Optimal Linear Coding Schemes for the Secure Decentralized Pliable Index Coding Problem

Abstract: We study the secure decentralized Pliable Index CODing (PICOD) problem with circular side information sets at the users. The security constraint forbids every user to decode more than one message while a decentralized setting means there is no central transmitter in the system. Compared to the secure but centralized version of the problem, a converse bound from one of our previous works showed a factor of three difference in optimal code length under the constraint of linear encoding. In this paper, we first list the linearly infeasible cases, that is, problems where no linear code can simultaneously achieve both correctness/decodability and security. Then, we propose linear coding schemes for all remaining cases and show that their attained code length is to within an additive constant gap from our converse bound.