Artificial-Noise-Aided Secure Multi-Antenna Transmission with Limited Feedback

We present an optimized secure multi-antenna transmission approach based on artificial-noise-aided beamforming, with limited feedback from a desired single-antenna receiver. To deal with beamformer quantization errors as well as unknown eavesdropper channel characteristics, our approach is aimed at maximizing throughput under dual performance constraints - a connection outage constraint on the desired communication channel and a secrecy outage constraint to guard against eavesdropping. We propose an adaptive transmission strategy that judiciously selects the wiretap coding parameters, as well as the power allocation between the artificial noise and the information signal. This optimized solution reveals several important differences with respect to solutions designed previously under the assumption of perfect feedback. We also investigate the problem of how to most efficiently utilize the feedback bits. The simulation results indicate that a good design strategy is to use approximately 20% of these bits to quantize the channel gain information, with the remainder to quantize the channel direction, and this allocation is largely insensitive to the secrecy outage constraint imposed. In addition, we find that 8 feedback bits per transmit antenna is sufficient to achieve approximately 90% of the throughput attainable with perfect feedback.Comment: to appear in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication

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

Secure on-off transmission design with channel estimation errors

Physical layer security has recently been regarded as an emerging technique to complement and improve the communication security in future wireless networks. The current research and development in physical layer security are often based on the ideal assumption of perfect channel knowledge or the capability of variable-rate transmissions. In this paper, we study the secure transmission design in more practical scenarios by considering channel estimation errors at the receiver and investigating both fixed-rate and variable-rate transmissions. Assuming quasi-static fading channels, we design secure on-off transmission schemes to maximize the throughput subject to a constraint on secrecy outage probability. For systems with given and fixed encoding rates, we show how the optimal on-off transmission thresholds and the achievable throughput vary with the amount of knowledge on the eavesdropper’s channel. In particular, our design covers the interesting case where the eavesdropper also uses the pilots sent from the transmitter to obtain imperfect channel estimation. An interesting observation is that using too much pilot power can harm the throughput of secure transmission if both the legitimate receiver and the eavesdropper have channel estimation errors, while the secure transmission always benefits from increasing pilot power when only the legitimate receiver has channel estimation errors but not the eavesdropper. When the encoding rates are controllable parameters to design, we further derive both a non-adaptive and an adaptive rate transmission schemes by jointly optimizing the encoding rates and the on-off transmission thresholds to maximize the throughput of secure transmissions

A Versatile Secure Transmission Strategy in the Presence of Outdated CSI

We study secure transmission considering the practical scenario where only outdated knowledge of the legitimate receiver’s channel and statistical knowledge of the eavesdropper’s channel is available at the transmitter. Conditioned on the limited channel knowledge, we adopt an on-off secure transmission scheme and propose a versatile strategy to determine the codeword transmission rate. We first analyze the outage performance of the system and then provide the design of optimal wiretap code parameters maximizing the secrecy throughput. Compared with the existing solution in the literature, the proposed secure transmission design enlarges the achievable reliability-security region and increases the maximum secrecy throughput.ARC Discovery Projects Grant DP15010390

Power allocation and signal labelling on physical layer security

PhD ThesisSecure communications between legitimate users have received considerable attention recently. Transmission cryptography, which introduces secrecy on the network layer, is heavily relied on conventionally to secure communications. However, it is theoretically possible to break the encryption if unlimited computational resource is provided. As a result, physical layer security becomes a hot topic as it provides perfect secrecy from an information theory perspective. The study of physical layer security on real communication system model is challenging and important, as the previous researches are mainly focusing on the Gaussian input model which is not practically implementable. In this thesis, the physical layer security of wireless networks employing finite-alphabet input schemes are studied. In particular, firstly, the secrecy capacity of the single-input single-output (SISO) wiretap channel model with coded modulation (CM) and bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) is derived in closed-form, while a fast, sub-optimal power control policy (PCP) is presented to maximize the secrecy capacity performance. Since finite-alphabet input schemes achieve maximum secrecy capacity at medium SNR range, the maximum amount of energy that the destination can harvest from the transmission while satisfying the secrecy rate constraint is computed. Secondly, the effects of mapping techniques on secrecy capacity of BICM scheme are investigated, the secrecy capacity performances of various known mappings are compared on 8PSK, 16QAM and (1,5,10) constellations, showing that Gray mapping obtains lowest secrecy capacity value at high SNRs. We propose a new mapping algorithm, called maximum error event (MEE), to optimize the secrecy capacity over a wide range of SNRs. At low SNR, MEE mapping achieves a lower secrecy rate than other well-known mappings, but at medium-to-high SNRs MEE mapping achieves a significantly higher secrecy rate over a wide range of SNRs. Finally, the secrecy capacity and power allocation algorithm (PA) of finite-alphabet input wiretap channels with decode-and-forward (DF) relays are proposed, the simulation results are compared with the equal power allocation algorithm