Artificial-Noise-Aided Secure Multi-Antenna Transmission with Limited Feedback

We present an optimized secure multi-antenna transmission approach based on artificial-noise-aided beamforming, with limited feedback from a desired single-antenna receiver. To deal with beamformer quantization errors as well as unknown eavesdropper channel characteristics, our approach is aimed at maximizing throughput under dual performance constraints - a connection outage constraint on the desired communication channel and a secrecy outage constraint to guard against eavesdropping. We propose an adaptive transmission strategy that judiciously selects the wiretap coding parameters, as well as the power allocation between the artificial noise and the information signal. This optimized solution reveals several important differences with respect to solutions designed previously under the assumption of perfect feedback. We also investigate the problem of how to most efficiently utilize the feedback bits. The simulation results indicate that a good design strategy is to use approximately 20% of these bits to quantize the channel gain information, with the remainder to quantize the channel direction, and this allocation is largely insensitive to the secrecy outage constraint imposed. In addition, we find that 8 feedback bits per transmit antenna is sufficient to achieve approximately 90% of the throughput attainable with perfect feedback.Comment: to appear in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication

Fronthaul Quantization as Artificial Noise for Enhanced Secret Communication in C-RAN

This work considers the downlink of a cloud radio access network (C-RAN), in which a control unit (CU) encodes confidential messages, each of which is intended for a user equipment (UE) and is to be kept secret from all the other UEs. As per the C-RAN architecture, the encoded baseband signals are quantized and compressed prior to the transfer to distributed radio units (RUs) that are connected to the CU via finite-capacity fronthaul links. This work argues that the quantization noise introduced by fronthaul quantization can be leveraged to act as "artificial" noise in order to enhance the rates achievable under secrecy constraints. To this end, it is proposed to control the statistics of the quantization noise by applying multivariate, or joint, fronthaul quantization/compression at the CU across all outgoing fronthaul links. Assuming wiretap coding, the problem of jointly optimizing the precoding and multivariate compression strategies, along with the covariance matrices of artificial noise signals generated by RUs, is formulated with the goal of maximizing the weighted sum of achievable secrecy rates while satisfying per-RU fronthaul capacity and power constraints. After showing that the artificial noise covariance matrices can be set to zero without loss of optimaliy, an iterative optimization algorithm is derived based on the concave convex procedure (CCCP), and some numerical results are provided to highlight the advantages of leveraging quantization noise as artificial noise.Comment: to appear in Proc. IEEE SPAWC 201

Secure Massive MIMO Communication with Low-resolution DACs

In this paper, we investigate secure transmission in a massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system adopting low-resolution digital-to-analog converters (DACs). Artificial noise (AN) is deliberately transmitted simultaneously with the confidential signals to degrade the eavesdropper's channel quality. By applying the Bussgang theorem, a DAC quantization model is developed which facilitates the analysis of the asymptotic achievable secrecy rate. Interestingly, for a fixed power allocation factor $\phi$, low-resolution DACs typically result in a secrecy rate loss, but in certain cases they provide superior performance, e.g., at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Specifically, we derive a closed-form SNR threshold which determines whether low-resolution or high-resolution DACs are preferable for improving the secrecy rate. Furthermore, a closed-form expression for the optimal $\phi$ is derived. With AN generated in the null-space of the user channel and the optimal $\phi$, low-resolution DACs inevitably cause secrecy rate loss. On the other hand, for random AN with the optimal $\phi$, the secrecy rate is hardly affected by the DAC resolution because the negative impact of the quantization noise can be compensated for by reducing the AN power. All the derived analytical results are verified by numerical simulations.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figure

On the Design of Artificial-Noise-Aided Secure Multi-Antenna Transmission in Slow Fading Channels

In this paper, we investigate the design of artificial-noise-aided secure multi-antenna transmission in slow fading channels. The primary design concerns include the transmit power allocation and the rate parameters of the wiretap code. We consider two scenarios with different complexity levels: i) the design parameters are chosen to be fixed for all transmissions, ii) they are adaptively adjusted based on the instantaneous channel feedback from the intended receiver. In both scenarios, we provide explicit design solutions for achieving the maximal throughput subject to a secrecy constraint, given by a maximum allowable secrecy outage probability. We then derive accurate approximations for the maximal throughput in both scenarios in the high signal-to-noise ratio region, and give new insights into the additional power cost for achieving a higher security level, whilst maintaining a specified target throughput. In the end, the throughput gain of adaptive transmission over non-adaptive transmission is also quantified and analyzed.Comment: to appear in IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technolog

Secure beamforming transmission with limited training and feedback

We consider the secure beamforming transmission over a quasi-static block fading channel from a multi-antenna transmitter to a desired single-antenna receiver, in the presence of a passive single-antenna eavesdropper. We focus on a practical scenario where the transmitter can only acquire the statistical channel knowledge of the eavesdropper and the partial channel knowledge of the legitimate receiver through a finite amount of signaling overhead. To keep control of the outage events caused by the limited channel knowledge, We firstly propose a strategy to determine the wiretap code parameters under the outage constraints, based on which we establish a necessary transmission condition to guarantee a positive secrecy rate. Aided by this transmission condition, we propose an on-off-based transmission scheme and characterize the secrecy throughput performance of the system. Our designed transmission scheme is beneficial for the deployment of physical layer security in practical frequency division duplex (FDD) systems with limited training and feedback.ARC Discovery Projects Grant DP15010390