1476 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MOBILE COMPUTING, VOL. 18, NO.

7, JULY 2019

Cache Replacement Schemes Based

on Adaptive Time Window for Video on
Demand Services in Femtocell Networks
Zohreh Hajiakhondi-Meybodi, Jamshid Abouei , Senior Member, IEEE, and
Amir Hossein Fahim Raouf , Student Member, IEEE

Abstract—The cache replacement policy is a crucial phase in caching-based systems that deal with the process of selecting applicable
cache contents. In this paper, we propose two novel cache replacement algorithms based on the dataset obtained from a typical wireless
femto network. In the first algorithm, called Weighted Least Frequently used with an Adaptive Time Window (WLF-ATW), we aim to make
a balance between the network’s traffic and the recognition of popular contents. The WLF-ATW algorithm takes the frequency and the
recency information of files into account to ascertain the popularity of contents. We suggest another new cache replacement policy
namely Fairness Scheduling-based with an Adaptive Time Window (FS-ATW) that is based on fairness scheduling in order to minimize
the user’s access delay. The novelty of our proposed FS-ATW lies in ranking clients according to their last situations that lead to a further
user’s experience. The effectiveness of these new algorithms is evaluated from the cache hit ratio, transferred byte volume, user’s
access delay, user’s experience, and load balance. A comprehensive numerical evaluation shows that the performance of the proposed
WLF-ATW and FS-ATW algorithms is significantly better than some existing cache replacement strategies.

Index Terms—Femtocell, cache, cache updating, content updating, wireless network

1 INTRODUCTION

C ACHINGhas been recognized as a promising solution

dealing with the user latency, network’s bandwidth
usage and the traffic load on the origin server with the
application on femtocell systems in the fifth generation of
wireless networks [1]. The key idea behind the caching
technology is to shrink the cell size and bring the most pop-
ular contents closer to clients using Femto Access Points
(FAPs), equipped with a high storage memory [2]. Since
Video on Demand (VoD) streaming services such as those
offered by Netflix and YouTube are dramatically increas-
ing wireless traffic [3], the caching-based mechanism is one
of the most capable approaches to mitigate this burden. As
the popularity of contents varies over time, FAPs need to
be updated regularly with the most popular contents to
achieve the best quality of service and the optimum usage
of resources [4]. Furthermore, when the cache is full and a
new content is requested, the deployed cache replacement
strategy determines which content to be evicted. These fun-
damental requirements give rise to main challenges in
cache replacement policies with the focus on cost incre-
ment. If a requested content exists in the FAP, the cache hit
occurs, otherwise, it is known as a hit miss and the

The authors are with the WINEL Research Lab., Department of Electrical
Engineering, Yazd University, Box No. 89195-741, Yazd, Iran.
E-mail: {hajiakhoondi, amirh.fraouf}@stu.yazd.ac.ir, abouei@yazd.ac.ir.
Manuscript received 18 Aug. 2017; revised 9 June 2018; accepted 24 July
2018. Date of publication 7 Aug. 2018; date of current version 31 May 2019.
(Corresponding author: Jamshid Abouei.)
For information on obtaining reprints of this article, please send e-mail to:
reprints@ieee.org, and reference the Digital Object Identifier below.
Digital Object Identifier no. 10.1109/TMC.2018.2864164
1536-1233 ß 2018 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See ht_tp://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
requested content is provided by the main server. In addi-
tion, the transferred byte volume is the most commonly
performance metric used in the literature for evaluation of
replacement schemes [5].
By introducing caching-based systems for the web
cache proxy and wireless networks, a wide variety of cache
replacement policies have been proposed. Totally, replace-
ment policies in the caching have been categorized into the
randomized [6], recency-based [7], [8], [9], frequency-based
[10], [11], recency/frequency-based [12] and function-based
methods [13], [14]. The authors in [7] present the Low Inter-
reference Recency Set (LIRS) strategy which addresses lim-
its of the Least Recently Used (LRU) algorithm to evaluate
the inter-reference recency for making a replacement deci-
sion. Generally, recency-based algorithms discard the least
recently requested contents by considering the fact that a
content referenced in recent past is likely to be referenced
again in near future [9]. Given that such strategies neglect
the access counts of contents, they are incapable of recogniz-
ing the frequently requested files. In another perspective,
the authors in [10] suggest a frequency-based strategy,
known as Least Frequently Used-Aging (LFU-Aging) policy
to enhance the performance of the LFU-based strategy by
limiting the request counters. Since in frequency-based
strategies, contents with a large counter value are identified
as the popular one, such strategies suffer from the cache
pollution which results in remaining a formerly popular
content in the cache for a long time.
Some recent studies employ a mixture of recency and fre-
quency information of contents, called recency/frequency-
based policy. In [15], the authors provide a comprehensive

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HAJIAKHONDI-MEYBODI ET AL.: CACHE REPLACEMENT SCHEMES BASED ON ADAPTIVE TIME WINDOW FOR VIDEO ON ...
survey in the recency/frequency-used algorithms such as
HYPER-G [16], Least Recently/Frequently-Used (LRFU)
[17] and Adaptive Replacement Cache (ARC) [18] algo-
rithms. The first study on the recency/frequency-used
methods was framed in [16], where the authors introduced
the HYPER-G strategy, which considers simultaneously the
recency, frequency and the size of all contents to select the
best file to evict. This line of work was further extended in
[17] where the LRFU strategy is deployed by considering a
weighting function with the control parameter
to provide
a spectrum of replacement policies that subsume the two
independent LRU and LFU algorithms. To reduce the
computational overhead in [17], Das et al. in [19] introduce
the Least Frequently Recently-Used (LFRU) replacement
policy in which the content with the minimum rank
achieved by multiplying the recency in the frequency value
is evicted. To enhance the performance of the LRFU strategy
in [17], the authors in [20] introduce a combination of the
LRU and the window-LFU algorithms. This policy achieves
a better performance than the conventional LRFU algorithm
when the control parameter
is small. Although most of
the recency/frequency-based strategies impose an addi-
tional complexity on the system, they benefit from the
advantages of both recency and frequency features.
There are also several function-based algorithms that rec-
ognize certain predetermined parameters in the form of the
cost function evaluating a request value to order the con-
tents of the cache [2], [14], [21]. One of the well-known algo-
rithms in this category is proposed by Golrezaei et al. with
the application on femtocell systems [14]. The cost function
associated with this strategy is based on the content access
delay which can be directly translated into the user’s quality
of service. The authors in [2] suggest an optimal cache
replacement strategy, in which similar cached contents of
all FAPs are selected centrally by the MBS. In this case, if
the FAP’s deployment is dense enough, clients will be able
to communicate with multiple FAPs, instead of one FAP
and each user experiences a distributed cache that is the
union of the FAPs’ caches. The uncoded femtocaching in [2]
is based on the minimization of the client’s latency, which is
shown that the optimum file assignment is an NP-complete
optimization problem.
Some practical caching systems often use simple cache
replacement algorithms without considering the future
content popularity. In this regard, some recent literature
involve learning the popularity of video files to make cache
replacement decisions [22], [23], [24], [25]. One online learn-
ing approach, which requires no training phase, is intro-
duced in [23] to learn the relationship between the future
popularity of contents and the requested video files. The
authors in [24] enhance the popularity-driven content cach-
ing algorithm in [23] that aims to accelerate the cache
replacement procedure. In another perspective, the authors
in [25] suggest a context-aware proactive caching algorithm
for wireless networks based on the contextual multi-armed
bandits that maximizes the expected number of satisfied
requests. There exist some other remarkable works employ-
ing the learning popularity of files in femtocaching [26],
[27]. Sengupta et. al. [26] propose a coded caching strategy
in heterogeneous small cell wireless networks. The main
idea behind the scheme in [26] is to reduce the bottleneck
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1477
problem in the limited capacity backhaul connection link to
the core network. In this regard, FAPs store some segments
of the Fountain-encoded versions of the most popular files,
where the popularity of files is determined via the combina-
torial multi-armed bandit framework. Among those early
studies covering video popularity models, reference [27]
suggests two auction-based algorithms with a low computa-
tional complexity for selection of the most popular files to
satisfy mobile users.
Objectives. Taking the above challenges into account, the
key contributions of this work are summarized as follows:
i) In this work, we have applied our algorithms in the
macro cellular network implemented at the Yazd
University consisting of FAPs, which are equipped
with storage and some User Terminals (UTs). The
main objective in the first part of this paper is to
select the best updating time, which is considered as
a trade-off between the network’s traffic and the on-
time popularity recognition of contents using an
adaptive time window. The dynamic nature of video
file popularity leads to identifying popular contents
and updating the cache of FAPs. Hence, we propose a
fast cache replacement strategy that responds to the
time varying of contents’ popularity. If the content
replacement process happens after the occurrence of
each cache miss, the traffic load on the network
increases [28], [29]. On the other hand, the main prob-
lem in classical periodic content replacement strate-
gies (e.g., [21], [30], [31]) is that if the time interval
between two consecutive updating times is too long,
the identification of popular files will experience
more delay. To tackle these problems, we introduce
for the first time a heuristic adaptive time window to
optimize the best updating time. For the proposed
scheme, the affiliation of adaptive time window’s
length to the number of requests leads to accelerating
to the identification of popular files in the peak time,
when a lot of clients are active and the probability
that a file becomes popular will increase. In the same
situation, if the updating time is selected as a specific
time, we face a drastic drop in the users’ satisfaction.
ii) In the second part of this paper, we propose two
efficient cache replacement strategies to enhance the
cache hit ratio and the user’s access delay. The first
proposed algorithm, namely Weighted Least Fre-
quently used with an Adaptive Time Window
(WLF-ATW) algorithm, is based on the recency/fre-
quency information of contents. In contrast to many
classical pertinent schemes (e.g., [7], [8], [9], [10],
[11]), the WLF-ATW strategy considers both recency
and frequency characteristics of contents to make an
appropriate decision to select the best file to store
into the FAPs. To further highlight the advantages
of our proposed WLF-ATW scheme, we should
emphasize on this point that traditional LRU-based
schemes [7], [8], [9] are time-consuming processes,
because the items on the list should be moved at
each time when the memory is accessed. To reduce
the implementation costs, LFU-based strategies are
introduced, in which the cache replacement keeps
1478
track of the frequency of requests without consider-
ing the request time [10], [11]. To overcome these
problems, several approaches based on the recency/
frequency of files with a more complexity have been
proposed in the literature [15], [16], [17], [18], [19],
that one of the most efficient schemes is the Win-
dow-LRFU strategy introduced in [20]. The main
advantage of the proposed WLF-ATW algorithm is
that the number of requests of files in a time window
is employed in this scheme to take into account a
combination of recency and frequency characteristics
of contents with a low complexity. It is numerically
shown that employing the proposed WLF-ATW
cache replacement algorithm exhibits a better perfor-
mance than the Window-LRFU [20], the LRU-based
[8] and the LFU-based [15] schemes in terms of the
portion of satisfied requests. In fact, our scheme
improves the cache hit ratio and reduces the trans-
ferred byte volume along with a lower complexity in
the implementation.
iii) In the second proposed cache replacement strategy,
namely the Fairness Scheduling algorithm with an
Adaptive Time Window (FS-ATW), the selection of
the most popular files to save into the cache of FAPs
is the solution of an optimization problem. We prove
that our problem involves placing video files in the
cache of FAPs to minimize the average delay of all
UTs. In this regard, we compare the performance of
the proposed FS-ATW algorithm with the uncoded
femtocaching scheme in [2] as a benchmark. In more
details, the femtocaching algorithm in [2] introduces
an optimum mechanism of assigning files to the
FAPs, to minimize the expected downloading time
for files, that the result is a reduction in the network’s
load. In this regard, the cached contents of all FAPs
in [2] are selected centrally by the MBS according to
a specific optimization algorithm. If each client com-
municates to only one FAP, the most similar popular
files are saved into the cache of all FAPs. In another
perspective, when UTs connect to several FAPs,
instead of one FAP, each user experiences a distrib-
uted cache of FAPs. In this case, the authors in [2]
show that the caching policy is an NP-complete opti-
mization problem. However, in the proposed FS-
ATW algorithm, due to the distributed nature of the
content replacement, the cached contents of all FAPs
are different without any requirement to solve an
NP-complete optimization problem. Moreover, in
contrast to the femtocaching algorithm in [2], the FS-
ATW strategy is based on the “fairness scheduling”
in order to minimize the user’s access delay with
development of load balance among clients.
It is worth mentioning that there are two different per-
spectives to investigate the superiority of a cache replace-
ment method, Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of
Experience (QoE) parameters. QoE is a measure for the
overall level of client satisfaction, that is related to but dif-
fers from QoS, which embodies the notion that the
network’s characteristics can be improved. In the last
decade, one of the most significant reasons that many
researchers have made the concept of caching from wired to
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MOBILE COMPUTING, VOL. 18, NO. 7, JULY 2019
Fig. 1. A typical structure of a single-cell network indicating connectivity
between one MBS, eight FAPs, and some UTs.
wireless networks is the necessity of reducing the network’s
traffic. In this regard, to evaluate the performance of cache
replacement strategies, many conventional performance
metrics in the field of QoS such as cache hit ratio, transferred
byte volume and latency are introduced. To provide a suffi-
cient QoE, the FS-ATW cache replacement strategy is pro-
posed to find the most popular files by maintaining the
fairness among clients. To achieve this goal, the satisfaction
rate of all users are substantial to select the most popular file.
Numerical results show that the FS-ATW algorithm not only
decreases the user’s access delay, but it also provides a better
experience for all users by deploying a fairness schedule.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2,
the network’s model is described and the main assumptions
and performance metrics required for our algorithms are
introduced. Section 3 introduces the user behavior pattern
and the basic concept of the popularity distribution of video
files. Section 4 deals with introducing two proposed cache
replacement strategies. Some numerical results are pre-
sented in Section 5. Finally, in Section 6, an overview of the
results and some conclusion remarks are presented.
2 PROBLEM DESCRIPTION AND ASSUMPTIONS
In this work, we consider a macro cellular network imple-
mented at the Yazd University consisting of S User Termi-
nals and N FAPs, denoted by ff1 ; f2 ; . . . ; fN g, which are
equipped with a considerable and equal cache size, denoted
by Cf , and an equal transmission range r (see Fig. 1). In this
paper, we assume that all the FAPs work in the closed-
access mode. The network contains a macro base station,
denoted by MBS, in a preassigned location with the commu-
nication range R, which includes the whole library of con-
tents C ¼ fc1 ; c2 ; . . . ; cM g, where M is the cardinality of the
contents’ set, and each video file ck has the size sck . Since
more than 70 percent of all mobile data traffic in near future
is devoted to downloading video contents [3], in this work,
we occasionally use the term “contents” instead of “video
files”. It is assumed that each FAP fi only serves UTs
ðiÞ ðiÞ ðiÞ ðiÞ
uj 2 U fi ¼ fu1 ; u2 ; . . . ; uNi g, i ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; N, existing in its
transmission range, where Ni denotes the cardinality of the
set U fi . In addition, it is supposed that the MBS PNcan serve
all S user terminals in the network, where i¼1 Ni  S.
The connectivity between FAPs and UTs is shown in Fig. 1.
ðiÞ ðiÞ
The edge between FAP fi and UT uj means uj is in the
HAJIAKHONDI-MEYBODI ET AL.: CACHE REPLACEMENT SCHEMES BASED ON ADAPTIVE TIME WINDOW FOR VIDEO ON ...
communication range of fi and can access to all cache
contents in the FAP fi .
ðiÞ
User Access Description. When a client uj requests a con-
tent ck 2 C, it is forwarded to its corresponding FAP, fi . If ck
exists in the cache of fi , it is directly sent to the client by the
FAP fi and the cache hit occurs, otherwise, it is forwarded to
the MBS and the cache miss happens. When the MBS trans-
mits ck to fi , the FAP decides to store a copy of ck , while satis-
fying the client’s request. In this case, further requests of ck
ðiÞ
by ul ; l ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; Ni , are served by fi without contacting
the MBS. For such a user access description, the traffic on the
network and the load on the MBS are reduced.
The common performance metrics used to evaluate the
operation of replacement strategies are the cache hit ratio,
the transferred byte volume, the user’s access delay and the
user’s experience. For such a performance metrics, we have
the following definitions.
Definition 1 (Cache Hit Ratio). This metric is defined as the
ratio of all requested contents which are cached in the cache mem-
ory of FAPs versus total requests. Let NF represents the number
of requested contents served by FAPs and NT denotes the total
number of requests in a specific period of time. In this case, the
cache hit ratio, denoted by CHR, is obtained as CHR ¼ N F
NT . If
the embedded storage of FAPs is large enough to store the entire
set of contents, the cache hit ratio is maximized, i.e.,
CHR ¼ 100%. However, due to the limited cache space, FAPs
can only store a subset of the frequently accessed contents. In this
regard, the most efficient replacement policy is the one that stores
more requested contents in order to improve the cache hit ratio.
Definition 2 (Transferred Byte Volume). This performance
metric is used to characterize the amount of data flowing
between the MBS and FAPs. The transferred byte volume,
denoted by TBV , is obtained by TBV ¼ B
BT , where BF indicates
F
the total bytes sent by the MBS to FAPs and BT is the total
requested bytes.
Definition 3 (User’s Access Delay). We define the user’s
access delay as the time from the user’s request arrives at the
system till it is satisfied. Note that a request is immediately sat-
isfied if the requested content is in the cache of local FAP. In
this case, the user’s delay would be approximated with zero.
Furthermore, the user’s delay in downloading of one content
from the MBS depends on several factors, including the total
number of active users and their positions in the cell, the dis-
tance between clients and the MBS, the channel quality and the
requested file size. It is shown in [14] that the effect of user’s
position and the channel quality on the aforementioned delay is
negligible. In this paper, the user’s delay in downloading of one
content from the MBS is influenced by either the requested con-
tent existed in the cache of local FAP or not. Based on the above
argument, the expected user’s access delay for uj ðiÞ in the trans-
mission range of FAP fi , i ¼ 1; . . . ; N, is obtained as
X
M Based on the information extracted from the campus net-
Duj ðiÞ ¼ ’ck Puj ðiÞ ;ck T j;k ; j ¼ 1; . . . ; Ni ;
k¼1
where Puj ðiÞ ;c represents the probability of requesting file ck
k
ðiÞ
by user uj as will be described in Section 3, T j;k is an indica-
tor variable which is equal to 0, if the video file ck is in the cache
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1479
of FAP fi , hence user uj ðiÞ can access the file ck without any
delay, otherwise, T j;k would be 1 . In addition, the delay of
downloading a video file ck with size sck from the MBS is
defined as ’ck ¼ sck mb , where mb is the time delay of download-
ing one video file per bit. According to the above performance
metrics, the best cache replacement strategy is the one that
maximizes the cache hit ratio and minimizes the transferred
byte volume and the user’s access delay.
Definition 4 (User’s Experience). To investigate the user’s
experience measurement, this paper brings into play the average
immediate satisfied requested contents of all users. The user’s
experience, denoted by UE, is obtained by
PNi Su ðiÞ
j
j¼1 T ðiÞ
uj
UE ¼ ; i ¼ 1; . . . ; N; (2)
Ni
where Suj ðiÞ indicates the number of immediate satisfied
requests of user uj ðiÞ , and Tuj ðiÞ is the total requested contents
by user uj ðiÞ .
Definition 5 (Load Balance). To evaluate the performance of
cache replacement strategies in terms of fairness, the load balance
metric is introduced. This metric illustrates the number of requests
served by the MBS versus the total requests for each client. In this
case, the load balance, denoted by LB, is obtained as follows:
u
ðiÞ
N j
LB ¼ B ; j ¼ 1; . . . ; Ni ; i ¼ 1; . . . ; N; (3)
Tuj ðiÞ
ðiÞ
u ðiÞ
where NBj represents the number of requests of user uj
which is not existed in the cache of FAP fi , and Tuj ðiÞ is the
total requested contents by user uj ðiÞ in a specific period of
time. It is worth mentioning that the low quantity of LB indi-
cates the user’s satisfaction, due to serving a large portion of
user’s requests by FAPs. Moreover, the flat distribution of the
load balance for all clients means the majority of users benefit
from the caching-based network with emphasis on the fairness
of the cache replacement strategy.
3 USER’S BEHAVIOR PATTERN
The main goal of this section is to present the user’s behav-
ior pattern, such as the request arrival pattern and the popu-
larity distribution of video files in the VoD-based network at
the Yazd University, to propose an efficient cache replace-
ment strategy in achieving a better system performance.
Several prior researches on the user’s behavior analysis in
VoD-based systems illustrate that the distribution of popu-
larity of contents follows the Zipf-like distribution (e.g.,
see [32], [33]). This distribution describes the relationship
between the frequency of requesting of one content and its
rank, when contents are ranked with respect to the fre-
quency of reference.
(1) work at the Yazd University, video files are categorized
into five groups: “Trailer”, “Music”, “News”, “Sport” and
“Entertainment”, denoted by y1 ; y2 ; . . . ; y5 , respectively. It is
assumed that each group contains Myl video files, where
P5
l¼1 M yl
¼ M. The users’ requests do not follow the same
behavior pattern meaning that the probability of requesting
1480
a category may be altered for different users. The probabil-
ity of requesting category yl by user uj ðiÞ , j ¼ 1; . . . ; Ni , and
i ¼ 1; . . . ; N, denoted by PuðiÞ ;y , is obtained based on the his-
j l
tory of users’ requests. Thus, we can write the probability
ðy Þ
of requesting file ck l by user uj ðiÞ as PuðiÞ ;cðyl Þ ¼ PuðiÞ ;y Pcðyl Þ ,
j k j l
ðy Þ
where we use the superscript (yl ) for ck l to show that ck is
the subset of category yl , Pcðyl Þ represents the probability
k
ðy Þ
of requesting file ck l by all users and is obtained as
N Rðy Þ
c l
P ðyl Þ ¼ k
NTR
, where N Rðyl Þ is the number of requesting file
ck ck
ðy Þ
ck l by all users in a specific time interval t as will be intro-
duced in Section 4, and NTR is the total number of requests
at time duration t. It should be noted that the Zipf-like dis-
ðy Þ
tribution indicates the probability of request ck l by all
users, while PuðiÞ ;cðyl Þ in our user’s behavior pattern repre-
j k
ðy Þ
sents the probability of requesting file ck l by user uj ðiÞ . We
employ such additional information in the proposed algo-
rithms to enhance the quality of experience for all users.
4 PROPOSED CACHING REPLACEMENT
ALGORITHMS
Considering the variation of content’s popularity over time
and the cache space limitation, the content replacement is
unavoidable. In this regard, we propose two efficient cache
replacement strategies, namely Weighted Least Frequently
used with an Adaptive Time Window and Fairness Sched-
uling-based with an Adaptive Time Window algorithms,
for the network’s model introduced in Section 2. The main
idea behind the WLF-ATW algorithm is to utilize both the
frequency and the recency information of video contents
with an adaptive time window to maximize the cache hit
ratio and control the traffic load of the network. Further-
more, the content replacement in the FS-ATW algorithm is
based on minimizing the users’ access delay. It should be
noted that the proposed WLF-ATW is applicable for wire-
less networks, where achieving a low computational com-
plexity is one of the most important factors, and the FS-
ATW, due to the reduction of the client’s latency, is suitable
for the fifth generation of cellular networks. For such meth-
ods, there are two following approaches to select the best
time to replace cached contents of FAPs:
i) Generally, in most LRU/LFU-based methods (e.g.,
[28], [29]), a content replacement occurs when a
cache miss happens. However, due to sequential
content replacements in these methods, the traffic
load on the network increases.
ii) On the other hand, in proactive-based cache replace-
ment algorithms (e.g., [21], [30], [31]), a content
replacement occurs periodically in hours of a day (in
most cases one specific time in a day), when the
network’s traffic is low. However, these approaches
suffer from the lack of on-time recognition of popular
files due to the long time interval between two conse-
cutive updating times, which leads to decreasing the
cache hit ratio and increasing the user’s access latency.
Taking the above challenges into account, it makes
sense to create a balance between the network’s traffic
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k
Fig. 2. (a) An adaptive time window selection in the WFL-ATW strategy.
(b) The time interval between two consecutive updating times ti1 and ti .
and the on-time recognition of popular files. To address
this issue, we utilize an adaptive sliding window to select
the best updating time to enhance the performance of the
cached-based network.
Algorithm 1- Weighted Least Frequently used with an Adap-
tive Time Window (WLF-ATW).
This two-phased cache replacement algorithm uses both
the frequency and the recency information of video contents
with an adaptive time window. The main purpose of this
algorithm is to take into account the network’s traffic cou-
pled with the identification of popular contents swiftly.
Phase 1 (Adaptive Time Window Length Identification). In the
first phase, the MBS aims to recognize the best value for
the adaptive time window length, denoted by t i , i.e., the
time interval between two consecutive updating times. We
define NR as the total number of users’ requests during
the last updating time to the current time. Denoting t0 as the
starting time, as depicted in Fig. 2a, NR is set to zero and
gradually increases by one after each request. Once NR
reaches a predetermined threshold level h, and the instanta-
neous network’s traffic1 is less than the threshold level z,
the cache replacement occurs at time t1 . After that, NR is set
to zero and the above procedure is repeated until NR
reaches again level h. In this case, if the instantaneous
network’s traffic is more than z, the cache replacement does
not occur till it is equal or less than z. This capability leads
to mitigating the network’s traffic.
In this algorithm, the threshold level h, which represents
the number of users’ requests, is a determinant factor to
find the next updating time. As will be shown in numerical
results in Section 5, a small value of h leads to an increase in
the traffic load of the network, however, the popular content
identification process occurs faster. To get more insight into
the selection process of parameter h, we plot in Fig. 3 the
average percentage of number of requests per hour accord-
ing to the information obtained from the campus network at
the Yazd University during the period of November 1, 2015
to February 3, 2016. It is observed from Fig. 3 that the
network’s traffic follows a fluctuation in different times of a
day. If the network’s traffic in hours of a day is compared to
a preassigned threshold z, which is selected as an average
network’s traffic, we conclude that a great deal of video
1. In this work, the network’s traffic concept means the instanta-
neous number of users’ requests.
HAJIAKHONDI-MEYBODI ET AL.: CACHE REPLACEMENT SCHEMES BASED ON ADAPTIVE TIME WINDOW FOR VIDEO ON ...
Fig. 3. The average percentage of number of requests per hour during
the period of November 1, 2015 to February 3, 2016, with an average
network’s traffic 4:17 rounded down z ¼ b4:17c ¼ 4.
data traffic is related to midday, i.e., 10 a.m. to 18 p.m.,
while it decreases on early morning and midnight. Hence,
the length of sliding time window t i is changed over time,
as shown in Fig. 2a. The optimum value of h leads to accel-
erating the identification of files that have been recently
popular and reducing the network’s traffic. In addition,
as will be shown in Section 5, parameter h is numerically
selected in order to maximize the cache hit ratio, while
minimizing the additional network’s traffic. To investi-
gate the impact of the user’s mobility on parameter h and
considering the fact that the value of h depends on the
average network’s traffic, if clients move inside a cell,
while the average number of active users experiences
smooth fluctuations, the mobility of users has no effect on
h. Using parameter h obtained from Phase 1, the MBS uti-
lizes an adaptive time window to trace all requested
video files and gets the information of both frequency
counter (or equivalently, the number of requests associ-
ated with video file ck ) and the time of requests corre-
sponding to tA" , denoted by Kck ðtA" Þ. More precisely, as
shown in Fig. 2b, if the time interval between two conse-
cutive updating times, for instance the time duration
t i ¼ ½ti1 ; ti , is divided to equal size D ¼ tA"  tA"1 ,
Kck ðtA" Þ represents the number of requests of video file ck
at time interval ½tA"1 ; tA"  over the period of t i . In this
regard, tA" is obtained as follows:
ti  ti1
tA" ¼ ð"  1Þ  D þ ti1 ; " ¼ 1; 2; . . . ;
D access delay in (1). Since the number of requests and
It should be noted that the value of D is selected in such a
way that ti tDi1 would be integer. In the following, we pro-
pose the second phase of the innovative WLF-ATW cache
replacement strategy.
Phase 2. (Content Rating Calculation). In the second phase
of the WLF-ATW cache replacement algorithm, the content
replacement is done based on the frequency and the recency
information of contents. In this regard, all the following
steps are performed by the MBS.
Step 1. Initialization. Set i ¼ 1, NR ¼ 0, t0 ¼ tLast , and h is
selected from Phase 1.
Step 2. Submit Information. Count the number of users’
requests in the network (i.e., parameter NR ), and compare
that with the threshold level h. Till NR is less than h, get the
information of frequency counter of requested video files
ck ; k ¼ 1; . . . ; M, and the corresponding time of request tA" ,
both represented by Kck ðtA" Þ.
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1481
Step 3. Content Rating Calculation. If the value of NR
obtained in Step 2 is equal to h, check the instantaneous
network’s traffic, and perform one of the following cases:
Case 1. If the instantaneous network’s traffic is less than
the threshold level z, then calculate the content rating of
all requested video files at time ti , denoted by Rck ðti Þ,
according to:
ti ti1
X Kc ðtA" Þ
D
k
Rck ðti Þ ¼ ; i ¼ 1; 2; . . . (5)
"¼1
ti  tA"
where ti and ti1 denote the current and the last updating
times, respectively (see Fig. 2b). In this regard, the video file
with the highest value of Rck ðti Þ is the most popular file.
Case 2. If the instantaneous network’s traffic is more than
the threshold level z, get the information of frequency
counter of the requested video files ck ; k ¼ 1; . . . ; M, and the
time of requests, and sequentially check the network’s traf-
fic until it is equal or less than z, then calculate Rck ðti Þ by
(5), to select the most popular files as in Case 1.
Step 4. Sorting Process. Sort the video files in descending
order of Rck ðti Þ, meaning that the video file with the highest
value of Rck ðti Þ is the most popular file.
Step 5. Termination. Update the cache of FAPs by storing
the first set of popular video files equal to the capacity
of the cache memory. Then, set NR ¼ 0 and t0 ¼ tLast is
replaced with t1 ¼ tLast and the algorithm in Phase 2 is
repeated from Step 2.
Remark 1. It is worth mentioning that using (5), if the time
of user’s request tA" is close to the current updating time
ti , the higher value of Rck ðti Þ, corresponding to the
requested file ck , is achieved. Hence, recent requested
contents have more priority than the older ones to be
stored into the cache of FAPs. In this regard, the video file
with the highest value of Rck ðti Þ is the most popular file.
The proposed WLF-ATW cache replacement strategy
eliminates the cache pollution by considering the time of
video file requests. The pseudo-code of proposed WLF-
ATW algorithm is outlined in Algorithm 1.
Algorithm 2. Fairness Scheduling-based with an Adaptive
Time Window (FS-ATW) Algorithm. This algorithm is based
: (4) on the fairness scheduling in order to minimize the users’
demanded contents are different in each FAP, the cache
updating time and stored contents in each FAP are not
equal. It means that the cache replacement phase is not per-
formed in a centralized manner by the MBS. The most sig-
nificant benefit of our distributed content replacement is
that the video files, which are stored in the cache of FAPs,
are different, therefore, it is suitable for clients that access to
more than one FAP. Consequently, the following phases are
performed for fj ; j ¼ 1; . . . ; N.
Phase 1 (Adaptive Time Window Length Identification). In this
phase, distances between UTs and FAPs are calculated to find
all users in the transmission range of FAPs. According to the
assumption that each user just accesses to one FAP, the dis-
tance between FAP fj and all users is calculated as follows:
X
j1
ðxul  xfj Þ2 þ ðyul  yfj Þ2  r2 ; l ¼ 1; . . . ; S  Nk ; (6)
k¼1
1482 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MOBILE COMPUTING, VOL. 18, NO. 7, JULY 2019

where ðxul ; yul Þ and ðxfj ; yfj Þ represent spatial coordinates
of user ul and FAP fj , respectively. For the case, when
the transmission ranges of FAPs do not overlap and
assuming that each user can access to only one FAP, the
distance
P in (6) must be calculated for FAP fj and
S  j1 h¼1 h users, j ¼ 1; . . . ; N. In contrast to Phase 1 in
N FAP fj occurs.
the WLF-ATW strategy, hj is determined for FAP
fj ; j ¼ 1; . . . ; N, based on the network’s traffic on the cor-
responding FAP fj . Denoting NRj as the number of
requested contents arrived at FAP fj ; once NRj ¼ hj and
the instantaneous network’s traffic is equal or less than
the threshold zj , the cache replacement process on FAP
fj commences.
Algorithm 1. Proposed WLF-ATW Cache Replacement
Strategy
1: Phase 1 (Adaptive Time Window Identification):
2: Consider the network’s traffic to select the best value of h.
3: Phase 2 (Content Rating Calculation):
4: Initialization: Set i ¼ 1, NR ¼ 0, t0 ¼ tLast , h is selected
from Phase 1.
5: for All users’ requests do
6: while NR < h do
7: Get the information of frequency counter Kck ðtA" Þ and
time of request tA" .
Step 2. Updating Time Calculation. Count the number of
users’ requests in the FAP fj ; j ¼ 1; . . . ; N (i.e., parameter
NRj ), and compare that with the threshold level hj . While
NRj reaches the value of hj and the instantaneous network’s
traffic is equal or less than zj , the cache replacement for
Step 3. (Acknowledgment). At the time of cache replace-
ment ti , all mobile users in the transmission range of FAP fj
send an ACK message to the corresponding FAP. In the
other words, if FAP fj receives an ACK message at time ti
ðrÞ
from user ul ; r ¼ 1; . . . ; N; r 6¼ j, that they did not connect
ðrÞ
to the FAP fj at time ti1 , it means that ul is a mobile user.
Therefore, the number of users in the transmission range of
FAP fj are updated with the value of Nj at time ti . In this
regard, the fixed and mobile users connecting to the FAP fj
are considered on the optimization problem in the next step.
Step 4. User’s Access Delay Calculation. To minimize the
ðjÞ
user’s access delay of all users ul , l ¼ 1; . . . ; Nj , in the com-
munication range of FAP fj , the optimization problem is
ðjÞ
performed for each user ul as
min DuðjÞ ; l ¼ 1; . . . ; Nj ;
Tl;k l
X
M (7)
subject to sck ð1  T l;k Þ  Cfj ;
k¼1

8: NR NR þ 1 where DuðjÞ is obtained by (1). We form an Nj  M indicator

9: end while l
10: if NR ¼ h then variable matrix of FAP fj , denoted by T fj , which lth row of
11: Check the instantaneous network’s traffic T fj is the solution of the optimization problem in (7) for
ðjÞ
12: if The instantaneous network’s traffic is equal or less user ul .
than the threshold z then Step 5. Fairness Scheduling. Considering the fact that
13: for All requested video files ck do the cache capacity of FAPs is not enough to save all users’
14: Calculate Rck ðti Þ of all requested video files accord- popular contents, users are ranked according to their satis-
ing to (5). factions. In this regard, we define the difference vector
15: end for E ¼ ½e1 ; . . . ; eNj , where el is obtained as follows:
16: else NTl
17: while The instantaneous network’s traffic is more el ¼ ; l ¼ 1; . . . ; Nj ; (8)
than z do NSl
18: Get the information of frequency counter Kck ðtA" Þ where NSl and NTl represent the number of satisfied requests
and time of request tA" . ðjÞ
19: end while of user ul by FAP fj and the total number of user’s requests
ðjÞ
20: for All requested video files ck do ul in the adaptive time window, respectively. A large
21: Calculate Rck ðti Þ. value of el represents the minority of user’s requests served
22: end for by FAP; for this reason, the priority of this user is more in
ðjÞ
23: end if the next updating time. Accordingly, the priority of user ul
24: Sort the video files in descending order of Rck ðti Þ. in ith time window, denoted by rl ðti Þ, is obtained as
25: for All i 2 N do
26: Update the cache of FAPs by storing the first set of rl ðti Þ ¼ el rl ðti1 Þ; l ¼ 1; . . . ; Nj : (9)
videos equal to the capacity of the cache memory ðjÞ
27: end for Since T l;k ¼ 0 represents the interest of user ul to file ck ,
ðjÞ
28: ti ¼ tLast , i i þ 1, NR ¼ 0. the priority of user ul is meaningless. Therefore, the
29: end if complementation of matrix T fj , denoted by T cfj , is
30: end for formed, in which the element T cl;k ¼ 1 shows the popular-
ðjÞ
31: Output: Update cache of all FAPs f j , j 2 N. ity of file ck for user ul .
c ðjÞ
After the matrix T fj formation, the priority of user ul is
c
Phase 2 (Content Replacement). In this phase, contents are multiplied in lth row of matrix T fj , and the matrix U fj is
ranked based on minimizing the users’ access delay in (1). obtained in the current updating time ti , where U l;k ¼
Then, the most popular ones are stored in the cache of FAPs rl ðti Þ  T cl;k . Then, the elements of column k, k ¼ 1; . . . ; M of
ðjÞ
till the capacity of the cache memory is not full. This phase matrix U fj , represented the rank of file ck for users ul ,
is performed as follows. l ¼ 1; . . . ; Nj , are added together and the cache replacement
Step 1. Initialization. Set i ¼ 1, NRj ¼ 0, t0 ¼ tLast , and hj is of FAP fj matrix, denoted by Rfj ¼ ½r1 ; . . . ; rM  is obtained,
PNj
selected from Phase 1 for each FAP fj ; j ¼ 1; . . . ; N. where rk ¼ l¼1 U l;k .

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HAJIAKHONDI-MEYBODI ET AL.: CACHE REPLACEMENT SCHEMES BASED ON ADAPTIVE TIME WINDOW FOR VIDEO ON ... 1483

Algorithm 2. Proposed FS-ATW Cache Replacement Step 6. Termination. Sort the video files in descending
Strategy order of rk , meaning that the video file with the highest
value of rk is the most popular file. Then, update the cache
1: Phase 1 (Adaptive Time Window Identification): of FAP fj by storing the first set of popular video files equal
2: for fj ; j ¼ 1; . . . ; N, do
to the capacity of the cache memory. Finally, set NRj ¼ 0
3: Calculate the distances between UTs and FAPs to find all
and t0 ¼ tLast is replaced with t1 ¼ tLast and the algorithm in
UTs in the communication range of FAPs according to:
Phase 2 is repeated from Step 2.
X
j1
The pseudo-code of our proposed algorithm is outlined
ðxul  xfj Þ2 þ ðyul  yfj Þ2  r2 l ¼ 1; . . . ; S  Nk ;
k¼1
in Algorithm 2. In general, the computational complexity of
the FS-ATW scheme is of order OðNNj MÞ, where N, Nj and
4: Consider the network’s traffic to select the best value of
M are the number of FAPs, the cardinality of clients in the
hj .
transmission range of FAP fj and the number of distin-
5: end for
6: Phase 2 (Content Replacement):
guished video contents in an implemented network, respec-
7: Initialization: Set i ¼ 1, NRj ¼ 0, t0 ¼ tLast , hj is selected tively. In more details, in the first Phase, distances between
from Phase 1 for each FAP fj ; j ¼ 1; . . . ; N. UTs and FAPs are calculated to find all users P in the trans-
8: for fj ; j ¼ 1; . . . ; N, do mission range of FAPs, where OðN  ðS  j1 k¼1 Nk ÞÞ stands
9: for All users’ requests do for the complexity of Phase 1. Moreover, the order of com-
10: NRj NRj þ 1 plexity of the optimization problem in the second Phase is
Cf
11: if NRj ¼ hj then OðNj  ðð2M  Mj  3Þ þ M þ M 2 ÞÞ, where Mj ¼ sc j illus-
k
12: if The instantaneous network’s traffic is less than the trates the capacity of FAP fj in the number of contents,
threshold zj then and the last step, related to sorting of popular contents is
13: All users send an ACK message to the correspond- of order OðMj2 Þ. Therefore, the total complexity of the FS-
ing FAP fj P
ðjÞ
ATW is OððN  ðS  j1 k¼1 Nk ÞÞ þ N  ðNj  ðð2M  Mj  3Þ þ
14: for All users ul do M þ M 2 Þ þ Mj2 ÞÞ. To compare the computational complexity
ðjÞ
15: Calculate the user’s access delay for all users ul of the FS-ATW scheme with other cache replacement algo-
in the communication range of FAP fj as follows: rithms such as the femtocaching algorithm in [2], it is worth
X
M
mentioning that the complexity of the femtocaching strategy
DuðjÞ ¼ ’ck PuðjÞ ;c T ck ;fj ; P
l l k in [2] is of order OððN þ SÞMÞ, where S ¼ N N
j¼1 j is the
k¼1
total number of clients in the network. Obviously, the imple-
16: Then minimize the optimization problem as fol- mentation of the FS-ATW algorithm in the network make a
lows: bit more complexity than the femtocaching strategy in [2],
while the FS-ATW scheme leads to 33 percent improvement
min DuðjÞ ; l ¼ 1; . . . ; Nj ;
T ðjÞ l in the load balance of clients when compared to the uncoded
ck ;u
l
femtocaching algorithm in [2]. It means that the number of
X
M
satisfied users in a caching-based network implemented by
s:t: sck ð1  T c ðjÞ Þ  Cfj :
k ;ul the FS-ATW strategy, due to the fairness scheduling is more
k¼1
than the uncoded femtocaching algorithm in [2].
17: Calculate the difference vector E ¼ ½e1 ; . . . ; eNj 
Nl
where el ¼ Tl .
NS 5 NUMERICAL RESULTS
18: Then calculate the priority of users according to:
In this section, we evaluate and compare the performances
rl ðti Þ ¼ el rl ðti1 Þ of the proposed WLF-ATW and FS-ATW algorithms in dif-
ðjÞ ferent scenarios with the existing conventional replacement
19: Multiple the priority of user ul by lth row of strategies such as the LRU and the LFU algorithms in [8],
matrix T cfj and then add the columns. [15] and the femtocaching replacement strategy [2] in terms
20: end for
of the cache hit ratio, transferred byte volume, user’s access
21: else
delay, user’s experience and the effect of cache capacity. For
22: while The instantaneous network’s traffic is more
the scenarios under simulation, we investigate how the
than zj do
cache replacement phase affects the aforementioned perfor-
23: Check the instantaneous network’s traffic, until
it is equal or less than zj , then do Step 13 till 19. mance metrics, and show the superiority of our algorithms
24: end while compared with traditional cache replacement methods.
25: end if Simulation Setup. We consider a macro cellular network
26: Sort the video files in descending order of rk . implemented at the Yazd University where 5104 UTs are
27: Update the cache of FAP f j by storing the first set of uniformly distributed inside the area covered by the MBS
videos equal to the capacity of the cache memory with the radius R ¼ 500 m. The MBS uses a transmission
28: ti ¼ tLast , i i þ 1, NRj ¼ 0. scheme similar to the 4G LTE standard, based on the OFDM
29: end if physical layer. In our simulation, we assume that the con-
30: end for nectivity range of each FAP is r ¼ 20 m, and the transmis-
31: end for sion range of FAPs are not overlapped as used in [2]. In
32: Output: Update the cache of all FAPs f j , j 2 N. addition, we assume that the size of all requested contents
is the same and about 37.5 MB, which is reasonable

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1484
Fig. 4. The cache hit ratio versus different values of h in the WLF-ATW
cache replacement algorithm.
assuming for 720p format with a resolution of 1280  720 px,
known as “HD” resolution, and a short length ( 5 min) play-
back time. Furthermore, it is supposed that the cache size of
each FAP is 22.5 GB, i.e., 10 percent size of total contents. In
this dataset, the total number of requested files is equal to
1846707, which 42.99 percent of them (or equivalently 820812
video files) are duplicated requests. All simulations are run
on a personal computer with 2.6 GHz Intel Core i7 with 16 GB
RAM using the MATLAB software 8.6.0.267246 (R2015b). In
these scenarios, it is assumed that the connectivity between
users and FAPs does not change during the transmission of a
video file. In addition, the number of active users per time are
calculated based on the information extracted from the cam-
pus network at the Yazd University as shown in Fig. 3. Taking
the above considerations into account, we present the follow-
ing scenarios based on the proposed cache replacement strate-
gies described in Algorithms 1 and 2.
First Scenario. We first evaluate the effect of different val-
ues of h on the WLF-ATW replacement algorithm described
in Section 4, where we consider 5104 users over the period
of November 1, 2015 to February 1, 2016 in a macro cellular
network implemented at the Yazd University. Fig. 4 illus-
trates the cache hit ratio versus different values of h ¼ bz, in
which z represents the average network’s traffic defined in
Section 4. According to the results in Fig. 4, a large value of h
leads to identifying popular contents with more delay and
decreasing the cache hit ratio. As a result, there exists a trade
off between the on-time recognition of popular contents and
the network’s resources consumption. It is seen from Fig. 4
that the best value of h for our simulation setup is h ¼ 10z,
where we use this value for the subsequent scenarios.
Fig. 5. The cache hit ratio versus the period of November 1, 2015 to December 1, 2015 for (a) WLF-ATW, Window-LRFU [20], LRU [8] and LFU [15];
and (b) FS-ATW and the Uncoded Femtocaching algorithm in [2] with h ¼ 10z.
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MOBILE COMPUTING, VOL. 18, NO. 7, JULY 2019
Second Scenario. In this part, we compare the performance
of our proposed replacement algorithms described in Sec-
tion 4 with the LRU, LFU, Window-LRFU and the uncoded
femtocaching replacement strategy in [2] from the aspect of
the cache hit ratio over the period of November 1, 2015 to
December 1, 2015 in 30 consecutive days. Since the WLF-
ATW algorithm is based on a combination of the content’s
recency and frequency information, it is seen in Fig. 5a that
our proposed WLF-ATW algorithm exhibits a higher cache
hit ratio when compared to the LRU, the LFU and the Win-
dow-LRFU schemes. This can be justified by noting that our
WLF-ATW algorithm predicts the popular contents based
on the both recency and frequency information of contents.
On the other hand, the proposed FS-ATW algorithm is com-
pared with the uncoded femtocaching replacement strategy
introduced in [2] in Fig. 5b. As previously mentioned, the
uncoded femtocaching algorithm aims to solve an optimiza-
tion problem in finding the optimum way of assigning files
to the FAPs, in order to minimize the expected download-
ing time of contents. For this reason, the uncoded femto-
caching algorithm in [2] is considered here as a benchmark
scheme. As seen from Fig. 5b, the gap between the uncoded
femtocaching scheme in [2] and our proposed FS-ATW
algorithm is negligible. However, it is worth mentioning
that the FS-ATW scheme has the best performance in terms
of the user’s experience, due to considering the fairness
scheduling to select the cache contents.
We also evaluate the performance of our proposed WLF-
ATW replacement algorithm with that of the Window-
LRFU, LRU and LFU schemes from the aspect of transferred
byte volume during 30 consecutive days in Fig. 6a. It should
be noted that if the size of requested contents is equal, the
amount of data flowing between the MBS and FAPs are
inversely proportional to the cache hit ratio. In general,
increasing the probability of finding the desired content in
the local FAP’s cache memories leads to decreasing the
amount of data flowing between the MBS and FAPs and a
better performance of the cache replacement algorithm.
With the same arguments as earlier in this scenario, the FS-
ATW algorithm exhibits approximately a similar behavior
compared to the uncoded femtocaching benchmark in [2]
(see Fig. 6b).
Third Scenario. In this scenario, we compare the perfor-
mance of our proposed replacement algorithms with the
Window-LRFU, LRU, LFU and the uncoded femtocaching
HAJIAKHONDI-MEYBODI ET AL.: CACHE REPLACEMENT SCHEMES BASED ON ADAPTIVE TIME WINDOW FOR VIDEO ON ...
Fig. 6. The transferred byte volume versus the period of November 1, 2015 to December 1, 2015 for (a) WLF-ATW, Window-LRFU [20], LRU [8] and
LFU [15]; and (b) FS-ATW and the Uncoded Femtocaching algorithm in [2] with h ¼ 10z.
in terms of the average user’s access delay in an adaptive
time window’s length after the updating time. Indeed, if the
requested content is in the local FAP, the user’s access delay
would be approximated with zero, otherwise, it would be
’ck . For a better comparison of the user’s access delay, we
normalize DuðiÞ with the maximum value of access latency
j
to file ck (i.e., parameter ’ck ). With the same arguments as in
the second scenario, the proposed WLF-ATW and FS-ATW
algorithms significantly reduce the user’s access delay
when compared to the Window-LRFU, LRU and the LFU
schemes. As seen from Fig. 7, the FS-ATW algorithm drasti-
cally reduces the average delay of all users, while the result
is close to the uncoded femtocaching benchmark in [2].
Hence, the FS-ATW algorithm not only decreases the user’s
Fig. 7. The users access normalized average delay versus the period of
November 1, 2015 to December 1, 2015 for WLF-ATW, FS-ATW,
Uncoded Femtocaching algorithm in [2], Window-LRFU [20], LRU [8],
and LFU [15] cache replacement algorithms with h ¼ 10z.
Fig. 8. The user’s experience versus the period of November 1, 2015 to
December 1, 2015 for WLF-ATW, FS-ATW, Uncoded Femtocaching
algorithm in [2], Window-LRFU [20], LRU [8], and LFU [15] cache
replacement algorithms with h ¼ 10z.
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1485
access delay, it also provides a better experience for all users
by deploying a fairness schedule.
Fourth Scenario. In this scenario, we evaluate the perfor-
mance of the proposed WLF-ATW and FS-ATW replace-
ment algorithms with the Window-LRFU, LRU, LFU and
the uncoded femtocaching from the aspect of the user’s
experience. As observed from Fig. 8, due to considering
the fairness scheduling to select the cache contents, the
proposed FS-ATW scheme has the best performance in
terms of the user’s experience which illustrates the aver-
age immediate satisfied requested content of all users.
Since conventional cache replacement algorithms gener-
ally neglect the fairness scheduling in their policies of
selecting popular contents, the average immediate satis-
fied requests in the FS-ATW is maximum. In this regard,
the proposed FS-ATW algorithm makes an effort to equi-
tably dedicate the cache capacity among the users. Hence,
the priority of storing popular contents is related to the
latest users’ situations.
Fifth Scenario. In this scenario, we demonstrate the effect
of increasing the storage capacity of each FAP on the sys-
tem’s performance. Fig. 9 compares the cache hit ratio ver-
sus the storage capacity of FAP stations which is expressed
as the percentage of the total volume of files in the network.
It is observed from Fig. 9 that increasing the volume of
cache capacity in all replacement strategies leads to enhanc-
ing the cache hit ratio. However, as it can be seen from
Fig. 9, the proposed FS-ATW algorithm displays almost the
same behavior as the uncoded femtocaching algorithm,
known as the benchmark in this work, where the cache
Fig. 9. The effect of cache capacity of FAPs on the cache hit ratio for
WLF-ATW, FS-ATW, Uncoded Femtocaching algorithm in [2], Window-
LRFU [20], LRU [8], and LFU [15] cache replacement algorithms with
h ¼ 10z.
1486
Fig. 10. The load balance versus the clients for FS-ATW, Uncoded
Femtocaching [2], and Window-LRFU cache replacement algorithms
with h ¼ 10z.
capacity of FAPs is more than 60 percent of the total volume
of files in the network.
Sixth Scenario. Finally, we evaluate the performance of
the proposed FS-ATW replacement algorithms with the
Window-LRFU and the uncoded femtocaching from the
aspect of the load balance introduced in Section 2. To illus-
trate the advantage of the proposed FS-ATW scheme in
terms of the load balance, we evaluate the number of
requested contents of 100 users, served by the MBS in the
implemented cache-based network at the Yazd University.
As shown in Fig. 10, the flat distribution of the load balance
for clients in the FS-ATW strategy indicates that all users
benefit equally from FAPs and the intense fluctuations in
the case of uncoded femtocaching and Window-LRFU algo-
rithms illustrate that the satisfaction rate of all users is not
the same and some users have more priority in the network.
As observed from Figs. 8 and 10, the proposed FS-ATW
scheme with emphasis on the fairness of the cache replace-
ment strategy to select the cache contents has the best per-
formance in terms of the user’s experience which illustrates
the average immediate satisfied requested content of all
users. Since conventional cache replacement algorithms dis-
regard the fairness to select the most popular files, these
strategies such as the femtocaching scheme in [2] just reduce
the network’s load, however, the FS-ATW scheme decreases
both the network’s traffic and the client’s load.
6 CONCLUSION
In this paper, we proposed two innovative cache replace-
ment algorithms based on the dataset obtained from the
campus network at the Yazd University. The first algorithm,
called Weighted Least Frequently used with an Adaptive
Time Window, intended to deal with the network’s traffic
and the recognition of popular files. The WLF-ATW algo-
rithm uses frequency counters and the recency information
of the contents in the victim selection process. Furthermore,
we extended the WLF-ATW scheme to a new algorithm,
namely Fairness Scheduling-based with an Adaptive Time
Window to schedule user’s requests fairly with the aim of
maximizing the user’s experience. We realized the best
updating time and solved the optimization problem of min-
imizing the user’s access delay. The uniqueness of our pro-
posed FS-ATW lies in ranking users according to their last
conditions that lead to a further user’s experience. Since our
work has focused on the improvement of the user’s experi-
ence, we defined a difference vector for all users to identify
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MOBILE COMPUTING, VOL. 18, NO. 7, JULY 2019
the portion of the number of satisfied requests of each user
versus the total number of the user’s requests. Numerical
results have shown almost 22 percent improvement in the
user’s experience for the FS-ATW algorithm when com-
pared to the uncoded femtocaching algorithm in [2]. In
addition, our evaluations showed that the WLF-ATW
scheme, with a simple computational complexity compared
to the FS-ATW and the uncoded femtocaching in [2], out-
performed the Window-LRFU, the LRU and the LFU algo-
rithms in different scenarios. In this paper, we assumed that
all the FAPs work in the closed-access mode. Our future
research involves considering the effect of mobility and fluc-
tuation of the number of active users on the Adaptive Time
Window method in an open-accessed mode femto network.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The work was supported in part by the project entitled
“Femtocaching Networks,” T/500/5856-ITRC, Iran.
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1487
Zohreh Hajiakhondi-Meybodi received the BSc
degree in communication engineering from Yazd
University, Iran, and the MSc degree in communi-
cation systems engineering (with the highest
honor) from Yazd University, Iran, in 2013 and
2017, respectively. Since 2014, she has been an
active member of the WINEL Research Lab at
Yazd University. Her research interests are in gen-
eral areas of wireless communication networks
and optimization algorithms, with particular refer-
ence to applications of caching-based systems.
Jamshid Abouei received the BSc degree in
electronics engineering and the MSc degree in
communication systems engineering (with the
highest honor) both from the Isfahan University
of Technology (IUT), Iran, in 1993 and 1996,
respectively, and the PhD degree in electrical
engineering from the University of Waterloo,
Waterloo, ON, Canada, in 2009. From 2009 to
2010, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Multi-
media Lab, Department of Electrical & Computer
Engineering, University of Toronto, ON, Canada.
Currently, he is an associate professor with the Department of Electrical
Engineering, Yazd University, Iran. His research interests are in general
areas of wireless ad hoc and sensor networks, with particular reference
to energy efficiency and optimal resource allocations. He is a senior
member of the IEEE.
Amir Hossein Fahim Raouf received the BSc
degree in communication systems engineering
from the Isfahan University of Technology (IUT),
Iran, and the MSc degree in communication sys-
tems engineering from Yazd University, Iran, in
2012 and 2016, respectively. Since 2013, he has
been an active member of the WINEL Research
Lab at Yazd University. His research interests
are in general areas of wireless communication
networks, information theory, and network cod-
ing. He is a student member of the IEEE.
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