Fundamental Limits of Cloud and Cache-Aided Interference Management With Multi-Antenna Edge Nodes

In fog-aided cellular systems, content delivery latency can be minimized by jointly optimizing edge caching and transmission strategies. In order to account for the cache capacity limitations at the edge nodes (ENs), transmission generally involves both fronthaul transfer from a cloud processor with access to the content library to the ENs and wireless delivery from the ENs to the users. In this paper, the resulting problem is studied from an information-theoretic viewpoint by making the following practically relevant assumptions: 1) the ENs have multiple antennas; 2) only uncoded fractional caching is allowed; 3) the fronthaul links are used to send fractions of contents; and 4) the ENs are constrained to use one-shot linear zero-forcing precoding on the wireless channel. Assuming off-line proactive caching and focusing on a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) latency metric, the optimal information-theoretic performance is investigated under both serial and pipelined fronthaul-edge transmission modes. The analysis characterizes the minimum high-SNR latency in terms of normalized delivery time (NDT) for worst case users' demands. The characterization is exact for a subset of system parameters and is generally optimal within a multiplicative factor of 3/2 for the serial case and 2 for the pipelined case. The results bring insights into the optimal interplay between edge and cloud processing in fog-aided wireless networks as a function of system resources, including the number of antennas at the ENs, the ENs' cache capacity, and the fronthaul capacity.