Fundamental limits of combinatorial multi-access caching

Brunero, Federico; Elia, Petros
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 25 July 2022

This work identifies the fundamental limits of multi-access coded caching (MACC) where each user is connected to multiple caches in a manner that follows a generalized combinatorial topology. This topology stands out as it allows for unprecedented coding gains, even with very modest cache resources. First, we extend the setting and the scheme presented by Muralidhar et al. to a much more general topology that supports both a much denser range of users and the coexistence of users connected to different numbers of caches, all while maintaining the astounding coding gains – here proven to be exactly optimal – associated with the combinatorial topology. This is achieved, for this generalized topology, with a novel information-theoretic converse that we present here, which establishes, together with the scheme, the exact optimal performance under the assumption of uncoded placement. We subsequently consider different connectivity ensembles, including the very general scenario of the entire ensemble of all possible network connectivities/topologies, where any subset of caches can serve any arbitrary number of users. For these settings, we develop novel converse bounds on the optimal performance averaged over the ensemble’s different connectivities. This novel analysis of topological ensembles leaves open the possibility that currentlyunknown topologies may yield even higher gains, a hypothesis that is part of the bigger question of which network topology yields the most caching gains.

DOI
HAL
Type:
Journal
Date:
2022-07-25
Department:
Communication systems
Eurecom Ref:
6711
Copyright:
© 2022 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.

PERMALINK : https://www.eurecom.fr/publication/6711