Super-activation as a unique feature of arbitrarily varying wiretap channels

Abstract

The question of additivity of the capacity of a channel goes back to Shannon who asked this for the zero error capacity function. Despite the common sense that the capacity is usually additive, there is surprisingly little known for non-trivial channels. This paper addresses this question for the arbitrarily varying wiretap channel (AVWC) which models secure communication in the presence of arbitrarily varying channel (AVC) conditions. For orthogonal AVWCs it has been shown that the non-additivity phenomenon of super-activation occurs; that is, there are orthogonal AVWCs, each having zero secrecy capacity, which allow for transmission with positive secrecy rate if they are used together. It is shown that for such orthogonal AVWCs super-activation is generic in the sense that whenever super-activation is possible, it is possible for all AVWCs in a certain neighborhood as well. Moreover, it is shown that the issue of super-activation and the continuity of the secrecy capacity solely depend on the legitimate link. Accordingly, the single-user AVC is studied and it is shown that in this case, super-activation for non-secure message transmission is not possible, making it a unique feature of secure communication over AVWCs. However, the capacity for message transmission of the single-user AVC is shown to be super-additive including a complete characterization.