Memory-Rate Tradeoff for Caching with Uncoded Placement under Nonuniform Random Demands

For a caching system with multiple users, we aim to characterize the memory-rate tradeoff for caching with uncoded cache placement, under nonuniform file popularity. Focusing on the modified coded caching scheme (MCCS) recently proposed by Yu, etal., we formulate the cache placement optimization problem for the MCCS to minimize the average delivery rate under nonuniform file popularity, restricting to a class of popularity-first placements. We then present two information-theoretic lower bounds on the average rate for caching with uncoded placement, one for general cache placements and the other restricted to the popularity-first placements. By comparing the average rate of the optimized MCCS with the lower bounds, we prove that the optimized MCCS attains the general lower bound for the two-user case, providing the exact memory-rate tradeoff. Furthermore, it attains the popularity-first-based lower bound for the case of general K users with distinct file requests. In these two cases, our results also reveal that the popularity-first placement is optimal for the MCCS, and zero-padding used in coded delivery incurs no loss of optimality. For the case of K users with redundant file requests, our analysis shows that there may exist a gap between the optimized MCCS and the lower bounds due to zero-padding. We next fully characterize the optimal popularity-first cache placement for the MCCS, which is shown to possess a simple file-grouping structure and can be computed via an efficient algorithm using closed-form expressions. Finally, we extend our study to accommodate both nonuniform file popularity and sizes, where we show that the optimized MCCS attains the lower bound for the two-user case, providing the exact memory-rate tradeoff. Numerical results show that, for general settings, the gap between the optimized MCCS and the lower bound only exists in limited cases and is very small.