An achievable secrecy throughput of hybrid-ARQ protocols for block fading channels

In applications of wireless packet-oriented data networks, a special coding scheme, the hybrid automatic retransmission request (HARQ) exhibits high throughput efficiency by adapting its error correcting code redundancy to channel conditions. Motivated by the increasing importance of secure communication over wireless networks, we investigate secure packet communication based on HARQ over block-fading (BF) channels. More specifically, we consider two legitimate users communicating over a BF channel in the presence of a passive eavesdropper who intercepts the transmission through another independent BF channel. We assume that the transmitter can obtain a 1-bit ACK/NACK feedback from the receiver via a reliable public channel. Under this setting, we consider incremental redundancy (IR) and repetition time diversity (RTD) HARQ schemes based on rate-compatible Wyner secrecy codes from an information theoretic point of view. We study a good Wyner code sequence, with which the legitimate receiver can decode the message and the eavesdropper can be perfectly confused. For a given pair of reliability / secrecy outage probabilities, we derive an achievable secrecy throughput of HARQ protocols for block-fading channels. Finally, we illustrate numerically that HARQ can benefit both throughput and secrecy.