Average Transmission Rate on D2D Coded Caching With Nonuniform File Popularity

Abstract

Coded caching under various heterogeneous settings has been intensively studied. Specifically, in a shared-link model, a coded caching scheme based on a popularity-first caching strategy has been proved to be order-optimal under arbitrary popularity distributions. It is of great interest to investigate whether a similar conclusion holds in a device-to-device (D2D) network. Unlike shared-link models, since the server does not participate in the delivery phase in D2D networks, the caching scheme must ensure that all files can be recovered from the union of users’ caches. In this paper, we consider a D2D network constrained to uncoded prefetching and propose a new achievable scheme that caches popular files preferentially while allocating the minimal but necessary cache space to unpopular files. Then we derive new lower bounds on the average transmission rate under arbitrary popularity distributions. The proposed lower bounds are established via a novel decoupling method that isolates the rate analysis of popular files from the cache space allocated to unpopular ones, which could be of independent interest for future work. Finally, we prove that our proposed scheme achieves order-optimality among uncoded schemes under arbitrary popularity distributions. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme and the tightness of the new lower bounds.