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

Secure Satellite Communication Systems Design with Individual Secrecy Rate Constraints

In this paper, we study multibeam satellite secure communication through physical (PHY) layer security techniques, i.e., joint power control and beamforming. By first assuming that the Channel State Information (CSI) is available and the beamforming weights are fixed, a novel secure satellite system design is investigated to minimize the transmit power with individual secrecy rate constraints. An iterative algorithm is proposed to obtain an optimized power allocation strategy. Moreover, sub-optimal beamforming weights are obtained by completely eliminating the co-channel interference and nulling the eavesdroppers' signal simultaneously. In order to obtain jointly optimized power allocation and beamforming strategy in some practical cases, e.g., with certain estimation errors of the CSI, we further evaluate the impact of the eavesdropper's CSI on the secure multibeam satellite system design. The convergence of the iterative algorithm is proven under justifiable assumptions. The performance is evaluated by taking into account the impact of the number of antenna elements, number of beams, individual secrecy rate requirement, and CSI. The proposed novel secure multibeam satellite system design can achieve optimized power allocation to ensure the minimum individual secrecy rate requirement. The results show that the joint beamforming scheme is more favorable than fixed beamforming scheme, especially in the cases of a larger number of satellite antenna elements and higher secrecy rate requirement. Finally, we compare the results under the current satellite air-interface in DVB-S2 and the results under Gaussian inputs.Comment: 34 pages, 10 figures, 1 table, submitted to "Transactions on Information Forensics and Security

Transmission resource allocation in multi-antenna wireless communication systems with channel uncertainty

In this thesis we investigate the design of transmission resource allocation in current and future wireless communication systems. We focus on systems with multiple antennas and characterize their performance from an information-theoretic viewpoint. The goal of this work is to provide practical transmission and resource allocation strategies taking into account imperfections in estimating the wireless channel, as well as the broadcast nature of the wireless channel. In the first part of the thesis, we consider training-based transmission schemes in which pilot symbols are inserted into data blocks to facilitate channel estimation. We consider one-way training-based systems with and without feedback, as well as two-way training-based systems. Two-way training enables both the transmitter and the receiver to obtain the channel state information (CSI) through reverse training and forward training, respectively. In all considered cases, we derive efficient strategies for transmit time and/or energy allocation among the pilot and data symbols. These strategies usually have analytical closed-form expressions and can achieve near optimal capacity performance evidenced by extensive numerical analysis. In one-way training-based systems without feedback, we consider both spatially independent and correlated channels. For spatially independent channels, we provide analytical bounds on the optimal training length and study the optimal antenna con¯guration that maximizes an ergodic capacity lower bound. For spatially correlated channels, we provide simple pilot and data transmission strategies that are robust under least-favorable channel correlation conditions. In one-way training-based systems with feedback, we study channel gain feedback (CGF), channel covariance feedback (CCF) and hybrid feedback. For spatially independent channels with CGF, we show that the solutions to the optimal training length and energy coincide with those for systems without feedback. For spatially correlated channels with CCF, we propose a simple transmission scheme, taking into account the fact that the optimal training length is at most as large as the number of transmit antennas. We then provided solution to the optimal energy allocation between pilot and data transmissions, which does not depend on the channel spatial correlation under a mild condition. Our derived resource allocation strategies in CGF and CCF systems are extended to hybrid CCF-CGF systems. In two-way training-based systems, we provide analytical solutions to the transmit power distribution among the different training phases and the data transmission phase. These solutions are shown to have near optimal symbol error rate (SER) and capacity performance. We find that the use of two-way training can provide noticeable performance improvement over reverse training only when the system is operating at moderate to high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and using high-order modulations. While this improvement from two-way training is insignificant at low SNR or low-order modulations. In the second part of the thesis, we consider transmission resource allocation in security-constrained systems. Due to the broadcast nature of the wireless medium, security is a fundamental issue in wireless communications. To guarantee secure communication in the presence of eavesdroppers, we consider a multi-antenna transmission strategy which sends both an information signal to the intended receiver and a noise-like signal isotropically to confuse the eavesdroppers. We study the optimal transmit power allocation between the information signal and the artificial noise. In particular, we show that equal power allocation is a near optimal strategy for non-colluding eavesdroppers, while more power should be used to generate the artificial noise for colluding eavesdroppers. In the presence of channel estimation errors, we find that it is better to create more artificial noise than to increase the information signal strength

Fixed-rank Rayleigh Quotient Maximization by an MMPSK Sequence

Certain optimization problems in communication systems, such as limited-feedback constant-envelope beamforming or noncoherent $M$-ary phase-shift keying ($M$PSK) sequence detection, result in the maximization of a fixed-rank positive semidefinite quadratic form over the $M$PSK alphabet. This form is a special case of the Rayleigh quotient of a matrix and, in general, its maximization by an $M$PSK sequence is $\mathcal{NP}$-hard. However, if the rank of the matrix is not a function of its size, then the optimal solution can be computed with polynomial complexity in the matrix size. In this work, we develop a new technique to efficiently solve this problem by utilizing auxiliary continuous-valued angles and partitioning the resulting continuous space of solutions into a polynomial-size set of regions, each of which corresponds to a distinct $M$PSK sequence. The sequence that maximizes the Rayleigh quotient is shown to belong to this polynomial-size set of sequences, thus efficiently reducing the size of the feasible set from exponential to polynomial. Based on this analysis, we also develop an algorithm that constructs this set in polynomial time and show that it is fully parallelizable, memory efficient, and rank scalable. The proposed algorithm compares favorably with other solvers for this problem that have appeared recently in the literature.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures, To appear in IEEE Transactions on Communication

Frequency-Domain Channel Estimation and Equalization for Single Carrier Underwater Acoustic Communications

A new frequency-domain channel estimation and equalization (FDE) scheme is proposed for single carrier (SC) underwater acoustic communications. The proposed SC-FDE employs a small training signal block for initial channel estimation in the frequency domain and converts the estimated transfer function to a desired DFT (discrete Fourier transform) size for channel equalization of the data blocks. The frequency domain equalizer is designed using the linear minimum mean square error criterion. A new phase coherent detection scheme is also proposed and deployed to combat the phase drift due to the instantaneous Doppler in the underwater channels. The channel transfer functions and group-averaged phase drift are re-estimated adaptively in a decision-directed manner for each data block in a packet, which contains M blocks of QPSK data. The proposed SC-FDE method is applied to single input multiple output (SIMO) systems using the experimental data measured off the coast of Panama City, Florida, USA, June 2007. The uncoded bit error rate of the SIMO systems varies between 1.3% to 6.8 x 10^-5 when 4 ~ 8 receive hydrophones are utilized, and the source-receiver range is 5.06 km

Two-Way Training for Discriminatory Channel Estimation in Wireless MIMO Systems

This work examines the use of two-way training to efficiently discriminate the channel estimation performances at a legitimate receiver (LR) and an unauthorized receiver (UR) in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless system. This work improves upon the original discriminatory channel estimation (DCE) scheme proposed by Chang et al where multiple stages of feedback and retraining were used. While most studies on physical layer secrecy are under the information-theoretic framework and focus directly on the data transmission phase, studies on DCE focus on the training phase and aim to provide a practical signal processing technique to discriminate between the channel estimation performances at LR and UR. A key feature of DCE designs is the insertion of artificial noise (AN) in the training signal to degrade the channel estimation performance at UR. To do so, AN must be placed in a carefully chosen subspace based on the transmitter's knowledge of LR's channel in order to minimize its effect on LR. In this paper, we adopt the idea of two-way training that allows both the transmitter and LR to send training signals to facilitate channel estimation at both ends. Both reciprocal and non-reciprocal channels are considered and a two-way DCE scheme is proposed for each scenario. {For mathematical tractability, we assume that all terminals employ the linear minimum mean square error criterion for channel estimation. Based on the mean square error (MSE) of the channel estimates at all terminals,} we formulate and solve an optimization problem where the optimal power allocation between the training signal and AN is found by minimizing the MSE of LR's channel estimate subject to a constraint on the MSE achievable at UR. Numerical results show that the proposed DCE schemes can effectively discriminate between the channel estimation and hence the data detection performances at LR and UR.Comment: 1