Content-Aware Transmission in UAV-Assisted Multicast Communication

To alleviate the explosive growth of data traffic caused by the increased use of smart devices, new transmission techniques are needed to increase the utilization of limited bandwidth resources and for providing high transmission rates in future wireless networks. On the other hand, due to their flexibility and autonomy, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are considered as a potential candidate to support ubiquitous connectivity and operate as flying base stations, where the deployment of UAVs can affect the quality of experience (QoE) of users. Hence, in this paper, we employ UAVs as aerial base stations to transmit data to ground users (GUs) via air to ground (A2G) communication links, where we show how content awareness can help improve the data rate. Specifically, we design two content-sharing (CS) data transmission schemes to improve the average data rate of the GUs. Additionally, two UAV deployment strategies, namely the fixed-point deployment scheme and traverse-search deployment scheme, are proposed based on the proposed CS transmission schemes. The simulation results demonstrate that our proposed data transmission schemes combined with their proposed deployment schemes outperform the traditional transmission scheme by 26 bits/s/Hz and 51 bits/s/Hz, respectively.