On the Secrecy Capacity of Fading Channels

We consider the secure transmission of information over an ergodic fading channel in the presence of an eavesdropper. Our eavesdropper can be viewed as the wireless counterpart of Wyner´s wiretapper. The secrecy capacity of such a system is characterized under the assumption of asymptotically long coherence intervals. We analyze the full channel state information (CSI) case, where the transmitter has access to the channel gains of the legitimate receiver and eavesdropper, and the main channel CSI scenario, where only the legitimate receiver channel gain is known at the transmitter. In each scenario, the secrecy capacity is obtained along with the optimal power and rate allocation strategies. We then propose a low-complexity on/off power allocation strategy that achieves near-optimal performance with only the main channel CSI. More specifically, this scheme is shown to be asymptotically optimal as the average SNR goes to infinity, and interestingly, is shown to attain the secrecy capacity under the full CSI assumption. Remarkably, our results reveal the positive impact of fading on the secrecy capacity and establish the critical role of rate adaptation, based on the main channel CSI, in facilitating secure communications over slow fading channels.