An Efficient Content Delivery System for 5G CRAN Employing Realistic Human Mobility

Today’s modern communication technologies such as cloud radio access and software defined networks are key candidate technologies for enabling 5G networks as they incorporate intelligence for data-driven networks. Traditional content caching in the last mile access point has shown a reduction in the core network traffic. However, the radio access network still does not fully leverage such solution. Transmitting duplicate copies of contents to mobile users consumes valuable radio spectrum resources and unnecessary base station energy. To overcome these challenges, we propose huMan mObility-based cOntent Distribution (MOOD) system. MOOD exploits urban scale users’ mobility to allocate radio resources spatially and temporally for content delivery. Our approach uses the broadcast nature of wireless communication to reduce the number of duplicated transmissions of contents in the radio access network for conserving radio resources and energy. Furthermore, a human activity model is presented and statistically analyzed for simulating people daily routines. The proposed approach is evaluated via simulations and compared with a generic broadcast strategy in an actual existing deployment of base stations as well as a smaller cells environment, which is a trending deployment strategy in future 5G networks. MOOD achieves 15.2 and 25.4 percent of performance improvement in the actual and small-cell deployment, respectively.