On the Design of Artificial-Noise-Aided Secure Multi-Antenna Transmission in Slow Fading Channels

In this paper, we investigate the design of artificial-noise-aided secure multi-antenna transmission in slow fading channels. The primary design concerns include the transmit power allocation and the rate parameters of the wiretap code. We consider two scenarios with different complexity levels: i) the design parameters are chosen to be fixed for all transmissions, ii) they are adaptively adjusted based on the instantaneous channel feedback from the intended receiver. In both scenarios, we provide explicit design solutions for achieving the maximal throughput subject to a secrecy constraint, given by a maximum allowable secrecy outage probability. We then derive accurate approximations for the maximal throughput in both scenarios in the high signal-to-noise ratio region, and give new insights into the additional power cost for achieving a higher security level, whilst maintaining a specified target throughput. In the end, the throughput gain of adaptive transmission over non-adaptive transmission is also quantified and analyzed.Comment: to appear in IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technolog

On the Calculation of the Incomplete MGF with Applications to Wireless Communications

(c) 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works. DOI: 10.1109/TCOMM.2016.2626440The incomplete moment generating function (IMGF) has paramount relevance in communication theory, since it appears in a plethora of scenarios when analyzing the performance of communication systems. We here present a general method for calculating the IMGF of any arbitrary fading distribution. Then, we provide exact closed-form expressions for the IMGF of the very general κ-μ shadowed fading model, which includes the popular κ-μ, η-μ, Rician shadowed, and other classical models as particular cases. We illustrate the practical applicability of this result by analyzing several scenarios of interest in wireless communications: 1) physical layer security in the presence of an eavesdropper; 2) outage probability analysis with interference and background noise; 3) channel capacity with side information at the transmitter and the receiver; and 4) average bit-error rate with adaptive modulation, when the fading on the desired link can be modeled by any of the aforementioned distributions.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Execelencia Internacional. Andalucía Tech

On the Throughput Cost of Physical Layer Security in Decentralized Wireless Networks

This paper studies the throughput of large-scale decentralized wireless networks with physical layer security constraints. In particular, we are interested in the question of how much throughput needs to be sacrificed for achieving a certain level of security. We consider random networks where the legitimate nodes and the eavesdroppers are distributed according to independent two-dimensional Poisson point processes. The transmission capacity framework is used to characterize the area spectral efficiency of secure transmissions with constraints on both the quality of service (QoS) and the level of security. This framework illustrates the dependence of the network throughput on key system parameters, such as the densities of legitimate nodes and eavesdroppers, as well as the QoS and security constraints. One important finding is that the throughput cost of achieving a moderate level of security is quite low, while throughput must be significantly sacrificed to realize a highly secure network. We also study the use of a secrecy guard zone, which is shown to give a significant improvement on the throughput of networks with high security requirements.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication

Robust Power Allocation and Outage Analysis for Secrecy in Independent Parallel Gaussian Channels

This letter studies parallel independent Gaussian channels with uncertain eavesdropper channel state information (CSI). Firstly, we evaluate the probability of zero secrecy rate in this system for (i) given instantaneous channel conditions and (ii) a Rayleigh fading scenario. Secondly, when non-zero secrecy is achievable in the low SNR regime, we aim to solve a robust power allocation problem which minimizes the outage probability at a target secrecy rate. We bound the outage probability and obtain a linear fractional program that takes into account the uncertainty in eavesdropper CSI while allocating power on the parallel channels. Problem structure is exploited to solve this optimization problem efficiently. We find the proposed scheme effective for uncertain eavesdropper CSI in comparison with conventional power allocation schemes.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. Author version of the paper published in IEEE Wireless Communications Letters. Published version is accessible at http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/LWC.2015.249734

Enhancing Secrecy with Multi-Antenna Transmission in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

We study physical-layer security in wireless ad hoc networks and investigate two types of multi-antenna transmission schemes for providing secrecy enhancements. To establish secure transmission against malicious eavesdroppers, we consider the generation of artificial noise with either sectoring or beamforming. For both approaches, we provide a statistical characterization and tradeoff analysis of the outage performance of the legitimate communication and the eavesdropping links. We then investigate the networkwide secrecy throughput performance of both schemes in terms of the secrecy transmission capacity, and study the optimal power allocation between the information signal and the artificial noise. Our analysis indicates that, under transmit power optimization, the beamforming scheme outperforms the sectoring scheme, except for the case where the number of transmit antennas are sufficiently large. Our study also reveals some interesting differences between the optimal power allocation for the sectoring and beamforming schemes.Comment: to appear in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Securit