Comparison of coding strategies for the block fading erasure wiretap channel

Abstract

In this paper we study the block fading binary erasure wiretap channel, where the transmitter sends secret messages to a legitimate receiver over a block fading erasure channel in the presence of an eavesdropper. The eavesdropper receives the transmitted secret message over a separate block fading binary erasure channel. It is assumed that the transmitter knows the instantaneous channel state information (CSI) of the main channel and knows only the probability distribution of the capacity of the wiretap channel. We mainly consider the case where the transmitter adapts the code based on the CSI of the main channel in order to achieve either a certain secrecy rate or a certain level of secrecy. We compare the two proposed scenarios for the adaptive coding method based on the probability of secrecy outage and the average throughput.