On the Construction of Polar Codes for Achieving the Capacity of Marginal Channels

Abstract

Achieving security against adversaries with unlimited computational power is of great interest in a communication scenario. Since polar codes are capacity achieving codes with low encoding-decoding complexity and they can approach perfect secrecy rates for binary-input degraded wiretap channels in symmetric settings, they are investigated extensively in the literature recently. In this paper, a polar coding scheme to achieve secrecy capacity in non-symmetric binary input channels is proposed. The proposed scheme satisfies security and reliability conditions. The wiretap channel is assumed to be stochastically degraded with respect to the legitimate channel and message distribution is uniform. The information set is sent over channels that are good for Bob and bad for Eve. Random bits are sent over channels that are good for both Bob and Eve. A frozen vector is chosen randomly and is sent over channels bad for both. We prove that there exists a frozen vector for which the coding scheme satisfies reliability and security conditions and approaches the secrecy capacity. We further empirically show that in the proposed scheme for non-symmetric binary-input discrete memoryless channels, the equivocation rate achieves its upper bound in the whole capacity-equivocation region