A general relaying transmission protocol for MIMO secrecy communications

In this paper, we consider a secrecy relaying communication scenario where all nodes are equipped with multiple antennas. An eavesdropper has the access to the global channel state information (CSI), and all the other nodes only know the CSI not associated with the eavesdropper. A new secrecy transmission protocol is proposed, where the concept of interference alignment is combined with cooperative jamming to ensure that artificial noise from transmitters can be aligned at the destination, but not at the eavesdropper due to the randomness of wireless channels. Analytical results, such as ergodic secrecy rate and outage probability, are developed, from which more insightful understanding of the proposed protocol, such as multiplexing and diversity gains, can be obtained. A few special cases, where outage probability cannot be decreased to zero regardless of SNR, are also discussed. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed secrecy transmission protocol.