Downlink Secrecy Rate of One-Bit Massive MIMO System With Active Eavesdropping

In this study, we consider the physical layer security in the downlink of a Massive MIMO system employing one-bit quantization at the base station (BS). We assume an active eavesdropper that attempts to spoiling the channel estimation acquisition at the BS for a legitimate user, whereas overhearing on downlink transmission. We consider the two most widespread methods for degrading the eavesdropper's channel, the nullspace artificial noise (NS-AN) and random artificial noise (R-AN). Then, we present a lower bound on the secrecy rate and asymptotic performance, considering zero-forcing beamforming (ZF-BF) and maximum-ratio transmission beamforming (MRT-BF). Our results reveal that even when the eavesdropper is close enough to the intercepted user, a positive secrecy rate -which tends to saturation with increasing the number of BS antennas N-is possible, as long as the transmit power of eavesdropper is less than that of the legitimate user during channel training. We show that ZF-BF with NS-AN provides the best performance. It is found that MRT-BF and ZF-BF are equivalent in the asymptotic limit of N and hence the artificial noise technique is the performance indicator. Moreover, we study the impact of power-scaling law on the secrecy rate. When the transmit power of BS is reduced proportional to 1/N, the performance is independent of artificial noise asymptotically and hence the beamforming technique is the performance indicator. In addition, when the BS's power is reduced proportional to 1/√N, all combinations of beamforming and artificial noise schemes are equally likely asymptotically, independent of quantization noise. We present various numerical results to corroborate our analysis.