In the problem of private information retrieval with side information, a single user wants to recover one of the @math independent messages which are stored at one or multiple servers. The user initially has a subset of messages as side information. The goal of the user is to retrieve the demand message by using minimum number of transmissions @math from the server(s) to the user under the condition that the index of the demand message should not be inferred by the server. We introduce the multi-user variant into this problem, where each user wants to retrieve one message and has a subset of messages as side information. In this paper, we study the special cases where all users want to retrieve one common message from a single server, but each user has different side information messages. We show that the optimal coding scheme can be constructed by first optimally partitioning the messages and then generating MDS codes separately in each subset of messages in the partition. We determine the @math , propose algorithms to compute @math , and construct optimal linear coding schemes with complexity polynomial in @math (but exponential in the number of side information messages).
The Private Information Retrieval (PIR) problem was first studied in @cite_9 from a computational complexity perspective. Recently, the PIR problem attracted considerable attention in the information theory society and many works study this problem from an information-theoretic point of view @cite_12 @cite_16 @cite_18 @cite_14 . A single user wants to privately download one message from a database. To achieve perfect privacy in the information-theoretic sense, if the database is only stored at one server, the user has to download all messages. The problem becomes more interesting if one supposes that the database is stored in multiple servers and there is no collusion between these servers. By exploiting the advantages of replications of the database in non-colluding servers, private information retrieval can be achieved without downloading all messages and the capacity of this problem is characterized in @cite_18 . Ensuing work has studied many variations of this theme, including databases coded by erasure codes @cite_17 @cite_19 @cite_11 @cite_6 @cite_2 @cite_5 , partial colluding servers @cite_14 @cite_7 @cite_13 , side information messages available at users @cite_0 @cite_3 @cite_20 @cite_10 @cite_1 and multiple messages @cite_4 @cite_8 ,
@cite_3 @cite_2 @cite_5 @cite_10 @cite_20 @cite_18 @cite_4 @cite_8 @cite_17 @cite_7 @cite_6 @cite_19 @cite_16 @cite_12 @cite_14 @cite_9 @cite_1 @cite_0 @cite_13 @cite_11
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We study the problem of Private Information Retrieval (PIR) in the presence of prior side information. The problem setup includes a database of @math independent messages possibly replicated on several servers, and a user that needs to retrieve one of these messages. In addition, the user has some prior side information in the form of a subset of @math messages, not containing the desired message and unknown to the servers. This problem is motivated by practical settings in which the user can obtain side information opportunistically from other users or has previously downloaded some messages using classical PIR schemes. The objective of the user is to retrieve the required message without revealing its identity while minimizing the amount of data downloaded from the servers. We focus on achieving information-theoretic privacy in two scenarios: (i) the user wants to protect jointly its demand and side information; (ii) the user wants to protect only the information about its demand, but not the side information. To highlight the role of side information, we focus first on the case of a single server (single database). In the first scenario, we prove that the minimum download cost is @math messages, and in the second scenario it is @math messages, which should be compared to @math messages, the minimum download cost in the case of no side information. Then, we extend some of our results to the case of the database replicated on multiple servers. Our proof techniques relate PIR with side information to the index coding problem. We leverage this connection to prove converse results, as well as to design achievability schemes. We consider the problem of single-round private information retrieval (PIR) from @math replicated databases. We consider the case when @math databases are outdated (unsynchronized), or even worse, adversarial (Byzantine), and therefore, can return incorrect answers. In the PIR problem with Byzantine databases (BPIR), a user wishes to retrieve a specific message from a set of @math messages with zero-error, irrespective of the actions performed by the Byzantine databases. We consider the @math -privacy constraint in this paper, where any @math databases can collude, and exchange the queries submitted by the user. We derive the information-theoretic capacity of this problem, which is the maximum number of that can be retrieved privately (under the @math -privacy constraint) for every symbol of the downloaded data. We determine the exact BPIR capacity to be @math , if @math . This capacity expression shows that the effect of Byzantine databases on the retrieval rate is equivalent to removing @math databases from the system, with a penalty factor of @math , which signifies that even though the number of databases needed for PIR is effectively @math , the user still needs to access the entire @math databases. The result shows that for the unsynchronized PIR problem, if the user does not have any knowledge about the fraction of the messages that are mis-synchronized, the single-round capacity is the same as the BPIR capacity. Our achievable scheme extends the optimal achievable scheme for the robust PIR (RPIR) problem to correct the introduced by the Byzantine databases as opposed to in the RPIR problem. Our converse proof uses the idea of the cut-set bound in the network coding problem against adversarial nodes. We consider the problem of private information retrieval (PIR) over a distributed storage system. The storage system consists of N non-colluding databases, each storing an MDS-coded version of M messages. In the PIR problem, the user wishes to retrieve one of the available messages without revealing the message identity to any individual database. We derive the information-theoretic capacity of this problem, which is defined as the maximum number of bits of the desired message that can be privately retrieved per one bit of downloaded information. We show that the PIR capacity in this case is C = (1 + K N + K2 N2 + ··· + KM−1 NN−1)−1 = (1 + R c + R2 c + ··· + RM c −1)−1 = 1−R c R c M, where R c is the rate of the (N, K) code used. The capacity is a function of the code rate and the number of messages only regardless of the explicit structure of the storage code. The result implies a fundamental tradeoff between the optimal retrieval cost and the storage cost. The result generalizes the achievability and converse results for the classical PIR with replicating databases to the case of coded databases. We consider the problem of private information retrieval (PIR) over a distributed storage system. The storage system consists of @math non-colluding databases, each storing a coded version of @math messages. In the PIR problem, the user wishes to retrieve one of the available messages without revealing the message identity to any individual database. We derive the information-theoretic capacity of this problem, which is defined as the maximum number of bits of the desired message that can be privately retrieved per one bit of downloaded information. We show that the PIR capacity in this case is @math , where @math is the rate of the @math code used. The capacity is a function of the code rate and the number of messages only regardless of the explicit structure of the storage code. The result implies a fundamental tradeoff between the optimal retrieval cost and the storage cost. The result generalizes the achievability and converse results for the classical PIR with replicating databases to the case of coded databases.