Multi-Antenna Coded Caching for Location-Dependent Content Delivery

Human-computer interaction continuously evolves towards a genuinely immersive experience, submerging users in a three-dimensional (3D) virtual world. A realistic, immersive experience necessitates a highly reliable and agile wireless connection to support immense data transmission. Yet, there are abundant but underutilized memory resources available at the devices which can be harnessed as supplementary assets to reduce the excessive burden on the wireless medium. What is more, the use of Coded Caching (CC) techniques enables the cumulative cache memory of users in the network to be used as an additional communication resource. To this end, a location-dependent multi-antenna CC-based content delivery scheme tailored specifically for wireless extended reality applications is proposed in this paper. First, a novel memory allocation process is developed, enabling an appropriate trade-off between local and global caching gains. In this regard, the local caching gain is maximized when the memory is mostly dedicated to locations with poor connectivity conditions (absolute fairness). In contrast, the global caching gain is maximized when the memory is uniformly allocated among all the locations. As a result of the memory allocation process, unequal fractions of location-dependent multimedia content are cached by each user. Given the asymmetric cache placement, a novel algorithm is proposed to create suitable codewords for each user during the subsequent delivery phase, which simultaneously achieves a global and local caching gain. The proposed delivery scheme also combines global caching and spatial multiplexing gains using a weighted max-min multicast beamformer design with multi-rate modulation. Numerical experiments and mathematical analysis demonstrate significant performance gains, in terms of the 95-percentile expected delivery time, compared to unicast and multicast scenarios where either the local or global caching gain is maximized.