Cache Sharing Method Using IEEE 802.11 Wireless Access Points for Mobile Environment

Mobile devices such as Smartphones have become commodity and access more and more large content from cloud platforms. In this paper, the authors propose a novel method to enable cache around edges of the network, i.e., at multiple stand-alone IEEE802.11 Access Points (APs) not necessarily connected to the Internet. In a nutshell, they enable external cache around a mobile edge device that can be accessed via IEEE 802.11 while it still uses 3G connectivity to access non-cached content. Their method does neither require Smartphones to have large storage, nor limit the opportunity to spatially share popular content with the other Smartphones, thus, provides the best caching solution for Smartphones to access large content from the cloud platforms.