Polar Coding for Bidirectional Broadcast Channels with Common and Confidential Messages

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.