1

Performance Analysis of a Secure STBC with

Coherent and Differential Detection
T. Allen, Senior Member, IEEE and N. Al-Dhahir, Fellow, IEEE
University of Texas at Dallas
Abstract A secure space-time block coding (STBC) scheme
for 2 and 4 transmit antennas is proposed in the presence of a
passive eavesdropper. The bit error probability is analyzed for
coherent detection as well as with differential detection. The
analytical expressions are validated through simulations and
demonstrate that our proposed secure STBC guarantees full
diversity to an intended recipient while reducing the diversity
order of an eavesdropper to zero even when she has perfect
channel state information.

I.

INTRODUCTION

In 1998, a simple STBC for two transmit antennas was

invented by Alamouti [1]. The scheme supports a maximum
likelihood (ML) detection scheme with only linear processing
at the receiver based on the assumption that channel state
information (CSI) is perfectly known at the receiver, but
unknown at the transmitter. Later, Alamoutis scheme was
generalized in [5] to multiple transmit antennas.
For diversity transmission over the Rayleigh flat-fading
channel with coherent detection, a closed-form bit error
probability (BEP) is given in [8] based on the probability
density function (PDF) of the instantaneous signal-to-noise
ratio (SNR). The authors in [9] used the results of [8] to
derive BEP expressions for the coherent detection of
Alamoutis STBC which were generalized to multiple
antennas in [10]. In practice, however, perfect CSI is not
readily available. The impact of imperfect CSI on the
performance of maximum-ratio combining (MRC) receivers
was investigated in [11] and offers insight into STBC
performance when using minimum mean square error
(MMSE) channel estimation. When CSI is not available at the
receiver, differential Alamouti STBC encoding/decoding [3] is
an attractive alternative. It was extended in [4] to multiple
transmit antennas based on orthogonal designs [2]. The
performance of differential STBC was investigated in [12] and
[13] where a closed-form BEP expression was derived for
spatially-independent fading channels.
Recently, there has been increased interest in using the
attributes of a wireless channel for security. Ensuring the
confidentiality of communications is fundamental to securing
any network. This requirement becomes particularly important
for wireless networks, where eavesdropping is facilitated by
the broadcast nature of the wireless medium. The physical
layer for wireless systems provides a rich collection of tools to
enhance security that is not available to a wireless system
designer who strictly employs a cryptographic solution.
The work of N. Al-Dhahir was made possible by NPRP grant # NPRP 6149-2-058 from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of Qatar
Foundation). The statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the
authors.

In this paper, we describe a simple new technique to secure

orthogonal STBC by applying random phase rotations to the
symbols at each transmit antenna. The secure STBC preserves
the linear detection complexity of the orthogonal STBC while
guaranteeing full diversity order for the intended recipient and
zero diversity order for the eavesdropper. We prove this result
by deriving closed-form BEP expressions for coherent and
differential detection of phase shift keying (PSK) modulation.
II.

MODEL AND ASSUMPTIONS

A legitimate user named Alice sends digital messages to

another user, Bob, using the Alamouti STBC [1]. To enhance
transmission security, Alice applies random phase rotations to
the symbols at each transmit antenna as illustrated in Figure 1.
For the kth STBC codeword, the encoder transmits
from antenna one and
from antenna two at time slot
one. At time slot two, the encoder transmits
from
antenna one and
from antenna two, resulting in the
following equivalent parameterized STBC
.

(1)

Figure 1: System Block Diagram

This parameterized STBC is a unitary transformation of the

original Alamouti STBC where orthogonality is preserved.
Moreover, by adding the two random phase rotations as
additional parameters, Alice now has a mechanism to thwart
any unintended recipients. In our adversarial model, an
eavesdropper, Eve, also receives Alices transmission. We
make the following worst-case assumptions that Eve : 1) has
perfect receive CSI; 2) knows Alices signal constellation; 3)
knows that Alice is using the secure Alamouti STBC with
random phase rotations in Equation (1) and that the phase
rotations change for each STBC codeword. However, Eve
does not know the rotation angles and is assumed to be
sufficiently spatially separated from Bob such that their
channels fade independently. Throughout this paper, vectors
are underlined, matrices denoted by bold font, and (*) denotes
the Hermitian (complex-conjugate) operator.
To initiate the transmission, Alice and Bob, assuming
channel reciprocity, use their received signal strength indicator

2
(RSSI) to exchange a secret key as follows: Alice and Bob,
each transmitting a known signal to each other. Alice initiates
the process and Bob responds. This two-way probing is
performed over two consecutive time slots so that the time
between two directional channel measurements is much
smaller than the channel coherence time. Eve listens to both
transmissions, but due to her spatial separation from Bob, her
RSSI is independent of Alices and Bobs RSSI. The secret
key serves as a seed to a random number generator and
synchronizes the random generation of the rotation angles
between Alice and Bob. Once the key is exchanged, it remains
valid until the session is terminated.
Once the generator is seeded, a random rotation angle is
generated (by keeping only the log2(L) most significant bits to
produce an index associated with a rotation angle from the MPSK signal constellation) for each transmit antenna and is
updated every STBC codeword. In this model, Alice has no
transmit CSI knowledge.
Alice encodes PSK symbols
using the STBC
in Equation (1)
where
are randomly generated, as described
above, each from a finite set of M values unknown to Bob.
The rotation angles
are chosen such that for any
choice of
and
from the original signal constellation,
the resulting transmitted signals are also from the same signal
constellation. For example, for M-PSK constellation symbols
given by
, we select
where
.
The two received signal samples for the kth STBC codeword
are given by (assuming a single receive antenna)

mitigated by that fact that the key is exchanged only once at

the beginning of the communication session.

where hi is the channel coefficient associated with transmit

antenna , {st,k} for t=1,2 are the two information symbols, and
{nt,k} are the additive noise samples. The channel coefficients
are assumed circularly-symmetric, independent identically
distributed (IID) complex-valued Gaussian random variables
with zero-mean and variance 1/2 per dimension. The channel
coefficients are assumed to be fixed over the channel
coherence time which spans multiple STBC codewords.
Noise samples are modeled as circularly-symmetric, IID,
complex-valued Gaussian random variables with zero-mean
and variance N0/2 per dimension.
Remark:
The RSSI quantizer design as well as the length of the
secret key was left as design trade-off issues for future work.
Increasing the number of probes used in the construction of
the secret key would incur additional overhead on the
transmission rate while providing additional security.
Furthermore, the rate at which secret bits can be extracted
from the channel is fundamentally limited by the channel
coherence time. In highly-dynamic environments, the reduced
channel coherence time will decrease the rate at which secret
bits can be extracted by Alice and Bob from the channel, but is

angle
given by the following simple form due to the
orthogonality of

A. Bobs ML Detector
Bobs received signal can be converted to the more
convenient form
(2)

where the channel matrix

is orthogonal and depends on
and {hi}. In Bobs receiver, the rotation
angles are known and due to the orthogonality of
, the
maximum likelihood (ML) detector is the matched filter
and
. Hence, the ML detector of
the secure STBC inherits the full diversity and linear detection
complexity properties from the Alamouti STBC.
B. Eves ML Detector
Eves received signal, , can also be modeled in a manner
similar to Bob but with independently-fading channel
coefficients { } and noise samples { } resulting in Eves
version of (2); namely
. Although Eve is
assumed to have perfect receive CSI, being an unintended
recipient, she does not know .
Given the received symbols , Eve computes her ML
estimate, denoted by

, of the transmitted symbols given by

.
Computing this ML estimate requires an exhaustive search
over the pairs of information symbols together with the
rotation angle pairs. To reduce this complexity, Eve can first
compute the ML estimate of
conditioned on the rotation

.
Since Eve has a priori knowledge of Alices transmission
scheme, she employs a conditional ML detector where Eve
conditions on the
possible values of to implement
parallel matched filters. Using the normalized outputs of these
matched filters, Eves ML detector then selects the symbol
closest to
in Euclidean distance which is then
passed to an M-PSK slicer.
C. Diversity Order of Secure STBC
To calculate the ML receiver diversity order, we will
consider the codeword difference matrix (CWDM) [2]
for
any two distinct codewords; i.e. when
.
For
Bob,
the
rotations
are
known,
hence,
. In this case, we have

.
Assume that the CWDM is singular; hence, its determinant
is equal to zero. It follows that
which is only
true when
. This contradicts the definition of the
CWDM and proves Bobs ML receiver has full diversity.
For Eve,
are not known at the receiver,
meaning that
. Consider the two
distinct
codewords
which are also common to all L-PSK
constellations. By direct substitution, we find that the CWDM
is the all-zero matrix. Hence, Eves ML diversity order is zero.
D. Secure STBC for 4 Transmit Antennas
In this subsection, we present two generalizations of our
secure STBC design to 4 transmit antennas based on the
Octonion and quasi-orthogonal STBCs.
D.1 Rate Octonion orthogonal STBC
For 4 transmit antennas, we propose the following secure
rate Octonion orthogonal STBC [17]

The ML diversity orders of Bob and Eve when using the

rate secure STBC for four transmit antennas can be derived
using the same approach described above to show that Bobs
ML receiver has full diversity (
are known at the receiver).
For Eves ML receiver, consider the two codewords
and
. Once again, by
direct substitution, we find that the CWDM is the all-zero
matrix and hence Eve's diversity order is zero.
D.2 Quasi-orthogonal STBC
To achieve higher rate, we propose the following secure
version of the rotated rate-1 full-diversity quasi-orthogonal
STBC (QO-STBC) [6],

where
is a fixed rotation angle which depends on the
signal constellation and is used to ensure full spatial diversity.
For QPSK constellations, the optimum fixed rotation angle is
. It can be shown that the secure QO-STBC given
above achieves full diversity when the random rotation angles,
, are known at the receiver (as in Bobs case). Once again,
it is easy to show, using a simple counter example, that when
are not known at the receiver (as in Eves case), the secure
QO-STBC has diversity order of zero. For example, when
and
,
the codeword difference matrix has zero rank.

III.

BEP ANALYSIS FOR COHERENT DETECTION OF SECURE

ALAMOUTI STBC WITH PERFECT CSI

A. Bobs Average BEP with Coherent Detection

As described in Section II, after the random rotations have
been added, the resultant symbols are still from the same MPSK constellation. Therefore, the performance of the secure
OSTBC can be modeled by the coherent detection of an MPSK signal transmitted over L=2 fading channels.
For QPSK transmission on a single fading channel, the
conditional BEP
is
where Q(.)
denotes the Gaussian Q-function,
is the
instantaneous SNR per bit. For Rayleigh fading,
is a Chisquared random variable (RV) with 2 degrees of freedom.
Hence, also is a Chi-squared RV with PDF

where

is the average SNR per bit.

The average BEP of QPSK transmission is obtained by

averaging the conditional BEP over the fading distribution;
resulting in the familiar BEP expression for QPSK
transmission over a single Rayleigh fading channel

To analyze Bobs BEP performance, we begin by reviewing

the mathematical model for a communication system with L
diversity channels. First, we assume that the L channels are
independent, frequency-non-selective, and slowly-fading with
Rayleigh-distributed envelope statistics. The signal in each
diversity channel is corrupted by a zero-mean additive white
Gaussian noise (AWGN) process. The noise processes in the L
channels are assumed to be mutually statistically independent,
with identical autocorrelation functions.
The instantaneous SNR per bit per channel,
is a Chisquared RV with 2 degrees of freedom, with the average SNR
per bit per channel
. For equally-likely transmitted
symbols, the total conditional SNR per bit
at the MRC
output is given by

For a coherent QPSK signal, the conditional BEP,

can be written using the following alternate
representation of the Gaussian Q-function (for x > 0)

To compute the unconditional BEP,

the multichannel conditional BER,

, we must average
, over the

4
joint PDF of the instantaneous SNR sequence
, namely
the joint PDF of the
,
. Since the
RVs
are assumed to be statistically independent, then
Equation (3) becomes

Equation (4) provides a general form for calculating the

average BEP for L-diversity channels in independent Rayleigh
fading. It is applicable when the combined channels come
from the same family of fading distributions but have different
parameters (e.g. instantaneous SNR per bit per channel) and
also when the diversity channels have fading distributions
coming from different families of distributions.
Equation (4) is absolutely integrable; hence, the order of
integration can be interchanged to allow the grouping of terms

where
is
the moment generating function (MGF) of the SNR per bit
associated with the lth diversity channel (with Rayleigh
fading). Finally, we arrive at the following average BEP for Ldiversity channels in independent Rayleigh fading

Remark:
If
are identically distributed Chi-squared RVs
(corresponding to the Rayleigh fading scenario), the PDF of
can be shown to be a Chi-squared RV with L degrees of
freedom and Equation (5) can be re-written as

A solution to (6) can be found in closed form by successive

integration by parts, to yield

where

We

make

the

following

observations on Equation (7): (i)

is simply the average
BEP for a QPSK signal over a single Rayleigh fading channel,
and (ii) Bobs performance is proportional to
meaning that he achieves full diversity. For the proposed
secure STBC (L = 2), Bobs BEP is given by

where
to see that, knowing

. From this BEP expression, it is easy

for a given signal constellation, the

above analysis can also be used to determine the BEP for the
secure STBC using 4 TX antennas in Section II.D.
B. Eves Average BEP with Coherent Detection
When Alice applies a random phase rotation to the
transmitted signal, it is clear from Equation (2) that this
effectively induces a random phase rotation on Eves channel.
Hence, Eves effective channel coefficient estimate will be
phase offset from the true channel coefficient
by a
discretely-random phase angle
(
), effectively
producing a channel estimation error.
These channel
estimation errors result in Eve being unable to decode the
transmitted symbols even when she employs ML detection.
More importantly, since
changes every symbol, blind
estimation techniques will be unable to counteract the effects
of these errors. The effects of channel estimation errors have
been modeled in [11] as a function of the complex correlation
between the actual channel coefficients as follows

Our secure STBC can be modeled by choosing

and
(by construction
. Hence, we have
.
Knowing that each
has an equal probability of being
selected, the average correlation between the actual channel
coefficient and Eves estimate
, which means that the added phase
rotations,
de-correlate the actual channel coefficient from
Eves CSI.
Hence, Eves performance will degrade
significantly due to the random-rotations-induced channel
estimations errors even with perfect CSI.
Furthermore, the effects of these channel estimation errors
have been shown in [11] to degrade the effective SNR per bit
per channel defined as

where is the complex correlation coefficient between the

actual fading and Eves estimate of it. Therefore, when Alice
adds a random rotation to the symbols being transmitted on a
channel, the effect is that the rotations de-correlate Eves CSI
(i.e.,
) such that the effective SNR per bit on that
channel is zero (in linear scale). As a result, Eve BEP is
.

Another consequence of the added random phase rotations

can be observed in Eves BEP as given in Equation (5). When
the effective SNR per bit for the kth channel vanishes,
then

which means that when Alice adds a random phase rotation to

the symbols being transmitted from a single antenna, Eve will
not realize any spatial diversity gain from that channel. If we
assume that the
are identically distributed, then the

5
average BEP for Eve in this situation can be calculated using
Equation (7) with L-1 diversity channels. If Alice continues to
add the random rotations to the symbols being transmitted
from other antennas (as is the case for our proposed scheme),
Eve will continue to lose diversity gains until Eve has an
irreducible error floor (diversity order = 0) with
.
IV.

SECURE DIFFERENTIAL STBC

In practice, accurate channel estimation is difficult to obtain

either due to rapid changes in the channel (Doppler effect) or
due to the overhead needed to estimate a large number of
parameters as in a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) system.
This makes differential schemes an attractive alternative. With
differential STBC encoding/decoding, CSI is not required
either at the transmitter or at the receiver.
The differential STBC scheme analyzed in this paper is the
one originally proposed by Tarokh and Jafarkhani [3], based
on the Alamouti transmit diversity scheme [1], but we follow
the simpler notation in [15]. As before, the parameterized
secure STBC [14] is given by Equation (1).

phase rotations change every codeword. When the rotations

are known (as in Bobs case), the differential signal can still
be decoded properly by undoing the effects of the rotations.
However, when the rotations are not known (as in Eves case),
the fact the rotations change every STBC codeword results in
the channel changing too fast for the differential signal to be
properly decoded.
A. Bobs Average BEP
For differential QPSK transmission on a single fading
channel, the conditional symbol error probability (SEP) is
given by

As was the case with a coherent receiver, the average BEP

of a differential QPSK signal is obtained by averaging the
conditional BEP over the fading distribution. The average
symbol error probability (SEP) of M-DPSK over a single
Rayleigh Fading channel is given by

A. Secure Differential Encoding

The differentially-encoded message
at time k+1, k0,
is obtained by multiplying the codeword at time k, denoted
by , by the current message
, specifically
From this expression, the BEP of DQPSK (M=4 and
) is given by

To initialize transmission, the transmitter sends a unitary

matrix

, for example,

The codeword

is

also a unitary matrix like the message matrix

and the
Alamouti structure is also preserved by the differential
encoding process (group property).
B. Decoding
The received signal over the kth STBC codeword can be
modeled as [15]

where the channel coefficients and noise samples are modeled

as in Section II.A, but when using differential encoding, we
assume the channel is constant over two STBC codewords
instead of only one STBC codeword as in the coherent case.
The ML detector for the message
transmitted by the
differential STBC scheme is given by [16]
(10)
V.

BEP ANALYSIS FOR THE SECURE DIFFERENTIAL STBC

Recall that the secure differential STBC requires the

channel to remain constant over at least two Alamouti STBC
codewords. However, by construction, the added random

Leveraging the L-branch diversity channel model defined in

Section III.B and the fact that the PDF of L IID Rayleigh flat
fading channels is a Chi-squared RV with L degrees of
freedom, we can arrive at a closed-form BEP expression for
DPSK transmission given in (7) where
is the BEP given
in (13) for DQPSK. Note also that Bob achieves full diversity
in either case. For the proposed secure differential STBC (L =
2), Bobs BEP is given by

where

for QPSK.

B. Eves Average BEP

As stated above, differential detection requires the channel
to remain constant over two consecutive STBC codewords. In
other words, the channel coefficients must be perfectly
correlated over two codewords. As was the case for coherent
detection, the added random phase rotations,
de-correlate
the channel over the two codewords such that the effective
SNR per bit on that channel is zero (in linear scale). As a

6
result, Eves BEP is
.
As was the case for Eves coherent detection, the
consequence of the added rotations can be observed in Eves
BEP as given in (14). By adding the random rotations to the
symbols being transmitted (as is the case for the proposed
scheme), Alice de-correlates the channel between consecutive
STBC codewords, thus producing an irreducible error floor
(diversity order = 0) in Eves performance, i.e.
.
VI.

SIMULATION RESULTS

BEP results for both the 2x1 coherent and differential

secure Alamouti STBCs are provided in Figure 2 and show
that for both coherent and differential detection, Bobs ML
receiver has full diversity while Eves ML receiver
experiences a diversity order of zero. Notice also that Bob
experience a 3 dB loss in performance when using differential
detection. In all cases, the simulation results validate the
performance analysis.
BEP results for both the Octonian and QO-STBC are shown
in Figure 3 and, in both cases, reaffirm that Bob achieves full
diversity while Eve experience a diversity order of zero. We
note that the Octonion achieves lower BER than the QOSTBC at the price of 25% reduction in rate since both STBCs
are assumed to use QPSK modulation.

Figure 3: BEP of Secure Octonian and QO-STBC

REFERENCES
[1]

[2]

[3]

VII. CONCLUSION
We proposed a secure Alamouti STBC and derived exact
closed-form expressions of its BEP for coherent and
differential detection. While the performance analysis
presented is applicable to any PSK modulation, an explicit
BEP expression was derived for QPSK. Our performance
analysis shows that having knowledge of the random phase
rotations preserves Bobs performance and adversely affects
the performance of Eves ML receiver. Moreover, we have
shown that adding random phase rotations to the symbols
being transmitted de-correlates the channel from Eves perfect
CSI; resulting in a zero diversity order. Comparison of
theoretical and simulation results validates the analysis.

[4]

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[6]
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Figure 2: BEP of the Coherent and Differential Secure STBC

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