Wyner's Network on Caches: Combining Receiver Caching with a Flexible Backhaul

In this work, we study a large linear interference network with an equal number of transmitters and receivers, where each transmitter is connected to two subsequent receivers. Each transmitter has individual access to a backhaul link (fetching the equivalent of $M_{T}$ files), while each receiver can cache a fraction $\gamma$ of the library. We explore the tradeoff between the communication rate, backhaul load, and caching storage by designing algorithms that can harness the benefits of cooperative transmission in partially connected networks, while exploiting the advantages of multicast transmissions attributed to user caching. We show that receiver caching and fetching content from the backhaul are two resources that can simultaneously increase the delivery performance in synergistic ways. Specifically, an interesting outcome of this work is that user caching of a fraction $\gamma$ of the library can increase the per-user Degrees of Freedom (puDoF) by $\gamma$. Further, the results reveal significant savings in the backhaul load, even in the small cache size region. For example, the puDoF achieved using the pair $(M_{T}=8, \gamma=0)$ can also be achieved with the pairs $(M_{T}=4,\gamma=0.035)$ and $(M_{T}=2,\gamma=0.1)$, showing that even small caches can provide significant savings in the backhaul load.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, submitted to ISIT 201

Fundamental Limits of Wireless Caching Under Mixed Cacheable and Uncacheable Traffic

We consider cache-aided wireless communication scenarios where each user requests both a file from an a-priori generated cacheable library (referred to as 'content'), and an uncacheable 'non-content' message generated at the start of the wireless transmission session. This scenario is easily found in real-world wireless networks, where the two types of traffic coexist and share limited radio resources. We focus on single-transmitter, single-antenna wireless networks with cache-aided receivers, where the wireless channel is modelled by a degraded Gaussian broadcast channel (GBC). For this setting, we study the delay-rate trade-off, which characterizes the content delivery time and non-content communication rates that can be achieved simultaneously. We propose a scheme based on the separation principle, which isolates the coded caching and multicasting problem from the physical layer transmission problem. We show that this separation-based scheme is sufficient for achieving an information-theoretically order optimal performance, up to a multiplicative factor of 2.01 for the content delivery time, when working in the generalized degrees of freedom (GDoF) limit. We further show that the achievable performance is near-optimal after relaxing the GDoF limit, up to an additional additive factor of 2 bits per dimension for the non-content rates. A key insight emerging from our scheme is that in some scenarios considerable amounts of non-content traffic can be communicated while maintaining the minimum content delivery time, achieved in the absence of non-content messages; compliments of 'topological holes' arising from asymmetries in wireless channel gains.Comment: Accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theor