In this paper, we studied the secure transmission of a hybrid automatic repeat request with chase combining (HARQ-CC) system, under the existence of multiple eavesdroppers and limited latency. First, we analyzed some critical performance metrics, including connection outage probability (COP), secrecy outage probability (SOP) and effective secrecy throughput (EST). Then, to maximize the EST, three optimization problems of rate adaption were discussed: (i) optimizing the code rate with a given secrecy redundancy rate by a parameterized closed-form solution; (ii) optimizing the secrecy redundancy rate with a given code rate by a fixed-point method; (iii) optimizing both code rate and secrecy redundancy rate by an iterative optimization algorithm. We also considered COP and SOP constraints among the problems while corresponding solutions were deduced. Finally, numerical and simulated results verified our conclusions that the approximated SOP matches well with Monte-Carlo simulation for a strict reliable constraint, and that the optimized transmitting rate enhances EST efficiently with multiple eavesdroppers and retransmissions. Moreover, the influence of the number of eavesdroppers on secrecy performance was analyzed. Briefly, secrecy performance inevitably deteriorates with increasing number of eavesdroppers due to raised information leakage.
Keywords: chase combining (CC); effective secrecy throughput (EST); hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ); physical layer security (PLS); secrecy outage probability (SOP).