Coded Caching in Land Mobile Satellite Systems

Abstract

We investigate the performance of coded caching in land mobile-satellite (LMS) systems, where a satellite station with full access to a content library serves K cache-aided land users. The promising gains that coded caching provides for the error-free shared-link Broadcast Channel are known to suffer in some low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) scenarios. For this reason, we analyze to what extent the coded caching gains are preserved in LMS systems, which are governed by low-to-moderate SNR due to the long propagation distances. We model the satellite-terrestrial channels through the widely adopted Shadowed-Rician fading, and we show that the coded caching gains are partially preserved even in the low-SNR limit due to the existence of line-of-sight (LOS) components, which allows us to double the goodput of LMS communication at low SNR. These results illustrate the potential of coded caching in LMS systems and motivate further research to design adapted and practical coded caching schemes for LMS systems.