From Uncoded Prefetching to Coded Prefetching in Coded Caching.
Chao Tian, Kai Zhang · arXiv (Cornell University) · 2017
In the coded caching framework proposed by Maddah Ali and Niesen, there are two classes of coding schemes known in the literature, namely uncoded prefetching schemes and coded prefetching schemes. In this work, we provide a connection between the uncoded prefetching scheme proposed by Maddah Ali and Niesen (and its improved version by Yu et al.) and the coded prefetching scheme proposed by Tian and Chen, when the number of files is no larger than that of users. We make a critical observation that a coding component in the Tian-Chen scheme can be replaced by a binary code, which enables us to view the two schemes as the extremes of a more general scheme. The intermediate operating points of this general scheme can in fact provide new tradeoff points previously not known in the literature, however, explicit characterizing the performance of this general scheme appears rather difficult.