Capacity Results for Relay Channels with Confidential Messages

Abstract

We consider a communication system where a relay helps transmission of messages from {a} sender to {a} receiver. The relay is considered not only as a helper but as a wire-tapper who can obtain some knowledge about transmitted messages. In this paper we study a relay channel with confidential messages(RCC), where a sender attempts to transmit common information to both a receiver and a relay and also has private information intended for the receiver and confidential to the relay. The level of secrecy of private information confidential to the relay is measured by the equivocation rate, i.e., the entropy rate of private information conditioned on channel outputs at the relay. The performance measure of interest for the RCC is the rate triple that includes the common rate, the private rate, and the equivocation rate as components. The rate-equivocation region is defined by the set that consists of all these achievable rate triples. In this paper we give two definitions of the rate-equivocation region. We first define the rate-equivocation region in the case of deterministic encoder and call it the deterministic rate-equivocation region. Next, we define the rate-equivocation region in the case of stochastic encoder and call it the stochastic rate-equivocation region. We derive explicit inner and outer bounds for the above two regions. On the deterministic/stochastic rate-equivocation region we present two classes of relay channels where inner and outer bounds match. We also evaluate the deterministic and stochastic rate-equivocation regions of the Gaussian RCC.