High performance cache-aided downlink systems: Novel algorithms and analysis

The thesis first addresses the worst-user bottleneck of wireless coded caching, which is known to severely diminish cache-aided multicasting gains. We present a novel scheme, called aggregated coded caching, which can fully recover the coded caching gains by capitalizing on the shared side information brought about by the effectively unavoidable file-size constraint. The thesis then transitions to scenarios with transmitters with multi-antenna arrays. In particular, we now consider the multi-antenna cache-aided multi-user scenario, where the multi-antenna transmitter delivers coded caching streams, thus being able to serve multiple users at a time, with a reduced radio frequency (RF) chains. By doing so, coded caching can assist a simple analog beamformer (only a single RF chain), thus incurring considerable power and hardware savings. Finally, after removing the RF-chain limitation, the thesis studies the performance of the vector coded caching technique, and reveals that this technique can achieve, under several realistic assumptions, a multiplicative sum-rate boost over the optimized cacheless multi-antenna counterpart. In particular, for a given downlink MIMO system already optimized to exploit both multiplexing and beamforming gains, our analysis answers a simple question: What is the multiplicative throughput boost obtained from introducing reasonably-sized receiver-side caches?