  Caching at mobile devices, accompanied by device-to-device (D2D)
communications, is one promising technique to accommodate the exponentially
increasing mobile data traffic. While most previous works ignored user
mobility, there are some recent works taking it into account. However, the
duration of user contact times has been ignored, making it difficult to
explicitly characterize the effect of mobility. In this paper, we adopt the
alternating renewal process to model the duration of both the contact and
inter-contact times, and investigate how the caching performance is affected by
mobility. The data offloading ratio, i.e., the proportion of requested data
that can be delivered via D2D links, is taken as the performance metric. We
first approximate the distribution of the communication time for a given user
by beta distribution through moment matching. With this approximation, an
accurate expression of the data offloading ratio is derived. For the
homogeneous case where the average contact and inter-contact times of different
user pairs are identical, we prove that the data offloading ratio increases
with the user moving speed, assuming that the transmission rate remains the
same. Simulation results are provided to show the accuracy of the approximate
result, and also validate the effect of user mobility.
