Secure Symmetrical Multilevel Diversity Coding

Symmetrical Multilevel Diversity Coding (SMDC) is a network compression problem introduced by Roche (1992) and Yeung (1995). In this setting, a simple separate coding strategy known as superposition coding was shown to be optimal in terms of achieving the minimum sum rate (Roche, Yeung, and Hau, 1997) and the entire admissible rate region (Yeung and Zhang, 1999) of the problem. This paper considers a natural generalization of SMDC to the secure communication setting with an additional eavesdropper. It is required that all sources need to be kept perfectly secret from the eavesdropper as long as the number of encoder outputs available at the eavesdropper is no more than a given threshold. First, the problem of encoding individual sources is studied. A precise characterization of the entire admissible rate region is established via a connection to the problem of secure coding over a three-layer wiretap network and utilizing some basic polyhedral structure of the admissible rate region. Building on this result, it is then shown that superposition coding remains optimal in terms of achieving the minimum sum rate for the general secure SMDC problem.