Multimedia content streaming from Internet-based sources emerges as one of the most demanded services by wireless users. In order to alleviate excessive traffic due to multimedia content transmission, many architectures (e.g., small cells, femtocells, etc.) have been proposed to offload such traffic to the nearest (or strongest) access point also called “helper”. However, the deployment of more helpers is not necessarily beneficial due to their potential of increasing interference. In this work, we evaluate a wireless system which can serve both cacheable and non-cacheable traffic. More specifically, we consider a general system in which a wireless user with limited cache storage requests cacheable content from a data center that can be directly accessed through a base station. The user can be assisted by a pair of wireless helpers that exchange non-cacheable content as well. Files not available from the helpers are transmitted by the base station. We analyze the system throughput and the delay experienced by the cached user and show how these performance metrics are affected by the packet arrival rate at the source helper, the availability of caching helpers, the caches’ parameters, and the user’s request rate by means of numerical results.

来自基于Internet的源的多媒体内容流成为无线用户最需要的服务之一。为了减轻由于多媒体内容传输引起的过多业务，已经提出了许多架构（例如，小型小区，毫微微小区等）来将这种业务分流到最近的（或最强的）接入点，也称为“助手”。但是，由于可能增加干扰，因此部署更多的助手不一定是有利的。在这项工作中，我们评估了可以同时服务可缓存和不可缓存流量的无线系统。更具体地说，我们考虑一种通用系统，其中具有有限高速缓存存储的无线用户从数据中心请求可通过基站直接访问的可高速缓存内容。一对可以交换不可缓存内容的无线助手也可以为用户提供帮助。辅助程序无法获得的文件由基站传输。我们分析了系统吞吐量和缓存用户经历的延迟，并通过以下方式显示了这些性能指标如何受到数据包到达源帮助程序的速率，缓存帮助程序的可用性，缓存的参数以及用户的请求速率的影响数值结果。