Adaptive Secure MIMO Transmission Mechanism against Smart Attacker

The MIMO transmission against a smart attacker has recently been formulated as a noncollaborative game, in which both the MIMO transmitter and the malicious attacker try to maximize their predefined utilities. In this paper, by carefully analyzing the Nash Equilibrium (NE), we focus on the conditions, in which the gaming results incline to the malicious attacker instead of the MIMO transmitter. In this adverse case, it is highly desirable to develop an effective mechanism to suppress the attack intention by the attacker for better secure communication. Motivated by this, an adaptive secure MIMO transmission scheme was proposed to make the MIMO transmitter better resist malicious attackers in adverse channel conditions. Compared with the existing gaming-based strategy, not only the transmit power of the MIMO transmitter but also the transmission probability will be adjusted in the proposed adaptive secure transmission scheme. Our analysis results show that the proposed scheme can be regarded as a generalized adaptive transmission one, i.e., when the adaptive transmit power policy is enough to suppress the attack motivation, the proposed scheme will be reduced to the adaptive power control scheme; otherwise, both the adaptive transmit power and the adaptive probabilistic transmission can be employed to suppress the attack motivation. The analysis results confirm us that the proposed adaptive transmission scheme provides us a choice to enhance the secure MIMO transmission performance in adverse conditions.