Secure Transmission in Multi-Cell Multi-User Massive MIMO Systems With an Active Eavesdropper

Abstract

In this letter, we investigate secure transmission for multi-cell multi-user massive multiple-input multiple-output systems with an active eavesdropper. During the uplink (UL) training, the eavesdropper can attack the training phase to cause pilot contamination. To resist such pilot contamination attack (PCA), we propose a secure transmission that does not require statistical information of the channels. In the proposed transmission strategy, we first detect PCA by a simple method. If the PCA is not detected, we then estimate the UL data of the users by a semi-blind method based on an asynchronous protocol. After that, we perform the data-aided channel estimation and design the corresponding precoder. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed transmission can effectively resist the PCA even when the PCA detection method fails.