Fundamental Limits of Cache-Aided Private Information Retrieval With Unknown and Uncoded Prefetching

We consider the problem of private information retrieval (PIR) from N non-colluding and replicated databases when the user is equipped with a cache that holds an uncoded fraction r from each of the K stored messages in the databases. We assume that the databases are unaware of the cache content. We investigate D*(r) the optimal download cost normalized with the message size as a function of K, N, and r. For a fixed K and N, we develop an inner bound (converse bound) for the D*(r) curve. The inner bound is a piece-wise linear function in r that consists of K line segments. For the achievability, we develop explicit schemes that exploit the cached bits as side information to achieve K -1 non-degenerate corner points. These corner points differ in the number of cached bits that are used to generate the one-side information equation. We obtain an outer bound (achievability) for any caching ratio by memory sharing between these corner points. Thus, the outer bound is also a piece-wise linear function in r that consists of K line segments. The inner and the outer bounds match in general for the cases of very low-caching ratio and very high-caching ratio. As a corollary, we fully characterize the optimal download cost caching ratio tradeoff for K = 3. For general K, N, and r, we show that the largest gap between the achievability and the converse bounds is 1/6. Our results show that the download cost can be reduced beyond memory sharing if the databases are unaware of the cached content.