ICE: Intelligent Caching at the Edge

The unprecedented growth of mobile data traffic brings unique challenges for network bandwidth and server resources to meet the diverse QoE (Quality of Experience). Caching becomes a promising way to alleviate these issues by storing a subset of data at the network edge, for which caching policy becomes critical. To this end, various caching schemes have been put forward, however, these schemes are either not intelligent lacking the ability of self-learning and self-decision-making, or inefficient with low data hit rate. Based on these observations, in this paper, we propose a novel Intelligent Caching framework at the Edge, named ICE, via deep reinforcement learning to capture certain valued information of the requested data. Notably, in our approach, the popularity of the data to be cached will be explored and considered. A Markov decision model is further developed to determine whether the data should be cached. The evaluation shows that ICE greatly improves the hit rate in comparison with the state-of-the-art approaches, and reduces the energy consumption for data transmission. Furthermore, based on ICE, the users' QoE is greatly improved. In conclusion, both theoretical analysis and experimental results prove the effectiveness and high performance of ICE compared with conventional strategies.