Recently, the research paper “Cooperative Edge Caching with Large Language Model in Wireless Networks”, co-authored by Wang Wentao — a 2023-cohort undergraduate in Foundations of Mathematical Science at DLI — as the second student author (with his supervisor as the first author), has been accepted by the international journal IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. The paper is a collaboration between the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Dalian University of Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong University and University of Science and Technology Beijing. It focuses on cooperative edge caching in wireless networks and on large language model (LLM) enabled intelligent network control.
Targeting wireless network scenarios with overlapping multi-base-station coverage and dynamically changing user requests, the study proposes a centralised cache replacement control framework driven by a large language model. The framework converts information such as the cache status of multiple base stations into structured text prompts, lets the LLM generate cache update decisions for each station, and combines action parsing, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and group relative policy optimization (GRPO) to improve the effectiveness and stability of those decisions. Experiments show that in a five-base-station scenario, the GRPO-tuned LLM controller achieves an average cooperative cache hit rate of 0.610, outperforming conventional heuristic methods and several reinforcement learning baselines, and demonstrates strong zero-shot transfer capability.
Figure: Overview of the two-stage (SFT and RL) LLM-based cooperative edge caching framework
During the research, under the supervision of mentors from Dalian University of Technology and the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wang Wentao contributed to the code design of the LLM-based edge caching framework, experimental evaluation and paper writing.
IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing is a major international journal in mobile computing published by the IEEE. It has long featured high-level research on mobile computing, wireless communications, edge computing, mobile systems and ubiquitous computing. The journal is recommended as a CCF-A publication and is ranked in Zone 1 of the Chinese Academy of Sciences discipline category for computer science and Q1 in the JCR classification.
The College is committed to providing a high-level academic and research exchange platform for staff and students, and strongly supports student research and innovation through a high-quality, Sino-foreign integrated curriculum and dedicated research support programmes. Going forward, DLI will continue to deepen international exchange and collaboration as well as industry–academia–research integration, so as to cultivate more top innovative talent with an international outlook, an innovative spirit and practical ability.
