Fundamental Limits of Wireless Caching under Uneven-Capacity Channels

Abstract: This work identifies the fundamental limits of cache-aided coded multicasting in the presence of the well-known `worst-user' bottleneck. This stems from the presence of receiving users with uneven channel capacities, which often forces the rate of transmission of each multicasting message to be reduced to that of the slowest user. This bottleneck, which can be detrimental in general wireless broadcast settings, motivates the analysis of coded caching over a standard Single-Input-Single-Output (SISO) Broadcast Channel (BC) with K cache-aided receivers, each with a generally different channel capacity. For this setting, we design a communication algorithm that is based on superposition coding that capitalizes on the realization that the user with the worst channel may not be the real bottleneck of communication. We then proceed to provide a converse that shows the algorithm to be near optimal, identifying the fundamental limits of this setting within a multiplicative factor of 4. Interestingly, the result reveals that, even if several users are experiencing channels with reduced capacity, the system can achieve the same optimal delivery time that would be achievable if all users enjoyed maximal capacity.