Secure Transmission Design With Feedback Compression for the Internet of Things

ARC Discovery Projects Grant DP150103905

An Overview of Physical Layer Security with Finite-Alphabet Signaling

Providing secure communications over the physical layer with the objective of achieving perfect secrecy without requiring a secret key has been receiving growing attention within the past decade. The vast majority of the existing studies in the area of physical layer security focus exclusively on the scenarios where the channel inputs are Gaussian distributed. However, in practice, the signals employed for transmission are drawn from discrete signal constellations such as phase shift keying and quadrature amplitude modulation. Hence, understanding the impact of the finite-alphabet input constraints and designing secure transmission schemes under this assumption is a mandatory step towards a practical implementation of physical layer security. With this motivation, this article reviews recent developments on physical layer security with finite-alphabet inputs. We explore transmit signal design algorithms for single-antenna as well as multi-antenna wiretap channels under different assumptions on the channel state information at the transmitter. Moreover, we present a review of the recent results on secure transmission with discrete signaling for various scenarios including multi-carrier transmission systems, broadcast channels with confidential messages, cognitive multiple access and relay networks. Throughout the article, we stress the important behavioral differences of discrete versus Gaussian inputs in the context of the physical layer security. We also present an overview of practical code construction over Gaussian and fading wiretap channels, and we discuss some open problems and directions for future research.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials (1st Revision

Spectral Efficiency and Energy Efficiency Tradeoff in Massive MIMO Downlink Transmission with Statistical CSIT

As a key technology for future wireless networks, massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) can significantly improve the energy efficiency (EE) and spectral efficiency (SE), and the performance is highly dependant on the degree of the available channel state information (CSI). While most existing works on massive MIMO focused on the case where the instantaneous CSI at the transmitter (CSIT) is available, it is usually not an easy task to obtain precise instantaneous CSIT. In this paper, we investigate EE-SE tradeoff in single-cell massive MIMO downlink transmission with statistical CSIT. To this end, we aim to optimize the system resource efficiency (RE), which is capable of striking an EE-SE balance. We first figure out a closed-form solution for the eigenvectors of the optimal transmit covariance matrices of different user terminals, which indicates that beam domain is in favor of performing RE optimal transmission in massive MIMO downlink. Based on this insight, the RE optimization precoding design is reduced to a real-valued power allocation problem. Exploiting the techniques of sequential optimization and random matrix theory, we further propose a low-complexity suboptimal two-layer water-filling-structured power allocation algorithm. Numerical results illustrate the effectiveness and near-optimal performance of the proposed statistical CSI aided RE optimization approach.Comment: Typos corrected. 14 pages, 7 figures. Accepted for publication on IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2002.0488

Multiple Access in Aerial Networks : From Orthogonal and Non-Orthogonal to Rate-Splitting

Recently, interest on the utilization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has aroused. Specifically, UAVs can be used in cellular networks as aerial users for delivery, surveillance, rescue search, or as an aerial base station (aBS) for communication with ground users in remote uncovered areas or in dense environments requiring prompt high capacity. Aiming to satisfy the high requirements of wireless aerial networks, several multiple access techniques have been investigated. In particular, space-division multiple access (SDMA) and power-domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) present promising multiplexing gains for aerial downlink and uplink. Nevertheless, these gains are limited as they depend on the conditions of the environment. Hence, a generalized scheme has been recently proposed, called rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA), which is capable of achieving better spectral efficiency gains compared to SDMA and NOMA. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of key multiple access technologies adopted for aerial networks, where aBSs are deployed to serve ground users. Since there have been only sporadic results reported on the use of RSMA in aerial systems, we aim to extend the discussion on this topic by modelling and analyzing the weighted sum-rate performance of a two-user network served by an RSMA-based aBS. Finally, related open issues and future research directions are exposed.publishedVersionPeer reviewe

Artificial-Noise-Aided Secure Transmission Scheme With Limited Training and Feedback Overhead

We design a novel artificial-noise-aided secure onoff transmission scheme in a wiretap channel. We consider a practical scenario where the multi-antenna transmitter only obtains partial channel knowledge from the single-antenna receiver through limited training and feedback but has no channel knowledge about the single-antenna eavesdropper. In the design, we first propose a three-period block transmission protocol to capture the practical training and quantization features. We then characterize the statistics of the received signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) at the receiver and the eavesdropper. Under the secrecy outage constraint, we exploit the on-off scheme to perform secure transmission and derive a closed-form expression for the secrecy throughput. Moreover, we investigate the optimization problem of maximizing the secrecy throughput by proposing an iterative algorithm to determine the optimal power allocation between the information signal and artificial noise, as well as the optimal codeword transmission rate. Furthermore, we define the net secrecy throughput (NST) which takes the signaling overhead into account and address the problem of optimally allocating the block resource to the training and feedback overhead. Numerical results clearly demonstrate how the optimal signaling overhead changes with the number of transmit antennas, and there exists an optimal number of antennas that maximizes the NST.ARC Discovery Projects Grant DP15010390

Physical Layer Security in Integrated Sensing and Communication Systems

The development of integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems has been spurred by the growing congestion of the wireless spectrum. The ISAC system detects targets and communicates with downlink cellular users simultaneously. Uniquely for such scenarios, radar targets are regarded as potential eavesdroppers which might surveil the information sent from the base station (BS) to communication users (CUs) via the radar probing signal. To address this issue, we propose security solutions for ISAC systems to prevent confidential information from being intercepted by radar targets. In this thesis, we firstly present a beamformer design algorithm assisted by artificial noise (AN), which aims to minimize the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the target while ensuring the quality of service (QoS) of legitimate receivers. Furthermore, to reduce the power consumed by AN, we apply the directional modulation (DM) approach to exploit constructive interference (CI). In this case, the optimization problem is designed to maximize the SINR of the target reflected echoes with CI constraints for each CU, while constraining the received symbols at the target in the destructive region. Apart from the separate functionalities of radar and communication systems above, we investigate sensing-aided physical layer security (PLS), where the ISAC BS first emits an omnidirectional waveform to search for and estimate target directions. Then, we formulate a weighted optimization problem to simultaneously maximize the secrecy rate and minimize the Cram\'er-Rao bound (CRB) with the aid of the AN, designing a beampattern with a wide main beam covering all possible angles of targets. The main beam width of the next iteration depends on the optimal CRB. In this way, the sensing and security functionalities provide mutual benefits, resulting in the improvement of mutual performances with every iteration of the optimization, until convergence. Overall, numerical results show the effectiveness of the ISAC security designs through the deployment of AN-aided secrecy rate maximization and CI techniques. The sensing-assisted PLS scheme offers a new approach for obtaining channel information of eavesdroppers, which is treated as a limitation of conventional PLS studies. This design gains mutual benefits in both single and multi-target scenarios

An Overview of Physical Layer Security with Finite Alphabet Signaling

Providing secure communications over the physical layer with the objective of achieving secrecy without requiring a secret key has been receiving growing attention within the past decade. The vast majority of the existing studies in the area of physical layer security focus exclusively on the scenarios where the channel inputs are Gaussian distributed. However, in practice, the signals employed for transmission are drawn from discrete signal constellations such as phase shift keying and quadrature amplitude modulation. Hence, understanding the impact of the finite-alphabet input constraints and designing secure transmission schemes under this assumption is a mandatory step towards a practical implementation of physical layer security. With this motivation, this article reviews recent developments on physical layer security with finite-alphabet inputs. We explore transmit signal design algorithms for single-antenna as well as multi-antenna wiretap channels under different assumptions on the channel state information at the transmitter. Moreover, we present a review of the recent results on secure transmission with discrete signaling for various scenarios including multi-carrier transmission systems, broadcast channels with confidential messages, cognitive multiple access and relay networks. Throughout the article, we stress the important behavioral differences of discrete versus Gaussian inputs in the context of the physical layer security. We also present an overview of practical code construction over Gaussian and fading wiretap channels, and discuss some open problems and directions for future research