Delay-Minimized Edge Caching in Heterogeneous Vehicular Networks: A Matching-Based Approach

To enable ever-increasing vehicular applications, heterogeneous vehicular networks (HetVNets) are recently emerged to provide enhanced and cost-effective wireless network access. Meanwhile, edge caching is imperative to future vehicular content delivery to reduce the delivery delay and alleviate the unprecedented backhaul pressure. This work investigates content caching in HetVNets where Wi-Fi roadside units (RSUs), TV white space (TVWS) stations, and cellular base stations are considered to cache contents and provide content delivery. Particularly, to characterize the intermittent network connection provided by Wi-Fi RSUs and TVWS stations, we establish an on-off model with service interruptions to describe the content delivery process. Content coding then is leveraged to resist the impact of unstable network connections with optimized coding parameters. By jointly considering file characteristics and network conditions, we minimize the average delivery delay by optimizing the content placement, which is formulated as an integer linear programming (ILP) problem. Adopting the idea of student admission model, the ILP problem is then transformed into a many-to-one matching problem and solved by our proposed stable-matching-based caching scheme. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can achieve near-optimal performances in terms of delivery delay and offloading ratio with low complexity.