On Secrecy Rate Analysis of MIMO Wiretap Channels Driven by Finite-Alphabet Input

Abstract

This work investigates the effect of finite-alphabet source input on the secrecy rate of a multi-antenna wiretap system. Existing works have characterized maximum achievable secrecy rate or secrecy capacity for single and multiple antenna systems based on Gaussian source signals and secrecy code. Despite the impracticality of Gaussian sources, the compact closed-form expression of mutual information between linear channel Gaussian input and corresponding output has led to broad application of Gaussian input assumption in physical secrecy analysis. For practical considerations, we study the effect of finite discrete-constellation on the achievable secrecy rate of multiple-antenna wire-tap channels. Our proposed precoding scheme converts the multi-antenna system into a bank of parallel channels. Based on this precoding strategy, we propose a decentralized power allocation algorithm based on dual decomposition for maximizing the achievable secrecy rate. In addition, we analyze the achievable secrecy rate for finite-alphabet inputs in low and high SNR cases. Our results demonstrate substantial difference in secrecy rate between systems given finite-alphabet inputs and systems with Gaussian inputs.