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

Physical Layer Service Integration in 5G: Potentials and Challenges

High transmission rate and secure communication have been identified as the key targets that need to be effectively addressed by fifth generation (5G) wireless systems. In this context, the concept of physical-layer security becomes attractive, as it can establish perfect security using only the characteristics of wireless medium. Nonetheless, to further increase the spectral efficiency, an emerging concept, termed physical-layer service integration (PHY-SI), has been recognized as an effective means. Its basic idea is to combine multiple coexisting services, i.e., multicast/broadcast service and confidential service, into one integral service for one-time transmission at the transmitter side. This article first provides a tutorial on typical PHY-SI models. Furthermore, we propose some state-of-the-art solutions to improve the overall performance of PHY-SI in certain important communication scenarios. In particular, we highlight the extension of several concepts borrowed from conventional single-service communications, such as artificial noise (AN), eigenmode transmission etc., to the scenario of PHY-SI. These techniques are shown to be effective in the design of reliable and robust PHY-SI schemes. Finally, several potential research directions are identified for future work.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure

Joint Wireless Information and Energy Transfer in a K-User MIMO Interference Channel

Recently, joint wireless information and energy transfer (JWIET) methods have been proposed to relieve the battery limitation of wireless devices. However, the JWIET in a general K-user MIMO interference channel (IFC) has been unexplored so far. In this paper, we investigate for the first time the JWIET in K-user MIMO IFC, in which receivers either decode the incoming information data (information decoding, ID) or harvest the RF energy (energy harvesting, EH). In the K-user IFC, we consider three different scenarios according to the receiver mode -- i) multiple EH receivers and a single ID receiver, ii) multiple IDs and a single EH, and iii) multiple IDs and multiple EHs. For all scenarios, we have found a common necessary condition of the optimal transmission strategy and, accordingly, developed the transmission strategy that satisfies the common necessary condition, in which all the transmitters transferring energy exploit a rank-one energy beamforming. Furthermore, we have also proposed an iterative algorithm to optimize the covariance matrices of the transmitters that transfer information and the powers of the energy beamforming transmitters simultaneously, and identified the corresponding achievable rate-energy tradeoff region. Finally, we have shown that by selecting EH receivers according to their signal-to-leakage-and-harvested energy-ratio (SLER), we can improve the achievable rate-energy region further.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1303.169