Secure Transmission With Multiple Antennas - Part II: The MIMOME Wiretap Channel

The role of multiple antennas for secure communication is investigated within the framework of Wyner’s wiretap channel. We characterize the secrecy capacity in terms of generalized eigenvalues when the sender and eavesdropper have multiple antennas, the intended receiver has a single antenna, and the channel matrices are fixed and known to all the terminals, and show that a beamforming strategy is capacity-achieving. In addition, we study a masked beamforming scheme that radiates power isotropically in all directions and show that it attains near-optimal performance in the high SNR regime. Insights into the scaling behavior of the capacity in the large antenna regime as well as extensions to ergodic fading channels are also provided.