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We consider a wireless device-to-device network, where n nodes are uniformly distributed at random over the network area. We let each node caches M files from a library of size m ≥ M. Each node in the network requests a file from the library independently at random, according to a popularity distribution, and is served by other nodes having the requested file in their local cache via (possibly) multihop transmissions. Under the classical “protocol model” of wireless networks, we characterize the optimal per-node capacity scaling law for a broad class of heavy-tailed popularity distributions, including Zipf distributions with exponent less than one. In the parameter regime of interest, i.e., m=o(nM), we show that a decentralized random caching strategy with uniform probability over the library yields the optimal per-node capacity scaling of Θ(√M/m) for heavy-tailed popularity distributions. This scaling is constant with n …