Design of Coded Caching Schemes with Linear Subpacketizations Based on Injective Arc Coloring of Regular Digraphs

Coded caching is an effective technique to decongest the amount of traffic in the backhaul link. In such a scheme, each file hosted in the server is divided into a number of packets to pursue a low broadcasting rate based on the designed placements at each user's cache. However, the implementation complexity of this scheme increases with the number of packets. It is important to design a scheme with a small subpacketization level and a relatively low transmission rate. Recently, placement delivery array (PDA) was proposed to address the subpacketization bottleneck of coded caching. This paper investigates the design of PDA from a new perspective, i.e., the injective arc coloring of regular digraphs. It is shown that the injective arc coloring of a regular digraph can yield a PDA with the same number of rows and columns. Based on this, a new class of regular digraphs are defined and the upper bounds on the injective chromatic index of such digraphs are derived. Consequently, four new coded caching schemes with a linear subpacketization level and a relatively small transmission rate are proposed, one of which generalizes the existing scheme for the scenario with a more flexible number of users.