On the Delay Limited Secrecy Capacity of Fading Channels

Abstract: In this paper, the delay limited secrecy capacity of the flat fading channel is investigated under two different assumptions on the available transmitter channel state information (CSI). The first scenario assumes perfect prior knowledge of both the main and eavesdropper channel gains. Here, upper and lower bounds on the secure delay limited capacity are derived and shown to be tight in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime (for a wide class of channel distributions). In the second scenario, only the main channel CSI is assumed to be available at the transmitter. Remarkably, under this assumption, we establish the achievability of non-zero secure rate (for a wide class of channel distributions) under a strict delay constraint. In the two cases, our achievability arguments are based on a novel two-stage approach that overcomes the secrecy outage phenomenon observed in earlier works.