Effective Content Delivery with Distributed Edge Caching in WiFi Networks

There are two dimensions that are being explored by the research community to alleviate the load on today’s Internet infrastructure, and service end-users’ demands: (i) cache content close to the users, and (ii) use of coded delivery to reduce the amount of data transmitted. This thesis aims to bridge the gap between theory and practice on content caching and delivery over wireless networks. To achieve this, this thesis provides the following contributions. (i) Design of a content caching and coded delivery system at the WiFi edge as well as the algorithms therewith, (ii) Estimation of the gains of caching and coding, as well as the tradeoffs between them in a WiFi network. Based on an extensive set of experiments, this thesis evaluates the effectiveness of caching and coding in a wireless system, specifically in WiFi networks.