A Hybrid Deep Learning Architecture for Content Request Prediction in the Internet of Vehicles

Low-latency content delivery is essential in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) to support autonomous driving, cooperative perception, and infotainment services. However, rapidly changing vehicular mobility and demand patterns limit the effectiveness of existing content prediction and caching strategies, which often capture either short-term temporal trends or long-range dependencies, but not both. This paper proposes a hybrid deep learning architecture that integrates Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks with Transformer encoders to jointly model fine-grained temporal dynamics and global correlations in content requests. The resulting popularity predictions are incorporated into a reinforcement learning (RL)-based caching policy, enabling proactive and adaptive cache placement at roadside units (RSUs) within an end-to-end optimization framework. Simulation results across representative IoV scenarios show that the proposed approach consistently improves cache hit ratio, retrieval latency, and prediction accuracy compared with LSTM-only, Transformer-only, Least Frequently Used (LFU), and Least Recently Used (LRU) baselines. Ablation studies further demonstrate the complementary strengths of the hybrid components, highlighting improved convergence behavior and robustness under varying demand distributions.