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

A Study Of Cooperative Spectrum Sharing Schemes For Internet Of Things Systems

The Internet of Things (IoT) has gained much attention in recent years with the massive increase in the number of connected devices. Cognitive Machine-to-Machine (CM2M) communications is a hot research topic in which a cognitive dimension allows M2M networks to overcome the challenges of spectrum scarcity, interference, and green requirements. In this paper, we propose a Generalized Cooperative Spectrum Sharing (GCSS) scheme for M2M communication. Cooperation extends the coverage of wireless networks as well as increasing their throughput while reducing the energy consumption of the connected low power devices. We study the outage performance of the proposed GCSS scheme for M2M system and derive exact expressions for the outage probability. We also analyze the effect of varying transmission powers on the performance of the system

Collaborative Distributed Beamforming for Spectrum-Sharing Systems

The scarcity of bandwidth has always been the main obstacle for providing reliable high date-rate wireless links, which are in great demand to accommodate nowadays and immediate future wireless applications. In addition, recent reports have showed inefficient usage and under-utilization of the available bandwidth. Cognitive radio (CR) has recently emerged as a promising solution to enhance the spectrum utilization, where it offers the ability for unlicensed users to access the licensed spectrum opportunistically. On one hand, by allowing opportunistic spectrum access, the overall spectrum utilization can be improved. On the other hand, transmission from cognitive nodes can cause severe interference to the licensed users of the spectrum. This requires cognitive radio networks (CRNs) to consider two essential design targets, namely, maximizing the spectrum utilization and minimizing the interference caused to the primary users (PUs). Such interference can be reduced through proper resource allocation, power control or other degrees of freedom techniques such as beamforming. In this thesis, we aim to use joint distributed beamforming and cooperative relaying in spectrum-sharing systems in an effort to enhance the spectrum efficiency and improve the performance of the secondary system. We investigate a one-way cooperative spectrum-sharing system in the presence of one PU and multiple PUs. We study two relaying schemes, namely, decode-and-forward (DF) and amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying in conjunction with distributed optimal beamforming. We employ zero forcing beamforming (ZFB) as a sub-optimal scheme, and compare both approaches through simulations. For both schemes, we derive closed-form expressions and asymptotic expressions for the outage probability and bit error rate (BER) over independent and identically distributed Rayleigh fading channels for binary phase shift keying (BPSK) and M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM) schemes. Numerical results show the effectiveness of the combination of the cooperative diversity and distributed beamforming in compensating for the loss in the secondary system's performance due to the primary user's co-channel interference (CCI). To further improve the spectrum efficiency, we employ distributed beamforming in two-way AF cooperative spectrum-sharing systems in the presence of multiple PUs. For this system, we investigate the transmission protocols over two, three and four time-slots. Our results show that the three time-slot protocol outperforms the two time-slot and four time-slot protocols in certain scenarios where it offers a good compromise between bandwidth efficiency and system performance. We extend the two-way relaying system to the DF scheme, where two practical two-way relaying strategies are investigated, namely, DF-XORing (bit-wise level) and DF-superposition (symbol-wise level). For each relaying strategy, we derive general optimal beamforming vectors and sup-optimal ZFB vectors at the relays. Employing ZFB, we present an analytical framework of the secondary system considering the effect of the primary-secondary mutual CCIs. Our results show that, when the received signals at the relays are weighted equally, the DF-XOR always outperforms both DF-superposition and AF relaying. In the last part of the thesis, we consider a limited feedback system model by assuming partial channel state information (CSI) of the interference channel between the secondary relays and primary receiver. In particular, the CSI feedback is limited only to the quantized channel direction information (CDI). To investigate the effect of the quantized CDI on the secondary system's performance, we derive closed-form expressions for the outage probability and the BER considering the mutual secondary-primary CCI. In the simulation results, we compare the system performance of the limited feedback with the perfect CSI. Our results show that the performance improves as the number of feedback bits increases