Communication-Efficient Private Information Acquisition: Multicasting via Crowding

This paper focuses on the way to protect privacy of clients requesting datasets stored in data servers while keeping communication efficiency. To this end, we introduce a novel communication-efficient and privacy protecting framework termed crowded information acquisition (CIA), well suited to a large number of clients scenario. We investigate the CIA under various conditions addressing possible communication scenarios. Contrary to the conventional belief, the results claim that a large number of clients demanding private services can enhance the privacy protection while providing low latency services and generating a small amount of traffic.