Index Coding with Coded Side-Information

Abstract

This letter investigates a new class of index coding problems. One sender broadcasts packets to multiple users, each desiring a subset, by exploiting prior knowledge of linear combinations of packets. We refer to this class of problems as index coding with coded side-information. Our aim is to characterize the minimum index code length that the sender needs to transmit to simultaneously satisfy all user requests. We show that the optimal binary vector index code length is equal to the minimum rank (minrank) of a matrix whose elements consist of the sets of desired packet indices and side-information encoding matrices. This is the natural extension of matrix minrank in the presence of coded side information. Using the derived expression, we propose a greedy randomized algorithm to minimize the rank of the derived matrix.