MIMO wiretap channel with ISI heterogeneity — Achieving secure DoF with no CSI

Abstract

We consider the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wiretap channel with intersymbol interference (ISI) in which a transmitter (Alice) wishes to securely communicate with a receiver (Bob) in presence of an eavesdropper (Eve). We focus on the practically relevant setting in which there is no channel state information (CSI) at Alice about either of the channels to Bob or Eve, except statistical information about the ISI channels (i.e., Alice only knows the effective number of ISI taps). The key contribution of this work is to show that even with no CSI at Alice, positive secure degrees of freedom (SDoF) are achievable by carefully exploiting a) the heterogeneity of the ISI links to Bob and Eve, and b) the relative number of antennas at all the three terminals. To this end, we propose a novel achievable scheme that carefully mixes information and artificial noise symbols in order to exploit ISI heterogeneity to achieve positive SDoF. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to explore the idea of exploiting ISI channel length heterogeneity to achieve positive SDoF for the MIMO wiretap channel with no CSI at the legitimate transmitter.