On the ergodic secrecy capacity with full duplex communication

Abstract

Full duplex (FD) communication promises significant performance gains under ideal network settings. Generally, it has been shown that the throughput and delay gains of FD communication are somewhat limited in realistic conditions, leading researchers to study other possible applications where significantly higher gains over half duplex communication can be availed. The potential of FD nodes in improving the physical layer security of a communication link is investigated in this contribution. Specifically, we present a thorough analysis of the achievable secrecy rate for a transceiver pair in FD mode in the presence of a passive eavesdropper assuming a generic system model. The ergodic secrecy rate with FD communication is found to grow linearly with the log of the direct channel signal to noise ratio as opposed to the flattened out secrecy rate with conventional half duplex communication and irrespective of the eavesdropper channel strengths.