Performance Analysis of Artificial-Noise-Based Secure Transmission in Wiretap Channel

Artificial noise (AN)-aided techniques have been considered to be promising and practical candidates for enhancing physical layer security. However, there has been a lack of analysis regarding the AN effect on the eavesdropper (EV) from the perspective of the signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR) regarding the existence of the EV’s channel state information (CSI) at the legitimate transmitter. In this paper, we analyze the performance of AN-aided secure transmission from the SINR perspective when a legitimate transmitter has and does not have the EV’s CSI. Based on the analyzed EV’s SINRs for the above two cases, the secrecy gap, which is the difference between the two secrecy capacities, is defined and analyzed. Based on the derived secrecy gap, we have analyzed the asymptotic performances of the secrecy capacity and gap when the number of antennas of the legitimate transmitter and the number of antennas of the EV have large values. Through asymptotic analysis, it is demonstrated that the AN-aided secure transmission under the practical environment (i.e., the case that the EV’s CSI is not available at the legitimate transmitter) can nearly achieve an ideal performance (i.e., the performance when the EV’s CSI is available at the legitimate transmitter) in a massive antenna system.