Vector Coded Caching Multiplicatively Increases the Throughput of Realistic Downlink Systems

The recent introduction of vector coded caching has revealed that multi-rank transmissions in the presence of receiver-side cache content can dramatically ameliorate the file-size bottleneck of coded caching and substantially boost performance in error-free wire-like channels. In this work, we employ large-matrix analysis to explore the effect of vector coded caching in realistic wireless multi-antenna downlink systems. For a given downlink MISO system already optimized to exploit both multiplexing and beamforming gains, and for a fixed set of antenna and SNR resources, our analysis answers a simple question: What is the multiplicative throughput boost obtained from introducing reasonably-sized receiver-side caches that can pre-store information content? The derived closed-form expressions capture various linear precoders, and a variety of practical considerations such as power dissemination across signals, realistic SNR values, as well as feedback costs. The schemes are very simple (we simply collapse precoding vectors into a single vector), and the recorded gains are notable. For example, for 32 transmit antennas, a received SNR of 20 dB, a coherence bandwidth of 300 kHz, a coherence period of 40 ms, and under realistic file-size and cache-size constraints, vector coded caching is here shown to offer a multiplicative throughput boost of about 310% with ZF/RZF precoding and a 430% boost in the performance of already optimized MF-based (cacheless) systems. Interestingly, vector coded caching also accelerates channel hardening to the benefit of feedback acquisition, often surpassing 540% gains over traditional hardening-constrained cacheless downlink systems.