Robust Secrecy Rate Optimization for Full-Duplex Bidirectional Communications

This paper considers the physical-layer secrecy design for full-duplex (FD) bidirectional communications in the presence of an eavesdropper (Eve). The goal of this work is to maximize the sum secrecy rate (SSR) of the bidirectional transmissions via appropriately designing the transmit covariance matrices at the legitimate nodes. To this end, we propose an alternating difference-of-concave (ADC) approach to iteratively optimizing the transmit covariance matrices. We show that each ADC iteration can be carried out efficiently with a semi-closed- form solution, and that every limit point of ADC iterations is a stationary solution of the SSR maximization problem. Besides the SSR maximization, this paper also deals with a robust SSR maximization problem to account for imperfect CSI of Eve. Assuming a moment-based random CSI error model (i.e., only mean and covariance of the error are known, but the exact distribution is not known), robust transmit designs based on Markov's inequality and the robust conic reformulation are developed. The efficacy of the proposed designs is demonstrated through simulations.