Multiple access channel with common message and secrecy constraint

Abstract

The authors study the problem of secret communication over a multiple‐access channel with a common message. Here, the authors assume that two transmitters have confidential messages, which must be kept secret from the wiretapper (the second receiver), and both of them have access to a common message which can be decoded by the two receivers. The authors call this setting as multiple‐access wiretap channel with common message (MAWC‐CM). For this setting, the authors derive general inner and outer bounds on the secrecy capacity region for the discrete memoryless case and show that these bounds meet each other for a special case called the switch channel. As well, for a Gaussian version of MAWC‐CM, the authors derive inner and outer bounds on the secrecy capacity region. Providing numerical results for the Gaussian case, the authors illustrate the comparison between the derived achievable rate region and the outer bound for the considered model and the capacity region of compound multiple access channel.