Cooperative content caching and delivery in vehicular networks: A deep neural network approach

The growing demand for low delay vehicular content has put tremendous strain on the backbone network. As a promising alternative, cooperative content caching among different cache nodes can reduce content access delay. However, heterogeneous cache nodes have different communication modes and limited caching capacities. In addition, the high mobility of vehicles renders the more complicated caching environment. Therefore, performing efficient cooperative caching becomes a key issue. In this paper, we propose a cross-tier cooperative caching architecture for all contents, which allows the distributed cache nodes to cooperate. Then, we devise the communication link and content caching model to facilitate timely content delivery. Aiming at minimizing transmission delay and cache cost, an optimization problem is formulated. Furthermore, we use a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) approach to model the decision-making process for caching among heterogeneous cache nodes, where each agent interacts with the environment collectively, receives observations yet a common reward, and learns its own optimal policy. Extensive simulations validate that the MADRL approach can enhance hit ratio while reducing transmission delay and cache cost.