Principles of Physical Layer Security in Multiuser Wireless Networks: A Survey

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the domain of physical layer security in multiuser wireless networks. The essential premise of physical-layer security is to enable the exchange of confidential messages over a wireless medium in the presence of unauthorized eavesdroppers without relying on higher-layer encryption. This can be achieved primarily in two ways: without the need for a secret key by intelligently designing transmit coding strategies, or by exploiting the wireless communication medium to develop secret keys over public channels. The survey begins with an overview of the foundations dating back to the pioneering work of Shannon and Wyner on information-theoretic security. We then describe the evolution of secure transmission strategies from point-to-point channels to multiple-antenna systems, followed by generalizations to multiuser broadcast, multiple-access, interference, and relay networks. Secret-key generation and establishment protocols based on physical layer mechanisms are subsequently covered. Approaches for secrecy based on channel coding design are then examined, along with a description of inter-disciplinary approaches based on game theory and stochastic geometry. The associated problem of physical-layer message authentication is also introduced briefly. The survey concludes with observations on potential research directions in this area.Comment: 23 pages, 10 figures, 303 refs. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1303.1609 by other authors. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, 201

AirSync: Enabling Distributed Multiuser MIMO with Full Spatial Multiplexing

The enormous success of advanced wireless devices is pushing the demand for higher wireless data rates. Denser spectrum reuse through the deployment of more access points per square mile has the potential to successfully meet the increasing demand for more bandwidth. In theory, the best approach to density increase is via distributed multiuser MIMO, where several access points are connected to a central server and operate as a large distributed multi-antenna access point, ensuring that all transmitted signal power serves the purpose of data transmission, rather than creating "interference." In practice, while enterprise networks offer a natural setup in which distributed MIMO might be possible, there are serious implementation difficulties, the primary one being the need to eliminate phase and timing offsets between the jointly coordinated access points. In this paper we propose AirSync, a novel scheme which provides not only time but also phase synchronization, thus enabling distributed MIMO with full spatial multiplexing gains. AirSync locks the phase of all access points using a common reference broadcasted over the air in conjunction with a Kalman filter which closely tracks the phase drift. We have implemented AirSync as a digital circuit in the FPGA of the WARP radio platform. Our experimental testbed, comprised of two access points and two clients, shows that AirSync is able to achieve phase synchronization within a few degrees, and allows the system to nearly achieve the theoretical optimal multiplexing gain. We also discuss MAC and higher layer aspects of a practical deployment. To the best of our knowledge, AirSync offers the first ever realization of the full multiuser MIMO gain, namely the ability to increase the number of wireless clients linearly with the number of jointly coordinated access points, without reducing the per client rate.Comment: Submitted to Transactions on Networkin

Approximate Sum-Capacity of K-user Cognitive Interference Channels with Cumulative Message Sharing

This paper considers the K user cognitive interference channel with one primary and K-1 secondary/cognitive transmitters with a cumulative message sharing structure, i.e cognitive transmitter $i\in [2:K]$ knows non-causally all messages of the users with index less than i. We propose a computable outer bound valid for any memoryless channel. We first evaluate the sum-rate outer bound for the high- SNR linear deterministic approximation of the Gaussian noise channel. This is shown to be capacity for the 3-user channel with arbitrary channel gains and the sum-capacity for the symmetric K-user channel. Interestingly. for the K user channel having only the K th cognitive know all the other messages is sufficient to achieve capacity i.e cognition at transmitter 2 to K-1 is not needed. Next the sum capacity of the symmetric Gaussian noise channel is characterized to within a constant additive and multiplicative gap. The proposed achievable scheme for the additive gap is based on Dirty paper coding and can be thought of as a MIMO-broadcast scheme where only one encoding order is possible due to the message sharing structure. As opposed to other multiuser interference channel models, a single scheme suffices for both the weak and strong interference regimes. With this scheme the generalized degrees of freedom (gDOF) is shown to be a function of K, in contrast to the non cognitive case and the broadcast channel case. Interestingly, it is show that as the number of users grows to infinity the gDoF of the K-user cognitive interference channel with cumulative message sharing tends to the gDoF of a broadcast channel with a K-antenna transmitter and K single-antenna receivers. The analytical additive additive and multiplicative gaps are a function of the number of users. Numerical evaluations of inner and outer bounds show that the actual gap is less than the analytical one.Comment: Journa

Interference Alignment for Cognitive Radio Communications and Networks: A Survey

© 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).Interference alignment (IA) is an innovative wireless transmission strategy that has shown to be a promising technique for achieving optimal capacity scaling of a multiuser interference channel at asymptotically high-signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Transmitters exploit the availability of multiple signaling dimensions in order to align their mutual interference at the receivers. Most of the research has focused on developing algorithms for determining alignment solutions as well as proving interference alignment’s theoretical ability to achieve the maximum degrees of freedom in a wireless network. Cognitive radio, on the other hand, is a technique used to improve the utilization of the radio spectrum by opportunistically sensing and accessing unused licensed frequency spectrum, without causing harmful interference to the licensed users. With the increased deployment of wireless services, the possibility of detecting unused frequency spectrum becomes diminished. Thus, the concept of introducing interference alignment in cognitive radio has become a very attractive proposition. This paper provides a survey of the implementation of IA in cognitive radio under the main research paradigms, along with a summary and analysis of results under each system model.Peer reviewe