On the Secrecy Degrees of Freedom with Full-Duplex Communication

Abstract

Full duplex communication enables simultaneous transmission from both ends of a communication link, thereby promising gains in terms of the throughput and the delay. Such compelling gains are conditioned on a number of design constraints. Generally, it has been shown that the throughput gain and the delay reduction of full duplex communication are somewhat limited in realistic network settings, leading researchers to study other possible applications of full duplex communication which can provide significantly higher gains over half duplex communication. Physical layer security is an example of such an application. The potential of full duplex nodes in improving the physical layer security of a communication link is investigated in this contribution. We specifically derive the information theoretic secrecy degrees of freedom measure for a pair of nodes communicating in full duplex mode. Moreover, closed form expressions for the instantaneous and ergodic throughput gain of full duplex communication over conventional half duplex is derived. The secrecy degrees of freedom with full duplex is shown to be two as opposed to that of zero in half duplex mode