Caching Gain in Wireless Networks with Fading: A Multi-User Diversity Perspective

TL;DR

This paper investigates how caching combined with multi-user diversity can significantly improve throughput in wireless networks affected by fading, revealing a trade-off between cache size and network performance.

Contribution

It introduces a one-hop transmission strategy leveraging multi-user diversity and derives a closed-form throughput scaling law considering cache size in large networks.

Findings

Substantial throughput gains with larger cache sizes.

A clear trade-off between cache memory and throughput.

Analytical results validated by simulations.

Abstract

We consider the effect of caching in wireless networks where fading is the dominant channel effect. First, we propose a one-hop transmission strategy for cache-enabled wireless networks, which is based on exploiting multi-user diversity gain. Then, we derive a closed-form result for throughput scaling of the proposed scheme in large networks, which reveals the inherent trade-off between cache memory size and network throughput. Our results show that substantial throughput improvements are achievable in networks with sources equipped with large cache size. We also verify our analytical result through simulations.