Secrecy in Cooperative Relay Broadcast Channels

We investigate the effects of user cooperation on the secrecy of broadcast channels by considering a cooperative relay broadcast channel. We show that user cooperation can increase the achievable secrecy region. We propose an achievable scheme that combines Marton´s coding scheme for broadcast channels and Cover and El Gamal´s compress-and-forward scheme for relay channels. We derive outer bounds for the rate-equivocation region using auxiliary random variables for single-letterization. Finally, we consider a Gaussian channel and show that both users can have positive secrecy rates, which is not possible for scalar Gaussian broadcast channels without cooperation.