Study of Tomlinson-Harashima Precoding Strategies for Physical-Layer Security in Wireless Networks

In this paper, we propose novel non-linear precoders for the downlink of a multi-user MIMO system with the existence of multiple eavesdroppers. The proposed non-linear precoders are designed to improve the physical-layer secrecy rate. Specifically, we combine the non-linear successive optimization Tomlinson-Harashima precoding (SO-THP) with generalized matrix inversion (GMI) technique to maximize the physical-layer secrecy rate. For the purpose of comparison, we examine different traditional precoders with the proposed algorithm in terms of secrecy rate as well as BER performance. We also investigate simplified generalized matrix inversion (S-GMI) and lattice-reduction (LR) techniques in order to efficiently compute the parameters of the precoders. We further conduct computational complexity and secrecy rate analysis of the proposed and existing algorithms. In addition, in the scenario without knowledge of channel state information (CSI) to the eavesdroppers, a strategy of injecting artificial noise (AN) prior to the transmission is employed to enhance the physical-layer secrecy rate. Simulation results show that the proposed non-linear precoders outperform existing precoders in terms of BER and secrecy rate performance.