Secrecy Performance of Transmit Antenna Selection for MIMO Relay Systems With Outdated CSI

Abstract

This paper investigates secure cooperative transmissions in a dual-hop MIMO relay system using a combined transmit antenna selection (TAS) and maximal-ratio combining (MRC) scheme over the Nakagami- $m$ fading channels, where an adaptive decode-and-forward relaying protocol and an multi-antenna eavesdropper are considered. Due to the feedback delay, channel state information (CSI) for TAS might be outdated at both the source and the relay. To evaluate the secrecy performance of the TAS/MRC scheme and the impacts of outdated CSI, the closed-form expressions for the metrics of exact ergodic secrecy rate and exact secrecy outage probability are derived under both perfect and outdated CSI conditions in a channel feedback error model. In order to explicitly reveal the behaviors of the secrecy performance in high signal-to-noise ratio regime, asymptotic expressions for both the metrics are further derived. As validated by simulation results, analytically numerical results demonstrate that outdated the CSI always results in a loss in the secrecy performance, but the loss can be recovered by increasing the number of antennas at legitimate receivers. Furthermore, the outdated CSI yields a reduced secrecy diversity order, whereas only the perfect CSI leads to the full secrecy diversity order.