Artificial-Noise Alignment for Secure Multicast using Multiple Antennas

Abstract: We propose an artificial-noise alignment scheme for multicasting a common-confidential message to a group of receivers. Our scheme transmits a superposition of information and noise symbols. The noise symbols are aligned at each legitimate receiver and hence the information symbols can be decoded. In contrast, the noise symbols completely mask the information symbols at the eavesdroppers. Our proposed scheme does not require the knowledge of the eavesdropper's channel gains at the transmitter for alignment, yet it achieves the best-known lower bound on the secure degrees of freedom. Our scheme is also a natural generalization of the approach of transmitting artificial noise in the null-space of the legitimate receiver's channel, previously proposed in the literature.