Massive Planar Antenna Arrays for Physical Layer Security

The need for physical layer security techniques is increasing rapidly with the significant rise in the number of devices connected to the internet. In this paper, physical layer security using massive planar antenna arrays is investigated to secure the communication between two parties in the presence of an eavesdropper. Different scenarios are studied assuming the presence of a passive eavesdropper at a known location. Some of the subarrays of the massive planar antenna arrays at both the transmitter and receiver are used to send jamming signals towards the eavesdropper to improve security. To measure the system secrecy, the secrecy capacity between the transmitter and receiver is derived and different schemes are studied considering their effect on the secrecy capacity. The simulation results show that when jamming signals are sent to the eavesdropper, the secrecy capacity improves significantly, and the eavesdropper is unable to obtain considerable useful information. Therefore, the use of massive MIMO for joint transmission and jamming is an important physical layer security technique to combat a passive eavesdropper.