Two-step transmission with artificial noise for secure wireless SIMO communications

The issue of physical layer security of the wireless single-input multiple-output (SIMO) system is addressed in this paper. We propose a two-step transmission scheme with artificial noise to improve the security and the scheme does not require the channel state information of the eavesdropper. In the first step, the destination which has multiple antennas generates a random reference symbol and artificial noise and transmits them in the direction of the source and its orthogonal space, respectively. The reference symbol is received by the source without being polluted by the artificial noise, while it is jammed by the artificial noise for the eavesdropper. In the second step, the symbol of the source is multiplied by the received reference symbol and then transmitted. Finally, the destination can directly estimate the symbol of the source using the reference symbol. However, the eavesdropper needs to additionally estimate the reference symbol for demodulating the symbol of the source, which usually obtains an inaccurate result due to the artificial noise. The information-theoretic security of our scheme is analyzed and a lower bound of the achievable secrecy rate is derived. The performance of the new scheme is compared with that of the traditional approach under different input signals through numerical simulations. The results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the traditional SIMO approach especially in the high SNR region.