D4.1 Initial SoTA and design of Wireless Edge Caching solutions

This document corresponds to deliverable D4.1 “Report on 6G-SENSES, Technologies for Wireless Edge Caching, Context and Architecture Design” of the 6G-SENSES project. The deliverable provides an in-depth survey of the state of the art related to Wireless Edge Caching technologies, providing a wide-ranging overview of the different layers involved in the development of this technology and its integration into contemporary network infrastructures. The report focuses on challenging network scenarios in which timely and updated sensing information is required or when operating in highly dynamic, mobile-driven networks involving unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or other mobile devices. In these cases, the limitations of conventional caching strategies become more pronounced, and specific solutions should be developed. As a first step in the analysis of the best Wireless Edge Caching solutions we first developed a thorough simulation framework that includes both network communication between devices and sensors. This simulation framework has been exploited to implement and compare multiple traditional caching strategies such as First-In First-Out (FIFO), Least Recently Used (LRU), and Least Frequently Used (LFU). The simulator has been used to compare the performances of all the caching strategies, under different key performance metrics, such as HIT/MISS ratios, end-to-end (E2E) delay, and data freshness. In addition, we plan to design algorithms that also exploit location related information, to develop ad-hoc location-based caching mechanism and evaluate how these approaches improve the caching performance with respect to standard caching mechanisms.