Capacity bounds for broadcast channels with confidential messages

This paper studies capacity bounds for discrete memoryless broadcast channels with confidential messages. Two private messages as well as a common message are transmitted; the common message is to be decoded by both receivers, while each private message is only for its intended receiver. In addition, each private message is to be kept secret from the unintended receiver where secrecy is measured by equivocation. Both inner and outer bounds are proposed to the rate equivocation region for broadcast channels with confidential messages. The proposed inner bound generalizes Csiszár and Körner's rate equivocation region for broadcast channels with a single confidential message, Liu et al.'s achievable rate region for broadcast channels with perfect secrecy, Marton's and Gel'fand-Pinsker's achievable rate region for general broadcast channels. The proposed outer bounds, together with the inner bound, help establish the rate equivocation region of several classes of discrete memoryless broadcast channels with confidential messages, including the less noisy, deterministic, and semideterministic broadcast channels. Furthermore, specializing to the general broadcast channel by removing the confidentiality constraint, the proposed outer bounds reduce to new capacity outer bounds for the discrete memory broadcast channel.