Improving Wireless Physical Layer Security via Exploiting Co-Channel Interference

This paper considers a scenario in which a source-destination pair needs to establish a confidential connection against an external eavesdropper, aided by the interference generated by another source-destination pair that exchanges public messages. The goal is to compute the maximum achievable secrecy degrees of freedom (S.D.o.F) region of a MIMO two-user wiretap network. First, a cooperative secrecy transmission scheme is proposed, whose feasible set is shown to achieve all S.D.o.F. pairs on the S.D.o.F. region boundary. In this way, the determination of the S.D.o.F. region is reduced to a problem of maximizing the S.D.o.F. pair over the proposed transmission scheme. The maximum achievable S.D.o.F. region boundary points are obtained in closed form, and the construction of the precoding matrices achieving the maximum S.D.o.F. region boundary is provided. The proposed expressions are functions of the number of antennas at each terminal, and apply to any number of antennas, thus constituting an advancement over prior works that have considered only fixed antenna configurations.