Delta compression optimisation for UAV‐enabled mobile edge caching

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)-based sensor network is an effective mechanism for recognising and tracking of manoeuvring targets as well as expanding the monitoring coverage in the battlefield. However, there exists redundancy among the spectrum data collected by a UAV monitor within a data collection period, which may waste storage space and reduce the speed of data uploaded to the control centre. The authors assume that each UAV is equipped with an edge computing server and propose a delta compression method, which can save cache space and transfer time. First, they present a cost model and evaluation model for delta compression of the COPY/ADD class. Then an optimisation problem is formulated aiming to obtain the optimal delta encoding. Additionally, a maximal total length of copied fragments (MTLC) algorithm is proposed to find more mutually separated L-grams common fragments between the data collected at two adjacent moments. Theoretical analysis proves that the MTLC algorithm can generate a good delta encoding with the maximum total length and then the minimum total number of the COPYs. Moreover, numerical results show that MTLC has better performance in constructing a good delta encoding than the simple greedy and hash suffix array delta algorithms.