On the ergodic secret message capacity of the wiretap channel with finite-rate feedback

Abstract

We study the secret message capacity of an ergodic block fading wiretap channel with partial channel state information at the transmitter and perfect channel state information at the receivers. We consider that in addition to the statistics of the main and the eavesdropper channel state information (CSI), the sender is provided by the legitimate receiver with a q-bit feedback, at the beginning of each coherence block, through an error-free feedback channel, with capacity q bits. We establish upper and lower bounds on the secrecy capacity. We show that a positive secrecy rate is achievable even when the feedback is at the end of each coherence block and q = 1. We also show that the lower and the upper bounds coincide asymptotically as q → ∞. Finally, asymptotic analysis at high Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) are presented where it is found that the capacity is bounded at high-SNR and present a simple suboptimal scalar quantizer that is capacity achieving, without the need of any numerical optimization, as q → ∞. When applied to Rayleigh fading channels, we show that, at high-SNR, a 4-bit feedback achieves 90% of the secrecy capacity when perfect main CSI is available at the transmitter.