Secure Broadcasting with Imperfect Channel State Information at the Transmitter

We investigate the problem of secure broadcasting over fast fading channels with imperfect main channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter. In particular, we analyze the effect of the noisy estimation of the main CSI on the throughput of a broadcast channel where the transmission is intended for multiple legitimate receivers in the presence of an eavesdropper. Besides, we consider the realistic case where the transmitter is only aware of the statistics of the eavesdropper’s CSI and not of its channel’s realizations. First, we discuss the common message transmission case where the source broadcasts the same information to all the receivers, and we provide an upper and a lower bounds on the ergodic secrecy capacity. For this case, we show that the secrecy rate is limited by the legitimate receiver having, on average, the worst main channel link and we prove that a non-zero secrecy rate can still be achieved even when the CSI at the transmitter is noisy. Then, we look at the independent messages case where the transmitter broadcasts multiple messages to the receivers, and each intended user is interested in an independent message. For this case, we present an expression for the achievable secrecy sum-rate and an upper bound on the secrecy sum-capacity and we show that, in the limit of large number of legitimate receivers K, our achievable secrecy sum-rate follows the scaling law log((1−) log(K)), where is the estimation error variance of the main CSI. The special cases of high SNR, perfect and no-main CSI are also analyzed. Analytical derivations and numerical results are presented to illustrate the obtained expressions for the case of independent and identically distributed Rayleigh fading channels.