Secure transmission in multi-cell massive MIMO systems

Abstract

In this paper, we consider a multi-cell massive MIMO system with matched-filter precoding and artificial noise (AN) generation at the base station (BS) for secure downlink transmission in the presence of multi-antenna passive eavesdroppers. We derive two tight lower bounds for the achievable ergodic secrecy rate and a tight upper bound on the secrecy outage probability of the considered system. The analytical results are used to optimize the amount of power allocated for AN generation. Our results reveal that AN generation is not required in massive MIMO systems as long as the number of BS antennas is much larger than the number of eavesdropper antennas. However, as the number of eavesdropper antennas increases relative to the number of BS antennas, AN becomes beneficial and the amount of power optimally allocated to AN generation increases with the number of eavesdropper antennas.