Optimal Index Codes via a Duality between Index Coding and Network Coding

In Index Coding, the goal is to use a broadcast channel as efficiently as possible to communicate information from a source to multiple receivers which can possess some of the information symbols at the source as side-information. In this work, we present a duality relationship between index coding (IC) and multiple-unicast network coding (NC). It is known that the IC problem can be represented using a side-information graph $G$ (with number of vertices $n$ equal to the number of source symbols). The size of the maximum acyclic induced subgraph, denoted by $MAIS$ is a lower bound on the \textit{broadcast rate}. For IC problems with $MAIS=n-1$ and $MAIS=n-2$, prior work has shown that binary (over ${\mathbb F}_2$) linear index codes achieve the $MAIS$ lower bound for the broadcast rate and thus are optimal. In this work, we use the the duality relationship between NC and IC to show that for a class of IC problems with $MAIS=n-3$, binary linear index codes achieve the $MAIS$ lower bound on the broadcast rate. In contrast, it is known that there exists IC problems with $MAIS=n-3$ and optimal broadcast rate strictly greater than $MAIS$

Index Coding: Rank-Invariant Extensions

An index coding (IC) problem consisting of a server and multiple receivers with different side-information and demand sets can be equivalently represented using a fitting matrix. A scalar linear index code to a given IC problem is a matrix representing the transmitted linear combinations of the message symbols. The length of an index code is then the number of transmissions (or equivalently, the number of rows in the index code). An IC problem ${\cal I}_{ext}$ is called an extension of another IC problem ${\cal I}$ if the fitting matrix of ${\cal I}$ is a submatrix of the fitting matrix of ${\cal I}_{ext}$. We first present a straightforward $m$\textit{-order} extension ${\cal I}_{ext}$ of an IC problem ${\cal I}$ for which an index code is obtained by concatenating $m$ copies of an index code of ${\cal I}$. The length of the codes is the same for both ${\cal I}$ and ${\cal I}_{ext}$, and if the index code for ${\cal I}$ has optimal length then so does the extended code for ${\cal I}_{ext}$. More generally, an extended IC problem of ${\cal I}$ having the same optimal length as ${\cal I}$ is said to be a \textit{rank-invariant} extension of ${\cal I}$. We then focus on $2$-order rank-invariant extensions of ${\cal I}$, and present constructions of such extensions based on involutory permutation matrices