Bounds on the Capacity of Private Information Retrieval Over Graphs

Abstract

In the private information retrieval (PIR) problem, a user wants to retrieve a file from a database without revealing any information about the desired file’s identity to the servers that store the database. In this paper, we study the PIR capacity of a graph-based replication system, in which each file is stored on two distinct servers according to an underlying graph. This paper aims to provide upper and lower bounds to the PIR capacity of graphs via various graph properties. In particular, we provide several upper bounds on the PIR capacity that apply to all graphs. We further improve the bounds for specific graph families (which turn out to be tight in certain cases) by utilizing the underlying graph structure. For the lower bounds, we establish optimal rate PIR schemes for star graphs via edge-coloring techniques. Lastly, we provide an improved PIR scheme for complete graphs, implying an improved general lower bound on all graphs’ PIR capacity.