Coded Caching Schemes with Low Rate and Subpacketizations

TL;DR

This paper explores the tradeoff between rate and packet number in coded caching schemes, proving Pareto-optimality of certain schemes, and introduces new classes of optimal schemes with low rate and packetization complexity.

Contribution

It characterizes the rate-packet number tradeoff using placement delivery arrays and introduces two new classes of Pareto-optimal schemes based on combinatorial design.

Findings

Proved the Maddah-Ali and Niesen PDA is Pareto-optimal.

Derived lower bounds on the rate for PDA-based schemes.

Developed two new classes of Pareto-optimal PDAs with low rate and packet number.

Abstract

Coded caching scheme, which is an effective technique to increase the transmission efficiency during peak traffic times, has recently become quite popular among the coding community. Generally rate can be measured to the transmission in the peak traffic times, i.e., this efficiency increases with the decreasing of rate. In order to implement a coded caching scheme, each file in the library must be split in a certain number of packets. And this number directly reflects the complexity of a coded caching scheme, i.e., the complexity increases with the increasing of the packet number. However there exists a tradeoff between the rate and packet number. So it is meaningful to characterize this tradeoff and design the related Pareto-optimal coded caching schemes with respect to both parameters. Recently, a new concept called placement delivery array (PDA) was proposed to characterize the coded caching scheme. However as far as we know no one has yet proved that one of the previously known PDAs is Pareto-optimal. In this paper, we first derive two lower bounds on the rate under the framework of PDA. Consequently, the PDA proposed by Maddah-Ali and Niesen is Pareto-optimal, and a tradeoff between rate and packet number is obtained for some parameters. Then, from the above observations and the view point of combinatorial design, two new classes of Pareto-optimal PDAs are obtained. Based on these PDAs, the schemes with low rate and packet number are obtained. Finally the performance of some previously known PDAs are estimated by comparing with these two classes of schemes.