D2D Communication Underlaying UAV-Enabled Network: A Content-Sharing Perspective

The last era has witnessed an unprecedented demand for digital content. To meet these rigorous demands, researchers have been busy developing content-sharing applications and services. The advancement in technology has aided this process. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have gained a lot of attention in assisting cellular networks since they play a paramount role in disaster management, capacity enhancement, on-demand communication, and content dissemination. In this study, we consider content-centric UAV communication underlaid device-to-device (D2D) users. Different from the current research trends, this study considers clustering the D2D users (i.e., ground users) and UAV only deliver the requested content to the cluster heads. We considered the clustering approach since the UAV is an energy constraint device and the aim is to reduce the energy consumed by the UAV during the communication phase. Clustering the ground nodes will allow the UAV to communicate to only cluster heads as compared with a bigger group of users. Cluster heads are then responsible to forward the cached contents to their respective cluster members. A comprehensive performance evaluation of the proposed scheme was conducted by benchmarking it against state-of-the-art research works and considering various performance parameters such as throughput, energy consumption, and content delivery delay. The proposed scheme produced promising results for all parameters and against other research works as well.