On channel-aware secure HARQ-IR

In this paper, we study secure hybrid automatic retransmission request (HARQ) over block-fading channels when the channel from a legitimate transmitter (i.e., Alice) to an eavesdropper (i.e., Eve) is less noisy than that to a legitimate receiver (i.e., Bob). In order to have a positive secrecy rate, we exploit the notion of the channel reciprocity in time division duplex mode, where the shared channel state information between Alice and Bob is used as a secret key. The resulting HARQ scheme is referred to as channel-aware secure HARQ (CAS-HARQ) in this paper. In this scheme, in order to keep Eve ignorant of the confidential message from Alice to Bob, deliberative transmissions of random message blocks are considered when the channel to Bob is weak. We derive closed-form expressions for bounds on the probabilities of connection outage and secrecy outage to see reliability and security, respectively, of CAS-HARQ. Based on our analysis, we can see that it is possible to have a positive secrecy rate with certain outage probabilities even if the channel to Eve is less noisy than that to Bob.