Artificial-Noise-Aided Beamforming Design in the MISOME Wiretap Channel Under the Secrecy Outage Probability Constraint

This paper studies the artificial noise (AN) aided beamforming design in the multiple-input, single-output, and multiple-eavesdropper wiretap channel from the perspective of secrecy outage. Unlike many existing works, which directly adopted the traditional null-space AN scheme, we start with a general assumption on the structure of the transmit signal, and seek to find the optimal structure by solving a secrecy outage probability (SOP) constrained secrecy rate maximization problem. By generalizing several existing conclusions regarding a single-antenna eavesdropper, we prove that the null-space AN scheme is indeed optimal for an arbitrary number of the eavesdropper’s antennas from the perspective of secrecy outage. Furthermore, the optimal power allocation between the information-bearing signal and the AN is found under both general conditions and the conservative assumption that the eavesdropper can be arbitrarily close to the transmitter or his receiver noise power can be arbitrarily low. It is also found that the increase in the eavesdropper’s antenna number is equivalent to requiring a smaller SOP under the conservative assumption. The results in this paper can help generalize existing design solutions for single-antenna eavesdroppers to multi-antenna eavesdroppers.