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A New Secure Transmission Scheme With Outdated Antenna Selection

We propose a new secure transmission scheme in the multi-input multi-output multi-eavesdropper wiretap channel. In this channel, the NA-antenna transmitter adopts transmit antenna selection (TAS) to choose the antenna that maximizes the instantaneous signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the receiver to transmit, while the NB-antenna receiver and the NE-antenna eavesdropper adopt maximal-ratio combining (MRC) to combine the received signals. We focus on the practical scenario where the channel state information (CSI) during the TAS process is outdated. In this scenario, we propose a new transmission scheme to prevent the detrimental effect of the outdated CSI on the wiretap codes design at the transmitter. To thoroughly assess the secrecy performance achieved by the proposed scheme, we derive new closed-form expressions for the exact secrecy outage probability and the probability of non-zero secrecy capacity for arbitrary SNRs. We also derive new compact expressions for the asymptotic secrecy outage probability at high SNRs. Notably, in the analysis we take spatial correlation at the receiver into consideration. Apart from the advantage of our scheme over the conventional TAS/MRC scheme, we demonstrate that the outdated TAS reduces the secrecy diversity order from NANB to NB. We also demonstrate that antenna correlation improves the secrecy performance at low SNR but deteriorates the secrecy performance at medium and high SNRs, by affecting the secrecy array gain only.ARC Discovery Projects Grant DP150103905

On–Off-Based Secure Transmission Design With Outdated Channel State Information

We design new secure on-off transmission schemes in wiretap channels with outdated channel state information (CSI). In our design we consider not only the outdated CSI from the legitimate receiver but two distinct scenarios, depending on whether or not the outdated CSI from the eavesdropper is known at the transmitter. Under this consideration our schemes exploit the useful knowledge contained in the available outdated CSI, based on which the transmitter decides whether to transmit or not. We derive new closed-form expressions for the transmission probability, the connection outage probability, the secrecy outage probability, and the reliable and secure transmission probability to characterize the achievable performance. Based on these results, we present the optimal solutions that maximize the secrecy throughput under dual connection and secrecy outage constraints. Our analytical and numerical results offer detailed insights into the design of the wiretap coding parameters and the imposed outage constraints. We further show that allowing more freedom on the codeword transmission rate enables a larger feasible region of the dual outage constraints by exploiting the trade-off between reliability and security.ARC Discovery Projects Grant DP15010390