Vector Coded Caching Multiplicatively Boosts MU-MIMO Systems Under Practical Considerations

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how vector coded caching enhances MU-MIMO systems by providing analytical expressions and simulations that demonstrate significant throughput gains, especially under practical conditions like imperfect CSI and massive MIMO regimes.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis of vector coded caching in MU-MIMO, including new low-complexity optimization methods and asymptotic throughput expressions for Rayleigh fading channels.

Findings

VCC significantly improves throughput over cacheless MU-MIMO.

Performance gains exceed 300% with 32 antennas and 2 receive antennas per user.

VCC maintains robustness under imperfect CSI conditions.

Abstract

This work presents a first comprehensive analysis of the impact of vector coded caching (VCC) in multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems with multiple receive antennas and variable pathloss -- two key factors that critically influence systems with inherent MU unicasting behavior. We investigate two widely adopted precoding strategies: (i) blockdiagonalization (BD) at the transmitter combined with maximal ratio combining (MRC) at the receivers, and (ii) zero-forcing (ZF) precoding. Our analysis explicitly accounts for practical considerations such as channel fading, channel state information (CSI) acquisition overhead, and fairness-oriented power allocation. Our contributions span both analytical and simulation-based fronts. On the analytical side, we derive analytical expressions for the achievable throughput under BD-MRC and ZF, highlighting the performance benefits of equipping multi-antenna users with cache-aided interference management. Specifically, we develop a low-complexity BD-MRC optimization method that leverages matrix structure to significantly reduce the dimensionality involved in precoding computation, followed by solving the associated maxmin fairness problem through an efficient one-dimensional search. In the massive MIMO regime, an asymptotic expression for the achievable throughput over Rayleigh fading channels is also derived. Simulations validate our theoretical results, confirming that VCC delivers substantial performance gains over optimized cacheless MU-MIMO systems. For example, with 32 transmit antennas and 2 receive antennas per user, VCC yields throughput improvements exceeding 300%. These gains are further amplified under imperfect CSI at the transmitter, where VCC's ability to offload interference mitigation to the receivers ensures robust performance even in the face of degraded CSI quality and elevated acquisition costs.