Capacity-Achieving PIR Schemes with Optimal Sub-Packetization

Abstract: Suppose a database containing $M$ records is replicated across $N$ servers, and a user wants to privately retrieve one record by accessing the servers such that identity of the retrieved record is secret against any up to $T$ servers. A scheme designed for this purpose is called a private information retrieval (PIR) scheme. In practice, capacity-achieving and small sub-packetization are both desired for PIR schemes, because the former implies the highest download rate and the latter usually means simple realization. For general values of $N,T,M$, the only known capacity-achieving PIR scheme was designed by Sun and Jafar in 2016 with sub-packetization $N^M$. In this paper, we design a linear capacity-achieving PIR scheme with much smaller sub-packetization $dn^{M-1}$, where $d={\rm gcd}(N,T)$ and $n=N/d$. Furthermore, we prove that for any linear capacity-achieving PIR scheme it must have sub-packetization no less than $dn^{M-1}$, implying our scheme has the optimal sub-packetization. Moreover, comparing with Sun and Jafar's scheme, our scheme reduces the field size by a factor of $\frac{1}{Nd^{M-2}}$.