Fundamental Limits of Caching for Demand Privacy Against Colluding Users

This article investigates the problem of
demand privacy against colluding users
for shared-link coded caching systems, where no subset of users can learn any information about the demands of the remaining users. The notion of privacy used here is stronger than similar notions adopted in past work and is motivated by the practical need to insure privacy regardless of the file distribution. Two scenarios are considered:
Single File Retrieval
(SFR) and
Linear Function Retrieval
(LFR), where in the latter case each user demands an arbitrary linear combination of the files. This paper’s main contributions are a novel achievable scheme for LFR, referred as
privacy key scheme
, and a new information theoretic converse bound for SFR. Clearly, being SFR a special case of LFR, an achievable scheme for LFR works for SFR as well, and a converse for SFR is a valid converse for LFR as well. By comparing the performance of the achievable scheme with the converse bound derived in this article (for the small cache size regime) and existing converse bounds without privacy constraints (in the remaining memory regime), the communication load of the privacy key scheme turns out to be optimal to within a constant multiplicative gap in all parameter regimes. Numerical results show that the new privacy key scheme outperforms in some regime known schemes based on the idea of virtual users, which also satisfy the stronger notion of user privacy against colluding users adopted here. Moreover, the privacy key scheme enjoys much lower subpacketization than known schemes based on virtual users.