On Pliable Index Coding

Abstract: A new variant of index coding problem termed as Pliable Index Coding Problem (PICOD) is formulated in [S. Brahma, C. Fragouli, "Pliable index coding", IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 61, no. 11, pp. 6192-6203, 2015]. In PICOD, we consider a server holding a set of messages and there is a set of clients having a subset of messages with them. Each client is satisfied if it receives any of the message which it doesn't have. We discuss about a class of PICOD where the side information is consecutive. We provide index codes for two extreme cases - for the class where each client gets exactly one desired message and for a class where total number of messages decoded by the effective clients is maximized. Another variant of index coding problem is - c-Constrained Pliable Index Coding Problem [Linqi Song, Christina Fragouli and Tianchu Zhao, "A Pliable Index Coding Approach to Data Shuffling," arXiv:1701.05540v3 [cs.IT] 3 May 2018]. It is basically PICOD with a c-constraint, i.e, each message is decoded by atmost c clients demanding that message. We provide index codes for some classes of this variant with consecutive side information.