A UAV-Enabled Data Dissemination Protocol With Proactive Caching and File Sharing in V2X Networks

Abstract

In Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) networks, where all vehicles and infrastructures are interconnected for information sharing, data dissemination is increasingly playing a significant role in superior and pluralistic communication services. To empower the efficiency of data dissemination, in this paper, we propose a novel unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled scheduling protocol consisting of a proactive caching policy and a file sharing strategy in V2X networks. In the proactive caching process, we deploy UAVs as flying base stations (BSs) with caching capability, where we propose a UAV dynamic trajectory scheduling (DTS) algorithm to optimize the caching duration. Whereas in the file sharing strategy, based on the previous vehicular caching status, we provide a framework of file sharing cycle for data dissemination scheduling and employ a channel prediction algorithm to alleviate communication overhead. Moreover, we propose a relay ordering algorithm to effectively improve the file sharing process. Simulation results demonstrate that, our proposed scheduling protocol can enhance the efficiency of data dissemination and achieve an improved network performance in terms of caching process, system throughput, and file sharing latency in V2X networks.