile Edge Caching

Abstract: Cache-equipped Base-Stations (CBSs) is an attractive alternative to offload the rapidly growing backhaul traffic in a mobile network. New 5G technology and dense femtocell enable one user to connect to multiple base-stations simultaneously. Practical implementation requires the caches in BSs to be regarded as a cache server, but few of the existing works considered how to offload traffic, or how to schedule HTTP requests to CBSs. In this work, we propose a DNS-based HTTP traffic allocation framework. It schedules user traffic among multiple CBSs by DNS resolution, with the consideration of load-balancing, traffic allocation consistency and scheduling granularity of DNS. To address these issues, we formulate the user-traffic allocation problem in DNS-based mobile edge caching, aiming at maximizing QoS gain and allocation consistency while maintaining load balance. Then we present a simple greedy algorithm which gives a more consistent solution when user-traffic changes dynamically. Theoretical analysis proves that it is within 3/4 of the optimal solution. Extensive evaluations in numerical and trace-driven situations show that the greedy algorithm can avoid about 50% unnecessary shift in user-traffic allocation, yield more stable cache hit ratio and balance the load between CBSs without losing much of the QoS gain.