The Capacity of Anonymous Communications

Abstract

We consider the communication scenario where K transmitters are each connected to a common receiver with an orthogonal noiseless link. One of the transmitters has a message for the receiver, who is prohibited from learning anything in the information theoretic sense about which transmitter sends the message (transmitter anonymity is guaranteed). The capacity of anonymous communications is the maximum number of bits of desired information that can be anonymously communicated per bit of total communication. For this anonymous communication problem over a parallel channel with K transmitters and 1 receiver, we show that the capacity is 1/K, i.e., to communicate 1 bit anonymously, each transmitter must send a 1 bit signal. Further, it is required that each transmitter has at least 1 bit correlated randomness (that is independent of the messages) per message bit and the size of correlated randomness at all K transmitters is at least K-1 bits per message bit.