On Combination Networks with Cache-aided Relays and Users

Caching is an efficient way to reduce peak hour network traffic congestion by storing some contents at the user's cache without knowledge of later demands. Coded caching strategy was originally proposed by Maddah-Ali and Niesen to give an additional coded caching gain compared the conventional uncoded scheme. Under practical consideration, the caching model was recently considered in relay network, in particular the combination network, where the central server communicates with $K=\binom{H}{r}$ users (each is with a cache of $M$ files) through $H$ immediate relays, and each user is connected to a different $r-$subsets of relays. Several inner bounds and outer bounds were proposed for combination networks with end-user-caches. This paper extends the recent work by the authors on centralized combination networks with end-user caches to a more general setting, where both relays and users have caches. In contrast to the existing schemes in which the packets transmitted from the server are independent of the cached contents of relays, we propose a novel caching scheme by creating an additional coded caching gain to the transmitted load from the server with the help of the cached contents in relays. We also show that the proposed scheme outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.Comment: 7 pages,2 figures, WSA 201

Placement Delivery Array Design for Combination Networks with Edge Caching

A major practical limitation of the Maddah-Ali-Niesen coded caching techniques is their high subpacketization level. For the simple network with a single server and multiple users, Yan \emph{et al.} proposed an alternative scheme with the so-called placement delivery arrays (PDA). Such a scheme requires slightly higher transmission rates but significantly reduces the subpacketization level. In this paper, we extend the PDA framework and propose three low-subpacketization schemes for combination networks, i.e., networks with a single server, multiple relays, and multiple cache-aided users that are connected to subsets of relays. One of the schemes achieves the cutset lower bound on the link rate when the cache memories are sufficiently large. Our other two schemes apply only to \emph{resolvable} combination networks. For these networks and for a wide range of cache sizes, the new schemes perform closely to the coded caching schemes that directly apply Maddah-Ali-Niesen scheme while having significantly reduced subpacketization levels.Comment: 5 pages, has been published at IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), Jun. 2018, Colorado, US

Improved Constructions of Coded Caching Schemes for Combination Networks

In an $(H,r)$ combination network, a single content library is delivered to ${H\choose r}$ users through deployed $H$ relays without cache memories, such that each user with local cache memories is simultaneously served by a different subset of $r$ relays on orthogonal non-interfering and error-free channels. The combinatorial placement delivery array (CPDA in short) can be used to realize a coded caching scheme for combination networks. In this paper, a new algorithm realizing a coded caching scheme for combination network based on a CPDA is proposed such that the schemes obtained have smaller subpacketization levels or are implemented more flexible than the previously known schemes. Then we focus on directly constructing CPDAs for any positive integers $H$ and $r$ with $r<H$. This is different from the grouping method in reference (IEEE ISIT, 17-22, 2018) under the constraint that $r$ divides $H$. Consequently two classes of CPDAs are obtained. Finally comparing to the schemes and the method proposed by Yan et al., (IEEE ISIT, 17-22, 2018) the schemes realized by our CPDAs have significantly advantages on the subpacketization levels and the transmission rates.Comment: 11 page