| Summary: | Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), featured by the high-mobility and high-quality propagation environment, have shown great potential in wireless communication applications. In this paper, a novel UAV-aided small-cell content caching network is proposed and analyzed, where joint transmission (JT) is considered in the dense small-cell networks and mobile UAVs are employed to shorten the serving distance. The system performance is evaluated in terms of the average cache hit probability and the ergodic transmission rate. From the analytical results, we find that (<i>i</i>) the proposed UAV-aided small-cell network shows superior caching performance and, even with a small density of UAVs the system’s cache hit probability, can be improved significantly; (<i>ii</i>) the content’s optimal caching probability to maximize the cache hit probability is proportional to the <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mrow><mo>(</mo><mi>K</mi><mo>+</mo><mn>1</mn><mo>)</mo></mrow></semantics></math></inline-formula>-th root of its request probability, where <i>K</i> is the number of small-cell base stations that serve each user by JT; (<i>iii</i>) caching the most popular content in UAVs may lead to a low transmission rate due to the limited resource offered by the low-density UAVs. Simulation results are presented to validate the theoretical results and the performance gain achieved by the optimal caching strategy.
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