Securing Multi-User Broadcast Wiretap Channels with Finite CSI Feedback

Abstract: In this work, we investigate the problem of secure broadcasting over block-fading wiretap channels with limited channel knowledge at the transmitter. More particularly, we analyze the effect of having a finite rate feedback on the throughput of multi-user broadcast wiretap channels. We consider that the transmitter is only provided by a $b$-bits feedback of the main channel state information (CSI) sent by each legitimate receiver, at the beginning of each fading block, over error-free public links with limited capacity. Also, we assume that the transmitter is aware of the statistics of the eavesdropper's CSI but not of its channel's realizations. Under these assumptions of CSI uncertainty, we characterize the ergodic secrecy capacity of the system when a common message is broadcasted to all legitimate receivers, the ergodic secrecy sum-capacity when multiple independent messages are transmitted, and the ergodic secrecy capacity region for the broadcast channel with confidential messages (BCCM). In all three scenarios, we show that as long as the transmitter has some knowledge of the main CSI, obtained even through a 1-bit CSI feedback, a non-zero secrecy rate can still be achieved. The impact of having the feedback sent over a binary erasure channel (BEC) is also investigated for the BCCM case. Here again, and even with the possibility of having the feedback bits erased, a positive secrecy rate can still be achieved as long as the erasure event is not a probability-one event. An asymptotic analysis of the obtained results is provided for the high SNR regime, and the scaling law of the system, when the number of legitimate receivers is large, is also presented.