Physical Layer Security for Massive MIMO Systems Impaired by Phase Noise

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how phase noise affects the secrecy performance of massive MIMO systems with passive eavesdroppers, deriving bounds and comparing local versus common oscillators.

Contribution

It provides a new lower bound for the ergodic secrecy rate considering phase noise and compares different oscillator deployment strategies.

Findings

Distributively deployed local oscillators can outperform a common oscillator with sufficient power.

Phase noise significantly impacts the secrecy rate in massive MIMO systems.

Analytical and simulation results validate the impact of system parameters on secrecy performance.

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the impact of phase noise on the secrecy performance of downlink massive MIMO systems in the presence of a passive multiple-antenna eavesdropper. Thereby, for the base station (BS) and the legitimate users, the effect of multiplicative phase noise is 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 data precoding and artificial noise 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. Our analytical and simulation results reveal that distributively deployed local oscillators (LOs) can achieve a better performance than one common LO for all BS antennas as long as a sufficient amount of power is assigned for data transmission.