Adaptive Deadline- and Energy-Aware Caching Algorithms in Dynamic Multi-UAV Edge Networks

Jian Kim, Ki-Il Kim

Content caching via unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) becomes one of the solutions to maintain content delivery when terrestrial infrastructure is unavailable or disrupted. However, existing caching approaches often focus primarily on cache-hit performance or average delivery delay, without jointly addressing spatially heterogeneous and time-varying demand, content-specific deadlines, and uneven communication-energy consumption across UAVs. To address these challenges, we formulate a dynamic deadline- and energy-aware cache placement and replacement problem that jointly considers deadline misses, UAV-side communication energy, and inter-UAV energy imbalance. To achieve this, we first develop deadline- and energy-aware UBAC (DE-UBAC), an interpretable hierarchical rule-based realization that incorporates deadline-aware prioritization, cooperative placement, energy-aware coordination, and cache-update cost. However, predefined priorities and thresholds limit its adaptability under dynamically coupled network conditions. We therefore propose GRU-assisted Deadline- and Energy-aware Proximal Policy Optimization (GRU-DEPPO), which combines local and global GRU-based temporal…