# Asynchronous Coded Caching with Uncoded Prefetching

## TL;DR

This paper extends coded caching techniques to asynchronous user requests with deadlines, proposing optimization methods for offline and online scenarios, and demonstrating that caching benefits persist despite request timing variations.

## Contribution

It introduces a new formulation for asynchronous coded caching with deadlines, including a linear programming approach for the offline case and a heuristic for the online case.

## Key findings

- Offline LP minimizes rate while meeting deadlines.
- Heuristic achieves high probability of meeting user deadlines.
- Coded caching benefits remain under mild asynchronism.

## Abstract

Coded caching is a technique that promises huge reductions in network traffic in content-delivery networks. However, the original formulation and several subsequent contributions in the area, assume that the file requests from the users are synchronized, i.e., they arrive at the server at the same time. In this work we formulate and study the coded caching problem when the file requests from the users arrive at different times. We assume that each user also has a prescribed deadline by which they want their request to be completed. In the offline case, we assume that the server knows the arrival times before starting transmission and in the online case, the user requests are revealed to the server over time. We present a linear programming formulation for the offline case that minimizes the overall rate subject to constraint that each user meets his/her deadline. While the online case is much harder, we introduce a novel heuristic for the online case and show that under certain conditions, with high probability the request of each user can be satisfied with her/his deadline. Our simulation results indicate that in the presence of mild asynchronism, much of the benefit of coded caching can still be leveraged.