Robust Beamforming Design for Sum Secrecy Rate Optimization in MU-MISO Networks

This paper studies the beamforming design problem of a multi-user downlink network, assuming imperfect channel state information known to the base station. In this scenario, the base station is equipped with multiple antennas, and each user is wiretapped by a specific eavesdropper where each user or eavesdropper is equipped with one antenna. It is supposed that the base station employs transmit beamforming with a given requirement on sum transmitting power. The objective is to maximize the sum secrecy rate of the network. Due to the uncertainty of the channel, it is difficult to calculate the exact sum secrecy rate of the system. Thus, the maximum of lower bound of sum secrecy rate is considered. The optimization of the lower bound of sum secrecy rate still makes the considered beamforming design problem difficult to handle. To solve this problem, a beamforming design scheme is proposed to transform the original problem into a convex approximation problem, by employing semidefinite relaxation and first-order approximation technique based on Taylor expansion. Besides, with the advantage of low complexity, a zero-forcing based beamforming method is presented in the case that base station is able to nullify the eavesdroppers' rate. When the base station doesn't have the ability, user selection algorithm would be in use. Numerical results show that the former strategy achieves better performance than the latter one, which is mainly due to the ability of optimizing beamforming direction, and both outperform the signal-to-leakage-and-noise ratio based algorithm.