Unitary modulation for secrecy enhancement in multi-antenna wireless systems with only CSIT

Abstract

This work proposes the use of a unitary modulation scheme to enhance physical layer secrecy in multi-antenna wireless systems. The proposed scheme takes advantage of having only channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) but not at the receiver and the eavesdropper. With CSIT, the transmitter can first take the LQ or singular value decomposition of the channel matrix and then replace its unitary component by an information-bearing unitary matrix symbol. When the SNR is sufficiently high, the legitimate receiver is able to extract the unitary matrix by exploiting the uniqueness of the matrix decomposition. But the eavesdropper is incapable of doing so due to the ambiguity caused by the unknown unitary rotation on its channel, which ensures zero information leakage to the eavesdropper when the channels are independent. A detection scheme based on the chordal distance is proposed, and the achievable secrecy rate is derived and shown to depend only on the mutual information of the main channel. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and secrecy advantages of our proposed unitary modulation scheme.