Abstract

A multi-antenna broadcast channel scenario is considered where a base station delivers contents to cache-enabled user terminals. A joint design of coded caching (CC) and multigroup multicast beamforming is proposed to benefit from spatial multiplexing gain, improved interference management and the global CC gain, simultaneously. The developed general content delivery strategies utilize the multiantenna multicasting opportunities provided by the CC technique while optimally balancing the detrimental impact of both noise and inter-stream interference from coded messages transmitted in parallel. Flexible resource allocation schemes for CC are introduced where the multicast beamformer design and the receiver complexity are controlled by varying the size of the subset of users served during a given time interval, and the overlap among the multicast messages transmitted in parallel, indicated by parameters α and β, respectively. Degrees of freedom (DoF) analysis is provided showing that the DoF only depends on α while it is independent of β. The proposed schemes are shown to provide the same degrees-of-freedom at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) as the state-of-art methods and, in general, to perform significantly better, especially in the finite SNR regime, than several baseline schemes.