Coded Caching for Delay-Sensitive Content

TL;DR

This paper investigates the tradeoff between caching performance gains and delivery delay in coded caching, proposing an efficient algorithm that balances these factors and demonstrates significant improvements in delay-sensitive applications like video streaming.

Contribution

It introduces a new caching algorithm that optimally balances coding gains and delay constraints, suitable for practical delay-sensitive content delivery.

Findings

Achieves near-optimal performance for large delays

Provides significant gains for small delays

Validated with a video-streaming prototype

Abstract

Coded caching is a recently proposed technique that achieves significant performance gains for cache networks compared to uncoded caching schemes. However, this substantial coding gain is attained at the cost of large delivery delay, which is not tolerable in delay-sensitive applications such as video streaming. In this paper, we identify and investigate the tradeoff between the performance gain of coded caching and the delivery delay. We propose a computationally efficient caching algorithm that provides the gains of coding and respects delay constraints. The proposed algorithm achieves the optimum performance for large delay, but still offers major gains for small delay. These gains are demonstrated in a practical setting with a video-streaming prototype.