Scalable Content Delivery with Coded Caching in Multi-Antenna Fading Channels

Abstract: We consider the content delivery problem in a fading multi-input single-output channel with cache-aided users. We are interested in the scalability of the equivalent content delivery rate when the number of users, $K$, is large. Analytical results show that, using coded caching and wireless multicasting, without channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT), linear scaling of the content delivery rate with respect to $K$ can be achieved in some different ways. First, if the multicast transmission spans over $L$ independent sub-channels, e.g., in quasi-static fading if $L = 1$, and in block fading or multi-carrier systems if $L>1$, linear scaling can be obtained when the product of the number of transmit antennas and the number of sub-channels scales logarithmically with $K$. Second, even with a fixed number of antennas, we can achieve the linear scaling with a threshold-based user selection requiring only one-bit feedbacks from the users. When CSIT is available, we propose a mixed strategy that combines spatial multiplexing and multicasting. Numerical results show that, by optimizing the power split between spatial multiplexing and multicasting, we can achieve a significant gain of the content delivery rate with moderate cache size.