Linear Precoder Design for an MIMO Gaussian Wiretap Channel With Full-Duplex Source and Destination Nodes

This paper investigates and quantifies the advantages of a Full-Duplex (FD) transmitter/receiver pair in improving the secrecy rate of the system. We consider a linear precoder design for a multiple-input multiple-output Gaussian wiretap channel, which comprises two legitimate nodes, i.e., Alice and Bob, operating in FD mode and exchanging confidential messages in the presence of a passive eavesdropper. Using the sum secrecy degrees of freedoms (sum SDoFs) as metric, we formulate an optimization problem with respect to Alice’s and Bob’s precoding matrices. In order to solve this problem, we first propose a cooperative secrecy transmission scheme, whose feasible set is sufficient to achieve the maximum sum SDoF. Based on that feasible set, we then determine in closed form the maximum achievable sum SDoF and also provide a method for constructing the precoding matrix pair, which achieves the maximum sum SDoF. The latter pair would be near-optimal in terms of the achievable secrecy sum rate in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. By providing the maximum achievable sum SDoF as a function of the number of antennas, one could select the optimal system parameters to further maximize the achievable sum SDoF. We use simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed precoding matrices in realistic channel scenarios and at various levels of the SNR.