Smart Caching: Empower the Video Delivery for 5G-ICN Networks

Since multimedia services will become fundamental in the upcoming 5G networks, how to improve the user quality of experience (QoE) is becoming a major challenge. In this paper, we integrate the concept of Information-Centric Networking (ICN) to the infrastructure of 5G networks. Due to the in-network caching feature of ICN, proactive caching can be beneficial in 5G networks. More precisely, this paper introduces a novel proactive caching approach (called smart caching) which leverages the non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) technique to predict the future ratings of user preferences on all videos for 5G-ICN networks. To solve the shortcoming of the NMF technique that generates inaccurate predictions for high rated but unpopular videos, we also take video historical popularity into consideration. Thus, the user future demands can be predicted based on the user preferences (i.e. the predicted ratings) and the historical popularity of videos. Simulation results show that the proposed smart caching outperforms existing approaches in terms of hit ratio, average video retrieval delay, and user satisfaction.