Finite Length Analysis of Caching-Aided Coded Multicasting

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the finite-length performance of random caching and coded multicasting schemes, revealing limitations and bounds on their efficiency when the number of packets per file is finite, and providing schemes that approach these bounds.

Contribution

It provides the first finite-length analysis of caching schemes, establishing bounds on their multiplicative gain and demonstrating near-optimal schemes with polynomial packet requirements.

Findings

Random schemes achieve at most a 2x gain with sub-exponential packets.

To achieve a 4/3 g multiplicative gain, packets must grow at least as O((N/M)^g).

Concentration results show polynomial packet size suffices for reliable performance.

Abstract

In this work, we study a noiseless broadcast link serving $K$ users whose requests arise from a library of $N$ files. Every user is equipped with a cache of size $M$ files each. It has been shown that by splitting all the files into packets and placing individual packets in a random independent manner across all the caches, it requires at most $N/M$ file transmissions for any set of demands from the library. The achievable delivery scheme involves linearly combining packets of different files following a greedy clique cover solution to the underlying index coding problem. This remarkable multiplicative gain of random placement and coded delivery has been established in the asymptotic regime when the number of packets per file $F$ scales to infinity. In this work, we initiate the finite-length analysis of random caching schemes when the number of packets $F$ is a function of the system parameters $M,N,K$. Specifically, we show that existing random placement and clique cover delivery schemes that achieve optimality in the asymptotic regime can have at most a multiplicative gain of $2$ if the number of packets is sub-exponential. Further, for any clique cover based coded delivery and a large class of random caching schemes, that includes the existing ones, we show that the number of packets required to get a multiplicative gain of $\frac{4}{3}g$ is at least $O((N/M)^g)$. We exhibit a random placement and an efficient clique cover based coded delivery scheme that approximately achieves this lower bound. We also provide tight concentration results that show that the average (over the random caching involved) number of transmissions concentrates very well requiring only polynomial number of packets in the rest of the parameters.