Secure short-packet transmission in uplink massive MU-MIMO assisted URLLC under imperfect CSI

Ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (URLLC) is still in the early stage of research due to its two strict and conflicting requirements, i.e., ultra-low latency and ultra-high reliability, and its impact on security performance is still unclear. Specifically, short-packet communication is expected to meet the delay requirement of URLLC, while the degradation of reliability caused by it makes traditional physical-layer security metrics not applicable. In this paper, we investigate the secure short-packet transmission in uplink massive multiuser multiple-input-multiple-output (MU-MIMO) system under imperfect channel state information (CSI). We propose an artificial noise scheme to improve the security performance of the system and use the system average secrecy throughput (AST) as the analysis metric. We derive the approximate closed-form expression of the system AST and further analyze the system asymptotic performance in two regimes. Furthermore, a one-dimensional search method is used to optimize the maximum system AST for a given pilot length. Numerical results verify the correctness of theoretical analysis, and show that there are some parameters that affect the tradeoff between security and latency. Moreover, appropriately increasing the number of antennas at the base station (BS) and transmission power at user devices (UDs) can increase the system AST to achieve the required threshold.