PA-Cache: Learning-based Popularity-Aware Content Caching in Edge Networks

With the aggressive growth of smart environments, a large amount of data are generated by edge devices. As a result, content delivery has been quickly pushed to network edges. Compared with classical content delivery networks, edge caches with smaller size usually suffer from more bursty requests, which makes conventional caching algorithms perform poorly in edge networks. This paper aims to propose an effective caching decision policy called PA-Cache that uses evolving deep learning to adaptively learn time-varying content popularity to decide which content to evict when the cache is full. Unlike prior learning-based approaches that either use a small set of features for decision making or require the entire training dataset to be available for learning a fine-tuned but might outdated prediction model, PA-Cache weights a large set of critical features to train the neural network in an evolving manner so as to meet the edge requests with fluctuations and bursts. We demonstrate the effectiveness of PA-Cache through extensive experiments with real-world data traces from a large commercial video-on-demand service provider. The evaluation shows that PA-Cache improves the hit rate in comparison with state-of-the-art methods at a lower computational cost.