Towards Cost Minimization for Wireless Caching Networks With Recommendation and Uncharted Users' Feature Information

Caching popular contents at the network edge has been considered as a promising enabler to relieve the pressure on networks due to the fact that a substantial portion of global data traffic is repeatedly requested by many subscribers and thus redundantly generated. Recommendation, on the other hand, has attracted spiraling attention for its capability of reshaping users' contents demand patterns. In this paper, we examine the practicability of recommendation in boosting the gains of edge caching with uncharted users' feature information. To this end, we first characterize the average system cost for a generic network model, disclosing its dependence on the recommendation and caching strategies. Then, we formulate the joint caching and recommendation decision oriented cost minimization problem, taking the constraints on each content provider's cache capacity budget, each individual user's recommendation size and recommendation quality into account. However, the implicit information regarding users' preference makes the problem inextricable. To address this issue, a versatile long short term memory (LSTM) network assisted prediction paradigm is proposed to attain the preference schema of users with the assistance of their historical behavior data. Based on that, we rigorously prove the NP-hardness of obtaining the optimal recommendation and caching policies that jointly minimize the system cost. Therewith, an iterative suboptimal algorithm is developed, which has provable polynomial time complexity and convergence guarantee. Extensive simulation results validate the effectiveness of our proposed LSTM enabled feature information prediction approach and the convergence performance of the devised joint decision making methodology. In addition, it is shown that the proposed scheme outperforms numerous benchmarks significantly.