Physical-layer secrecy in wireless fading channels has been studied extensively in recent years to ensure reliable communication between the transmitter and the receiver subject to constraints on the information attainable by the eavesdropper. With multiple antennas at the transmitter, Goel and Negi proposed the use of artificial noise (AN) in the null space of the receiver's channel to corrupt the eavesdropper's reception, which helps guarantee secrecy without knowledge of the eavesdropper's channel. It has been shown that the secrecy capacity can be made arbitrarily large by increasing the transmission power, when perfect knowledge of the receiver's channel direction information (CDI) is available. However, in practice, this is not possible due to rate-limitations on the feedback channel. This paper studies the impact of quantized channel feedback on the secrecy capacity achievable with artificial noise.We show that, with imperfect CDI at the transmitter, the AN that was originally intended only for the eavesdropper may leak into the receiver's channel and limit the achievable secrecy rate. To maintain a constant performance degradation, the number of feedback bits must increase at least logarithmically with the transmission power. Moreover, we observe that the portion of power allocated to the transmission of AN should decrease as the number of quantization bits decreases to alleviate the degradation due to noise leakage.
Physical-layer secrecy in wireless fading channels has been studied extensively in recent years to ensure reliable communication between the transmitter and the receiver subject to constraints on the information attainable by the eavesdropper. With multiple antennas at the transmitter, Goel and Negi proposed the use of artificial noise (AN) in the null space of the receiver's channel to corrupt the eavesdropper's reception, which helps guarantee secrecy without knowledge of the eavesdropper's channel. It has been shown that the secrecy capacity can be made arbitrarily large by increasing the transmission power, when perfect knowledge of the receiver's channel direction information (CDI) is available. However, in practice, this is not possible due to rate-limitations on the feedback channel. This paper studies the impact of quantized channel feedback on the secrecy capacity achievable with artificial noise.We show that, with imperfect CDI at the transmitter, the AN that was originally intended only for the eavesdropper may leak into the receiver's channel and limit the achievable secrecy rate. To maintain a constant performance degradation, the number of feedback bits must increase at least logarithmically with the transmission power. Moreover, we observe that the portion of power allocated to the transmission of AN should decrease as the number of quantization bits decreases to alleviate the degradation due to noise leakage.
The impact of quantized channel direction information (CDI) on the achievable secrecy rate is studied for multiple antenna wiretap channels. By assuming that the eavesdropper's channel is unknown at the transmitter, we adopt the transmission scheme where artificial noise (AN) is imposed in the null space of the legitimate receiver's channel to disrupt the eavesdropper's reception. It has been shown that, in the ideal case where perfect CDI is available at the transmitter, the achievable secrecy rate can be made arbitrarily large by increasing the transmission power. However, when only quantized CDI is available, the AN that was originally intended to jam the eavesdropper may now leak into the legitimate receiver's channel, causing significant secrecy rate loss. For a given number of feedback bits B and transmission power P, we derive the optimal power allocation among the message-bearing signal and the AN to maximize the secrecy rate under AN leakage. We show that, when B is sufficiently large, one should allocate power evenly among the message-bearing signal and the AN; whereas when B is small, one should be more conservative in allocating power to the AN. Moreover, by showing that the achievable secrecy rate under quantized CDI is bounded by a constant, we derive a scaling law between B and P that is necessary to maintain a constant secrecy rate loss compared to the perfect CDI case. The scaling of B is shown to be logarithmic of P. These results are first derived for the multiple-input single-output single-antenna-eavesdropper scenario and are later extended to the multiple-input multiple-output multiple-antenna-eavesdropper case. Numerical simulations are provided to verify our theoretical claims.
In this work, we examine the impact of quantized channel direction feedback on the achievable secrecy rate of multiple-antenna wiretap channels. To guarantee secrecy without knowledge of the eavesdropper's channel, we consider the transmission scheme proposed by Goel and Negi where artificial noise (AN) is imposed in the null space of the legitimate receiver's channel to disrupt the eavesdropper's reception. When perfect knowledge of the legitimate receiver's channel direction information (CDI) is available at the transmitter, the secrecy rate can be made arbitrarily large by increasing the transmission power. However, perfect CDI is difficult to achieve in practice due to rate-limitations on the feedback channel. When only quantized CDI is available at the transmitter, the AN that is only intended to disrupt the eavesdropper's reception may leak into the legitimate receiver's channel, causing significant loss in secrecy rate. In fact, we show that the achievable secrecy rate under quantized CDI is bounded by a constant even as the transmission power increases. To guarantee a constant rate loss compared to the perfect CDI case, we show that the number of feedback bits must scale at least logarithmically with the transmission power. These theoretical claims are verified by computer simulations.
Utilizing artificial noise (AN) is a good means to guarantee security against eavesdropping in a multi-input multi-output system, where the AN is designed to lie in the null space of the legitimate receiver's channel direction information (CDI). However, imperfect CDI will lead to noise leakage at the legitimate receiver and cause significant loss in the achievable secrecy rate. In this paper, we consider a delayed feedback system, and investigate the impact of delayed CDI on security by using a transmit beamforming and AN scheme. By exploiting the Gauss-Markov fading spectrum to model the feedback delay, we derive a closed-form expression of the upper bound on the secrecy rate loss, where Nt= 2. For a moderate number of antennas where Nt>; 2, two special cases, based on the first-order statistics of the noise leakage and large number theory, are explored to approximate the respective upper bounds. In addition, to maintain a constant signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio degradation, we analyze the corresponding delay constraint. Furthermore, based on the obtained closed-form expression of the lower bound on the achievable secrecy rate, we investigate an optimal power allocation strategy between the information signal and the AN. The analytical and numerical results obtained based on first-order statistics can be regarded as a good approximation of the capacity that can be achieved at the legitimate receiver with a certain number of antennas, Nt. In addition, for a given delay, we show that optimal power allocation is not sensitive to the number of antennas in a high signal-to-noise ratio regime. The simulation results further indicate that the achievable secrecy rate with optimal power allocation can be improved significantly as compared to that with fixed power allocation. In addition, as the delay increases, the ratio of power allocated to the AN should be decreased to reduce the secrecy rate degradation.
While the impact of finite-rate feedback on the capacity of fading channels has been extensively studied in the literature, not much attention has been paid to this problem under secrecy constraint. In this work, we study the ergodic secret capacity of a multiple-input multiple-output multiple-antenna-eavesdropper (MIMOME) wiretap channel with quantized channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter and perfect CSI at the legitimate receiver, under the assumption that only the statistics of eavesdropper CSI is known at the transmitter. We refine the analysis of the random vector quantization (RVQ) based artificial noise (AN) scheme in [1], where a heuristic upper bound on the secrecy rate loss, when compared to the perfect CSI case, was given. We propose a lower bound on the ergodic secrecy capacity. We show that the lower bound and the secrecy capacity with perfect CSI coincide asymptotically as the number of feedback bits and the AN power go to infinity. For practical applications, we propose a very efficient quantization codebook construction method for the two transmit antennas case.
While the impact of finite-rate feedback on the capacity of fading channels has been extensively studied in the literature, not much attention has been paid to this problem under secrecy constraint. In this work, we study the ergodic secret capacity of a multiple-input multiple-output multiple-antenna-eavesdropper (MIMOME) wiretap channel with quantized channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter and perfect CSI at the legitimate receiver, under the assumption that only the statistics of eavesdropper CSI is known at the transmitter. We refine the analysis of Lin et al.'s random vector quantization (RVQ) based artificial noise (AN) scheme, where a heuristic upper bound on the secrecy rate loss (compared to the perfect CSI case) was given. We propose a lower bound on the ergodic secrecy capacity. We show that the lower bound and the secrecy capacity with perfect CSI coincide asymptotically as the number of feedback bits and the AN power go to infinity. For practical applications, we propose a very efficient quantization codebook construction method for the two transmit antennas case.
Exploiting the randomness embedded in wireless channels, the physical-layer security techniques can provide additional security robustness against malicious eavesdropping at the physical layer of communication systems. To further this line of study, this thesis focuses on developing advanced multi-antenna transmission strategies for enhancing the secrecy performance of wireless communication systems. Assuming perfect channel feedback from the desired receiver and none from the eavesdropper, we consider beamforming with smartly injected artificial noise, aiming to confuse the eavesdropper whilst leaving the desired receiver unaffected. The system parameters are either chosen to be fixed for all transmissions, or adaptively adjusted based on the channel feedback from the desired receiver. For both cases, we provide novel and explicit design solutions for achieving the maximum throughput subject to a secrecy outage constraint. We then derive accurate approximations for the maximum throughput, and give new insights into the additional power cost for achieving a higher security level and the throughput gain of adaptive transmission over non-adaptive transmission. Having investigated the perfect feedback scenario, we then relax the feedback assumption and consider practical effects imposed by limited feedback constraints on the channel from the desired receiver to the transmitter. To deal with quantization error due to limited feedback whilst also accounting for unknown channel of the eavesdropper, we specify a connection outage constraint to guarantee the reliability of desired communication and a secrecy outage constraint to guard against malicious eavesdropping. Under dual outage constraints, we derive a novel optimized rate-adaptive transmission design to maximize the average secrecy throughput. New insights regarding the optimal power/feedback allocation and the number of feedback bits required for efficient quantization are obtained through our analysis. Our preceding study focused on isolated point-to-point transmission without any interference. However, the performance of contemporary wireless networks is often limited by interference from concurrent transmissions. To characterize the impact of interference on secure communication, we consider an interference-limited large-scale network. To confuse the malicious eavesdroppers, in addition to information-bearing signals, the transmitters are designed to generate artificial noise through either beamforming or antenna sectoring in a distributed manner. For both cases, using tools from stochastic geometry, we provide a statistical characterization of the reliability performance of desired communication and the secrecy performance against eavesdropping. We then investigate the networkwide secrecy throughput performance and optimize the transmit power allocation. Our analysis reveals interesting differences between the beamforming and sectoring approaches in terms of the optimal power allocation and the maximum networkwide secrecy throughput.