A general private information retrieval scheme for MDS coded databases with colluding servers

Abstract: The problem of private information retrieval gets renewed attentions in recent years due to its information-theoretic reformulation and applications in distributed storage systems. PIR capacity is the maximal number of bits privately retrieved per one bit of downloaded bit. The capacity has been fully solved for some degenerating cases. For a general case where the database is both coded and colluded, the exact capacity remains unknown. We build a general private information retrieval scheme for MDS coded databases with colluding servers. Our scheme achieves the rate $(1+R+R^2+\cdots+R^{M-1})$, where $R=1-\frac{{{N-T}\choose K}}{{N\choose K}}$. Compared to existing PIR schemes, our scheme performs better for a certain range of parameters and is suitable for any underlying MDS code used in the distributed storage system.