Secure Decentralized Pliable Index Coding for Target Data Size

Decentralized Pliable Index Coding (DPIC) problem addresses efficient information exchange in distributed systems where clients communicate among themselves without a central server. An important consideration in DPIC is the heterogeneity of side-information and demand sizes. Although many prior works assume homogeneous settings with identical side-information cardinality and single message demands, these assumptions limit real-world applicability where clients typically possess unequal amounts of prior information. In this paper, we study DPIC problem under heterogeneous side-information cardinalities. We propose a transmission scheme that coordinates client broadcasts to maximize coding efficiency while ensuring that each client achieves a common target level $T$. In addition, we impose a strict security constraint that no client acquires more than the target $T$ number of messages, guaranteeing that each client ends up with exactly $T$ messages. We analyze the communication cost incurred by the proposed scheme under this security constraint.

💡 Research Summary

The paper addresses a novel variant of the Decentralized Pliable Index Coding (DPIC) problem in which clients possess heterogeneous amounts of side‑information and a strict security requirement is imposed: after the communication phase every client must hold exactly a predetermined number T of distinct messages, no more and no less. The authors focus on a specific side‑information structure called Linearly Progressive Sets with Fixed Overlap (LPS‑FO), originally introduced in