Exponential Separation of Quantum Communication and Classical Information

We exhibit a Boolean function for which the quantum communication complexity is exponentially larger than the classical information complexity. An exponential separation in the other direction was already known from the work of Kerenidis et. al. [SICOMP 44, pp. 1550-1572], hence our work implies that these two complexity measures are incomparable. As classical information complexity is an upper bound on quantum information complexity, which in turn is equal to amortized quantum communication complexity, our work implies that a tight direct sum result for distributional quantum communication complexity cannot hold. The function we use to present such a separation is the Symmetric k-ary Pointer Jumping function introduced by Rao and Sinha [ECCC TR15-057], whose classical communication complexity is exponentially larger than its classical information complexity. In this paper, we show that the quantum communication complexity of this function is polynomially equivalent to its classical communication complexity. The high-level idea behind our proof is arguably the simplest so far for such an exponential separation between information and communication, driven by a sequence of round-elimination arguments, allowing us to simplify further the approach of Rao and Sinha. As another application of the techniques that we develop, we give a simple proof for an optimal trade-off between Alice's and Bob's communication while computing the related Greater-Than function on n bits: say Bob communicates at most b bits, then Alice must send n/exp(O(b)) bits to Bob. This holds even when allowing pre-shared entanglement. We also present a classical protocol achieving this bound.Comment: v1, 36 pages, 3 figure

Privacy-Preserving Shortest Path Computation

Navigation is one of the most popular cloud computing services. But in virtually all cloud-based navigation systems, the client must reveal her location and destination to the cloud service provider in order to learn the fastest route. In this work, we present a cryptographic protocol for navigation on city streets that provides privacy for both the client's location and the service provider's routing data. Our key ingredient is a novel method for compressing the next-hop routing matrices in networks such as city street maps. Applying our compression method to the map of Los Angeles, for example, we achieve over tenfold reduction in the representation size. In conjunction with other cryptographic techniques, this compressed representation results in an efficient protocol suitable for fully-private real-time navigation on city streets. We demonstrate the practicality of our protocol by benchmarking it on real street map data for major cities such as San Francisco and Washington, D.C.Comment: Extended version of NDSS 2016 pape

Construction and Verification of Performance and Reliability Models

Over the last two decades formal methods have been extended towards performance and reliability evaluation. This paper tries to provide a rather intuitive explanation of the basic concepts and features in this area. Instead of striving for mathematical rigour, the intention is to give an illustrative introduction to the basics of stochastic models, to stochastic modelling using process algebra, and to model checking as a technique to analyse stochastic models

A Candidate for a Strong Separation of Information and Communication

The weak interactive compression conjecture asserts that any two-party communication protocol with communication complexity C and information complexity I can be compressed to a protocol with communication complexity poly(I)polylog(C). We describe a communication problem that is a candidate for refuting that conjecture. Specifically, while we show that the problem can be solved by a protocol with communication complexity C and information complexity I=polylog(C), the problem seems to be hard for protocols with communication complexity poly(I)polylog(C)=polylog(C)

Strong Coordination over Noisy Channels: Is Separation Sufficient?

We study the problem of strong coordination of actions of two agents $X$ and $Y$ that communicate over a noisy communication channel such that the actions follow a given joint probability distribution. We propose two novel schemes for this noisy strong coordination problem, and derive inner bounds for the underlying strong coordination capacity region. The first scheme is a joint coordination-channel coding scheme that utilizes the randomness provided by the communication channel to reduce the local randomness required in generating the action sequence at agent $Y$. The second scheme exploits separate coordination and channel coding where local randomness is extracted from the channel after decoding. Finally, we present an example in which the joint scheme is able to outperform the separate scheme in terms of coordination rate.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures. An extended version of a paper accepted for the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), 201

Remote preparation of quantum states

Remote state preparation is the variant of quantum state teleportation in which the sender knows the quantum state to be communicated. The original paper introducing teleportation established minimal requirements for classical communication and entanglement but the corresponding limits for remote state preparation have remained unknown until now: previous work has shown, however, that it not only requires less classical communication but also gives rise to a trade-off between these two resources in the appropriate setting. We discuss this problem from first principles, including the various choices one may follow in the definitions of the actual resources. Our main result is a general method of remote state preparation for arbitrary states of many qubits, at a cost of 1 bit of classical communication and 1 bit of entanglement per qubit sent. In this "universal" formulation, these ebit and cbit requirements are shown to be simultaneously optimal by exhibiting a dichotomy. Our protocol then yields the exact trade-off curve for arbitrary ensembles of pure states and pure entangled states (including the case of incomplete knowledge of the ensemble probabilities), based on the recently established quantum-classical trade-off for quantum data compression. The paper includes an extensive discussion of our results, including the impact of the choice of model on the resources, the topic of obliviousness, and an application to private quantum channels and quantum data hiding.Comment: 21 pages plus 2 figures (eps), revtex4. v2 corrects some errors and adds obliviousness discussion. v3 has section VI C deleted and various minor oversights correcte