The integration of multiple services such as the transmission of private, common, and confidential messages at the physical layer is becoming important for future wireless networks in order to increase spectral efficiency. In this paper, bidirectional relay networks are considered, in which a relay node establishes bidirectional communication between two other nodes using a decode-and-forward protocol. In the broadcast phase, the relay transmits additional common and confidential messages, which then requires the study of the bidirectional broadcast channel (BBC) with common and confidential messages. This channel generalizes the broadcast channel with receiver side information considered by Kramer and Shamai. Low complexity polar codes are constructed that achieve the capacity region of both the degraded symmetric BBC, and the BBC with common and confidential messages. The use of polar codes allows an intuitive interpretation of how to incorporate receiver side information and secrecy constraints as different sets of frozen bits at the different receivers for an optimal code design. In order to show that the constructed codes achieve capacity, a tighter bound on the cardinality of an auxiliary random variable used in the converse is found using a method by Salehi.

We consider transmission over a wiretap channel where both the main channel and the wiretapper's channel are binary erasure channels (BEC). A code construction method is proposed using two edge-type low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes based on the coset encoding scheme. Using a single edge-type LDPC ensemble with a given threshold over the BEC, we give a construction for a two edge-type LDPC ensemble with the same threshold. If the given single edge-type LDPC ensemble has degree two variable nodes, our construction gives rise to degree one variable nodes in the code used over the main channel. This results in zero threshold over the main channel. In order to circumvent this problem, the degree distribution of the two edge-type LDPC ensemble is numerically optimized. We find that the resulting ensembles are able to perform close to the boundary of the rate-equivocation region of the wiretap channel. Further, a method to compute the ensemble average equivocation of two edge-type LDPC ensembles is provided by generalizing a recently published approach to measure the equivocation of single edge-type ensembles for transmission over the BEC in the point-to-point setting. From this analysis, we find that relatively simple constructions give very good secrecy performance.

We study secret-key agreement over a non-coherent block-fading multiple input multiple output (MIMO) wiretap channel. We give an achievable scheme based on training and source emulation and analyze the rate in the high SNR regime. Based on this analysis we find the optimal number of antennas to use for training. Our main result is that if the sum of the number of antennas at Alice and Bob is larger than the coherence time of the channel, the achievable rate does not depend on the number of antennas at Eve. In this case source emulation is not needed, and using only training is optimal. We also consider the case when there is no public channel available. In this case we show that secret-key agreement is still possible by using the wireless channel for discussion, giving the same number of secure degrees of freedom as in the case with a public channel.

We consider the symmetric discrete memoryless relay channel with orthogonal receiver components and show that polar codes are suitable for decode-and-forward and compress-and-forward relaying. In the first case we prove that polar codes are capacity achieving for the physically degraded relay channel; for stochastically degraded relay channels our construction provides an achievable rate. In the second case we construct sequences of polar codes that achieve the compress-and-forward rate by nesting polar codes for source compression into polar codes for channel coding. In both cases our constructions inherit most of the properties of polar codes. In particular, the encoding and decoding algorithms and the bound on the block error probability O(2-Nβ) which holds for any 0<;β<;1/2.

We consider transmission over a wiretap channel where both the main channel and the wiretapper's channel are Binary Erasure Channels (BEC). We use regular convolutional LDPC ensembles, introduced by Felström and Zigangirov, together with Wyner's coset encoding scheme. We show that such a construction achieves the whole rate-equivocation region of the BEC wiretap channel. This result is based on the recent observation by Kudekar, Richardson, and Urbanke who proved that convolutional LDPC ensembles exhibit a “threshold saturation” phenomenon which converts the MAP threshold into the BP threshold for transmission over the BEC. Although our present result is less general (since we only consider the BEC) than the elegant code constructions based on polar codes which were recently introduced by several research groups, we see two potential advantages which we believe makes our construction worth considering. First, the proposed codes have a significantly better performance already for moderate lengths. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the proposed construction has the potential of being universal. More precisely, the phenomenon of spatial coupling has been observed empirically to hold for general binary memoryless symmetric channels as well. Hence, we conjecture that our construction is a universal rate-equivocation achieving construction when the main channel and wiretapper's channel are binary memoryless symmetric channels, and the wiretapper's channel is degraded with respect to the main channel.

We approximate the capacity of the Gaussian parallel relay network with general channel gains. Our strategy is to find capacity approximations for the corresponding network in the discrete superposition model and to use the fact that those are an approximation for the Gaussian capacity. The gap between our approximation and the Gaussian capacity is a constant depending only on the number of relays, hence it is a valuable characterization for the regime of high SNR and high rate.

In this paper we construct a family of rate-compatible LDPC convolutional codes for Type-II HARQ systems. For each code family, the codes of lower rates are constructed by successively extending the graph of the high-rate base code. Theoretically, the proposed rate-compatible family includes all rates from 0 to 1. We prove analytically that all LDPC convolutional codes in the family are capacity achieving over the binary erasure channel (BEC). Thus, if applied to an idealized HARQ system over the BEC where the channel parameter stays constant within one complete information delivery, the throughput achieves the capacity of the channel. Moreover, the code construction is realized by regular degree distributions, which greatly simplifies the optimization.