An optimal strategy for UAV-assisted video caching and transcoding

Worldwide Internet traffic has seen phenomenal growth in recent years. The main cause of this exponential upsurge is bandwidth-hungry video streaming and content-sharing services. Caching video files at the edge nodes is a prospective solution for faster content transmission and improved user experience. In addition, the transcoding of video contents is also crucial to address diverse user requirements. While the goal of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted systems so far is on computation offloading, the utilization of UAVs for caching and transcoding was not considered. In this paper, the proposed strategy introduces UAVs to serve requests for video files locally and alleviate backhaul pressure. The proposed optimization model reduces content transmission delay by exploiting caching and transcoding facilities at the UAVs. In addition to the optimization problem formulation, a low-complexity heuristic algorithm is introduced to find an acceptable solution in real time. Simulation results confirm that the proposed UAV-assisted model achieves significant performance gain by reducing content transmission delay and offloading backhaul traffic.