Dirty-Paper Coding Based Secure Transmission for Multiuser Downlink in Cellular Communication Systems

This paper studies the secure transmission in a multiuser broadcast channel where only the statistical channel state information of the eavesdropper is available. We propose to apply secret dirty-paper coding (S-DPC) in this scenario to support the secure transmission of one user and the normal (unclassified) transmission of the other users. By adopting the S-DPC and encoding the secret message in the first place, all the information-bearing signals of the normal transmission are treated as noise by potential eavesdroppers and thus provide secrecy for the secure transmission. In this way, the proposed approach exploits the intrinsic secrecy of multiuser broadcasting and can serve as an energy-efficient alternative to the traditional artificial noise (AN) scheme. To evaluate the secrecy performance of this approach and compare it with the AN scheme, we propose two S-DPC-based secure transmission schemes for maximizing the secrecy rate under constraints on the secrecy outage probability (SOP) and the normal transmission rates. The first scheme directly optimizes the covariance matrices of the transmit signals, and a novel approximation of the intractable SOP constraint is derived to facilitate the optimization. The second scheme combines zero-forcing dirty-paper coding and AN, and the optimization involves only power allocation. We establish efficient numerical algorithms to solve the optimization problems for both schemes. Theoretical and simulation results confirm that, in addition to supporting the normal transmission, the achievable secrecy rates of the proposed schemes can be close to that of the traditional AN scheme, which supports only the secure transmission of one user.