Abstract

The caching paradigm has been introduced to alleviate backhaul traffic load and to reduce latencies due to massive never ending increase in data traffic. To fully exploit the benefits offered by caching, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and device-to-device (D2D) communication can be further utilized. In contrast to prior works, that strictly limits the content delivery routes up to two hops, we explore a multi-hop communications scenario, where the UAVs, the UEs, or both can relay the content to individual users. In this context, we formulate the problem for joint route selection and power allocation to minimize the overall system content delivery duration. First, motivated by the limitations of existing works, we consider the case where the nodes may transmit content simultaneously rather than sequentially and propose simple yet effective approach to allocate the transmission power. Second, we design a low-complexity greedy algorithm jointly handling route selection and power allocation. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed greedy algorithm outperforms the benchmark algorithm by up to 56.98% in terms of content delivery duration while it achieves close-to-optimal performance.