  Coded multicasting has been shown to be a promis- ing approach to
significantly improve the caching performance of content delivery networks with
multiple caches downstream of a common multicast link. However, achievable
schemes proposed to date have been shown to achieve the proved order-optimal
performance only in the asymptotic regime in which the number of packets per
requested item goes to infinity. In this paper, we first extend the asymptotic
analysis of the achievable scheme in [1], [2] to the case of heterogeneous
cache sizes and demand distributions, providing the best known upper bound on
the fundamental limiting performance when the number of packets goes to
infinity. We then show that the scheme achieving this upper bound quickly loses
its multiplicative caching gain for finite content packetization. To overcome
this limitation, we design a novel polynomial-time algorithm based on random
greedy graph- coloring that, while keeping the same finite content
packetization, recovers a significant part of the multiplicative caching gain.
Our results show that the order-optimal coded multicasting schemes proposed to
date, while useful in quantifying the fundamental limiting performance, must be
properly designed for practical regimes of finite packetization.
