Mobility-Aware Proactive Edge Caching for Large Files in the Internet of Vehicles

By shifting the requested content to the edge in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), edge caching is expected to be an effective solution to satisfy the low latency and high-reliability requirements of IoV users for multimedia services. However, the edge node’s coverage area and storage space are limited. Moreover, since vehicles have high mobility and in-vehicle multimedia applications require sequential delivery for contents, we need to address two main issues: 1) how to optimize the proactive content caching decision (i.e., the placement of cached content chunks) among edge nodes (ENs) to provide better Quality of Services (QoS) for IoV users and 2) how to ensure that vehicles can download the required contents sequentially to improve Quality of Experience (QoE). In this article, we propose a mobility-aware proactive edge caching scheme (MSTPS), where the spatial and temporal prediction of vehicles are taken into account for content deployment and scheduling. Specifically, we optimize the caching decision based on predicting the vehicle’s driving trajectory and travel preference. The scheme learns the vehicle’s travel preferences to cope with mobility uncertainty by combining users with similar travel patterns. Meanwhile, the proposed scheme can support the sequential downloading of content chunks. Furthermore, in order to deal with the dynamic characteristics and unpredictable challenges of the IoV, we design a system recovery strategy, which can avoid the degradation of the proposed scheme due to the failure of prediction. Finally, by using real mobility data sets and scenarios, we explore the impact of the number of ENs deployed in advance for each vehicle’s request when the cache needs to be updated on system performance. In addition, we evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. Our proposed scheme can achieve the best cache hit ratio and decrease caching costs compared to the existing mobility-aware in-order caching schemes.