Coded Caching for Delay-Sensitive Content

Coded caching is a recently proposed technique that has been shown to achieve significant performance gains for cache networks compared to uncoded schemes. However, this substantial coding gain is attained at the cost of introducing delivery delay, which may not be tolerable in some applications. In this paper, we identify and investigate the tradeoff between the performance gain of coded caching and the delivery delay. We propose a computationally efficient algorithm effectively exploits possible coding opportunities while at the same time respecting delay constraints. The proposed algorithm achieves the optimum performance for large delay, while still offering major gains for small delay. These gains are demonstrated in a practical setting with a video-streaming prototype.