The Exact Rate Memory Tradeoff for Small Caches with Coded Placement

The idea of coded caching was introduced by Maddah-Ali and Niesen who demonstrated the advantages of coding in caching problems. To capture the essence of the problem, they introduced the $(N, K)$ canonical cache network in which $K$ users with independent caches of size $M$ request files from a server that has $N$ files. Among other results, the caching scheme and lower bounds proposed by them led to a characterization of the exact rate memory tradeoff when $M\geq \frac{N}{K}(K-1)$. These lower bounds along with the caching scheme proposed by Chen et al. led to a characterization of the exact rate memory tradeoff when $M\leq \frac{1}{K}$. In this paper we focus on small caches where $M\in \left[0,\frac{N}{K}\right]$ and derive new lower bounds. For the case when $\big\lceil\frac{K+1}{2}\big\rceil\leq N \leq K$ and $M\in \big[\frac{1}{K},\frac{N}{K(N-1)}\big]$, our lower bounds demonstrate that the caching scheme introduced by G{\'o}mez-Vilardeb{\'o} is optimal and thus extend the characterization of the exact rate memory tradeoff. For the case $1\leq N\leq \big\lceil\frac{K+1}{2}\big\rceil$, we show that the new lower bounds improve upon the previously known lower bounds.