Secure Communications Over Cell-Free Massive MIMO Networks With Hardware Impairments

Abstract

This paper investigates the effect of hardware impairments on the physical layer security for a cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) network in the presence of pilot spoofing attack. By employing a classical additive hardware distortion model, the joint hardware impairment effects brought by both access points (APs) and user equipments have been taken into account, whereas the eavesdropper is assumed to be equipped with perfect hardware. Thereby, we derive a closed-form lower bound for the ergodic secrecy rate in the presence of imperfect channel state information. To obtain further insights, we investigate asymptotic secrecy performance under different hardware scaling factors. It proves that the hardware-quality scaling effect vanishes as the number of APs increases in the considered secure cell-free massive MIMO system with active attack. Furthermore, by using continuous approximation and path-following algorithms, the optimal power allocation scheme is obtained to maximize the achievable secrecy rate. Numerical results validate the derived results and the efficiency of the proposed power allocation scheme.