An official website of the United States government
This paper treats point-to-point, multiple access and random access lossless source coding in the finite-blocklength regime. A random coding technique is developed, and its power in analyzing the third-order coding performance is demonstrated in all three scenarios. Results include a third-order-optimal characterization of the Slepian-Wolf rate region and a proof showing that for dependent sources, the independent encoders used by Slepian-Wolf codes can achieve the same third-order- optimal performance as a single joint encoder. The concept of random access source coding, which generalizes the multiple access scenario to allow for a subset of participating encoders that is unknown a priori to both the encoders and the decoder, is introduced. Contributions include a new definition of the probabilistic model for a random access-discrete multiple source, a general random access source coding scheme that employs a rateless code with sporadic feedback, and an analysis demonstrating via a random coding argument that there exists a deterministic code of the proposed structure that simultaneously achieves the third- order-optimal performance of Slepian-Wolf codes for all possible subsets of encoders.
more »
« less
A Shannon-Theoretic Approach to the Storage–Retrieval Trade-Off in PIR Systems
We consider the storage–retrieval rate trade-off in private information retrieval (PIR) systems using a Shannon-theoretic approach. Our focus is mostly on the canonical two-message two-database case, for which a coding scheme based on random codebook generation and the binning technique is proposed. This coding scheme reveals a hidden connection between PIR and the classic multiple description source coding problem. We first show that when the retrieval rate is kept optimal, the proposed non-linear scheme can achieve better performance over any linear scheme. Moreover, a non-trivial storage-retrieval rate trade-off can be achieved beyond space-sharing between this extreme point and the other optimal extreme point, achieved by the retrieve-everything strategy. We further show that with a method akin to the expurgation technique, one can extract a zero-error PIR code from the random code. Outer bounds are also studied and compared to establish the superiority of the non-linear codes over linear codes.
more »
« less
- PAR ID:
- 10429266
- Publisher / Repository:
- MDPI
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Information
- Volume:
- 14
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2078-2489
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 44
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Private information retrieval (PIR) allows a user to retrieve a desired message out of K possible messages from N databases without revealing the identity of the desired message. There has been significant recent progress on understanding fundamental information-theoretic limits of PIR, and in particular the download cost of PIR for several variations. Majority of existing works however, assume the presence of replicated databases, each storing all the K messages. In this work, we consider the problem of PIR from storage constrained databases. Each database has a storage capacity of μKL bits, where K is the number of messages, L is the size of each message in bits, and μ ∈ [1/N, 1] is the normalized storage. In the storage constrained PIR problem, there are two key design questions: a) how to store content across each database under storage constraints; and b) construction of schemes that allow efficient PIR through storage constrained databases. The main contribution of this work is a general achievable scheme for PIR from storage constrained databases for any value of storage. In particular, for any (N, K), with normalized storage μ = t/N, where the parameter t can take integer values t ∈ {1, 2, ..., N}, we show that our proposed PIR scheme achieves a download cost of (1 + 1/t + 1/2 + ⋯ + 1/t K-1 ). The extreme case when μ = 1 (i.e., t = N) corresponds to the setting of replicated databases with full storage. For this extremal setting, our scheme recovers the information-theoretically optimal download cost characterized by Sun and Jafar as (1 + 1/N + ⋯ +1/N K-1 ). For the other extreme, when μ = 1/N (i.e., t = 1), the proposed scheme achieves a download cost of K. The most interesting aspect of the result is that for intermediate values of storage, i.e., 1/N <; μ <; 1, the proposed scheme can strictly outperform memory-sharing between extreme values of storage.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)This paper applies error-exponent and dispersionstyle analyses to derive finite-blocklength achievability bounds for low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes over the point-to-point channel (PPC) and multiple access channel (MAC). The error-exponent analysis applies Gallager's error exponent to bound achievable symmetrical and asymmetrical rates in the MAC. The dispersion-style analysis begins with a generalization of the random coding union (RCU) bound from random code ensembles with i.i.d. codewords to random code ensembles in which codewords may be statistically dependent; this generalization is useful since the codewords of random linear codes such as LDPC codes are dependent. Application of the RCU bound yields finite-blocklength error bounds and asymptotic achievability results for both i.i.d. random codes and LDPC codes. For discrete, memoryless channels, these results show that LDPC codes achieve first- and second-order performance that is optimal for the PPC and identical to the best prior results for the MAC.more » « less
-
We study the problem of weakly private information retrieval (PIR) when there is heterogeneity in servers’ trustfulness under the maximal leakage (Max-L) metric. A user wishes to retrieve a desired message from N non-colluding servers efficiently, such that the identity of the desired message is not leaked in a significant manner; however, some servers can be more trustworthy than others. We propose a code construction for this setting and optimize the probability distribution for this construction. It is shown that the optimal probability allocation for the proposed scheme essentially separates the delivery patterns into two parts: a completely private part that has the same download overhead as the capacity-achieving PIR code, and a non-private part that allows complete privacy leakage but has no download overhead by downloading only from the most trustful server. The optimal solution is established through a sophisticated analysis of the underlying convex optimization problem, and a reduction between the homogeneous setting and the heterogeneous setting.more » « less
-
Aggarwal, Divesh (Ed.)A Homomorphic Secret Sharing (HSS) scheme is a secret-sharing scheme that shares a secret x among s servers, and additionally allows an output client to reconstruct some function f(x) using information that can be locally computed by each server. A key parameter in HSS schemes is download rate, which quantifies how much information the output client needs to download from the servers. Often, download rate is improved by amortizing over 𝓁 instances of the problem, making 𝓁 also a key parameter of interest. Recent work [Fosli et al., 2022] established a limit on the download rate of linear HSS schemes for computing low-degree polynomials and constructed schemes that achieve this optimal download rate; their schemes required amortization over 𝓁 = Ω(s log(s)) instances of the problem. Subsequent work [Blackwell and Wootters, 2023] completely characterized linear HSS schemes that achieve optimal download rate in terms of a coding-theoretic notion termed optimal labelweight codes. A consequence of this characterization was that 𝓁 = Ω(s log(s)) is in fact necessary to achieve optimal download rate. In this paper, we characterize all linear HSS schemes, showing that schemes of any download rate are equivalent to a generalization of optimal labelweight codes. This equivalence is constructive and provides a way to obtain an explicit linear HSS scheme from any linear code. Using this characterization, we present explicit linear HSS schemes with slightly sub-optimal rate but with much improved amortization 𝓁 = O(s). Our constructions are based on algebraic geometry codes (specifically Hermitian codes and Goppa codes).more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3390/info14010044
