Analysis and Design of Secure Massive MIMO Systems in the Presence of Hardware Impairments

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how hardware impairments affect the secrecy performance of massive MIMO systems, proposing optimization strategies and a new precoding method to mitigate negative effects and enhance security.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of hardware impairments on secrecy in massive MIMO, deriving bounds and proposing a generalized null-space precoding technique.

Findings

Additive distortion noise can improve secrecy performance.

Hardware impairments generally reduce secrecy rates.

Spatially orthogonal pilots are preferable unless phase noise is very strong.

Abstract

To keep the hardware costs of future communications systems manageable, the use of low-cost hardware components is desirable. This is particularly true for the emerging massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems which equip base stations (BSs) with a large number of antenna elements. However, low-cost transceiver designs will further accentuate the hardware impairments which are present in any practical communication system. In this paper, we investigate the impact of hardware impairments on the secrecy performance of downlink massive MIMO systems in the presence of a passive multiple-antenna eavesdropper. Thereby, for the BS and the legitimate users, the joint effects of multiplicative phase noise, additive distortion noise, and amplified receiver noise are taken into account, whereas the eavesdropper is assumed to employ ideal hardware. We derive a lower bound for the ergodic secrecy rate of a given user when matched filter (MF) data precoding and artificial noise (AN) transmission are employed at the BS. Based on the derived analytical expression, we investigate the impact of the various system parameters on the secrecy rate and optimize both the pilot sets used for uplink training and the AN precoding. Our analytical and simulation results reveal that 1) the additive distortion noise at the BS may be beneficial for the secrecy performance, especially if the power assigned for AN emission is not sufficient; 2) all other hardware impairments have a negative impact on the secrecy performance; 3) {\textcolor{blue}{despite their susceptibility to pilot interference in the presence of phase noise}}, so-called spatially orthogonal pilot sequences are preferable unless the phase noise is very strong; 4) the proposed generalized null-space (NS) AN precoding method can efficiently mitigate the negative effects of phase noise.