skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Search for: All records

Creators/Authors contains: "Almoualem, Firas"

Note: When clicking on a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number, you will be taken to an external site maintained by the publisher. Some full text articles may not yet be available without a charge during the embargo (administrative interval).
What is a DOI Number?

Some links on this page may take you to non-federal websites. Their policies may differ from this site.

  1. 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