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

To Harvest and Jam: A Paradigm of Self-Sustaining Friendly Jammers for Secure AF Relaying

This paper studies the use of multi-antenna harvest-and-jam (HJ) helpers in a multi-antenna amplify-and-forward (AF) relay wiretap channel assuming that the direct link between the source and destination is broken. Our objective is to maximize the secrecy rate at the destination subject to the transmit power constraints of the AF relay and the HJ helpers. In the case of perfect channel state information (CSI), the joint optimization of the artificial noise (AN) covariance matrix for cooperative jamming and the AF beamforming matrix is studied using semi-definite relaxation (SDR) which is tight, while suboptimal solutions are also devised with lower complexity. For the imperfect CSI case, we provide the equivalent reformulation of the worst-case robust optimization to maximize the minimum achievable secrecy rate. Inspired by the optimal solution to the case of perfect CSI, a suboptimal robust scheme is proposed striking a good tradeoff between complexity and performance. Finally, numerical results for various settings are provided to evaluate the proposed schemes.Comment: 16 pages (double column), 8 figures, submitted for possible journal publicatio

Robust Transmissions in Wireless Powered Multi-Relay Networks with Chance Interference Constraints

In this paper, we consider a wireless powered multi-relay network in which a multi-antenna hybrid access point underlaying a cellular system transmits information to distant receivers. Multiple relays capable of energy harvesting are deployed in the network to assist the information transmission. The hybrid access point can wirelessly supply energy to the relays, achieving multi-user gains from signal and energy cooperation. We propose a joint optimization for signal beamforming of the hybrid access point as well as wireless energy harvesting and collaborative beamforming strategies of the relays. The objective is to maximize network throughput subject to probabilistic interference constraints at the cellular user equipment. We formulate the throughput maximization with both the time-switching and power-splitting schemes, which impose very different couplings between the operating parameters for wireless power and information transfer. Although the optimization problems are inherently non-convex, they share similar structural properties that can be leveraged for efficient algorithm design. In particular, by exploiting monotonicity in the throughput, we maximize it iteratively via customized polyblock approximation with reduced complexity. The numerical results show that the proposed algorithms can achieve close to optimal performance in terms of the energy efficiency and throughput.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figure

A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances and Future Trends

This paper examines the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity, confidentiality, integrity and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state-of-the-art in physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer. We also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their counter-measures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive jammer, adaptive jammer and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.Comment: 36 pages. Accepted to Appear in Proceedings of the IEEE, 201

Truth-Telling Mechanism for Two-Way Relay Selection for Secrecy Communications With Energy-Harvesting Revenue

This paper brings the novel idea of paying the utility to the winning agents in terms of some physical entity in cooperative communications. Our setting is a secret two-way communication channel where two transmitters exchange information in the presence of an eavesdropper. The relays are selected from a set of interested parties, such that the secrecy sum rate is maximized. In return, the selected relay nodes' energy harvesting requirements will be fulfilled up to a certain threshold through their own payoff so that they have the natural incentive to be selected and involved in the communication. However, relays may exaggerate their private information in order to improve their chance to be selected. Our objective is to develop a mechanism for relay selection that enforces them to reveal the truth since otherwise they may be penalized. We also propose a joint cooperative relay beamforming and transmit power optimization scheme based on an alternating optimization approach. Note that the problem is highly non-convex, since the objective function appears as a product of three correlated Rayleigh quotients. While a common practice in the existing literature is to optimize the relay beamforming vector for given transmit power via rank relaxation, we propose a second-order cone programming-based approach in this paper, which requires a significantly lower computational task. The performance of the incentive control mechanism and the optimization algorithm has bee