Centralized Hierarchical Coded Caching Scheme for Two-Layer Network

This paper considers a two-layer hierarchical network, where a server containing <i>N</i> files is connected to K1 mirrors and each mirror is connected to K2 users. Each mirror and each user has a cache memory of size M1 and M2 files, respectively. The server can only broadcast to the mirrors, and each mirror can only broadcast to its connected users. For such a network, we propose a novel coded caching scheme based on two known placement delivery arrays (PDAs). To fully utilize the cache memory of both the mirrors and users, we first treat the mirrors and users as cache nodes of the same type; i.e., the cache memory of each mirror is regarded as an additional part of the connected users' cache, then the server broadcasts messages to all mirrors according to a K1K2-user PDA in the first layer. In the second layer, each mirror first cancels useless file packets (if any) in the received useful messages and forwards them to the connected users, such that each user can decode the requested packets not cached by the mirror, then broadcasts coded subpackets to the connected users according to a K2-user PDA, such that each user can decode the requested packets cached by the mirror. The proposed scheme is extended to a heterogeneous two-layer hierarchical network, where the number of users connected to different mirrors may be different. Numerical comparison showed that the proposed scheme achieved lower coding delays compared to existing hierarchical coded caching schemes at most memory ratio points.