The capacity of cache aided private information retrieval

The problem of cache enabled private information retrieval (PIR) is considered in which a user wishes to privately retrieve one out of K messages, each of size L bits from N distributed databases. The user has a local cache of storage SL bits which can be used to store any function of the K messages. The main contribution of this work is the exact characterization of the capacity of cache enabled PIR as a function of the storage parameter S. In particular, for a given cache storage parameter S, the information-theoretically optimal download cost D∗(S)/L (or the inverse of capacity) is shown to be equal to (1 − S/K)(1 + 1/N + … + 1/NK−1). Special cases of this result correspond to the settings when S = 0, for which the optimal download cost was shown by Sun and Jafar to be (1 + 1/N + … + 1/NK−1), and the case when S = K, i.e., cache size is large enough to store all messages locally, for which the optimal download cost is 0. The intermediate points S ∊ (0, K) can be readily achieved through a simple memory-sharing based PIR scheme. The key technical contribution of this work is the converse, i.e., a lower bound on the download cost as a function of storage S which shows that memory sharing is information-theoretically optimal.