Private Status Updating with Erasures: A Case for Retransmission Without Resampling

A status updating system is considered in which a source updates a destination over an erasure channel. The utility of the updates is measured through a function of their age-of-information (AoI), which assesses their freshness. Correlated with the status updates is another process that needs to be kept private from the destination. Privacy is measured through a leakage function that depends on the amount and time of the status updates received: stale updates are more private than fresh ones. Different from most of the current AoI literature, a post-sampling waiting time is introduced in order to provide a privacy cover at the expense of AoI. More importantly, it is also shown that, depending on the leakage budget and the channel statistics, it can be useful to retransmit stale status updates following erasure events without resampling fresh ones.

Timely Multi-Process Estimation with Erasures

We consider a multi-process remote estimation system observing $K$ independent Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes. In this system, a shared sensor samples the $K$ processes in such a way that the long-term average sum mean square error (MSE) is minimized. The sensor operates under a total sampling frequency constraint $f_{\max}$ and samples the processes according to a Maximum-Age-First (MAF) schedule. The samples from all processes consume random processing delays, and then are transmitted over an erasure channel with probability $\epsilon$. Aided by optimal structural results, we show that the optimal sampling policy, under some conditions, is a \emph{threshold policy}. We characterize the optimal threshold and the corresponding optimal long-term average sum MSE as a function of $K$, $f_{\max}$, $\epsilon$, and the statistical properties of the observed processes.

Timely Private Information Retrieval

We introduce the problem of \emph{timely} private information retrieval (PIR) from $N$ non-colluding and replicated servers. In this problem, a user desires to retrieve a message out of $M$ messages from the servers, whose contents are continuously updating. The retrieval process should be executed in a timely manner such that no information is leaked about the identity of the message. To assess the timeliness, we use the \emph{age of information} (AoI) metric. Interestingly, the timely PIR problem reduces to an AoI minimization subject to PIR constraints under \emph{asymmetric traffic}. We explicitly characterize the optimal tradeoff between the PIR rate and the AoI metric (peak AoI or average AoI) for the case of $N=2$, $M=3$. Further, we provide some structural insights on the general problem with arbitrary $N$, $M$.

Download Cost of Private Updating

We consider the problem of privately updating a message out of $K$ messages from $N$ replicated and non-colluding databases. In this problem, a user has an outdated version of the message $\hat{W}_\theta$ of length $L$ bits that differ from the current version $W_\theta$ in at most $f$ bits. The user needs to retrieve $W_\theta$ correctly using a private information retrieval (PIR) scheme with the least number of downloads without leaking any information about the message index $\theta$ to any individual database. To that end, we propose a novel achievable scheme based on \emph{syndrome decoding}. Specifically, the user downloads the syndrome corresponding to $W_\theta$, according to a linear block code with carefully designed parameters, using the optimal PIR scheme for messages with a length constraint. We derive lower and upper bounds for the optimal download cost that match if the term $\log_2\left(\sum_{i=0}^f \binom{L}{i}\right)$ is an integer. Our results imply that there is a significant reduction in the download cost if $f < \frac{L}{2}$ compared with downloading $W_\theta$ directly using classical PIR approaches without taking the correlation between $W_\theta$ and $\hat{W}_\theta$ into consideration.