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Journal of ZheJiang University (Engineering Science)  2026, Vol. 60 Issue (6): 1289-1298    DOI: 10.3785/j.issn.1008-973X.2026.06.016
    
Collaborative content caching optimization in UAV-assisted internet of vehicle based on NOMA
Yiwei ZHANG(),Xin CUI*(),Qinghui ZHAO,Yan CHEN
School of Computer Science and Technology, Shandong University of Technology, Zibo 255049, China
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Abstract  

A UAV-swarm-enabled collaborative content caching scheme based on non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) was proposed in order to address the communication requirement of computation-intensive and latency-sensitive service in highly dynamic internet of vehicle (IoV) scenario. NOMA technology was integrated to achieve spectrum sharing among multiple vehicle by deploying UAV swarm as edge node. A K-Means++ based dynamic clustering mechanism was designed to periodically partition vehicle cluster and optimize the deployment location of UAV cluster head. A graph convolutional network (GCN) was constructed for the UAV swarm network in order to aggregate the topological relationship, caching status and content popularity feature through a dynamic adjacency matrix. Then the capability of cross-node information sharing was enhanced. The cooperative caching problem was formulated as a decentralized partially observable Markov decision process (Dec-POMDP). An attention mechanism was introduced into the Qmix deep reinforcement learning algorithm. The attention mechanism was utilized to perform weighted fusion of neighboring UAV state in order to maximize the long-term cache hit rate. The simulation results showed that NOMA achieved nearly 60% improvement in latency and throughput performance compared with traditional orthogonal multiple access (OMA). The proposed scheme outperformed other caching schemes across various vehicle density scenario, showing enhancement in key performance metrics such as cache hit rate, average content retrieval latency and energy consumption. The efficiency and robustness of the proposed scheme in dynamic IoV environment were validated.



Key wordscontent caching      non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)      internet of vehicle      mobile edge computing      deep reinforcement learning algorithm      graph convolutional network     
Received: 09 June 2025      Published: 06 May 2026
CLC:  TN 925  
Fund:  科技博士项目基金资助项目(4041422007).
Corresponding Authors: Xin CUI     E-mail: zhangyiwei1014@163.com;cx@sdut.edu.cn
Cite this article:

Yiwei ZHANG,Xin CUI,Qinghui ZHAO,Yan CHEN. Collaborative content caching optimization in UAV-assisted internet of vehicle based on NOMA. Journal of ZheJiang University (Engineering Science), 2026, 60(6): 1289-1298.

URL:

https://www.zjujournals.com/eng/10.3785/j.issn.1008-973X.2026.06.016     OR     https://www.zjujournals.com/eng/Y2026/V60/I6/1289


无人机辅助车联网NOMA协同缓存优化

针对车联网(IoV)高动态场景下计算密集与延迟敏感型业务的通信需求,提出基于非正交多址接入(NOMA)的无人机集群协作内容缓存方案. 引入无人机集群作为边缘节点,结合NOMA技术实现多车辆频谱共享,设计基于K-Means++的动态分簇机制以周期性划分车辆集群,优化无人机簇头的部署位置. 对无人机集群网构建图卷积网络(GCN),通过动态邻接矩阵聚合无人机集群的拓扑关系、缓存状态及内容流行度特征,增强跨节点信息共享能力. 将协同缓存问题建模为分散式部分可观测马尔可夫决策过程(Dec-POMDP),把注意力机制引入Qmix深度强化学习算法,利用注意力机制加权融合邻域无人机状态,实现长期缓存命中率最大化. 仿真结果表明,与传统正交多址接入(OMA)相比,NOMA在时延和吞吐量性能上提高了近60%,所提方案相较于其他缓存方案,在不同车辆密度场景下,缓存命中率、平均内容检索时延及能耗等性能指标均有所提高,验证了所提方案在动态车联网环境下的高效性与鲁棒性.


关键词: 内容缓存,  非正交多址接入(NOMA),  车联网,  移动边缘计算,  深度强化学习算法,  图卷积网络 
Fig.1 Schematic diagram of cooperative caching in NOMA-based UAV cluster
算法1 GCQM无人机协同缓存算法
1) 初始化:定义图${G} $、初始全局状态$ {\boldsymbol{S}} $、每个无人机的局部观测状态$ {\boldsymbol{o}} $和邻接矩阵集$ \boldsymbol{A} $. 初始化GCN参数$ {{\boldsymbol{W}}}^{\left(l\right)} $、局部Q网络参数$ {{\boldsymbol{\theta}} }_{\text{local}} $和全局Q网络参数$ {{\boldsymbol{\theta}} }_{\text{mix}} $、批量大小$ {N}_{{\mathrm{b}}} $.
2) For each iteration do
Step1: 图卷积网络特征提取和Q网络输入
3) For each UAV agent do
4)    使用式(30)~(32)提取最终特征并输入局部Q网络
5)    使用式(33)计算每个无人机的局部Q值
6)  end
7) 将所有局部Q值输入全局混合网络$ {f}_{\text{mix}} $中,以计算全局Q
Step 2: 损失计算和参数更新
8)  使用式(35)计算全局 Q 网络的损失值
9)  更新GCN参数$ {\nabla }_{{\boldsymbol{W}}(l)}{L}_{\text{local}}={\partial {L}_{\text{local}}}/{\partial {{\boldsymbol{W}}}^{(l)}} $
10) 更新局部Q网络参数$ {{\boldsymbol{\theta}} }_{\text{local}}\leftarrow {{\boldsymbol{\theta}} }_{\text{local}}-\eta {\nabla }_{{{{\boldsymbol{\theta }}}_{\text{local}}}}{L}_{\text{local}} $
11) 更新全局Q网络参数$ {{\boldsymbol{\theta}} }_{\text{mix}}\leftarrow {{\boldsymbol{\theta }}}_{\text{mix}}-\eta {\nabla }_{{{{\boldsymbol{\theta}} }_{\text{mix}}}}{L}_{\text{local}} $
Step 3: 动作选择与经验回放
12) 每驾无人机选择动作$ {\boldsymbol{a}}_{{t}_{c}}^{u} $
13) 存储$ ({\boldsymbol{s}}_{{{{t}}_{{c}}}},{\boldsymbol{a}}_{{{{t}}_{{c}}}},{\boldsymbol{r}}_{{{{t}}_{{c}}}},{\boldsymbol{s}}_{{{{t}}_{{c}+1}}}) $到经验回放池中
14) 选择一个小批量样本并重复损失计算和参数更新过程
15) End
16) 输出:优化后的全局Q值和无人机行动策略
 
参数数值参数数值
HAP高度20 km噪声功率?174 dBm/Hz
HAP发射功率40 dBm仿真时长1080 s
HAP带宽100 MHzGCN学习率0.005
H2U链路频率3.5 GHzQmix学习率0.001
U2V载波频率2 GHz折扣因子0.9
UAV带宽20 MHz经验回放区10000
无人机发射功率30 dBm小批量样本64
本地与协作命中率权重0.67, 0.33训练轮次5000
Tab.1 Simulation parameter for UAV-assisted caching network
车辆数轮廓系数车辆数轮廓系数
200.68800.55
400.641000.54
600.63
Tab.2 Silhouette coefficient of K-Means++ dynamic clustering under different vehicle fleet size
车辆数吞吐量/(Gb·s?1)时延/ms
NOMAOMANOMAOMA
208.16.2120181
6012.37.5145382
10015.68.9195620
Tab.3 Comparison of throughput and delay performance between NOMA and OMA
Fig.2 Performance evaluation of hit rate, delay, backhaul load and energy consumption under different vehicle scale
Fig.3 Performance evaluation of hit rate, delay, backhaul load and energy consumption under different UAV cache capacity
Fig.4 Validation of GCN's critical role in UAV cooperative caching convergence
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