On the Impact of Lossy Channels in Wireless Edge Caching

One of the main challenges for continued wireless capacity growth is the difficulty in exploiting the multicast nature of the wireless medium: wireless end points rarely experience the same channel conditions or access the same content at the same time. In this paper, we present and analyze a novel wireless video delivery paradigm based on the combined use of channel-aware caching and coded multicasting that allows simultaneously serving multiple cache-enabled access points that may be requesting different content and experiencing different channel conditions. To this end, we reformulate the caching-aided coded multicast problem as a joint source-channel coding problem and design an achievable scheme that preserves the cache-enabled multiplicative throughput gains of the error-free scenario, by guaranteeing per-receiver rates unaffected by the presence of receivers with worse channel conditions.