On the Secrecy Mutual Information of Spatial
Modulation with Finite Alphabet
Xinrong Guan, Yueming Cai, Weiwei Yang
Department of Wireless Communications, PLA University of Science and Technology, Nanjing 210007 China
E-mail: ywygxr@yahoo.com.cn, caiym@vip.sina.com, yww_1010@yahoo.com.cn
Abstract-In this paper, the spatial modulation (SM) is
considered as a novel physical layer technique to
improve the physical layer security of wireless networks.
Exploiting the index of antenna as an additional
dimension to convey part of source information bits, SM
helps to achieve multiplexing gain and realize higher
data rates. Moreover, by properly designing the
transmission signal, SM can also improve physical layer
security. The secrecy mutual information of SM with
finite alphabet input is derived in this work, and a
precoding scheme is proposed to improve the physical
layer security performance of SM. Analysis and
numerical results verify the validity and effectiveness of
the proposed scheme, and it also shows that the
maximum achievable secrecy mutual information is the
logarithm of the number of transmit antennas.
Index Terms-physical layer security, spatial
modulation, finite alphabet, secrecy mutual information
I. INTRODUCTION
D UE to the broadcast nature of the wireless medium,
security is one of the most important issue in wireless
communication networks. Traditionally, security is
guaranteed by encryption protocols at the upper layers.
However, the public-key cryptography is being challenged
owing to two aspects reasons. Firstly, it is based on the
assumption that certain mathematical functions are hard to
invert due to the computational complexity. With advances
in technology, the available computational power increases
largely. As a result, such methods may no longer be secure.
Secondly, this assumption itself is mostly unproven in
theory. Therefore, following the pioneering work of [1],
there have been an upsurge of research interests in
information-theoretic security, which aims at providing a
perfect secrecy at the physical layer. Exploiting the
randomness inherent in channels, an additional level of
protection can be obtained. As pointed out in previous
works, the secrecy rate in single antenna systems is
typically zero if the source-destination channel (main
channel) is worse than the source-eavesdropper channel
(eavesdropper’s channel) [2]. By taking advantages of
signal processing in multiple antenna systems, this
limitation can be overcome. The multiple antennas
transmission schemes proposed by recent works can usually
be categorized into three fashions, beamforming, jamming
and the joint design of them [3-7]. However, issues such as
inter-channel interference (ICI), inter-antenna synchroniza-
This work was supported by the Important National Science &
Technology Specific Project under Grant 2010ZX03006-002-04, and the
National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61001107.
978-1-4673-5829-3/12/$26.00 ©2012 IEEE
tion (IAS) and multiple radio frequency (RF) chains make
the practical implementation of these schemes difficult.
Therefore, a clear research goal is to develop new
approaches to achieve physical layer security.
On the other hand, spatial modulation (SM) has recently
received much attention since it can achieve a spatial
multiplexing gain while mitigating the aforementioned
limitations [8]. By mapping information bits into the
antenna indices, a higher rate is realized with lower
hardware complexity. At the receiver, the message
conveyed on the indices can be recovered by detecting
which antenna transmits the signal. The optimal receiver
design and error performance analysis are presented in
[9-10], while the capacity of SM with Gaussian input over
Rayleigh fading channels has been derived in [11].
After careful analysis, it can be found that both physical
layer security and spatial modulation rely on the
randomness and uniqueness properties of wireless channels.
Obviously, the secrecy capacity would be zero if the main
channel is exactly the same as the eavesdropper’s channel.
In this condition, no matter what signal processing
technique is used, the capacity at the destination equals that
at the eavesdropper. Similarly, in the SM, the symbols
modulated on the antenna indices would be
undistinguishable if all the channels are identical. Therefore,
the feasibility of physical layer security and spatial
modulation depends on the same nature of the wireless
channels. Now that, the research on the combination of
them may be an interesting topic of much significance.
Inspired by this observation, we consider how to exploit
SM as a novel signal processing technique to improve the
physical layer security in this paper. The channels between
the source and the destination are different from that
between the source and the eavesdropper, so the message
mapped on the indices can only be decoded by the
destination if we design the transmission properly. In our
work, firstly, the mutual information over the main channel
and the eavesdropper’s channel is derived, thus the secrecy
mutual information is obtained. Secondly, to improve the
secrecy mutual information of SM, a precoding scheme is
proposed. Thirdly, finite alphabet input is considered in this
work since the Gaussian input is not able to be realized in
practical system, though it is the optimal signal source to
achieve the capacity [12]. And the results show that the
maximum secrecy mutual information of SM is the
logarithm of the number of the transmit antennas.
The rest of the work is organized as follows. Section Ċ
presents the system model. Section ċ deals with the
secrecy mutual information and precoding design. Section
Č depicts the numerical results, and the last section III. SECRECY PERFORMANCE
concludes the paper.
A. Secrecy Mutual Information
II. SYSTEM MODEL
Denote the set of transmit symbol by X ^ x1 , x2 ,..., xN `
( E( X ) 1), the set of antenna indices by A ^1, 2,..., M ` ,
2
Consider a multiple-input-single-output (MISO) system
consisting of one source node with M ( M 2 p ) antennas, then the received signal at the destination for the mth
one destination node, and one eavesdropper, as depicted in antenna transmits the nth symbol is written as
Fig. 1.
y PS hm xn  v (1)

in which PS is the transmission power of the source, v

h is the noise at the destination. Obviously, the channel
coefficient hm is used when the mth antenna is selected.
We assume PS 1 in the following discussion for brevity.
Considering the event that the index a m is equivalent
g to the event h hm , the continuous random variable y
follows a complex Gaussian distribution with the
conditional probability density function (PDF) expressed as

Figure 1. System model. 1 § y  hm xn 2

·
p y h hm , x xn  exp ¨  ¸ (2)
SV 2
¨ V2 ¸
We denote the Raleigh channel between the mth © ¹
transmit antenna and the destination by hm  m 1,2,..., M  ,
Since the source information is a random binary sequence,
the channel between the mth transmit antenna and the
each antenna and each symbol would be selected with the
eavesdropper by gm . All channels are assumed to follow
same probability, i.e. p(h hm) 1/ M (m) , p(x xn ) 1/ N ,
the independent and identical Raleigh distribution with the
(n) . As a result, the conditional PDF p  z h hm  ,
variance O , and remain constant over one frame. As a
p  z x xn  , and the boundary PDF p  y  are given as
common assumption in the physical layer security, the
channel statement information (CSI) of all channels is 1 N 1 § y  hm xn 2 ·
p  y h hm  ¦ exp ¨ ¸ (3)
assumed to be available. This is a reasonable assumption in N n 1 SV 2 ¨ V2 ¸
© ¹
some practical systems, such as in a cellular network, the
1 M 1 § y  hm xn 2 ·
source can be the base station while the destination and the p  y x xn  ¦ exp ¨ ¸ (4)
eavesdropper are both mobile users. In this case, the base M m 1 SV 2 ¨ V 2
¸
© ¹
station can access full CSI of all channels. The noise at § y  hm xn 2 ·
1 M N 1
each node is assumed to be white complex Gaussian with p y ¦¦ exp ¨¨  V 2 ¸¸
MN m 1 n 1 SV 2
(5)
zero mean and variance of V 2 , i.e. follow the distribution © ¹
CN (0, V 2 ) . With (4) and (5), the conditional mutual information
The source information block is divided into two between y and the index a  A when x is given can
sub-blocks. The first one, which contains p bits, is be obtained as
mapped into the index of transmit antenna, i.e. it is used to M N p  y h hm , x xn 
select an antenna to transmit the second sub-block. The I  a; y x ¦¦³ p x xn , h hm  p  y h hm , x xn  log2 dy
m 1n 1
y p  y x xn 
second one is used to choose a traditional modulation (6)
1 § y  hm xn 2 ·
symbol in the N ( N 2q ) points constellation, such as exp ¨ 
¨
¸
1 M N 1 § y  hm xn 2
· SV ©
2
V 2 ¸¹
N-ary phase shift keying (N-PSK) constellation. It should ¦¦
MN m 1 n 1 ³y SV 2
= exp ¨  ¸ log2 dy
¨ V2 ¸ § y h x 2 ·
be noted that only the selected antenna transmits signal © ¹ 1 M 1 ¨ ¸
¦ exp¨  V 2 ¸
m2 n

while others keep silent in the SM scheme discussed in this M m2 1 SV 2

© ¹
paper. For instance, as shown in Table 1, an input bit
sequence [010] (the highlighted row) is mapped into the Substituting y hm xn  v , (6) can be written as
BPSK symbol “+1” and the second transmit antenna by 1 M N 1 § v2 · M
§ h h x v 2  v 2 ·
 
I  a; y x ¦¦ exp¨ ¸log2 ¦exp¨ ¸
m m2 n

MN m 1 n 1 ³v SV2 ¨ V2 ¸ m2 1 ¨¨
using the SM mapping table. log2 M  ¸dv
© ¹ V2 ¸ (7)
© ¹
TABLE I. SM MAPPING TABLE WITH M 4 AND BPSK
ª 2 ·º
§
 
2

1 M N « ¨ hm hm2 xn  v  v ¸»
M
=log2 M  ¦¦ v 2 ¦
E log
MN m 1 n 1 « m2 1 ¨¨
exp 
V2 ¸»
Input Antenna Transmit Input Antenna Transmit «¬ ¸»
© ¹¼
bits index symbol bits index symbol
With similar algebraic manipulations, the mutual
00 0 1 +1 10 0 3 +1 information between y and x is derived as
00 1 1 -1 10 1 3 -1 ª º
« M N § d v2 · »
01 0 2 +1 11 0 4 +1 M N
«
«
¦ ¦ exp ¨  D 2 ¸
¨ V ¸
»
»
(8)
1 m2 1 n 2 1
© ¹
I  x; y  log 2 N  ¦ ¦ E v « log 2 »
MN m 1 n 1 « §
  ·»
2
01 1 2 -1 11 1 4 -1 M h  h x  v
¦ exp ¨¨  ¸»
m m2 n
«
« V2 ¸»
m2 1 ¨ ¸
¬« © ¹ ¼»
 2
in which d D hm xn  hm 2 xn 2 . Based on (7) and (8), the V 2 hm xn  hm xn / 2 . Accordingly, the average pairwise
2 2
mutual information over the main channel is written as error probability (APEP) for the decoding at the destination
I  x, a; y  D I  a; y x  I  x; y  is obtained as
(9)
1 M N ª M N § d  v 2  v 2 ·º 1 M N M N § d ·
log2 MN  ¦¦ Ev «log2 ¦ ¦ exp ¨  D 2
MN m 1 n 1 « ¨ V
¸»
¸» PD ¦¦
MN  MN 1 m 1 n 1
¦¦ Q¨ D ¸ (14)
¬ m2 1 n2 1
© ¹¼ m2 1 n2 1 © 2V ¹
( m2 , n2 ) z ( m, n )
Observing that d D 0 when m2 m and n2 n , (9)
can be rewritten as Similarly, the APEP at the eavesdropper is
ª §  f (V )
 ·º
2
1 M N M N § d ·
« ¨
§ 2 ¸»
dD  v  v ·¸» (10)
2 PE ¦¦
MN  MN 1 m 1 n 1
¦¦ Q¨ E ¸ (15)
© 2V ¹
M N M N
1 «log ¨1
I  x, a; y D log2 MN  ¦¦ v 2 ¦¦ ¨
E
MN m 1 n 1 « ¨ m2 1 n2 1
exp ¨ 
V2
¸
¸¸»
m2 1 n2 1
( m2 , n2 ) z ( m, n )
« ¨ (m2 ,n2 )z(m,n) © ¹¸»
«¬ © ¨ ¸»
¹¼
C. Precoding
where (m2 , n2 ) z (m, n) denotes that the events m2 m
and n2 n do not occur simultaneously. Denote the As we mentioned, selecting an antenna is equivalent to
signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by SNR 1/ V2 of, then we have selecting a channel. Hence, the process of SM, i.e. selecting
f (V 2 ) o 0 , thus the upper bound I  x, a; y D an antenna to transmit a chosen symbol according to the
UP
log2 MN is
obtained. source information block, can be viewed as a mapping I
On the other hand, the mutual information over the given by
eavesdropper’s channel is expressed as
I : Au X RD where RD ^h m nx m, n` (16)
1 M N ª § d u  u ·º
2 2
M N
(10)
I  x, a; yE log2 MN  ¦¦Eu «log2 ¦¦exp¨ E V2
MN m 1 n 1 « m2 1n2 1 ¨
¸»
¸»
in which RD can be viewed as the received signal space at
¬ © ¹¼ the destination for non-noise channel. There are totally
MN signal points in RD , and d D is the mutual
in which d E g m xn  g m 2 xn 2 and u is the noise at the
Euclidean distance between any two of them. For the
eavesdropper. As a result, the secrecy mutual information is
eavesdropper’s channel, there is a similar mapping M
obtained as
given by
ISEC I  x, a; y D  I  x, a; y E
ª
M : Au X RE where RE ^g m nx m, n` (17)
M N § dE  v 2 · º
« ¦¦ ¨  V 2 ¸¸ »»
exp ¨
(11) An effective approach to improve the secrecy mutual
1 M N «
¦¦Ev «log2 M N §© ¹
m2 1 n2 1
= » information is to degrade the detection performance at the
MN m 1 n 1 « dD  v · »
2
eavesdropper, so we pursue a precoding scheme to reduce
« ¦¦exp¨  V 2 ¸ »
¨ ¸
d E , based on the observation from (15).
«¬ m2 1 n2 1
© ¹ »¼
We assume that the CSI of the eavesdropper’s channel is
B. Pairwise Error Probability available at the source. Therefore, the aim is to develop a
method to adjust the MN signal points in space RE , so
The task of decoding at the destination is to detect not that the Euclidean distance d E and the mutual
only the traditional symbol x but also the index of information I  x, a; y  E decreases. Recalling what is
transmit antenna a , i.e. to decide which channel is used. mentioned in section I, if the channels are all the same, the
The maximum likelihood (ML) decoding algorithm can be messages carried on the indices of antennas would be
expressed as following undistinguishable. Inspired by this, we multiply the
 ml , xˆ 
n arg min
m A , xn  X
y  hm xn
2
(12)
symbols transmitted by the mth antenna by a complex
precoding coefficient D m to rotate and amplify the signal,
Denoting rm , n hm xn , thus we have the pairwise error which is determined by
probability (PEP) P(rm , n o rm2 , n2 ) , i.e. the probability of g1
Dm (18)
detecting the m2 th antenna transmits xn 2 when instead, gm
the m1th antenna transmits xn1 as following With precoding, we have Dm gm xn g1xn for all m , i.e. no

 
matter which antenna transmits xn , the received signal
 
P rm,n o rm2 ,n2
2 2
Pr y  hm xn ! y  hm2 xn2 point in RE would always be g1 xn . Consequently, it
holds that Dm gm xn  Dm2 gm2 xn 2 0 if we have n n2 , thus
ª hm xn  hm2 xn2 º
2

 
 a
the mutual information over the eavesdropper’s channel can
= Pr «Re v hm xn  hm2 xn2 » (13)
*
!
« 2 » be rewritten as
¬ ¼
 b § d · ª § § d 'u 2  u 2 ··º
1 M N « ¨ M N
¸¸» (19)
=Q¨ D ¸ I  x, a; y E log2 MN  ¦¦
MN m 1 n 1
Eu log2 M  ¦¦exp¨  E 2
« ¨ ¨ V ¸¸¸»
© 2V ¹ «¬ ¨© © ¹¹»¼
m2 1 n2 1
n2zn

where (a) is derived by substituting y hm xn  v and where dE ' Dm gm xn Dm2 gm2 xn2 . Naturally, the eavesdropper
arranging the terms, and (b) is derived by using the fact that can not decode the message mapped on the indices.
 
*
Re v hm xn  hm2 xn2 is still a RV following the complex However, this would not happen to the destination because
Gaussian distribution with zero mean and variance of of the difference between the main channel and the
eavesdropper’s channel. With (19), the maximum value of 3

I  x, a; y  E that achieves at high SNR region is obtained as N=1

following N=2

secrecy mutual information(bit/s/Hz)

2.5
N=4
I  x , a; y  E
UP M=8
log 2 N (20)
2
Therefore, the maximum secrecy mutual information with
precoding is given as
1.5

ISEC I  x, a; y D  I  x, a; yE
UP UP M=4
log2 M (21)
1
It implies that the maximum secrecy mutual information is
the logarithm of the number of transmit antennas.
0.5
M=2
IV. NUMERICAL RESULTS
0
In this section, the performance of the proposed scheme, -20 -15 -10 -5 0 5 10 15 20 25 30
SNR(dB)
which exploits SM to improve physical layer security, is
investigated numerically. The parameter is set as O 1 and Fig. 2. Secrecy mutual information VS SNR for M=2, 4, 8 and N=1, 2, 4
V 2 1 . We perform 10000 independent trials of Monte
Carlo experiments to obtain the average results. 0
10
Fig. 2 illustrates the secrecy mutual information for the
proposed SM based scheme with precoding. As expected,
the maximum secrecy mutual information is the logarithm
of the number of transmit antennas, e.g. it achieves 3
-1 M=2, N=1
bits/s/Hz at 30 dB for M 8 . In the special case N 1 , 10
M=2, N=2
all of the source information bits are conveyed on the M=4, N=2
APEP

indices of antennas, and it outperforms other cases with the M=8, N=2

same value of M . This is because the perfect secrecy is eavesdropper

provided for the information mapped on the indices once
the proposed precoding scheme is used.
The average pairwise error probability VS SNR for
various number of antennas is shown in Fig. 3. Firstly, it
shows that the proposed SM scheme leads to a very high
error probability at the eavesdropper, while the destination
can decode as usual. Secondly, we observe that using fewer
antennas can achieve a better detection performance,
though it also causes smaller secrecy mutual information,
as depicted in Fig.2. This reflects the trade-off between
multiplexing gain and diversity gain in SM. And it is
interesting to find that the APEP at the eavesdropper is 50%
for N 1 .
V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we have investigated how to exploit SM as
a new approach to implement physical layer security, and
the secrecy mutual information with finite alphabet input is
derived. Furthermore, a precoding scheme is proposed to
minimize the mutual information over eavesdropper’s
channel so that a better secrecy performance is realized. As
a novel physical layer technique to achieve multiplexing
gain with low complexity, SM is a promising research field
of much practical significance. This paper gives some
insights into the application of SM in physical layer
security. There are still plenty of issues to be addressed in
this open area. Further studies may include the secrecy
performance analysis of SM without CSI of the
eavesdropper, the application of SM in spectrum sharing
and physical layer network coding, and so on.
REFERENCES
[1] A. D. Wyner, “The Wire-tap Channel,” Bell Syst. Tech. J., vol. 54,
no.8, pp.1355-1387, Jan. 1975.
[2] S. K. Leung-Yan-Cheong and M. E. Hellman, “The Gaussian
Wiretap Channel,” IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. 24, pp. 451–456,
Jul. 1978.
-2
10
destination
-3
10
-20 -12 -4 4 12 20
SNR(dB)
Fig. 3. APEP VS various value of SNR for M=2, 4, 8 and N=1,2
[3] F. Oggier and B. Hassibi, “The Secrecy Capacity of the MIMO
Wiretap Channel,” IEEE International Symposium on Information
Theory, Toronto, Canada, pp.524-528, Jul. 2008.
[4] A. Khisti and G. W. Wornell, “Secure Transmission with Multiple
Antennas—Part I: The MISOME Wiretap Channel,” IEEE
Transactions on Information Theory, vol.56, no.7, pp. 3088–3104,
2009.
[5] S. Shafiee, N. Liu, and S. Ulukus, “Towards the Secrecy Capacity of
the Gaussian MIMO Wire-tap Channel: The 2-2-1 Channel,” IEEE
Transactions on Information Theory, vol.55, no.9, pp. 4033–4039,
2009.
[6] A Khisti and G. W. Wornell, “Secure Transmission with Multiple
Antennas—Part II: The MIMOME Wiretap Channel,” IEEE
Transactions on Information Theory, vol.56, no.11, pp.5515–5532,
2010.
[7] X. Guan, Y. Cai, Y. Wang, and W. Yang, “Increasing Secrecy
Capacity via Joint Design of Cooperative Beamforming and
Jamming,” in Proc of PIMRC, Toronto, Canada, pp. 1279-1283, Sept.
2011.
[8] R. Mesleh, H. Haas, S. Sinanovic, C. W. Ahn, and S. Yun, “Spatial
Modulation,” IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol., vol. 57, no. 4, pp. 2228 -
2241, July 2008.
[9] J. Jeganathan, A. Ghrayeb, L. Szczecinski, “Spatial Modulation:
Optimal Detection and Performance Analysis,” IEEE Commun. Lett.,
vol. 12, no. 8, pp. 545-547, Aug. 2008.
[10] A. Alshamali and B. Quza, “Performance of Spatial Modulation in
Correlated and Uncorrelated Nakagami Fading Channel”, J.Commun.,
vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 170-174, Apr. 2009.
[11] Y. Yang and B. Jiao, “Information-guided channel-hopping for high
data rate wireless communication”, IEEE Commun. Lett., vol. 12, no.
4, pp. 225-227, Apr. 2008.
[12] C. Xiao and Y. R. Zheng, “On the mutual information and power
allocation for vector Gaussian channels with finite discrete inputs,”
in Proc. IEEE Globecom, New Orleans, LA, pp. 1-5, Nov. 2008.