Social-aware Cooperative Caching in Fog Radio Access Networks

In this paper, the cooperative caching problem in fog radio access networks (F-RANs) is investigated to jointly optimize the transmission delay and energy consumption. Exploiting the potential social relationships among fog access points (F-APs), we firstly propose a clustering scheme based on hedonic coalition game (HCG) to improve the potential cooperation gain. Then, considering that the optimization problem is non-deterministic polynomial hard (NP-hard), we further propose an improved firefly algorithm (FA) based cooperative caching scheme, which utilizes a mutation strategy based on local content popularity to avoid pre-mature convergence. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme can effectively reduce the content transmission delay and energy consumption in comparison with the baselines.