Artificial-noise-aided secure multi-antenna transmission in slow fading channels with limited feedback

We study secure multi-antenna transmission with limited feedback from the intended receiver and no feedback from the malicious eavesdropper. Our system uses the artificial-noise-aided beamforming approach to enhance secrecy, considering slow fading channels with outage constraints on the reliability performance of legitimate communication and the secrecy performance against eavesdropping. Our analytical results provide conditions on the minimum number of feedback bits and the minimum strength of the intended channel for making secure transmission possible. We observe that strengthening the secrecy outage constraint puts higher requirements on the number of feedback bits and the strength of the intended channel. To maximize the achievable secrecy rate, the optimal transmit power allocation between the information signal and the artificial noise is also derived in closed form.