A Time-Driven UAV Deployment and Content Caching Approach for Multi-UAV-Enabled Consumer Electronics Network

To address the problem of high delay due to the explosive growth of mobile data traffic in consumer electronics network (CEN), in this paper, we investigate the multiple-unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled CEN content caching problem, focusing on minimizing content access delay by jointly optimizing UAV deployment, ground user (GU) access, and content caching while satisfying other resource constraints. We propose an algorithm based on alternating optimization for the scenario where multiple UAVs and base station (BS) collaborate to provide caching services. The algorithm attains a sub-optimal solution with a convergence guarantee by iteratively solving the three sub-problems derived from the decomposition of the target problem. First, a convex difference-based algorithm solves the UAV deployment sub-problem. Second, a greedy-based algorithm is used to solve the content caching sub-problem. Then, a continuous convex approximation algorithm based on the penalty function is used to solve the user access sub-problem. Finally, the above procedure is repeated to obtain a sub-optimal solution to the target problem. The proposed joint optimization algorithm is shown to outperform the benchmark algorithms in terms of average content access delay and cache hit ratio, as evidenced by numerical results.