  This paper addresses the problem of exponentially increasing
sub-packetization with the number of users in a centralized coded caching
system by introducing a new coded caching scheme inspired by the symmetric
neighboring consecutive side information index coding problem. The scheme has a
placement policy where the number of sub-packets required grows only linearly
with the number of users, with no restriction on file size, and a delivery
policy which is instantaneously decodable. Further, an application of the new
delivery scheme in a multi-access coded caching set-up is studied and a few
results in that direction are presented. In particular, in the multi-access
set-up, for cases where optimality rate-memory trade-off characterizations are
available, it is shown that the new delivery scheme achieves optimal or
near-optimal rates.
