  Wireless communication enabled by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has emerged
as an appealing technology for many application scenarios in future wireless
systems. However, the limited endurance of UAVs greatly hinders the practical
implementation of UAV-enabled communications. To overcome this issue, this
paper proposes a novel scheme for UAV-enabled communications by utilizing the
promising technique of proactive caching at the users. Specifically, we focus
on content-centric communication systems, where a UAV is dispatched to serve a
group of ground nodes (GNs) with random and asynchronous requests for files
drawn from a given set. With the proposed scheme, at the beginning of each
operation period, the UAV pro-actively transmits the files to a subset of
selected GNs that cooperatively cache all the files in the set. As a result,
when requested, a file can be retrieved by each GN either directly from its
local cache or from its nearest neighbor that has cached the file via
device-to-device (D2D) communications. It is revealed that there exists a
fundamental trade-off between the file caching cost, which is the total time
required for the UAV to transmit the files to their designated caching GNs, and
the file retrieval cost, which is the average time required for serving one
file request. To characterize this trade-off, we formulate an optimization
problem to minimize the weighted sum of the two costs, via jointly designing
the file caching policy, the UAV trajectory and communication scheduling. As
the formulated problem is NP-hard in general, we propose efficient algorithms
to find high-quality approximate solutions for it. Numerical results are
provided to corroborate our study and show the great potential of proactive
caching for overcoming the limited endurance issue in UAV-enabled
communications.
