On transmission of a remote source with secrecy constraints over noisy channels

Abstract

The problem of transmitting a remote source via multiple agents to a single destination is considered with secrecy constraints. In particular, noisy versions of a source are observed by multiple agents who then encode and transmit their observations to a decoder over dedicated noisy channel. The decoder should be able to reconstruct the remote source within a certain distortion limit. In addition, there exists an eavesdropper with correlated side information to the source who is capable of wiretapping the links from the agents to the decoder so as to extract as much information as possible about the source. Therefore, the agents should encode their observations in such a way that while as less information as possible is leaked to the eavesdropper the decoder can satisfy the distortion constraint. For this problem, we study the tradeoffs among agents' transmission rates, experienced distortion at the destination, and equivocation rates at the eavesdropper, and provide an achievable region.