D2D Assisted Multi-antenna Coded Caching

Device-to-device (D2D) aided multicast beamforming design for multi-antenna coded caching is explored to improve the per-user rate and mitigate the beamformer complexity. Novel beamforming and resource allocation schemes are proposed where the local cache content exchange among nearby users is exploited. The transmission is split into two phases: local D2D content exchange and downlink transmission. In the D2D phase, subsets of users are selected to share content with the adjacent users directly. The downlink phase utilizes multicast beamforming by the base station to simultaneously serve all users to fulfill the remaining content requests. A low complexity D2D-multicast mode selection algorithm is proposed with comparable performance to the optimal exhaustive search. Furthermore, D2D transmission scenarios and conditions useful for minimizing the overall delivery time are identified. Finally, we show that introducing the new D2D phase to the existing works significantly reduces the beamformers' complexity in the downlink phase. The results further highlight that by exploiting the direct D2D exchange of file fragments, the common multicast rate for delivering the remaining file fragments in the downlink phase is increased. As a result, overall content delivery performance is greatly enhanced, especially in the finite signal-to-noise (SNR) regime.