VeSoNet: Traffic-Aware Content Caching for Vehicular Social Networks Using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Vehicular social networking is an emerging application of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) which aims to achieve seamless integration of vehicular networks and social networks. However, the unique characteristics of vehicular networks, such as high mobility and frequent communication interruptions, make content delivery to end-users under strict delay constraints extremely challenging. In this paper, we propose a social-aware vehicular edge computing architecture that solves the content delivery problem by using some vehicles in the network as edge servers that can store and stream popular content to close-by end-users. The proposed architecture includes three main components: 1) the proposed social-aware graph pruning search algorithm computes and assigns the vehicles to the shortest path with the most relevant vehicular content providers. 2) the proposed traffic-aware content recommendation scheme recommends relevant content according to its social context. This scheme uses graph embeddings in which the vehicles are represented by a set of low-dimension vectors (vehicle2vec) to store information about previously consumed content. Finally, we propose a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) method to optimise the content provider vehicle distribution across the network. The results obtained from a real-world traffic simulation show the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed system when compared to the state-of-the-art baselines.