An Improved Feedback Coding Scheme for the Wire-tap Channel

Abstract: The model of wiretap channel (WTC) is important as it constitutes the essence of physical layer security (PLS). Wiretap channel with noiseless feedback (WTC-NF) is especially interesting as it shows what can be done when a private feedback is available. The already existing secret key based feedback coding scheme focuses on generating key from the feedback and using this key to protect part of the transmitted message. It has been shown that this secret key based feedback coding scheme is only optimal for the degraded WTC-NF, and finding an optimal feedback scheme for the general WTC-NF motivates us to exploit other uses of the feedback. In this paper, a new feedback coding scheme for the general WTC-NF is proposed, where the feedback is not only used to generate key, but also used to generate help information which helps the legitimate parties to improve the communication between them. We show that the proposed new feedback scheme performs better than the already existing one, and a binary example is given to further explain the results of this paper.