Secure transmission with artificial noise in the multiuser downlink: Secrecy sum-rate and optimal power allocation

Wireless communication is particularly susceptible to eavesdropping due to its broadcast nature. Security and privacy issues have become increasingly critical for wireless networks. This paper considers the problem of secret communication in the multiuser downlink eavesdropped by a passive eavesdropper (EVE). The well-known zero-forcing preceding is adopted at the transmitter to produce concurrent data streams to the users, and at the same time an artificial noise (AN) is generated to prevent EVE from intercepting the information. We first derive an analytical closed-form expression for the secrecy sum-rate in the large system limit. We then use it as the objective function to optimize the power allocation (PA) between the information signals and the AN to maximize the secrecy sum-rate. A simple analytical expression of the optimal PA is derived in the high transmit power regime, which proves to be a near-optimal and generic strategy. The large system results are quite accurate for finite-size systems and thus can provide useful insights into system analysis and design. Our analytical and simulation results show that the AN assisted strategy achieves the same multiplexing gain as in the multiuser downlink without eavesdropping. Moreover, more power should be allocated to AN when the system serves fewer users and EVE has more antennas.