Caching in Wireless Networks

Abstract

We consider the problem of delivering content cached in a wireless network of n nodes randomly located on a square of area n. The network performance is described by the n2^n-dimensional caching capacity region of the wireless network. We provide an inner bound on this caching capacity region, and, in the high path-loss regime, a matching (in the scaling sense) outer bound. For large path-loss exponent, this provides an information-theoretic scaling characterization of the entire caching capacity region. The proposed communication scheme achieving the inner bound shows that the problems of cache selection and channel coding can be solved separately without loss of order-optimality. On the other hand, our results show that the common architecture of nearest-neighbor cache selection can be arbitrarily bad, implying that cache selection and load balancing need to be performed jointly.