Integrated VLC/RF Wireless Technologies for Reliable Content Caching System in Vehicular Networks

Abstract

In a vehicular communications environment, the need for information sharing, entertainment, and multimedia will increase, leading to congestion of backhaul networks. The major challenge of this network is latency and resource limitations. Proactive caching can be obtained from local caches rather than from remote servers, which can avoid long delays resulting from limited backhaul capacity and resources. Therefore, proactive caching reduces latency and improves the quality of services. Determining which files should be cached in memory is a critical issue. The paper proposes various placement schemes for caching at the vehicle and mobile base station (MBS) layers. The optimal caching place represents better user demand and latency based on the demand and mobility model. Non-cooperative and cooperative vehicles with vehicle-to-vehicle communication (V2V) are included. In both models, the high data rate of visible light communication (VLC) in the vehicular networks tends to enhance the caching capability. We also illustrate a sub-optimal algorithm to solve optimization problems compared to the optimal brute force solver and the sub-optimal genetic algorithm. Numerical results show that proactive caching schemes have a significant gain in system performance. The analysis shows that VLC improves proactive caching performance when there are less than 25 vehicles. The joint proactive caching scheme works better as the number of vehicles increases. The V2V proactive caching is useful when vehicles per platoon are ≥ 10