Robustness of Low-Complexity Massive MIMO Architectures Against Passive Eavesdropping

Abstract: Invoking large transmit antenna arrays, massive MIMO wiretap settings are capable of suppressing passive eavesdroppers via narrow beamforming towards legitimate terminals. This implies that secrecy is obtained almost for free in these settings. We show that this property holds not only for fully digital MIMO architectures, but also in massive MIMO settings whose transmitters employ architectures with reduced complexity. The investigations consider two dominant approaches for complexity reduction, namely antenna selection and hybrid analog-digital precoding. We show that using either approach, the information leakage normalized by the achievable sum-rate vanishes as the transmit array size grows large. For both approaches, the decaying speed is determined. The results demonstrate that, as the transmit array size grows large, the normalized leakages obtained by antenna selection and hybrid analog-digital precoding converge to zero double-logarithmically and logarithmically, respectively. These analytic derivations are confirmed for various benchmark architectures through numerical investigations.