Secrecy Capacity of a Class of Broadcast Channels with an Eavesdropper

We study the security of communication between a single transmitter and multiple receivers in a broadcast channel in the presence of an eavesdropper. We consider several special classes of channels. As the first model, we consider the degraded multi-receiver wiretap channel where the legitimate receivers exhibit a degradedness order while the eavesdropper is more noisy with respect to all legitimate receivers. We establish the secrecy capacity region of this channel model. Secondly, we consider the parallel multi-receiver wiretap channel with a less noisiness order in each sub-channel, where this order is not necessarily the same for all sub-channels. We establish the common message secrecy capacity and sum secrecy capacity of this channel. Thirdly, we study a special class of degraded parallel multi-receiver wiretap channels and provide a stronger result. In particular, we study the case with two sub-channels two users and one eavesdropper, where there is a degradedness order in each sub-channel such that in the first (resp. second) sub-channel the second (resp. first) receiver is degraded with respect to the first (resp. second) receiver, while the eavesdropper is degraded with respect to both legitimate receivers in both sub-channels. We determine the secrecy capacity region of this channel. Finally, we focus on a variant of this previous channel model where the transmitter can use only one of the sub-channels at any time. We characterize the secrecy capacity region of this channel as well.