Rate coverage analysis of cache-enabled cellular networks with content based cell association

Abstract

Cell association is considered as one of the key design issues in cellular networks which may significantly affects the quality of experience of the end users, the traffic load balancing of the base stations (BSs), and the network capacity. The scope of this work is to investigate the cell association policy in cache-enabled cellular networks for the performance enhancement of content delivery. Particularly, a content based cell association policy is considered, under which a user is designed to associated with the nearest feasible BS (the nearest BS which caches the requested file) if the interference from the physically nearest BS is constrained. In this context, we propose a stochastic geometry framework to analyze the association probability of the users and thereby the rate coverage performance of the cache-enabled cellular network. We also provide simulation results to validate our analysis. It is demonstrated through both the analytical and simulation results that the benefit of the proposed content based cell association policy is significant over the conventional cell association policy without interference constraint.