In collaboration with Princeton University
Z. Goldfeld, G. Kramer, H. H. Permuter and P. Cuff
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 63, no. 1, pp. 469-495, January 2017, and International Zurich Seminar on Communications
A broadcast channel (BC) where the decoders cooperate via a one-sided link is considered. One common and two private messages are transmitted and the private message to the cooperative user should be kept secret from the cooperationaided user. The secrecy level is measured in terms of strong secrecy, i.e., a vanishing information leakage. An inner bound on the capacity region is derived by using a channel-resolvabilitybased code that double-bins the codebook of the secret message, and by using a likelihood encoder to choose the transmitted codeword. The inner bound is shown to be tight for semideterministicand physically degraded BCs, and the results are compared with those of the corresponding BCs without a secrecy constraint. Blackwell and Gaussian BC examples illustrate the impact of secrecy on the rate regions. Unlike the case without secrecy, where sharing information about both private messages via the cooperative link is optimal, our protocol conveys parts of the common and non-confidential messages only. This restriction reduces the transmission rates more than the usual rate loss due to secrecy requirements. An example that illustrates this loss is provided.