New Results on the Storage-Retrieval Tradeoff in Private Information Retrieval Systems

Abstract

In a private information retrieval (PIR) system, the user needs to retrieve one of the possible messages from a set of storage servers, but wishes to keep the identity of the requested message private from any given server. Existing efforts in this area have made it clear that the efficiency of the retrieval will be impacted significantly by the amount of the storage space allowed at the servers. In this work, we consider the tradeoff between the storage cost and the retrieval cost. We first present three fundamental results: 1) a regime-wise approximate characterization of the optimal tradeoff with a factor of two, 2) a cyclic permutation lemma that can produce more sophisticated codes from simpler base codes, and 3) a relaxed entropic linear program (LP) lower bound that has a polynomial complexity. Equipped with the cyclic permutation lemma, we then propose two novel code constructions, and by applying the lemma, obtain new storage-retrieval points. Furthermore, we derive more explicit lower bounds by utilizing only a subset of the constraints in the relaxed entropic LP in a systematic manner. Though the new upper bound and lower bound do not lead to a better approximation factor uniformly, they are significantly tighter than the existing art in some regimes.