UAV-Assisted Data Dissemination with Proactive Caching and File Sharing in V2X Networks

Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communications refers to an intelligent and connected vehicular network where all vehicles and infrastructure systems are interconnected with each other. Data dissemination is playing an increasingly significant role in enhancing the network connectivity and data transmission performance. However, conventional scenarios and protocols cannot satisfy the growing pluralistic and superior quality of services (QoS) requirements of included vehicles. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted data dissemination protocol with proactive caching at the vehicles and an advanced file sharing strategy for revolutionizing communications. Specifically, in the proactive caching phase, we employ UAVs to act as flying base stations (BSs) for information interactions. Considering the time-variant network topology, we further propose a spatial scheduling (SS) algorithm for the trajectory optimization of each UAV, which can expedite the caching process and boost the system throughput. Then in the file sharing phase, based on the previous caching status, we provide a relay ordering algorithm to enhance the network transmission performance. Numerical results verify that our proposed UAV-assisted data transmission protocol can achieve a desirable system performance in terms of the downloading process, network throughput, and average data delivery delay.