On the application of cooperative transmission to secrecy communications

Information theoretic security has recently emerged as an effective physical layer approach to provide secure communications. The outage performance of such a secrecy communication system is considered in this paper, since it is an important criterion to measure whether users' predefined quality of service can be met. Provided that the legitimate receiver and eavesdropper have the same noise power, many existing secure schemes cannot achieve outage probability approaching zero, regardless of how large the transmission power is. By introducing cooperative transmission into secrecy communication systems, it will be shown here that outage probability approaching zero can be achieved. In particular, scenarios with single-antenna nodes and multiple-antenna nodes will both be addressed, and the optimal design of beamforming/precoding will be investigated. Explicit expressions of the achievable outage probability and diversity-multiplexing tradeoff will be developed to demonstrate the performance of the proposed cooperative secure transmission schemes, and numerical results are presented.