  Mobile cellular networks are becoming increasingly complex to manage while
classical deployment/optimization techniques and current solutions (i.e., cell
densification, acquiring more spectrum, etc.) are cost-ineffective and thus
seen as stopgaps. This calls for development of novel approaches that leverage
recent advances in storage/memory, context-awareness, edge/cloud computing, and
falls into framework of big data. However, the big data by itself is yet
another complex phenomena to handle and comes with its notorious 4V: velocity,
voracity, volume and variety. In this work, we address these issues in
optimization of 5G wireless networks via the notion of proactive caching at the
base stations. In particular, we investigate the gains of proactive caching in
terms of backhaul offloadings and request satisfactions, while tackling the
large-amount of available data for content popularity estimation. In order to
estimate the content popularity, we first collect users' mobile traffic data
from a Turkish telecom operator from several base stations in hours of time
interval. Then, an analysis is carried out locally on a big data platform and
the gains of proactive caching at the base stations are investigated via
numerical simulations. It turns out that several gains are possible depending
on the level of available information and storage size. For instance, with 10%
of content ratings and 15.4 Gbyte of storage size (87% of total catalog size),
proactive caching achieves 100% of request satisfaction and offloads 98% of the
backhaul when considering 16 base stations.
