Ergodic secret message capacity of the wiretap channel with finite-rate feedback

Abstract

We study the secret message capacity of an ergodic block fading wiretap channel with partial channel state information at the transmitter and perfect channel state information at the receivers, under both a short term power constraint (STPC) and a long term power constraint (LTPC). We consider that in addition to the statistics of the main and the eavesdropper channel state information (CSI), the sender is provided by the legitimate receiver with a q-bit feedback, at the beginning of each coherence block, through an error-free public channel, with capacity q bits. We establish upper and lower bounds on the secrecy capacity. We show that the lower and the upper bounds coincide asymptotically as q → ∞. When applied to Rayleigh fading channels, we show that, a 4-bit feedback achieves about 90% of the secrecy capacity when perfect main CSI is available at the transmitter. Finally, asymptotic analysis at high and low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) is presented. It is found that the capacity is bounded at high-SNR, whereas at asymptotically low-SNR, the lower bounds and the upper bound scale linearly with SNR under STPC. Furthermore, subject to LTPC, the capacity at low-SNR is equal to the capacity of the main channel without secrecy constraint and with perfect CSI at both the transmitter and the receiver, under a mild condition on the fading statistics. We also show that a positive secrecy rate is achievable even when the feedback is at the end of each coherence block and q=1. © 2002-2012 IEEE.