Secure transmission via transmit antenna selection in MIMO wiretap channels

We propose and analyze transmit antenna selection (TAS) to enhance physical layer security in a wiretap channel with multiple antennas at the transmitter, the receiver, and the eavesdropper. We consider the practical scenario of passive eavesdropping, where the transmitter does not have any channel state information (CSI) of the eavesdropper´s channel. In the main channel between the transmitter and the receiver, we select a single antenna at the transmitter that maximizes the instantaneous signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the receiver. At the receiver and the eavesdropper, we consider two combining techniques: 1) maximal-ratio combining (MRC) and 2) selection combining (SC). For non-identical Rayleigh fading between the main channel and the eavesdropper´s channel, we first derive new closed-form expressions for the exact and asymptotic secrecy outage probabilities. The asymptotic results accurately reveal the secrecy diversity order and the secrecy array gain. Next, we derive new closed-form expressions for the probability of positive secrecy and characterize the ε-outage secrecy capacity. We show that, under TAS/MRC and TAS/SC protocols, the secrecy outage probability approaches zero and the ε-outage secrecy capacity increases with increasing number of transmitter antennas.