Energy Efficient Caching and Sharing Policy in Multihop Device-to-Device Networks

Caching content at the user device and sharing files via multihop Device-to-Device link can offload the traffic from the Base Station, which is inevitable to consume the user’s energy. But most works usually assume that the battery capacity is implicitly infinite and rarely consider the impact of the user’s remaining battery energy on the file transmission. In fact, the user device has limited battery capacity and the transmission may be not completed due to the insufficient battery energy. So it is important to utilize the limited battery energy to ensure more successful transmission and traffic offloading. In this paper, we firstly optimize the caching policy and obtain the minimum energy cost of cache-enabled multihop D2D communications. For this purpose, we classify users into different clusters and use a weighted undirected graph to represent the topological relationship of users in one cluster. Then, we propose a novel algorithm to find the optimal path to transmit files via multihop D2D link. Finally, we obtain the minimum energy cost and optimal caching policy. Simulation results show that the proposed caching policy performs better than other general caching strategies in terms of energy conservation.