Communications, Caching, and Computing for Next Generation HetNets.

To accommodate the dramatically increasing traffic demand, some of the intermediate nodes within HetNets should be endowed with storage and computation capabilities for facilitating pervasive computation service and massive content delivery. ICN and MEC are recognized as two promising techniques, with which content can be cached and computed in close proximity to mobile devices. These advanced techniques enable Het- Nets to accommodate and support more mobile users, but also bring challenges of architecture deployment and resource deployment. Along these lines, the fist part of this article offers a novel joint architecture of communications, caching, and computing for HetNets based on wireless network virtualization with software defined networking, where ICN and MEC support each other to promote network performance and guarantee different types of business demands. Based on the integrated framework, we further present two different self-enforcing mechanisms (i.e., a caching-assisted MEC approach and a computing-assisted ICN approach) to achieve mutual promotion between caching and computing. Against this background, the second part of this article offers virtual multi-resource deployment for both uplink and downlink scenarios to evaluate a three-way trade-off among communication, caching, and computing revenues. The results demonstrate our hypothesis on the utilization of the mutual promotion between ICN and MEC to improve the overall performance of future wireless systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]