Joint broadcast scheduling and user's cache management for efficient information delivery

In information delivery through broadcasting, a server continuously pushes information in a broadcast channel and the users access it by tuning in and waiting until the information they are interested in is transmitted. The s erver follows a schedule that attempts to match the user access statistics in order to reduce the access latency. In case of inhomogeneous user popula tions with several different access profiles, the users have local cache to smooth out the mismatches of their profile with the broadcast schedule sta tistics. In this work we propose a method for joint design of the server br oadcast schedule and the user caching strategy such that the access delay i s minimized. We identify a fluid model of the joint problem on which the jo int optimization is performed and subsequently the dynamic schedule is desi gned to match the optimal fluid model parameters. It turns out that with jo int design of the broadcast schedule and the user cache management policy s ignificant performance improvement is achieved, particularly for inhomogene ous user populations.