Care to Share?: An Empirical Analysis of Capacity Enhancement by Sharing at the Edge

The exponential growth in online content consumption is a key concern for designing future generation network architectures. In this paper, we use content access patterns from a large trace of content accesses comprising about half the population of United Kingdom to make the case that a large portion of the backhaul load can be mitigated by content sharing amongst edge devices. We explore various models for edge devices to store and share content amongst each other, ranging from reactive opportunistic sharing to predicting future content access and speculatively placing content on strategic devices prior to request. We analyse the performance of each of these models in terms of content placement and traffic savings, which are constrained by the storage available on edge devices, the performance of the speculation engine and the wireless channel conditions. We formulate and solve at scale an optimisation problem for strategically placing content for sharing within a geographically localised cell to show such an approach can save up to 47% of the traffic generated from a small cell.