Delivery Time Minimization in Edge Caching: Synergistic Benefits of Subspace Alignment and Zero Forcing

An emerging trend of next generation communication systems is to provide network edges with additional capabilities such as additional storage resources in the form of caches to reduce file delivery latency. To investigate this aspect, we study the fundamental limits of a cache-aided wireless network consisting of one central base station, $M$ transceivers and $K$ receivers from a latency-centric perspective. We use the normalized delivery time (NDT) to capture the per-bit latency for the worst-case file request pattern at high signal-to-noise ratios (SNR), normalized with respect to a reference interference-free system with unlimited transceiver cache capabilities. For various special cases with $M=\{1,2\}$ and $K=\{1,2,3\}$ that satisfy $M+K\leq 4$, we establish the optimal tradeoff between cache storage and latency. This is facilitated through establishing a novel converse (for arbitrary $M$ and $K$) and an achievability scheme on the NDT. Our achievability scheme is a synergistic combination of multicasting, zero-forcing beamforming and interference alignment.Comment: submitted to ICC 2018; fixed some typo

Caching with Unknown Popularity Profiles in Small Cell Networks

A heterogenous network is considered where the base stations (BSs), small base stations (SBSs) and users are distributed according to independent Poisson point processes (PPPs). We let the SBS nodes to posses high storage capacity and are assumed to form a distributed caching network. Popular data files are stored in the local cache of SBS, so that users can download the desired files from one of the SBS in the vicinity subject to availability. The offloading-loss is captured via a cost function that depends on a random caching strategy proposed in this paper. The cost function depends on the popularity profile, which is, in general, unknown. In this work, the popularity profile is estimated at the BS using the available instantaneous demands from the users in a time interval $[0,\tau]$. This is then used to find an estimate of the cost function from which the optimal random caching strategy is devised. The main results of this work are the following: First it is shown that the waiting time $\tau$ to achieve an $\epsilon>0$ difference between the achieved and optimal costs is finite, provided the user density is greater than a predefined threshold. In this case, $\tau$ is shown to scale as $N^2$, where $N$ is the support of the popularity profile. Secondly, a transfer learning-based approach is proposed to obtain an estimate of the popularity profile used to compute the empirical cost function. A condition is derived under which the proposed transfer learning-based approach performs better than the random caching strategy.Comment: 6 pages, Proceedings of IEEE Global Communications Conference, 201

Capacity of Cellular Networks with Femtocache

The capacity of next generation of cellular networks using femtocaches is studied when multihop communications and decentralized cache placement are considered. We show that the storage capability of future network User Terminals (UT) can be effectively used to increase the capacity in random decentralized uncoded caching. We further propose a random decentralized coded caching scheme which achieves higher capacity results than the random decentralized uncoded caching. The result shows that coded caching which is suitable for systems with limited storage capabilities can improve the capacity of cellular networks by a factor of log(n) where n is the number of nodes served by the femtocache.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, presented at Infocom Workshops on 5G and beyond, San Francisco, CA, April 201

On the Interplay Between Edge Caching and HARQ in Fog-RAN

In a Fog Radio Access Network (Fog-RAN), edge caching is combined with cloud-aided transmission in order to compensate for the limited hit probability of the caches at the base stations (BSs). Unlike the typical wired scenarios studied in the networking literature in which entire files are typically cached, recent research has suggested that fractional caching at the BSs of a wireless system can be beneficial. This paper investigates the benefits of fractional caching in a scenario with a cloud processor connected via a wireless fronthaul link to a BS, which serves a number of mobile users on a wireless downlink channel using orthogonal spectral resources. The fronthaul and downlink channels occupy orthogonal frequency bands. The end-to-end delivery latency for given requests of the users depends on the HARQ processes run on the two links to counteract fading-induced outages. An analytical framework based on theory of Markov chains with rewards is provided that enables the optimization of fractional edge caching at the BSs. Numerical results demonstrate meaningful advantages for fractional caching due to the interplay between caching and HARQ transmission. The gains are observed in the typical case in which the performance is limited by the wireless downlink channel and the file popularity distribution is not too skewed