Cache increases the capacity of wireless networks

Caching in wireless ad hoc networks can reduce network traffic and content access delay, as nodes can retrieve contents from near neighbors rather than the faraway server. However, the fundamental performance limits of caching in wireless ad hoc networks have rarely been studied in an analytical manner. In this paper, we study the fundamental property of wireless networks with caching, i.e., the scaling laws of the network capacity based on cache size of individual node, the total size of unique content and the number of nodes in the network. We present an upper bound on network capacity, and present an achievable capacity lower bound, where we propose a caching scheme to show what capacity can actually be achievable. Our results suggest that the capacity of wireless ad hoc networks with caching can remain constant even as the number of nodes in the network increases. We also present numerical results and demonstrate that our results are consistent with existing analytical results under extreme conditions where the node communication scenario matches theirs.