Power and Rate Adaptive Pushing Over Fading Channels

Proactive caching is capable of reducing access latency and improving network throughput, thereby attracting attention from both industry and academia. However, the energy efficiency (EE) of proactive caching over fading channels has not been well studied yet. In this paper, we aim at presenting an energy-efficient content pushing policy by carefully adapting the transmit rate and power in pushing and on-demand delivery phases, while assuring delivery delay constraints. To this end, the average delay, delay-outage probability, and EE are analyzed for a general adaptive pushing policy based on the saddle point approximation. According to these results, we formulate EE maximization problems under average delay and delay-outage constraints, respectively, for two special types of adaptive pushing policies, namely, opportunistic pushing and water-filling-based pushing. Due to the high complexity of the grid search for solving the formulated problems, suboptimal algorithms are presented based on gradient descent and golden section search methods. Moreover, we mathematically derive the scaling property and numerically obtain request probability and delivery delay thresholds for content pushing. Simulations show that the presented pushing policies achieve higher EE than on-demand transmissions, especially when the content item is popular and the tolerable delivery delay is small.