Speeding up Future Video Distribution via Channel-Aware Caching-Aided Coded Multicast

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel channel-aware caching and coded multicast scheme for wireless video delivery, enhancing bandwidth efficiency and accommodating diverse channel conditions among users.

Contribution

It proposes a joint source-channel coding approach that maintains throughput gains in wireless multicast scenarios with heterogeneous user channel conditions.

Findings

Achieves multiplicative throughput gains in wireless multicast

Guarantees per-receiver rates unaffected by poor channel conditions

Provides a scalable solution for future multimedia wireless networks

Abstract

Future Internet usage will be dominated by the consumption of a rich variety of online multimedia services accessed from an exponentially growing number of multimedia capable mobile devices. As such, future Internet designs will be challenged to provide solutions that can deliver bandwidth-intensive, delay-sensitive, on-demand video-based services over increasingly crowded, bandwidth-limited wireless access networks. One of the main reasons for the bandwidth stress facing wireless network operators is the difficulty to exploit the multicast nature of the wireless medium when wireless users or access points rarely experience the same channel conditions or access the same content at the same time. In this paper, we present and analyze a novel wireless video delivery paradigm based on the combined use of channel-aware caching and coded multicasting that allows simultaneously serving multiple cache-enabled receivers that may be requesting different content and experiencing different channel conditions. To this end, we reformulate the caching-aided coded multicast problem as a joint source-channel coding problem and design an achievable scheme that preserves the cache-enabled multiplicative throughput gains of the error-free scenario,by guaranteeing per-receiver rates unaffected by the presence of receivers with worse channel conditions.