Coded Caching for Multi-level Popularity and Access
Jad Hachem, Nikhil Karamchandani, Suhas Diggavi
备注：
Parts of the results in this paper have already been published and are available on arXiv: abs/1404.6560, abs/1504.05931, and the older version of this submission
To address the exponentially rising demand for wireless content, use of caching is emerging as a potential solution. It has been recently established that joint design of content delivery and storage (coded caching) can significantly improve performance over conventional caching. Coded caching is well suited to emerging heterogeneous wireless architectures which consist of a dense deployment of local-coverage wireless access points (APs) with high data rates, along with sparsely-distributed, large-coverage macro-cell base stations (BS). This enables design of coded caching-and-delivery schemes that equip APs with storage, and place content in them in a way that creates coded-multicast opportunities for combining with macro-cell broadcast to satisfy users even with different demands. Such coded-caching schemes have been shown to be order-optimal with respect to the BS transmission rate, for a system with single-level content, i.e., one where all content is uniformly popular. In this work, we consider a system with non-uniform popularity content which is divided into multiple levels, based on varying degrees of popularity. The main contribution of this work is the derivation of an order-optimal scheme which judiciously shares cache memory among files with different popularities. To show order-optimality we derive new information-theoretic lower bounds, which use a sliding-window entropy inequality, effectively creating a non-cutset bound. We also extend the ideas to when users can access multiple caches along with the broadcast. Finally we consider two extreme cases of user distribution across caches for the multi-level popularity model: a single user per cache (single-user setup) versus a large number of users per cache (multi-user setup), and demonstrate a dichotomy in the order-optimal strategies for these two extreme cases.
Coded caching scheme provides us an effective framework to realize additional coded multicasting gain by exploiting coding into multiple transmitted signals. The goal of coded caching design is to jointly optimize the placement and delivery scheme so as to minimize the amount of transmitted coded signals. However, few research efforts consider multiple-round coded caching design problem, in which fixed and mobile users may coexist in one network different number of active users present in successive rounds. Obviously, such dynamic network configurations may lead to undesired frequent placement…
This paper addresses the problem of exponentially increasing sub-packetization with the number of users in a centralized coded caching system by introducing a new coded caching scheme inspired by the symmetric neighboring consecutive side information index coding problem. The scheme has a placement policy where the number of sub-packets required grows only linearly with the number of users, with no restriction on file size, and a delivery policy which is instantaneously decodable. Further, an application of the new delivery scheme in a multi-access coded caching set-up is studied and a few res…
In this paper, we study how coded caching can be efficiently applied to multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communications. This is an extension to cache-aided multiple-input single-output (MISO) communications, where it is shown that with an $L$-antenna transmitter and coded caching gain $t$, a cumulative coded caching and spatial multiplexing gain of $t+L$ is achievable. We show that, interestingly, for MIMO setups with $G$-antenna receivers, a coded caching gain larger than MISO setups by a multiplicative factor of $G$ is possible, and the full coded caching and spatial multiplexing gain …
In coded caching system we prefer to design a coded caching scheme with low subpacketization and small transmission rate (i.e., the low implementation complexity and the efficient transmission during the peak traffic times). Placement delivery arrays (PDA) can be used to design code caching schemes. In this paper we propose a framework of constructing PDAs via Hamming distance. As an application, two classes of coded caching schemes with linear subpacketizations and small transmission rates are obtained.
The coded caching problem with secrecy constraint i.e., the users should not be able to gain any information about the content of the files that they did not demand, is known as the secretive coded caching problem. This was proposed by Ravindrakumar et al. in the paper titled ``Private Coded Caching'' that appeared in \emph{ IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security}, 2018 and is characterised by subpacketization levels growing exponentially with the number of users. In the context of coded caching without secrecy, coded caching schemes at subexponential subpacketization levels a…
Coded caching schemes with low subpacketization and small transmission rate are desirable in practice due to the requirement of low implementation complexity and efficiency of the transmission. Placement delivery arrays (PDA in short) can be used to generate coded caching schemes. However, many known coded caching schemes have large memory ratios. In this paper, we realize that some schemes with low subpacketization generated by PDAs do not fully use the users' caching content to create multicasting opportunities and thus propose to overcome this drawback. As an application, we obtain two new …
We study the problem of constructing centralized coded caching schemes with low subpacketization level based on the placement delivery array (PDA) design framework. PDA design is an efficient way to construct centralized coded caching schemes and most existing schemes, including the famous Maddah-Ali-Niesen scheme, can be described using PDA. In this paper, we first prove that constructing a PDA is equivalent to constructing three binary matrices that satisfy certain conditions. From this perspective, we then propose some new constructions of coded caching schemes using PDA design based on pro…
Coded caching is an effective technique to reduce the redundant traffic in wireless networks. The existing coded caching schemes require the splitting of files into a possibly large number of subfiles, i.e., they perform coded subfile caching. Keeping the files intact during the caching process would actually be appealing, broadly speaking because of its simpler implementation. However, little is known about the effectiveness of this coded file caching in reducing the data delivery rate. In this paper, we propose such a file caching scheme which uses a decentralized algorithm for content place…
We consider the coded caching problem with shared caches where several users share a cache, but each user has access to only a single cache. For this network, the fundamental limits of coded caching are known for centralized and decentralized settings under uncoded placement. In the centralized case, to achieve the gains offered by coded caching, one requires a sub-packetization which increases exponentially with the number of caches. The dedicated cache networks had a similar issue, and placement delivery arrays (PDAs) were introduced as a solution to it. Using the PDA framework, we propose a…
Coded caching systems have been widely studied to reduce the data transmission during the peak traffic time. In practice, two important parameters of a coded caching system should be considered, i.e., the rate which is the maximum amount of the data transmission during the peak traffic time, and the subpacketization level, the number of divided packets of each file when we implement a coded caching scheme. We prefer to design a scheme with rate and packet number as small as possible since they reflect the transmission efficiency and complexity of the caching scheme, respectively. In this paper…
In typical coded caching scenarios, the content of a central library is assumed to be of interest to all receiving users. However, in a realistic scenario the users may have diverging interests which may intersect to various degrees. What happens for example if each file is of potential interest to, say, $40\,\%$ of the users and each user has potential interest in $40\,\%$ of the library? What if then each user caches selfishly only from content of potential interest? In this work, we formulate the symmetric selfish coded caching problem, where each user naturally makes requests from a subset…
We consider distributed and dynamic caching of coded content at small base stations (SBSs) in an area served by a macro base station (MBS). Specifically, content is encoded using a maximum distance separable code and cached according to a time-to-live (TTL) cache eviction policy, which allows coded packets to be removed from the caches at periodic times. Mobile users requesting a particular content download coded packets from SBSs within communication range. If additional packets are required to decode the file, these are downloaded from the MBS. We formulate an optimization problem that is ef…
Caching multimedia contents at the network edge is a key solution to decongest the amount of traffic in the backhaul link. In this paper, we extend and analyze the coded caching technique [1] in an unexplored scenario, i.e. at the edge of two-tier heterogeneous networks with an arbitrary number of users. We characterize the performance of such scheme by deriving a closed-form expression of the average backhaul load and reveal a significant gain compared to other benchmark caching schemes proposed in the literature.
Consider a centralized caching network with a single server and $K$ users. The server has a database of $N$ files with each file being divided into $F$ packets ($F$ is known as subpacketization), and each user owns a local cache that can store $\frac{M}{N}$ fraction of the $N$ files. We construct a family of centralized coded caching schemes with polynomial subpacketization. Specifically, given $M$, $N$ and an integer $n\geq 0$, we construct a family of coded caching schemes for any $(K,M,N)$ caching system with $F=O(K^{n+1})$. More generally, for any $t\in\{1,2,\cdots,K-2\}$ and any integer $…
This paper considers the secretive coded caching problem with shared caches in which no user must have access to the files that it did not demand. In a shared cache network, the users are served by a smaller number of helper caches and each user is connected to exactly one helper cache. To ensure the secrecy constraint in shared cache networks, each user is required to have an individual cache of at least unit file size. For this setting, a secretive coded caching scheme was proposed recently in the literature (\enquote{Secretive Coded Caching with Shared Caches}, in \textit{IEEE Communication…
Coded caching is a technique where we utilize multi-casting opportunities to reduce rate in cached networks. One limitation of coded caching schemes is that they reveal the demands of all users to their peers. In this work, we consider coded caching schemes that assure privacy for user demands with a particular focus on reducing subpacketization. For the 2-user, 2-file case, we present a new linear demand-private scheme with the lowest possible subpacketization. This is done by presenting the scheme explicitly and proving impossibility results under lower subpacketization. Additionally, when o…
This paper considers the multiaccess coded caching systems formulated by Hachem et al., including a central server containing $N$ files connected to $K$ cache-less users through an error-free shared link, and $K$ cache-nodes, each equipped with a cache memory size of $M$ files. Each user has access to $L$ neighbouring cache-nodes with a cyclic wrap-around topology. The coded caching scheme proposed by Hachem et al. suffers from the case that $L$ does not divide $K$, where the needed number of transmissions (a.k.a. load) is at most four times the load expression for the case where $L$ divides $…
Recently Hachem et al. formulated a multiaccess coded caching model which consists of a central server connected to $K$ users via an error-free shared link, and $K$ cache-nodes. Each cache-node is equipped with a local cache and each user can access $L$ neighbouring cache-nodes with a cyclic wrap-around fashion. In this paper, we take the privacy of the users' demands into consideration, i.e., each user can only get its required file and can not get any information about the demands of other users. By storing some private keys at the cache-nodes, we propose a novel transformation approach to t…
The work identifies the fundamental limits of coded caching when the K receiving users share Λ$\leq$ K helper-caches, each assisting an arbitrary number of different users. The main result is the derivation of the exact optimal worst-case delivery time - under the assumption of uncoded cache placement - for any user-to-cache association profile, where each such profile describes how many users are helped by each cache. This is achieved with a new information-theoretic converse that is based on index coding and which proves that a simple XOR-shrinking-and-removal coded-caching scheme is optimal…
Exponentially growing subpacketization is known to be a major issue for practical implementation of coded caching, specially in networks with multi-antenna communication setups. We provide a new coded caching scheme for such networks, which requires linear subpacketization and is applicable to any set of network parameters, as long as the multi-antenna gain $L$ is larger than or equal to the global caching gain $t$. Our scheme includes carefully designed cache placement and delivery algorithms; which are based on circular shift of two generator arrays in perpendicular directions. It also achie…
The multi-access variant of the coded caching problem in the presence of an external wiretapper is investigated . A multi-access coded caching scheme with $K$ users, $K$ caches and $N$ files, where each user has access to $L$ neighbouring caches in a cyclic wrap-around manner, is proposed, which is secure against the wiretappers. Each transmission in the conventional insecure scheme will be now encrypted by a random key. The proposed scheme uses a novel technique for the key placement in the caches. It is also shown that the proposed secure multi-access coded caching scheme is within a constan…
Coded-caching is a promising technique to reduce the peak rate requirement of backhaul links during high traffic periods. In this letter, we study the effect of adaptive transmission on the performance of coded-caching based networks. Particularly, concentrating on the reduction of backhaul peak load during the high traffic periods, we develop adaptive rate and power allocation schemes maximizing the network successful transmission probability, which is defined as the probability of the event with all cache nodes decoding their intended signals correctly. Moreover, we study the effect of diffe…
The decentralized coded caching was introduced in [M.~A. Maddah-Ali and U.~Niesen, `Decentralized coded caching attains order-optimal memory-rate tradeoff,' \emph{IEEE/ACM Trans. Networking}, vol.~23, no.~4, pp. 1029--1040, Aug. 2015] in which no coordination is required for the content placement. In this paper, with $N$ files and $K$ users, first it is shown that the decentralized coded caching scheme of Ali and Niesen is optimal for $N \geq K$ using techniques from index coding. Next the case when the shared link is error prone is considered. For this case, an optimal error correcting delive…
Caching is a technique to reduce the communication load in peak hours by prefetching contents during off-peak hours. An information-theoretic framework for coded caching was introduced by Maddah-Ali and Niesen in a recent work, where it was shown that significant improvement can be obtained compared to uncoded caching. Considerable efforts have been devoted to identify the precise information-theoretic fundamental limits of the coded caching systems, however the difficulty of this task has also become clear. One of the reasons for this difficulty is that the original coded caching setting allo…
Multi-access coded caching schemes from cross resolvable designs (CRD) have been reported recently \cite{KNRarXiv}. To be able to compare coded caching schemes with different number of users and possibly with different number of caches a new metric called rate-per-user was introduced and it was shown that under this new metric the schemes from CRDs perform better than the Maddah-Ali-Niesen scheme in the large memory regime. In this paper a new class of CRDs is presented and it is shown that the multi-access coded caching schemes derived from these CRDs perform better than the Maddah-Ali-Niesen…
Recently coded caching has emerged as a promising means to handle continuously increasing wireless traffic. However, coded caching requires users to cooperate in order to minimize the overall transmission rate. How users with heterogeneous preferences cooperate in coded caching and how to calculate the resulting caching gains are still open problems. In this paper, a two-phase cache-aided network is investigated, in which users with heterogeneous preferences are served by a base station through a shared link. Effective throughput is considered as a performance metric. It is proved that the ach…
The multi-access variant of the coded caching problem with $N$ files, $K$ users and $K$ caches, where each user has access to $L$ neighbouring caches in a cyclic wrap-around manner, is considered. A cut-set based lower bound on the optimal rate-memory trade-off of the multi-access coded caching (MACC) scheme is derived. Furthermore, an improved lower bound on the optimal rate-memory trade-off of the MACC scheme is derived using non-cut-set arguments. The improved lower bound is tighter than the previously known lower bounds for the same setting.
Recently multi-access coded caching schemes with number of users different from the number of caches obtained from a special case of resolvable designs called Cross Resolvable Designs (CRDs) have been reported and a new performance metric called rate-per-user has been introduced \cite{KNRarXiv}. In this paper we present a generalization of this work resulting in multi-access coded caching schemes with improved rate-per-user.
Coded caching utilizes proper file subpacketization and coded delivery to make full use of the multicast opportunities in content delivery, to alleviate file transfer load in massive content delivery scenarios. Most existing work considers deterministic environments. An important practical topic is to characterize the impact of the uncertainty from user inactivity on coded caching. We consider a one server cache-enabled network under homogeneous file and network settings in presence of user inactivity. Unlike random or probabilistic caching studied in the literature, deterministic coded cachin…
Multi-antenna coded caching combines a global caching gain, proportional to the total cache size in the network, with an additional spatial multiplexing gain that stems from multiple transmitting antennas. However, classic centralized coded caching schemes are not suitable for dynamic networks as they require prior knowledge of the number of users to indicate what data should be cached at each user during the placement phase. On the other hand, fully decentralized schemes provide comparable gains to their centralized counterparts only when the number of users is very large. In this paper, we p…
We address the worst-user bottleneck of wireless coded caching, which is known to severely diminish cache-aided multicasting gains due to the fundamental worst-channel limitation of multicasting transmission. We consider the quasi-static Rayleigh fading Broadcast Channel, for which we first show that the effective coded caching gain of the XOR-based standard coded-caching scheme completely vanishes in the low-SNR regime. Then, we reveal that this collapse is not intrinsic to coded caching. We do so by presenting a novel scheme that can fully recover the coded caching gains by capitalizing on o…
We consider the problem of \emph{secretive coded caching} in a shared cache setup where the number of users accessing a particular \emph{helper cache} is more than one, and every user can access exactly one helper cache. In secretive coded caching, the constraint of \emph{perfect secrecy} must be satisfied. It requires that the users should not gain, either from their caches or from the transmissions, any information about the content of the files that they did not request from the server. In order to accommodate the secrecy constraint, our problem setup requires, in addition to a helper cache…
In this paper, we consider a coded caching scenario where users have heterogeneous interests. Taking into consideration the system model originally proposed by Wang and Peleato, for which the end-receiving users are divided into groups according to their file preferences, we develop a novel information-theoretic converse on the optimal worst-case communication load under uncoded cache placement. Interestingly, the developed converse bound, jointly with one of the coded schemes proposed by Wang and Peleato, allows us to characterize the optimal worst-case communication load under uncoded prefet…
The rate performance of wireless coded caching schemes is typically limited by the lowest achievable per-user rate in the given multicast group, during each transmission time slot. In this paper, we provide a new coded caching scheme, alleviating this worst-user effect for the prominent case of multimedia applications. In our scheme, instead of maximizing the symmetric rate among all served users, we maximize the total quality of experience (QoE); where QoE at each user is defined as the video quality perceived by that user. We show the new scheme requires solving an NP-hard optimization probl…
We consider multi-access coded caching problem introduced by Hachem et.al., where each user has access to $L$ neighboring caches in a cyclic wrap-around fashion. We focus on the deterministic schemes for a specific class of multi-access coded caching problem based on the concept of PDA. We construct new PDAs which specify the delivery scheme for the specific class of multi-access coded caching problem discussed in this paper. For the proposed scheme, the coding gain is larger than that of the state-of-the-art while the sub-packetization level varies only linearly with the number of users. Henc…
In this paper, we investigate the problem of asynchronous coded caching in fog radio access networks (F-RANs). To minimize the fronthaul load, the encoding set collapsing rule and encoding set partition method are proposed to establish the relationship between the coded-multicasting contents for asynchronous and synchronous coded caching. Furthermore, a decentralized asynchronous coded caching scheme is proposed, which provides asynchronous and synchronous transmission methods for different delay requirements. The closed-form expression of the fronthaul load is established for the special case…
