A Tunable Caching Distribution Model for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Networks

In the existing works on performance analysis of cache-enabled unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks, caching distribution is fixed, and the joint cache-level and transmission-level cooperation has not been analyzed in literature. Considering UAVs agility and line-of-sight (LOS)/non-line-of-sight (NLOS) channel characteristics, this article proposes a tunable caching distribution model, where content placement and transmission can be flexibly adjusted to match interference topology dynamics and derives semi-closed expression of caching coverage probability via stochastic geometry. Specifically, UAVs will take the partition coefficient rho to determine caching distribution, where the most popular content files are reserved in every UAV within the cooperation group and jointly transmit to the user, while other files are probabilistic stored in the remaining cache space to achieve content diversity. In addition, when requiring the less popular files, the user will always connect to the UAV with the best signal-to-interference (SIR) ratio among cache hit UAVs within the cooperation group. The theoretical analysis investigates the effects of various system parameters such as UAVs height, cooperative radius, and content popularity on the caching coverage probability and optimal rho for can be found. It can be seen that optimal rho will be decreased first and then increased along with the increase of UAVs height, which reveals the tradeoff between cache hit probability and transmission reliability. Analytical results show that our proposed cache and transmission policy can achieve 34% gain of coverage probability compared to the policy of probabilistic cached.