Enhancing secrecy rates in a wiretap channel

Abstract

Reliable communication imposes an upper limit on the achievable rate, namely the Shannon capacity. Wyner's wiretap coding ensures a security constraint and reliability, but results in a decrease of achievable rate. To mitigate the loss in secrecy rate, we propose a coding scheme in which we use sufficiently old messages as key and prove that multiple messages are secure with respect to all the information possessed by the eavesdropper. We also show that we can achieve security in the strong sense. Next, we study a fading wiretap channel with full channel state information of the eavesdropper's channel and use our coding/decoding scheme to achieve a secrecy capacity close to the Shannon capacity of the main channel (in the ergodic sense). Finally, we study a case where the transmitter does not have instantaneous information of the channel state of the eavesdropper, but only its distribution.