Cache-Aided Content Delivery over Erasure Broadcast Channels

TL;DR

This paper proposes a joint caching and coding scheme for erasure broadcast channels with weak and strong receivers, demonstrating improved cache-rate trade-offs and benefits for all users, even those without caches.

Contribution

It introduces a novel scheme dividing files into subfiles with tailored caching and delivery, enhancing performance over existing methods.

Findings

All receivers benefit from caches, including those without caches.

The scheme achieves a better cache-rate trade-off than previous approaches.

It handles arbitrary erasure probabilities for different receiver types.

Abstract

A cache-aided broadcast network is studied, in which a server delivers contents to a group of receivers over a packet erasure broadcast channel (BC). The receivers are divided into two sets with regards to their channel qualities: the weak and strong receivers, where all the weak receivers have statistically worse channel qualities than all the strong receivers. The weak receivers, in order to compensate for the high erasure probability they encounter over the channel, are equipped with cache memories of equal size, while the receivers in the strong set have no caches. Data can be pre-delivered to weak receivers' caches over the off-peak traffic period before the receivers reveal their demands. Allowing arbitrary erasure probabilities for the weak and strong receivers, a joint caching and channel coding scheme, which divides each file into several subfiles, and applies a different caching and delivery scheme for each subfile, is proposed. It is shown that all the receivers, even those without any cache memories, benefit from the presence of caches across the network. An information theoretic trade-off between the cache size and the achievable rate is formulated. It is shown that the proposed scheme improves upon the state-of-the-art in terms of the achievable trade-off.