Coordinated Beamforming for Secure Transmission in the Downlink Multicell MIMO Systems

Abstract

In this paper, we consider secure transmission in the downlink of a multicell multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system with M cells; each cell consists of an N-antenna base station (BS) and K single-antenna users. Coordinated beamforming (CBf) is employed for secrecy enhancement. For CBf, the BSs can jointly design their respective beamformers to control intercell interference and information leakage. Based on regularized channel inversion (RCI) precoding structures, we derive the concise formulas for the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) for the legitimate users and the colluding malicious users and the achievable secrecy sum rate for the CBf. Furthermore, we obtain a novel closed-form expression of the secrecy sum in the large-system regime where N and K tend to infinity with a fixed ratio β=K/N. Based on the large-system regime result, the regularization parameter is optimized to maximize the secrecy sum rate. It shows that the optimal regularization parameter decreases with the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and stays constant at high SNR if β>1/M. Compared with single-cell processing (SCP) without BS cooperation, simulation results show that the secrecy performance can be significantly enhanced by exploiting CBf. The analytical results are validated with the finite-size system by simulation.