Joint mixed-timescale optimization of content caching and delivery policy in NOMA-based vehicular networks

Abstract

Recently, the development of Internet of Vehicles (IoV) and the increasing popularity of video applications have led to the fast-growing in-car video demand causing numerous challenges in wireless networks. Pre-caching and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) have been regarded as two effective techniques to alleviate the mentioned challenge. In this paper, we propose a cache-aided cooperative transmission to maximize the quality of service (QoS) in the NOMA-based vehicular network. A QoS-oriented joint optimization problem is formulated, which incorporates power allocation, content caching, and delivery strategy. Considering, on the one hand, the slow update rate of cache content and, on the other hand, frequent handovers of vehicles between different transmitters, a mixed-timescale optimization is proposed where the serving cache is updated in a long-term phase, while content delivery and power allocation are optimized in a short-term phase. In the proposed approach, content caching is determined based on future user requests, vehicle tracking, and other delivery information. To make this possible, we leverage a substantial number of stochastic samples to approximate content caching in the long-term caching phase. Due to the NOMA-based transmission and integral variables, the setting leads to a Mixed Integer Non-Linear Programming (MINLP) problem, which is NP-hard. To solve this problem, an iterative method based on sample average approximation (SAA) and Successive Convex Approximation (SCA) is applied. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve better QoS than other recently proposed transmission schemes.