A wireless caching helper system with heterogeneous traffic and random availability.

Multimedia content streaming from Internet-based sources emerges as one of the most demanded services by wireless users. In order to alleviate excessive traffic due to multimedia content transmission, many architectures (e.g., small cells, femtocells, etc.) have been proposed to offload such traffic to the nearest (or strongest) access point also called "helper". However, the deployment of more helpers is not necessarily beneficial due to their potential of increasing interference. In this work, we evaluate a wireless system which can serve both cacheable and non-cacheable traffic. More specifically, we consider a general system in which a wireless user with limited cache storage requests cacheable content from a data center that can be directly accessed through a base station. The user can be assisted by a pair of wireless helpers that exchange non-cacheable content as well. Files not available from the helpers are transmitted by the base station. We analyze the system throughput and the delay experienced by the cached user and show how these performance metrics are affected by the packet arrival rate at the source helper, the availability of caching helpers, the caches' parameters, and the user's request rate by means of numerical results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]