Security Enhancement via Antenna Selection in MIMOME Channels With Discrete Inputs

Transmit antenna selection (TAS) is an emerging technology in physical layer security. To provide new insights into the achievable secrecy performance of TAS in practical communication systems, this paper investigates the average secrecy rate (ASR) and secrecy outage probability (SOP) under practical modulation schemes in TAS aided multiple-input multiple-output multiple-antenna eavesdropper (MIMOME) wiretap channels over Rayleigh fading. Particularly, this research concentrates more on the square M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM). Furthermore, in the considered MIMOME channel, a single antenna is selected to transmit the secret message, and selection combining (SC) or maximal-ratio combining (MRC) is utilized at the legitimate receiver and the eavesdropper. Based on this system model, novel expressions for the ASR and SOP are formulated to characterize the secrecy performance of the finite-alphabet driven MIMOME channel. Besides exact analysis, an asymptotic analysis is performed using the considered performance metrics in high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. Theoretical analyses suggest that the asymptotic ASR and SOP converge to finite constants in high SNR regime due to the discrete constellation constraint, and we find that the asymptotic behaviour of discrete inputs differs from that of Gaussian inputs. Furthermore, we derive concise expressions to characterize the rate of convergence (ROC) of the ASR and SOP, respectively. To unveil more system design insights, we discuss the relationship between the ROC and several important system parameters such as the antenna number and the modulation order.