This work studies the advantages of coded multicasting for the downlink of aFog Radio Access Network (F-RAN) system equipped with a multicast fronthaullink. In this system, a control unit (CU) in the baseband processing unit (BBU)pool is connected to distributed edge nodes (ENs) through a multicast fronthaullink of finite capacity, and the ENs have baseband processing and cachingcapabilities. Each user equipment (UE) requests a file in a content librarywhich is available at the CU, and the requested files are served by the closestENs based on the cached contents and on the information received on themulticast fronthaul link. The performance of coded multicast fronthauling isinvestigated in terms of the delivery latency of the requested contents underthe assumption of pipelined transmission on the fronthaul and edge links and ofsingle-user encoding and decoding strategies based on the hard transfer offiles on the fronthaul links. Extensive numerical results are provided tovalidate the advantages of the coded multicasting scheme compared to uncodedunicast and multicast strategies.
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