No Arabic abstract
Motivated by applications in distributed storage, the storage capacity of a graph was recently defined to be the maximum amount of information that can be stored across the vertices of a graph such that the information at any vertex can be recovered from the information stored at the neighboring vertices. Computing the storage capacity is a fundamental problem in network coding and is related, or equivalent, to some well-studied problems such as index coding with side information and generalized guessing games. In this paper, we consider storage capacity as a natural information-theoretic analogue of the minimum vertex cover of a graph. Indeed, while it was known that storage capacity is upper bounded by minimum vertex cover, we show that by treating it as such we can get a 3/2 approximation for planar graphs, and a 4/3 approximation for triangle-free planar graphs. Since the storage capacity is intimately related to the index coding rate, we get a 2 approximation of index coding rate for planar graphs and 3/2 approximation for triangle-free planar graphs. We also show a polynomial time approximation scheme for the index coding rate when the alphabet size is constant. We then develop a general method of gadget covering to upper bound the storage capacity in terms of the average of a set of vertex covers. This method is intuitive and leads to the exact characterization of storage capacity for various families of graphs. As an illustrative example, we use this approach to derive the exact storage capacity of cycles-with-chords, a family of graphs related to outerplanar graphs. Finally, we generalize the storage capacity notion to include recovery from partial node failures in distributed storage. We show tight upper and lower bounds on this partial recovery capacity that scales nicely with the fraction of failures in a vertex.
We study the index coding problem in the presence of an eavesdropper, where the aim is to communicate without allowing the eavesdropper to learn any single message aside from the messages it may already know as side information. We establish an outer bound on the underlying secure capacity region of the index coding problem, which includes polymatroidal and security constraints, as well as the set of additional decoding constraints for legitimate receivers. We then propose a secure variant of the composite coding scheme, which yields an inner bound on the secure capacity region of the index coding problem. For the achievability of secure composite coding, a secret key with vanishingly small rate may be needed to ensure that each legitimate receiver who wants the same message as the eavesdropper, knows at least two more messages than the eavesdropper. For all securely feasible index coding problems with four or fewer messages, our numerical results establish the secure index coding capacity region.
This letter investigates a new class of index coding problems. One sender broadcasts packets to multiple users, each desiring a subset, by exploiting prior knowledge of linear combinations of packets. We refer to this class of problems as index coding with coded side-information. Our aim is to characterize the minimum index code length that the sender needs to transmit to simultaneously satisfy all user requests. We show that the optimal binary vector index code length is equal to the minimum rank (minrank) of a matrix whose elements consist of the sets of desired packet indices and side- information encoding matrices. This is the natural extension of matrix minrank in the presence of coded side information. Using the derived expression, we propose a greedy randomized algorithm to minimize the rank of the derived matrix.
Under the paradigm of caching, partial data is delivered before the actual requests of users are known. In this paper, this problem is modeled as a canonical distributed source coding problem with side information, where the side information represents the users requests. For the single-user case, a single-letter characterization of the optimal rate region is established, and for several important special cases, closed-form solutions are given, including the scenario of uniformly distributed user requests. In this case, it is shown that the optimal caching strategy is closely related to total correlation and Wyners common information. Using the insight gained from the single-user case, three two-user scenarios admitting single-letter characterization are considered, which draw connections to existing source coding problems in the literature: the Gray--Wyner system and distributed successive refinement. Finally, the model studied by Maddah-Ali and Niesen is rephrased to make a comparison with the considered information-theoretic model. Although the two caching models have a similar behavior for the single-user case, it is shown through a two-user example that the two caching models behave differently in general.
We consider the three-receiver Gaussian multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) broadcast channel with an arbitrary number of antennas at each of the transmitter and the receivers. We investigate the degrees-of-freedom (DoF) region of the channel when each receiver requests a private message, and may know some of the messages requested by the other receivers as receiver message side information (RMSI). We establish the DoF region of the channel for all 16 possible non-isomorphic RMSI configurations by deriving tight inner and outer bounds on the region. To derive the inner bounds, we first propose a scheme for each RMSI configuration which exploits both the null space and the side information of the receivers. We then use these schemes in conjunction with time sharing for 15 RMSI configurations, and with time sharing and two-symbol extension for the remaining one. To derive the outer bounds, we construct enhanc
The characterisation of information processing is an important task in complex systems science. Information dynamics is a quantitative methodology for modelling the intrinsic information processing conducted by a process represented as a time series, but to date has only been formulated in discrete time. Building on previous work which demonstrated how to formulate transfer entropy in continuous time, we give a total account of information processing in this setting, incorporating information storage. We find that a convergent rate of predictive capacity, comprised of the transfer entropy and active information storage, does not exist, arising through divergent rates of active information storage. We identify that active information storage can be decomposed into two separate quantities that characterise predictive capacity stored in a process: active memory utilisation and instantaneous predictive capacity. The latter involves prediction related to path regularity and so solely inherits the divergent properties of the active information storage, whilst the former permits definitions of pathwise and rate quantities. We formulate measures of memory utilisation for jump and neural spiking processes and illustrate measures of information processing in synthetic neural spiking models and coupled Ornstein-Uhlenbeck models. The application to synthetic neural spiking models demonstrates that active memory utilisation for point processes consists of discontinuous jump contributions (at spikes) interrupting a continuously varying contribution (relating to waiting times between spikes), complementing the behaviour previously demonstrated for transfer entropy in these processes.