UC Irvine

With the rapid development of wireless communications, security becomes extremely important. In many applications, each transmitter desires to send independent and confidential message to its intended receiver while ensuring mutual information-theoretic secrecy. In this dissertation, I study strategies for enhanced secrecy in wireless communication systems with limited rate feedback and transmitter cooperation. The two-user Gaussian channel model is considered under different scenarios. The transmitters both require channel state information (CSI), which is quantized at the receiver and fed back through the sum-rate-limited feedback channels. The quantization errors reduce the beamforming gain from the direct transmitter, and cause interference leakage from the cross transmitter. In the first scenario, I introduce the wiretap channel model where one receiver is a known eavesdropper, and a second transmitter is used to send a cooperative jamming signal to degrade the eavesdropper's channel. I consider two cases, one where no information about the eavesdroppers is available, and one where statistical CSI is available. With no information about the eavesdroppers, I show how to choose the allocation of feedback bits to the transmitters in order to maximize the amount of jamming power available to interfere with the eavesdroppers, subject to maintaining the lower bound on the rate at a minimum quality-of-service level. For the case of statistical CSI, I derive an approximate lower bound on the average secrecy rate, and optimize the bound to find a suitable bit allocation and the transmit power allocated to the transmitters. In the second scenario, I consider the interference channel model where the two transmitters are amenable to cooperation for improving the overall secrecy performance of the system. I derive an approximation for the average secrecy rate of each link, and optimize the sum secrecy rate over the transmit power and feedback bits allocated to the transmitters. Interestingly, increasing the transmit power beyond a certain point decreases the secrecy performance. When the transmitters have the same number of antennas, I derive the results in closed form. Simulations validate the theoretical analysis and demonstrate the significant performance gains that result from the use of optimal transmit power control and intelligent feedback bit allocation.