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

Abstract

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: 1) the design parameters are chosen to be fixed for all transmissions; and 2) 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 while maintaining a specified target throughput. In the end, the throughput gain of adaptive transmission over non-adaptive transmission is also quantified and analyzed.