Capacity-Achieving Private Information Retrieval Schemes from Uncoded Storage Constrained Servers with Low Sub-packetization

This paper investigates reducing sub-packetization of capacity-achieving schemes for uncoded Storage Constrained Private Information Retrieval (SC-PIR) systems. In the SC-PIR system, a user aims to retrieve one out of $K$ files from $N$ servers while revealing nothing about its identity to any individual server, in which the $K$ files are stored at the $N$ servers in an uncoded form and each server can store up to $mu K$ equivalent files, where $mu$ is the normalized storage capacity of each server. We first prove that there exists a capacity-achieving SC-PIR scheme for a given storage design if and only if all the packets are stored exactly at $Mtriangleq mu N$ servers for $mu$ such that $M=mu Nin{2,3,ldots,N}$. Then, the optimal sub-packetization for capacity-achieving linear SC-PIR schemes is characterized as the solution to an optimization problem, which is typically hard to solve because of involving indicator functions. Moreover, a new notion of array called Storage Design Array (SDA) is introduced for the SC-PIR system. With any given SDA, an associated capacity-achieving SC-PIR scheme is constructed. Next, the SC-PIR schemes that have equal-size packets are investigated. Furthermore, the optimal equal-size sub-packetization among all capacity-achieving linear SC-PIR schemes characterized by Woolsey et al. is proved to be $frac{N(M-1)}{gcd(N,M)}$. Finally, by allowing unequal size of packets, a greedy SDA construction is proposed, where the sub-packetization of the associated SC-PIR scheme is upper bounded by $frac{N(M-1)}{gcd(N,M)}$. Among all capacity-achieving linear SC-PIR schemes, the sub-packetization is optimal when $min{M,N-M}|N$ or $M=N$, and within a multiplicative gap $frac{min{M,N-M}}{gcd(N,M)}$ of the optimal one otherwise. In particular, for the case $N=dcdot Mpm1$ where $dgeq 2$, another SDA is constructed to obtain lower sub-packetization.