Evaluation of flying caching servers in UAV-BS based realistic environment

Abstract

The dramatic growth of data traffic during the past decade has challenged wireless networks to provide new mechanisms to support such demand. Fast deployable wireless networks supported by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are a promising solution, especially to support in crowded scenarios with high peaks of traffic. Nevertheless, mounting a Base Station (BS) on UAVs (UAV-BSs) raises several challenges like the saturation of the backhaul (BH) link, needed for the communication between them and the Core Network (CN). In this work, this issue is addressed with the usage of the Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) technology, consisting on the placement of servers, providing computing platforms and storage, directly at the edge of these networks, e.g. on the UAV-BSs. In particular, we consider a portion of a Radio Access Network (RAN) composed by UAV-BSs, equipped with servers that provide the caching capability. The performance is evaluated, using realistic traffic demand, for different traffic characteristics, capacity of the cache server and users' density. Simulation results reveal that the usage of the MEC caching prevents the BH network saturation, since in case a requested content is locally cached, the BH network is not used. As consequences, the user coverage and the access capacity increase up to 33% and 70%, respectively and the experienced delay drops by 30%. (C) 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.