Caching and D2D sharing for content delivery in software-defined UAV networks

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In cases of catastrophic events such as natural disasters or physical calamities, current network infrastructure can become inoperative. Furthermore, there are transient events leading to excessive demand surges where it is needed to deploy additional network capacity on-demand. In such cases, rapid network deployments become vital to establish communications and enable networked services. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) networks are good candidates for this kind of operation. Software-defined networking and content-centric operation are promising technologies to enable agile control, network visibility and efficient content delivery via centralized optimization in these challenged systems. In this work, we consider an edge network which is composed of UAVs and serves in a content-centric mode with in-network caching and device-to-device (D2D) transmissions. We develop a cache placement and selection scheme for energy efficient operation. We also investigate how such a system performs under different operating conditions.