Hierarchical Joint Source-Channel Coding with Constrained Information Leakage

Abstract

This paper studies the hierarchical joint source-channel coding with information leakage constraint in the first-phase reconstruction and distortion constraints. The receiver's access to the data varies and is evaluated by the quality of the side information. Due to the consideration of channel capacity limitation or the efficiency of the system performance, the encoder may send some additional information in Phase 1 that can only be decoded in Phase 2 with higher-quality side information. While this can optimize the overall performance, the additional information causes excessive information leakage. We provide general inner and outer bounds for the conditions such that a given distortion-leakage pair $(D_1,D_2,L)$ is achievable, together with a capacity-achieving condition.