Towards a UAV-centric Content Caching Architecture for Communication-challenged Environments
Amit Kumar Bhuyan, Hrishikesh Dutta, Subir Kumar Biswas · GLOBECOM 2022 - 2022 IEEE Global Communications Conference · 2022
This article presents an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) based caching framework for content provisioning in disaster scenarios. In a disaster scenario without the availability of static base stations and their wireline backhauls, community of stranded users can access contents from a network of static and traveling UAVs. A set of relatively static anchor UAVs with vertical as well as lateral links provide content access to its local users. A set of ferrying UAVs with only lateral links, but with wider mobility, can also provision content to users while visiting different communities of users. The algorithmic objective is to intelligently cache contents in the storage-constrained UAVs in order to maximize content availability for the users affected by such disasters. The paper develops a novel approach of content duplication within the anchor UAVs along with a mechanism to distribute non-duplicated contents across the ferrying UAVs. Through analytical modeling and simulation experiments it is demonstrated that content availability in such an arrangement can be maximized by choosing an optimal level of duplication for content with specific popularity distributions. The paper does functional verification and performance evaluation of the proposed caching framework under a wide range of network size, UAV distribution, content popularity, and ferrying UAV trajectories.