Under the paradigm of caching, partial data is delivered before the actual requests of users are known. In this paper, this problem is modeled as a canonical distributed source coding problem with side information, where the side information represen
ts the users requests. For the single-user case, a single-letter characterization of the optimal rate region is established, and for several important special cases, closed-form solutions are given, including the scenario of uniformly distributed user requests. In this case, it is shown that the optimal caching strategy is closely related to total correlation and Wyners common information. Using the insight gained from the single-user case, three two-user scenarios admitting single-letter characterization are considered, which draw connections to existing source coding problems in the literature: the Gray--Wyner system and distributed successive refinement. Finally, the model studied by Maddah-Ali and Niesen is rephrased to make a comparison with the considered information-theoretic model. Although the two caching models have a similar behavior for the single-user case, it is shown through a two-user example that the two caching models behave differently in general.
Function computation of arbitrarily correlated discrete sources over Gaussian networks with orthogonal components is studied. Two classes of functions are considered: the arithmetic sum function and the type function. The arithmetic sum function in t
his paper is defined as a set of multiple weighted arithmetic sums, which includes averaging of the sources and estimating each of the sources as special cases. The type or frequency histogram function counts the number of occurrences of each argument, which yields many important statistics such as mean, variance, maximum, minimum, median, and so on. The proposed computation coding first abstracts Gaussian networks into the corresponding modulo sum multiple-access channels via nested lattice codes and linear network coding and then computes the desired function by using linear Slepian-Wolf source coding. For orthogonal Gaussian networks (with no broadcast and multiple-access components), the computation capacity is characterized for a class of networks. For Gaussian networks with multiple-access components (but no broadcast), an approximate computation capacity is characterized for a class of networks.
In wireless sensor networks, various applications involve learning one or multiple functions of the measurements observed by sensors, rather than the measurements themselves. This paper focuses on type-threshold functions, e.g., the maximum and indic
ator functions. Previous work studied this problem under the collocated collision network model and showed that under many probabilistic models for the measurements, the achievable computation rates converge to zero as the number of sensors increases. This paper considers two network models reflecting both the broadcast and superposition properties of wireless channels: the collocated linear finite field network and the collocated Gaussian network. A general multi-round coding scheme exploiting not only the broadcast property but particularly also the superposition property of the networks is developed. Through careful scheduling of concurrent transmissions to reduce redundancy, it is shown that given any independent measurement distribution, all type-threshold functions can be computed reliably with a non-vanishing rate in the collocated Gaussian network, even if the number of sensors tends to infinity.
We consider a fading AWGN 2-user 2-hop network where the channel coefficients are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) drawn from a continuous distribution and vary over time. For a broad class of channel distributions, we characterize th
e ergodic sum capacity to within a constant number of bits/sec/Hz, independent of signal-to-noise ratio. The achievability follows from the analysis of an interference neutralization scheme where the relays are partitioned into $M$ pairs, and interference is neutralized separately by each pair of relays. When $M=1$, the proposed ergodic interference neutralization characterizes the ergodic sum capacity to within $4$ bits/sec/Hz for i.i.d. uniform phase fading and approximately $4.7$ bits/sec/Hz for i.i.d. Rayleigh fading. We further show that this gap can be tightened to $4log pi-4$ bits/sec/Hz (approximately $2.6$) for i.i.d. uniform phase fading and $4-4log( frac{3pi}{8})$ bits/sec/Hz (approximately $3.1$) for i.i.d. Rayleigh fading in the limit of large $M$.
