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IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications

Secure Massive MIMO With the Artificial Noise-Aided Downlink Training

Nam‐Phong Nguyen, Hien Quoc Ngo, Trung Q. Duong, Hoang Duong Tuan, Kamel Tourki

Published Apr 1, 2018• 73 citations
Publisher

Abstract

This paper considers a massive MIMO network that includes one multiple-antenna base station, one multiple-antenna eavesdropper, and K single-antenna users. The eavesdropper operates in passive mode and tries to overhear the confidential information from one of the users in the down-link transmission. In order to secure the confidential information, two artificial noise (AN)-aiding schemes are proposed. In the first scheme, AN is injected into the downlink training signals to prevent the eavesdropper from obtaining the correct channel state information of the eavesdropping link. In the second scheme, AN is deployed in both downlink training phase and payload data transmission phase to further degrade the eavesdropping channel. Analytical expressions and tight approximations of the achievable secrecy rate of the considered systems are derived with taking imperfect channel estimation and two types of precoding, i.e., maximum-ratio-transmission and zero-forcing, into consideration. Optimization algorithms for power allocation are proposed to enhance the secrecy performance of the proposed AN-aiding schemes. The results reveal that deploying AN in the downlink training phase of massive MIMO networks does not affect the downlink channel estimation process at users while enabling the system to suppress the downlink channel estimation process at eavesdropper. As a consequence, the proposed AN-aided schemes improve the system performance significantly. Furthermore, implementing AN in both phases allows the considered system having a flexible solution to maximize its secrecy performance at the price of higher complexity.

DOI
10.1109/jsac.2018.2825140

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This paper considers a massive MIMO network that includes one multiple-antenna base station, one multiple-antenna eavesdropper, and K single-antenna users. The eavesdropper operates in passive mode and tries to overhear the confidential information from one of the users in the down-link transmission. In order to secure the confidential information, two artificial noise (AN)-aiding schemes are proposed. In the first scheme, AN is injected into the downlink training signals to prevent the eavesdropper from obtaining the correct channel state information of the eavesdropping link. In the second scheme, AN is deployed in both downlink training phase and payload data transmission phase to further degrade the eavesdropping channel. Analytical expressions and tight approximations of the achievable secrecy rate of the considered systems are derived with taking imperfect channel estimation and two types of precoding, i.e., maximum-ratio-transmission and zero-forcing, into consideration. Optimization algorithms for power allocation are proposed to enhance the secrecy performance of the proposed AN-aiding schemes. The results reveal that deploying AN in the downlink training phase of massive MIMO networks does not affect the downlink channel estimation process at users while enabling the system to suppress the downlink channel estimation process at eavesdropper. As a consequence, the proposed AN-aided schemes improve the system performance significantly. Furthermore, implementing AN in both phases allows the considered system having a flexible solution to maximize its secrecy performance at the price of higher complexity.
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In this paper, we investigate secure and reliable transmission strategies for multi-cell multi-user massive multiple-input multiple-output systems with a multi-antenna active eavesdropper. We consider a time-division duplex system where uplink training is required and an active eavesdropper can attack the training phase to cause pilot contamination at the transmitter. This forces the precoder used in the subsequent downlink transmission phase to implicitly beamform toward the eavesdropper, thus increasing its received signal power. Assuming matched filter precoding and artificial noise (AN) generation at the transmitter, we derive an asymptotic achievable secrecy rate when the number of transmit antennas approaches infinity. For the case of a single-antenna active eavesdropper, we obtain a closed-form expression for the optimal power allocation policy for the transmit signal and the AN, and find the minimum transmit power required to ensure reliable secure communication. Furthermore, we show that the transmit antenna correlation diversity of the intended users and the eavesdropper can be exploited in order to improve the secrecy rate. In fact, under certain orthogonality conditions of the channel covariance matrices, the secrecy rate loss introduced by the eavesdropper can be completely mitigated.
In this paper, we consider physical layer security provisioning in multi-cell massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. Specifically, we consider secure downlink transmission in a multi-cell massive MIMO system with matched-filter precoding and artificial noise (AN) generation at the base station (BS) in the presence of a passive multi-antenna eavesdropper. We investigate the resulting achievable ergodic secrecy rate and the secrecy outage probability for the cases of perfect training and pilot contamination. Thereby, we consider two different AN shaping matrices, namely, the conventional AN shaping matrix, where the AN is transmitted in the null space of the matrix formed by all user channels, and a random AN shaping matrix, which avoids the complexity associated with finding the null space of a large matrix. Our analytical and numerical results reveal that in multi-cell massive MIMO systems employing matched-filter precoding (1) AN generation is required to achieve a positive ergodic secrecy rate if the user and the eavesdropper experience the same path-loss, (2) even with AN generation secure transmission may not be possible if the number of eavesdropper antennas is too large and not enough power is allocated to channel estimation, (3) for a given fraction of power allocated to AN and a given number of users, in case of pilot contamination, the ergodic secrecy rate is not a monotonically increasing function of the number of BS antennas, and (4) random AN shaping matrices provide a favourable performance/complexity tradeoff and are an attractive alternative to conventional AN shaping matrices.
Owing to the openness of wireless channels, ensuring the security of communication for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems faces severe challenges. For the massive MIMO system in the presence of a full-duplex (FD) multi-antenna eavesdropper, a dual artificial-noise (AN) injection scheme is proposed to enhance communication security in this paper. Specifically, AN is superimposed onto the transmitted pilot signals to interfere with the eavesdropper from estimating the legitimate user channel in pilot training phases. In the phase of data transmission, the AN generated in the null space of the legitimate user is introduced to prevent the eavesdropper from receiving the confidential messages. Meanwhile, an iterative optimization algorithm is presented to obtain the optimal power allocation between the information-bearing signals and the AN for the potential countermeasures taken by the eavesdropper. Numerical results are presented to validate the superior performance of the proposed scheme in security ensurance compared to the conventional ones with AN injection schemes.
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.
To reduce the number of radio-frequency chains of base station, the use of finite resolution analog beamforming is desirbale in massive multiple-input multiple-output system. This article investigates the secure downlink massive multiple-input multiple-output data transmission with artificial noise at base station in the presence of a multi-antenna passive eavesdropper. The achievable user’s ergodic information rate and ergodic capacity of the eavesdropper are analyzed in detail, respectively. With maximum ratio transmission or maximum ratio combining, we derive closed-form expressions for a tight lower bound on ergodic secrecy rate and tight upper bound for secrecy outage probability. Based on these analytical expressions, the effects of various system parameters on secrecy performance, such as power allocation factor, number of eavesdropper’s antennas, number of the user terminals, total transmission power, and finite resolution analog beamforming parameters, are investigated in detail. Also, the optimal power allocation scheme between data and artificial noise signals is achieved in closed form to maximize the ergodic secrecy rate. In addition, we derive the conditions that the secure massive multiple-input multiple-output system need to meet to obtain a positive secrecy rate. Finally, numerical simulation results validate the system’s secrecy performance and verify all the theoretical analytical results.