On the Achievability of Coded Multicasting Fronthaul Delivery in Fog-Aided Networks

TL;DR

This paper proposes a new coded multicasting scheme for fog networks with multiple edge nodes and users, improving content delivery efficiency and extending previous work beyond small network configurations.

Contribution

It introduces an achievable coded multicasting scheme for general M-by-K fog networks, expanding beyond the 2-by-2 case and providing performance evaluation against theoretical bounds.

Findings

The scheme achieves near-optimal performance compared to theoretical lower bounds.

Numerical analysis confirms the scheme's effectiveness in various network configurations.

Extension of multicasting strategies to arbitrary network sizes enhances practical applicability.

Abstract

Fog networks benefit from content caching at edge nodes (ENs) as well as fronthaul connectivity to the cloud. In previous works, both dedicated and multicast fronthaul links has been considered under different assumptions with Normalized Delivery Time (NDT) as a standard to measure the performance. While dedicated links has been studied extensively in different caching scenarios, multicast links has been developed under assumption of 2-by-2 fog network where cloud is connected to two ENs serving two users. The extension to arbitrary number of ENs and users only provides the lower bound on the achievable performance. In contrast, this letter proposes an achievable coded multicasting scheme for a general M-by-K fog network with M ENs and K users. The optimality of the proposed scheme is evaluated using both comparison with theoretical lower bound as well as using numerical analysis.