Secure Transmission With Aid of a Helper for MIMOME Network Having Finite Alphabet Inputs

This paper considers secure transmission with the aid of a helper for finite alphabet signals in multiple-input–multiple-output multiple antenna eavesdropper networks, where the helper transmits a jamming signal along with the confidential message sent by the source node to confuse the eavesdropper. For the scenario in which the only statistical channel-state-information (CSI) of the eavesdropper links is available at the transmitter, the ergodic secrecy rate lacks closed-form expression, and the evaluation of the ergodic secrecy rate is computationally prohibitive. To address this problem, an accurate approximation of the ergodic secrecy rate is proposed to reduce the computational complexity. Utilizing this approximation of the ergodic secrecy rate, the joint optimization of precoding design and power allocation between the source and the helper is investigated to improve the ergodic secrecy rate. Furthermore, to achieve a tradeoff between computational complexity and performance, low-complexity schemes without iteration are proposed based on the analysis at extreme signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In the low SNR regime, we prove that it is optimal to transmit confidential messages with full power, and the beamforming design is the first-order optimal precoder. At high SNR, we transform the problem of precoding design into a semi-definite programming problem, which can be efficiently solved by the interior-point method.