On Optimal Proactive and Retention-Aware Caching with User Mobility

Caching popular contents at edge devices is an effective solution to alleviate the burden of the backhaul networks. Earlier investigations commonly neglected the storage cost in caching. More recently, retention-aware caching, where both the downloading cost and storage cost are accounted for, is attracting attention. Motivated by this, we address proactive and retention-aware caching with user mobility, optimizing the sum of the two types of costs. This is a combinatorial optimization problem. However, we derive a stream of analytical results and they together lead to an algorithm that guarantees global optimum with polynomial-time complexity. Numerical results show significant improvements in comparison to popular caching and random caching.