Content-type coding

This paper is motivated by the observation that, in many cases, we do not need to serve specific messages, but rather, any message within a content-type. Content-type traffic pervades a host of applications today, ranging from search engines and recommender networks to newsfeeds and advertisement networks. The paper asks a novel question: if there are benefits in designing network and channel codes specifically tailored to content-type requests. It provides three examples of content-type formulations to argue that, indeed in some cases we can have significant such benefits.