Degrees of Freedom in Cached MIMO Relay Networks

It is well known that conventional cooperative relay schemes cannot provide Degrees of Freedom (DoF) gains due to the cut-set bound. In this paper, we propose a physical layer (PHY) caching scheme for relay networks to achieve DoF gains over conventional relay schemes. By properly caching some popular content at the relay station (RS), the proposed PHY caching can opportunistically transform the unfavorable relay channel topology into a more favorable MIMO broadcast channel topology (cache-induced MIMO cooperation opportunity) and enjoy a large DoF gain. Specifically, we first propose a maximum distance separable (MDS) coded PHY caching scheme to significantly improve the MIMO cooperation opportunity induced by PHY caching. Then we propose a global optimal cache content placement solution to maximize the DoF gain. We also propose a low complexity cache content placement algorithm to find a near-optimal solution without explicit knowledge of the popularity of the content files. Finally, we quantify the DoF gain w.r.t. some important system parameters. Simulations show that the proposed scheme can achieve significant throughput gains over various baselines.