Physical layer security with artificial noise: Secrecy capacity and optimal power allocation

We consider the problem of secure communication in wireless fading channels in the presence of non-colluding passive eavesdroppers. The transmitter has multiple antennas and is able to simultaneously transmit an information bearing signal to the intended receiver and artificial noise to the eavesdroppers. We obtain an analytical closed-form lower bound for secrecy capacity, which is used as the objective function to optimize transmit power allocation between the information signal and the artificial noise. Our analytical and numerical results show that equal power allocation is a simple and generic strategy which achieves near optimal capacity performance. We also find that adaptive power allocation based on each channel realization provides no or insignificant capacity improvement over equal power allocation.