Online Caching With Delayed Hits in Multi-Server Edge Networks

Edge caching is a critical application scenario in edge networks. By storing diverse files on edge servers and dynamically fetching new files from the cloud, edge networks can provide low-latency file access services for mobile users. In practice, the file fetching latency is non-negligible. Consecutive requests for the same missing file during the fetching phase introduce additional latency (referred to as delayed hits). Existing studies either ignore the delayed hits when making caching decisions or are not applicable to multi-server edge networks. In this paper, we investigate the online caching problem with delayed hits in the multi-server edge networks and prove its hardness. The objective is to minimize the total file access latency. To solve the proposed problem, we propose Cadle, which makes caching decisions based on the latency of different file access operations and weights of files in an online manner, without relying on any prior knowledge of future requests. We prove the competitive ratio of Cadle.We also conduct extensive experiments on the real-world dataset to verify the performance of Cadle. The experimental results show that Cadle reduces the total file access latency by at least 31.8% on average, and improves the hit ratio by at least 25.9% on average compared with state-of-the-art approaches.