Proactive content delivery for vehicles over cellular networks: The fundamental benefits of computing and caching

The emergence of self-driving technologies implies that a future vehicle will likely become an entertainment center that demands personalized multimedia contents with very high quality. The surge of vehicular content demand brings significant challenges for the fifth generation (5G) cellular communication network. To cope with the challenge of massive content delivery, previous studies suggested that the 5G mobile edge network should be designed to integrate communication, computing, and cache (3C) resources to enable advanced functionalities such as proactive content delivery and in-network caching. However, the fundamental benefits achievable by computing and caching in mobile communications networks are not yet properly understood. This paper proposes a novel theoretical framework to characterize the tradeoff among computing, cache, and communication resources required by the mobile edge network to fulfill the task of content delivery. Analytical and numerical results are obtained to characterize the 3C resource tradeoff curve. These results reveal key insights into the fundamental benefits of computing and caching in vehicular mobile content delivery networks.