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International Conference on Communications

Beamforming design for secure downlink transmission of MU-MIMO systems with multi-antenna eavesdropper

Ronghong Mo, Chau Yuen, Jun Zhang, Xiaoming Chen

Published May 1, 2016• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the physical layer security for downlink MU-MIMO systems where the transmitter and the eavesdropper are equipped with multiple antennas, while the legitimate users have single antenna. This is a more challenging topic because the eavesdropper appears to be more powerful than the legitimate users. We propose a transmission scheme able to enhance secure transmission for legitimate users, by intentionally applying different beamforming matrices to pilot signals and data signals. The beamforming matrix for data signals is constructed in a way that legitimate users can derive the channel matrix experienced by data signals based on pilot signals, whereas the eavesdropper fails to obtain the channel matrix experienced by data signals even with the aid of pilot signals. Therefore coherent detection at the eavesdropper is impossible and the signal-plus-interference-to-noise (SINR) of the eavesdropper is significantly degraded. In addition, the proposed beamforming design is formulated as an optimization problem to maximize the minimum SINR. We theoretically prove that with this formulation, the resultant optimal SINR is not affected by the proposed format of beamforming matrix for data signals. Numerical results show that, the proposed beamforming design outperforms the conventional beamforming design in terms of ergodic secrecy sum rate. Furthermore, with suitable beamforming designs, the ergodic secrecy sum rate achieved will not be noticeably affected by the number of antennas at the eavesdropper, although it is significantly degraded with conventional beamforming design.

DOI
10.1109/icc.2016.7511287

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In this paper we investigate the physical layer security for downlink MU-MIMO systems where the transmitter and the eavesdropper are equipped with multiple antennas, while the legitimate users have single antenna. This is a more challenging topic because the eavesdropper appears to be more powerful than the legitimate users. We propose a transmission scheme able to enhance secure transmission for legitimate users, by intentionally applying different beamforming matrices to pilot signals and data signals. The beamforming matrix for data signals is constructed in a way that legitimate users can derive the channel matrix experienced by data signals based on pilot signals, whereas the eavesdropper fails to obtain the channel matrix experienced by data signals even with the aid of pilot signals. Therefore coherent detection at the eavesdropper is impossible and the signal-plus-interference-to-noise (SINR) of the eavesdropper is significantly degraded. In addition, the proposed beamforming design is formulated as an optimization problem to maximize the minimum SINR. We theoretically prove that with this formulation, the resultant optimal SINR is not affected by the proposed format of beamforming matrix for data signals. Numerical results show that, the proposed beamforming design outperforms the conventional beamforming design in terms of ergodic secrecy sum rate. Furthermore, with suitable beamforming designs, the ergodic secrecy sum rate achieved will not be noticeably affected by the number of antennas at the eavesdropper, although it is significantly degraded with conventional beamforming design.
This paper examines linear beamforming methods for secure communications in a multiuser wiretap channel with a single transmitter, multiple legitimate receivers, and a single eavesdropper, where all nodes are equipped with multiple antennas. No information regarding the eavesdropper is presumed at the transmitter, and we examine both the broadcast MIMO downlink with independent information, and the multicast MIMO downlink with common information for all legitimate receivers. In both cases the information signal is transmitted with just enough power to guarantee a certain SINR at the desired receivers, while the remainder of the power is used to broadcast artificial noise. The artificial interference selectively degrades the passive eavesdropper's signal while remaining orthogonal to the desired receivers. We analyze the confidentiality provided by zero-forcing and optimal minimum-power beamforming designs for the broadcast channel, and optimal minimum-MSE beamformers for the multicast channel. Numerical simulations for the relative SINR and BER performance of the eavesdropper demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed physical-layer security schemes.
Physical layer security has drawn significant attention in recent years because of its advances in preventing confidential information leakage to eavesdroppers. In this paper, we focus on secure beamformer designs in multi-user multi-input multi-output (MU-MIMO) systems with a multi-antenna eavesdropper attempting to overhear the confidential information of a particular user. Unlike existing works, we aim to exploit inherent multi-user interference to disrupt the reception of the eavesdropper and enhance the security of wireless communications. Particularly, utilizing practical signal-to-interference-noise (SINR) metrics, the objective of secure beamformer design is to minimize the eavesdropper's SINR, while providing legitimate users with required pre-specified SINRs to guarantee quality of service (QoS).We propose secure beamformer designs for the downlink transmission situation, under the conditions of known and unknown eavesdropper's channels, respectively. With the proposed secure beamformers, the multi-user signal behaves like artificial noise or distributed friendly jamming, which can further degrade the reception of the eavesdropper. Extensive simulation studies confirm our analytical performance predictions and illustrate the advantages of the proposed beamformer designs for secure MU-MIMO transmissions.
Physical layer security has drawn significant attention in recent years because of its advancement in preventing confidential information leakage to eavesdroppers. In this paper, we focus on secure beamformer designs in multiuser multi-input multi-output (MU-MIMO) systems with a multi-antenna eavesdropper attempting to overhear the confidential information of a particular user. Unlike the existing work, we aim to exploit the inherent multi-user interference to disrupt the reception of the eavesdropper and enhance the security of wireless communications. Particularly, utilizing practical signal-to-interference-noise metrics, the objective of the secure beamformer design is to minimize the eavesdropper's SINR, while providing legitimate users with required prespecified SINRs to guarantee the qualify of service. We propose secure beamformer designs for both downlink and uplink transmissions, under the conditions of known and unknown eavesdropper's channels, respectively. With the proposed secure beamformers, the multiuser signal behaves like the artificial noise or distributed friendly jamming, which can further degrade the reception of the eavesdropper. Extensive simulation studies confirm our analytical performance predictions and illustrate the advantages of proposed beamformer designs for secure MU-MIMO transmissions.
In this paper, we propose a pseudo-random beamforming (PRBF) technique for improving physical-layer security (PLS) in multiple input multiple output (MIMO) downlink cellular networks consisting of a legitimate base station (BS), multiple legitimate mobile stations (MSs) and potential eavesdroppers. The legitimate BS can obtain available potential eavesdroppers’ channel state information (CSI), which is registered in an adjacent cell. In the proposed PRBF technique, the legitimate BS pseudo-randomly generates multiple candidates of the transmit beamforming (BF) matrix, in which each transmit BF matrix consists of multiple orthonormal BF vectors and shares BF information with legitimate MSs before data transmission. Each legitimate MS generates receive BF vectors to maximize the receive signal-to-interference-plus-noise (SINR) for all pseudo-randomly generated transmit beams and calculates the corresponding SINR. Then, each legitimate MS sends a single beam index and the corresponding SINR value of the BF vector that maximizes the received SINR for each BF matrix since a single spatial stream is sent to each legitimate MS. Based on the feedback information from legitimate MSs and the CSI from the legitimate BS to eavesdroppers, the legitimate BS selects the optimal transmit BF matrix and the legitimate MSs that maximizes secrecy sum-rate. We also propose a codebook-based opportunistic feedback (CO-FB) strategy to reduce feedback overhead at legitimate MSs. Based on extensive computer simulations, the proposed PRBF with the proposed CO-FB significantly outperforms the conventional random beamforming (RBF) with the conventional opportunistic feedback (O-FB) strategies in terms of secrecy sum-rate and required feedback bits.
In this paper, we study the design of secure communication for time division duplexing multi-cell multi-user massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with active eavesdropping. We assume that the eavesdropper actively attacks the uplink pilot transmission and the uplink data transmission before eavesdropping the downlink data transmission phase of the desired users. We exploit both the received pilots and data signals for uplink channel estimation. We show analytically that when the number of transmit antennas and the length of the data vector both tend to infinity, the signals of the desired user and the eavesdropper lie in different eigenspaces of the received signal matrix at the base station if their signal powers are different. This finding reveals that decreasing (instead of increasing) the desire user's signal power might be an effective approach to combat a strong active attack from an eavesdropper. Inspired by this result, we propose a data-aided secure downlink transmission scheme and derive an asymptotic achievable secrecy sum-rate expression for the proposed design. Numerical results indicate that under strong active attacks, the proposed design achieves significant secrecy rate gains compared to the conventional design employing matched filter precoding and artificial noise generation.
This paper studies secure wireless transmission from a multi-antenna transmitter to a single-antenna intended receiver overheard by multiple eavesdroppers with considering the imperfect channel state information (CSI) of wiretap channel.To enhance security of communication link, the artificial noise (AN) is generated at transmitter.We first design the robust joint optimal beamforming of secret signal and AN to minimize transmit power with constraints of security quality of service (QoS), i.e., minimum allowable signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) at receiver and maximum tolerable SINR at eavesdroppers.The formulated design problem is shown to be nonconvex and we transfer it into linear matrix inequalities (LMIs).The semidefinite relaxation (SDR) technique is used and the approximated method is proved to solve the original problem exactly.To verify the robustness and tightness of proposed beamforming, we also provide a method to calculate the worst-case SINR at eavesdroppers for a designed transmit scheme using semidefinite programming (SDP).Additionally, the secrecy rate maximization is explored for fixed total transmit power.To tackle the nonconvexity of original formulation, we develop an iterative approach employing sequential parametric convex approximation (SPCA).The simulation results illustrate that the proposed robust transmit schemes can effectively improve the transmit performance.