Beamforming Aided Interference Management for Improved Secrecy in Multicell Environments

Abstract:
It is well known that wireless networks are vulnerable to passive attacks such as eavesdropping due to the broadcast nature of the wireless communication channel. As a countermeasure to such attacks, beamforming and artificial noise approaches are frequently resorted to. In this paper, we propose a joint optimization problem for beamforming, user scheduling, and base station assignment in a multicell network from secrecy perspective. Our proposed methodology tailors the ambient interference to act as artificial noise hence increases the secrecy capacity. We also extent the optimization problem to a more generalized case to include artificial noise at the base stations to further enhance the secrecy of the multicell network. Via simulations, we show that proposed systems enhance secrecy capacity when compared to the existing solutions.