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This paper presents a joint typicality framework for encoding and decoding nested linear codes in multi-user networks. This framework provides a new perspective on compute–forward within the context of discrete memoryless networks. In particular, it establishes an achievable rate region for computing a linear combination over a discrete memoryless multiple-access channel (MAC). When specialized to the Gaussian MAC, this rate region recovers and improves upon the lattice-based compute–forward rate region of Nazer and Gastpar, thus providing a unified approach for discrete memoryless and Gaussian networks. Furthermore, our framework provides some valuable insights on establishing the optimal decoding rate region for compute–forward by considering joint decoders, progressing beyond most previous works that consider successive cancellation decoding. Specifically, this paper establishes an achievable rate region for simultaneously decoding two linear combinations of nested linear codewords from $K$ senders.

Refereed/Peer-reviewed This paper considers the design of heterogeneous multi-cloud systems for big data storage and computing in the presence of cloud collusion and failures. A fundamental concept of such a system is the secrecy capacity, which represents the maximum amount of information that can be stored for each unit of storage space under the requirements of secure distributed computing. A capacity-achieving code is designed for matrix multiplication, a computing subroutine widely used in machine learning applications. The code allows fast parallel decoding and unequal data allocation in the clouds. Such a flexibility leads naturally to the idea of optimizing data allocation to minimize the computing time. Given any feasible storage budget, the optimal solution is derived, characterizing explicitly the fundamental tradeoff between storage and computing. Furthermore, it is shown via majorization theory that the whole tradeoff curve improves if the cloud computing rates are more even. Experiments on Amazon EC2 clusters are conducted, corroborating our theoretical observations and the negligibility of decoding overhead

Algebraic network information theory is an emerging facet of network information theory, studying the achievable rates of random code ensembles that have algebraic structure, such as random linear codes. A distinguishing feature is that linear combinations of codewords can sometimes be decoded more efficiently than codewords themselves. The present work further develops this framework by studying the simultaneous decoding of multiple messages. Specifically, consider a receiver in a multi-user network that wishes to decode several messages. Simultaneous joint typicality decoding is one of the most powerful techniques for determining the fundamental limits at which reliable decoding is possible. This technique has historically been used in conjunction with random i.i.d. codebooks to establish achievable rate regions for networks. Recently, it has been shown that, in certain scenarios, nested linear codebooks in conjunction with “single-user” or sequential decoding can yield better achievable rates. For instance, the compute–forward problem examines the scenario of recovering $L \le K$ linear combinations of transmitted codewords over a $K$ -user multiple-access channel (MAC), and it is well established that linear codebooks can yield higher rates. This paper develops bounds for simultaneous joint typicality decoding used in conjunction with nested linear codebooks, and applies them to obtain a larger achievable region for compute–forward over a $K$ -user discrete memoryless MAC. The key technical challenge is that competing codeword tuples that are linearly dependent on the true codeword tuple introduce statistical dependencies, which requires careful partitioning of the associated error events.

Secure network coding assumes that the underlying network channels are error-free; thus, if our channels introduce errors, we need to first apply a channel code to correct them, and then build security on top of the resulting error-free network. In this paper, we develop achievability protocols and outer bounds for the secure network coding setting, where the edges are subject to packet erasures, and public feedback of the channel state is available to both Eve and the legitimate network nodes. We show that by leveraging erasures and feedback, we can achieve secrecy rates that are in some cases multiple times higher than the alternative of separate channel-error-correction followed by secure network coding; moreover, we develop outer bounds and prove optimality of our proposed schemes in some special cases.