Secure satellite communication systems design with individual secrecy rate constraints

In this paper, we study multibeam satellite secure communication through physical (PHY) layer security techniques, i.e., joint power control and beamforming. By first assuming that the channel state information (CSI) is available and the beamforming weights are fixed, a novel secure satellite system design is investigated to minimize the transmit power with individual secrecy rate constraints. An iterative algorithm is proposed to obtain an optimized power allocation strategy. Moreover, suboptimal beamforming weights are obtained by completely eliminating the cochannel interference and nulling the eavesdroppers' signal simultaneously. In order to obtain jointly optimized power allocation and a beamforming strategy in some practical cases, e.g., with certain estimation errors of the CSI, we further evaluate the impact of the eavesdropper's CSI on the secure multibeam satellite system design. The convergence of the iterative algorithm is proven under justifiable assumptions. The performance is evaluated by taking into account the impact of the number of antenna elements, number of beams, individual secrecy rate requirement, and CSI. The proposed novel secure multibeam satellite system design can achieve optimized power allocation to ensure the minimum individual secrecy rate requirement. The results show that the joint beamforming scheme is more favorable than the fixed beamforming scheme, especially in the cases of a larger number of satellite antenna elements and higher secrecy rate requirement. Finally, we compare the results under the current satellite air-interface in DVB-S2 and the results under Gaussian inputs. © 2011 IEEE.