Two-way training for discriminatory channel estimation in wireless MIMO systems

This work examines the use of two-way training to efficiently discriminate the channel estimation performances at a legitimate receiver (LR) and an unauthorized receiver (UR) in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless system. This work improves upon the original discriminatory channel estimation (DCE) scheme proposed by Chang et al. where multiple stages of feedback and retraining were used. While most studies on physical layer secrecy are under the information-theoretic framework and focus directly on the data transmission phase, studies on DCE focus on the training phase and aim to provide a practical signal processing technique to discriminate between the channel estimation performances (and, thus, the effective received signal qualities) at LR and UR. A key feature of DCE designs is the insertion of artificial noise (AN) in the training signal to degrade the channel estimation performance at UR. To do so, AN must be placed in a carefully chosen subspace, based on the transmitter's knowledge of LR's channel, in order to minimize its effect on LR. In this paper, we adopt the idea of two-way training that allows both the transmitter and LR to send training signals to facilitate channel estimation at both ends. Both reciprocal and nonreciprocal channels are considered and a two-way DCE scheme is proposed for each scenario. For mathematical tractability, we assume that all terminals employ the linear minimum mean square error criterion for channel estimation. Based on the mean square error (MSE) of the channel estimates at all terminals, we formulate and solve an optimization problem where the optimal power allocation between the training signal and AN is found by minimizing the MSE of LR's channel estimate subject to a constraint on the MSE achievable at UR. Numerical results show that the proposed DCE schemes can effectively discriminate between the channel estimation and, hence, the data detection performances at LR and UR.