Dependence Balance and Capacity Bounds for Multiterminal Communication and Wiretap Channels

An information measure based on fractional partitions of a set is used to develop a general dependence balance inequality for communication. This inequality is used to obtain new upper bounds on reliable and secret rates for multiterminal channels. For example, we obtain a new upper bound on the rate of shared randomness generated among terminals, a counterpart of the cut-set bound for reliable communication. The bounds for reliable communication utilize the concept of auxiliary receivers, and we show the bounds are optimized by Gaussian distributions for Gaussian channels. The bounds are applied to multiaccess channels with generalized feedback and relay channels, and improve the cut-set bound for scalar Gaussian channels. The improvement for Gaussian relay channels complements results obtained with other methods.