A new Capacity-Achieving Private Information Retrieval Scheme with (Almost) Optimal File Length for Coded Servers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new capacity-achieving private information retrieval scheme for coded servers that significantly reduces file length requirements, making PIR more practical for distributed storage systems.

Contribution

It proposes a novel $(N,K,M)$ coded linear PIR scheme with minimal file length, improving over previous methods and establishing conditions for optimality.

Findings

File length is reduced to rac{K(N-K)}{\u0131cdot}(N,K,M) scheme

The scheme is capacity-achieving for the $(N,K,M)$ coded PIR model

File length is proven optimal under certain conditions

Abstract

In a distributed storage system, private information retrieval (PIR) guarantees that a user retrieves one file from the system without revealing any information about the identity of its interested file to any individual server. In this paper, we investigate $(N,K,M)$ coded sever model of PIR, where each of $M$ files is distributed to the $N$ servers in the form of $(N,K)$ maximum distance separable (MDS) code for some $N>K$ and $M>1$. As a result, we propose a new capacity-achieving $(N,K,M)$ coded linear PIR scheme such that it can be implemented with file length $\frac{K(N-K)}{\gcd(N,K)}$, which is much smaller than the previous best result $K\big(\frac{N}{\gcd(N,K)}\big)^{M-1}$. Notably, among all the capacity-achieving coded linear PIR schemes, we show that the file length is optimal if $M>\big\lfloor \frac{K}{\gcd(N,K)}-\frac{K}{N-K}\big\rfloor+1$, and within a multiplicative gap $\frac{K}{\gcd(N,K)}$ of a lower bound on the minimum file length otherwise.