Capacity Regions for Broadcast Channels With Degraded Message Sets and Message Cognition Under Different Secrecy Constraints

This paper considers a three-receiver broadcast channel with degraded message sets and message cognition. The model consists of a common message for all three receivers, a private common message for only two receivers and two additional private messages for these two receivers, such that each receiver is only interested in one message, while being fully cognizant of the other one. First, this model is investigated without any secrecy constraints, where the capacity region is established. This result implies that the straightforward extension of Körner and Marton inner bound to the investigated scenario is optimal. In particular, this agrees with Nair and Wang result, which states that the idea of indirect decoding –introduced to improve Körner and Marton inner bound– does not provide a better region for this scenario. Further, some secrecy constraints are introduced by letting the private messages to be confidential ones. Two different secrecy criteria are considered: joint secrecy and individual secrecy. For both criteria, a general achievable rate region is provided, in addition to establishing the secrecy capacity regions, if the two legitimate receivers are more capable than the eavesdropper. The established capacity regions indicate that the individual secrecy criterion can provide a larger capacity region as compared to the joint one, because the cognizant messages can be used as a secret keys for the other messages. Moreover, the joint secrecy capacity is established for a more general class of more capable channels, where only one of the two legitimate receivers is more capable than the eavesdropper by proving the optimality of the principle of indirect decoding introduced by Nair and El Gamal for this class of channels. This result is in contrast with the non-secrecy case, where the indirect decoding does not provide any gain.