Abstract-Given a multiple-antenna source and a multipleantenna destination, a multiple-antenna relay between the source and the destination is desirable under useful circumstances. A non-regenerative multiple-antenna relay, also called nonregenerative MIMO (multi-input multi-output) relay, is designed to optimize the capacity between the source and the destination. Without a direct link between the source and the destination, the optimal canonical coordinates of the relay matrix are first established, and the optimal power allocations along these coordinates are then found. The system capacity with the optimal relay matrix is shown to be significantly higher than those with heuristic relay matrices. When a direct link is present, upper and lower bounds of the optimal system capacity are discussed.Index Terms-Multiple-antenna relay, MIMO relay, nonregenerative relay, capacity analysis, optimal canonical coordinates, optimal power allocation.

Abstract-Wireless communication is susceptible to adversarial eavesdropping due to the broadcast nature of the wireless medium. In this paper it is shown how eavesdropping can be alleviated by exploiting the superposition property of the wireless medium. A wiretap channel with a helping interferer (WT-HI), in which a transmitter sends a confidential message to its intended receiver in the presence of a passive eavesdropper, and with the help of an independent interferer, is considered. The interferer, which does not know the confidential message, helps in ensuring the secrecy of the message by sending independent signals. An achievable secrecy rate for the WT-HI is given. The results show that interference can be exploited to assist secrecy in wireless communications. An important example of the Gaussian case, in which the interferer has a better channel to the intended receiver than to the eavesdropper, is considered. In this situation, the interferer can send a (random) codeword at a rate that ensures that it can be decoded and subtracted from the received signal by the intended receiver but cannot be decoded by the eavesdropper. Hence, only the eavesdropper is interfered with and the secrecy level of the confidential message is increased.

The focus of this paper is an information-theoretic study of retransmission protocols for reliable packet communication under a secrecy constraint. The hybrid automatic retransmission request (HARQ) protocol is revisited for a block-fading wire-tap channel, in which two legitimate users communicate over a block-fading channel in the presence of a passive eavesdropper who intercepts the transmissions through an independent block-fading channel. In this model, the transmitter obtains a 1-bit ACK/NACK feedback from the legitimate receiver via an error-free public channel. Both reliability and confidentiality of secure HARQ protocols are studied by the joint consideration of channel coding, secrecy coding, and retransmission protocols. In particular, the error and secrecy performance of repetition time diversity (RTD) and incremental redundancy (INR) protocols are investigated based on good Wyner code sequences, which ensure that the confidential message is decoded successfully by the legitimate receiver and is kept in total ignorance by the eavesdropper for a given set of channel realizations. This paper first illustrates that there exists a good rate-compatible Wyner code family which ensures a secure INR protocol. Next, two types of outage probabilities, connection outage and secrecy outage probabilities are defined in order to characterize the tradeoff between the reliability of the legitimate communication link and the confidentiality with respect to the eavesdropper's link. For a given connection/secrecy outage probability pair, an achievable throughput of secure HARQ protocols is derived for block-fading channels. Finally, both asymptotic analysis and numerical computations demonstrate the benefits of HARQ protocols to throughput and secrecy.

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