Context-Aware Caching Distribution and UAV Deployment: A Game-Theoretic Approach

Abstract

This paper investigates the problem of the optimal arrangement for both unmanned aerial vehicles’ (UAVs’) caching contents and service locations in UAV-assisted networks based on the context awareness, which considers the influence between users and environment. In the existing work, users within the coverage of UAVs are considered to be served perfectly, which ignores the communication probability caused by line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) links. However, the links are related to the deployment of UAVs. Moreover, the transmission overhead should be taken into account. To balance the tradeoff between these two factors, we design the ratio of users’ probability and transmission overhead as the performance measure mechanism to evaluate the performance of UAV-assisted networks. Then, we formulate the objective for maximizing the performance of UAV-assisted networks as a UAV-assisted caching game. It is proved that the game is an exact potential game with the performance of UAV-assisted networks serving as the potential function. Next, we propose a log-linear caching algorithm (LCA) to achieve the Nash equilibrium (NE). Finally, related simulation results reflect the great performance of the proposed algorithm.