Robust outage secrecy rate optimizations for a MIMO secrecy channel

This letter investigates robust secrecy rate optimization techniques for a multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) wiretap channel in the presence of a multiantenna eavesdropper. In particular, two robust secrecy rate optimization problems are studied: robust power minimization with an outage secrecy rate constraint and robust secrecy rate maximization subject to the outage secrecy rate and transmit power constraints. Here, it is assumed that the legitimate transmitter has perfect channel state information (CSI) of the legitimate receiver and imperfect CSI of the eavesdropper. Both robust problems are not convex in terms of transmit covariance matrix and the outage secrecy rate constraint. Hence, we propose a conservative approximation approach to reformulate this outage secrecy rate constraint by exploiting the Bernstein-type inequality to obtain a tractable solution for these two robust problems. Numerical results have been provided to validate the convergence and the performance of the proposed robust algorithms.