Proactive Optimization with Machine Learning: Femto-caching with Future Content Popularity

Optimizing resource allocation with predicted information has shown promising gain in boosting network performance and improving user experience. Earlier research efforts focus on optimizing proactive policies under the assumption of knowing the future information. Recently, various techniques have been proposed to predict the required information, and the prediction results were then treated as the true value in the optimization, i.e., "first-predict-then-optimize". In this paper, we introduce a proactive optimization framework for anticipatory resource allocation, where the future information is implicitly predicted under the same objective with the policy optimization in a single step. An optimization problem is formulated to integrate the implicit prediction and the policy optimization, based on the conditional distribution of the future information given the historical observations. To solve such a problem, we transform it equivalently to a problem depending on the joint distribution of future and historical information. Then, we resort to unsupervised learning with neural networks to learn the proactive policy as a function of the past observations via stochastic optimization. We take proactive caching and bandwidth allocation at base stations as a concrete example, where the objective function is the conditional expectation of successful offloading probability taken over the future popularity given the historically observed popularity. We use simulation to validate the proposed framework and compare it with the "first-predict-then-optimize" strategy and a heuristic "end-to-end" optimization strategy with supervised learning.