  This paper studies the impact of transmit antenna selection on the secrecy
performance of massive MIMO wiretap channels. We consider a scenario in which a
multi-antenna transmitter selects a subset of transmit antennas with the
strongest channel gains. Confidential messages are then transmitted to a
multi-antenna legitimate receiver while the channel is being overheard by a
multi-antenna eavesdropper. For this setup, we approximate the distribution of
the instantaneous secrecy rate in the large-system limit. The approximation
enables us to investigate the optimal number of selected antennas which
maximizes the asymptotic secrecy throughput of the system. We show that
increasing the number of selected antennas enhances the secrecy performance of
the system up to some optimal value, and that further growth in the number of
selected antennas has a destructive effect. Using the large-system
approximation, we obtain the optimal number of selected antennas analytically
for various scenarios. Our numerical investigations show an accurate match
between simulations and the analytic results even for not so large dimensions.
