A study on physical layer security of massive MIMO in the Rician fading channel consideration

Massive MIMO is one of the fundamental technologies for 5G and beyond networks, which combines antennas at the transmitter and receiver to achieve significant efficiency. The technology provides a high spectral and energy yield with minimal manipulation, in the fact that this technology has enabled a wide range of IoT application solutions with apparent advantages in scenarios involving a vast amount of terminals. However, creating high-density networks of IoT applications brings a new challenging security problem for the system, which should be studied under a suitable deployment channel model assumption as the Rice channel model. This paper presents a novel security analytic method to identify and detect an eavesdropper over the physical layer of massive MIMO systems under Rican channel conditions. The numerical analysis results indicate that the proposal can detect attacks and estimate the probability of false alarms when attackers exist.