Smart Caching in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Future mobile radio networks will aim on broadband access for all users. The performance of the radio network vitally depends on the length and the characteristic of the transmission path between user terminal and access point. Furthermore in urban environments a full broadband coverage is hard to provide. Together, this will cause a high variation of link quality which makes especially broadband services hard to realize. This paper introduces a technique called smart caching, which allows overcoming the problem of variation in network performance at least for non-real-time and non-interactive services. Smart caching follows the approach of pre-fetching and buffering data at the edge of the core network and transmitting it whenever the terminal comes into service range of an access point.