Secrecy Analysis for Massive MIMO Systems with Internal Eavesdroppers

In massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, idle users may passively overhear the signal transmitted to the intended user, known as internal eavesdroppers. In order to improve the secrecy performance, artificial noise (AN) is used jointly with maximum ratio transmission (MRT) precoding. Since the idle users can be anywhere in the cell, we investigate the secrecy outage probability for the legitimate user by taking an expectation over the positions of all internal eavesdroppers. Furthermore, according to the secrecy performance of the legitimate user in the given location, we define a new concept Secrecy Area centered on the base station (BS) where all the legitimate users satisfy the secrecy quality-of-service (QoS) requirements i.e. secrecy outage probability. Then, in order to achieve the maximum Secrecy Area under the given secrecy QoS requirements, we derive the optimal power allocation factor for AN, which is irrelevant to the channel state information (CSI) of both the legitimate user and the eavesdropper. The analytical and simulation results show that, by AN-assisted MRT precoding, the secrecy performance is significantly improved and the Secrecy Area can be efficiently enlarged with a modest increase of the transmit power.