The secrecy capacity of relay channels with orthogonal components is studied
in the presence of an additional passive eavesdropper node. The relay and
destination receive signals from the source on two orthogonal channels such
that the destination also receives transmissions from the relay on its channel.
The eavesdropper can overhear either one or both of the orthogonal channels.
Inner and outer bounds on the secrecy capacity are developed for both the
discrete memoryless and the Gaussian channel models. For the discrete
memoryless case, the secrecy capacity is shown to be achieved by a partial
decode-and-forward (PDF) scheme when the eavesdropper can overhear only one of
the two orthogonal channels. Two new outer bounds are presented for the
Gaussian model using recent capacity results for a Gaussian multi-antenna
point-to-point channel with a multi-antenna eavesdropper. The outer bounds are
shown to be tight for two sub-classes of channels. The first sub-class is one
in which the source and relay are clustered and the and the eavesdropper
receives signals only on the channel from the source and the relay to the
destination, for which the PDF strategy is optimal. The second is a sub-class
in which the source does not transmit to the relay, for which a
noise-forwarding strategy is optimal.Comment: Submitted to Eurasip Journal on Wireless Communications and
Networking special issue on Wireless physical layer security, Dec. 2008,
Revised Jun. 200