Achieving Shannon Capacity in a Fading Wiretap Channel

Reliable communication imposes an upper limit on the achievable rate, namely the Shannon capacity. Wyner’s wiretap coding, which ensures a security constraint also, in addition to reliability, results in decrease of the achievable rate. To mitigate the loss in the secrecy rate, we propose a coding scheme where we use sufficiently old messages as key and for this scheme prove that multiple messages are secure with respect to (w.r.t.) all the information possessed by the eavesdropper. We also show that we can achieve security in the strong sense. Next we consider a fading wiretap channel with full channel state information of the eavesdropper’s channel and use our coding/decoding scheme to achieve secrecy capacity close to the Shannon capacity of the main channel (in the ergodic sense). Finally we also consider the case where the transmitter does not have the instantaneous information of the channel state of the eavesdropper, but only its distribution.