A Survey of Physical Layer Security Techniques for 5G Wireless Networks and Challenges Ahead

Physical layer security which safeguards data confidentiality based on the information-theoretic approaches has received significant research interest recently. The key idea behind physical layer security is to utilize the intrinsic randomness of the transmission channel to guarantee the security in physical layer. The evolution towards 5G wireless communications poses new challenges for physical layer security research. This paper provides a latest survey of the physical layer security research on various promising 5G technologies, including physical layer security coding, massive multiple-input multiple-output, millimeter wave communications, heterogeneous networks, non-orthogonal multiple access, full duplex technology, etc. Technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends of physical layer security in 5G and beyond are discussed.Comment: To appear in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication

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

An Overview of Physical Layer Security with Finite-Alphabet Signaling

Providing secure communications over the physical layer with the objective of achieving perfect secrecy without requiring a secret key has been receiving growing attention within the past decade. The vast majority of the existing studies in the area of physical layer security focus exclusively on the scenarios where the channel inputs are Gaussian distributed. However, in practice, the signals employed for transmission are drawn from discrete signal constellations such as phase shift keying and quadrature amplitude modulation. Hence, understanding the impact of the finite-alphabet input constraints and designing secure transmission schemes under this assumption is a mandatory step towards a practical implementation of physical layer security. With this motivation, this article reviews recent developments on physical layer security with finite-alphabet inputs. We explore transmit signal design algorithms for single-antenna as well as multi-antenna wiretap channels under different assumptions on the channel state information at the transmitter. Moreover, we present a review of the recent results on secure transmission with discrete signaling for various scenarios including multi-carrier transmission systems, broadcast channels with confidential messages, cognitive multiple access and relay networks. Throughout the article, we stress the important behavioral differences of discrete versus Gaussian inputs in the context of the physical layer security. We also present an overview of practical code construction over Gaussian and fading wiretap channels, and we discuss some open problems and directions for future research.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials (1st Revision

Coding mechanisms for communication and compression : analysis of wireless channels and DNA sequencing

textThis thesis comprises of two related but distinct components: Coding arguments for communication channels and information-theoretic analysis for haplotype assembly. The common thread for both problems is utilizing information and coding theoretic principles in understanding their underlying mechanisms. For the first class of problems, I study two practical challenges that prevent optimal discrete codes utilizing in real communication and compression systems, namely, coding over analog alphabet and fading. In particular, I use an expansion coding scheme to convert the original analog channel coding and source coding problems into a set of independent discrete subproblems. By adopting optimal discrete codes over the expanded levels, this low-complexity coding scheme can approach Shannon limit perfectly or in ratio. Meanwhile, I design a polar coding scheme to deal with the unstable state of fading channels. This novel coding mechanism of hierarchically utilizing different types of polar codes has been proved to be ergodic capacity achievable for several fading systems, without channel state information known at the transmitter. For the second class of problems, I build an information-theoretic view for haplotype assembly. More precisely, the recovery of the target pair of haplotype sequences using short reads is rephrased as the joint source-channel coding problem. Two binary messages, representing haplotypes and chromosome memberships of reads, are encoded and transmitted over a channel with erasures and errors, where the channel model reflects salient features of highthroughput sequencing. The focus is on determining the required number of reads for reliable haplotype reconstruction.Electrical and Computer Engineerin

An Overview of Physical Layer Security with Finite Alphabet Signaling

Providing secure communications over the physical layer with the objective of achieving secrecy without requiring a secret key has been receiving growing attention within the past decade. The vast majority of the existing studies in the area of physical layer security focus exclusively on the scenarios where the channel inputs are Gaussian distributed. However, in practice, the signals employed for transmission are drawn from discrete signal constellations such as phase shift keying and quadrature amplitude modulation. Hence, understanding the impact of the finite-alphabet input constraints and designing secure transmission schemes under this assumption is a mandatory step towards a practical implementation of physical layer security. With this motivation, this article reviews recent developments on physical layer security with finite-alphabet inputs. We explore transmit signal design algorithms for single-antenna as well as multi-antenna wiretap channels under different assumptions on the channel state information at the transmitter. Moreover, we present a review of the recent results on secure transmission with discrete signaling for various scenarios including multi-carrier transmission systems, broadcast channels with confidential messages, cognitive multiple access and relay networks. Throughout the article, we stress the important behavioral differences of discrete versus Gaussian inputs in the context of the physical layer security. We also present an overview of practical code construction over Gaussian and fading wiretap channels, and discuss some open problems and directions for future research

D11.2 Consolidated results on the performance limits of wireless communications

Deliverable D11.2 del projecte europeu NEWCOM#The report presents the Intermediate Results of N# JRAs on Performance Limits of Wireless Communications and highlights the fundamental issues that have been investigated by the WP1.1. The report illustrates the Joint Research Activities (JRAs) already identified during the first year of the project which are currently ongoing. For each activity there is a description, an illustration of the adherence and relevance with the identified fundamental open issues, a short presentation of the preliminary results, and a roadmap for the joint research work in the next year. Appendices for each JRA give technical details on the scientific activity in each JRA.Peer ReviewedPreprin

Semantic and effective communications

Shannon and Weaver categorized communications into three levels of problems: the technical problem, which tries to answer the question "how accurately can the symbols of communication be transmitted?"; the semantic problem, which asks the question "how precisely do the transmitted symbols convey the desired meaning?"; the effectiveness problem, which strives to answer the question "how effectively does the received meaning affect conduct in the desired way?". Traditionally, communication technologies mainly addressed the technical problem, ignoring the semantics or the effectiveness problems. Recently, there has been increasing interest to address the higher level semantic and effectiveness problems, with proposals ranging from semantic to goal oriented communications. In this thesis, we propose to formulate the semantic problem as a joint source-channel coding (JSCC) problem and the effectiveness problem as a multi-agent partially observable Markov decision process (MA-POMDP). As such, for the semantic problem, we propose DeepWiVe, the first-ever end-to-end JSCC video transmission scheme that leverages the power of deep neural networks (DNNs) to directly map video signals to channel symbols, combining video compression, channel coding, and modulation steps into a single neural transform. We also further show that it is possible to use predefined constellation designs as well as secure the physical layer communication against eavesdroppers for deep learning (DL) driven JSCC schemes, making such schemes much more viable for deployment in the real world. For the effectiveness problem, we propose a novel formulation by considering multiple agents communicating over a noisy channel in order to achieve better coordination and cooperation in a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework. Specifically, we consider a MA-POMDP, in which the agents, in addition to interacting with the environment, can also communicate with each other over a noisy communication channel. The noisy communication channel is considered explicitly as part of the dynamics of the environment, and the message each agent sends is part of the action that the agent can take. As a result, the agents learn not only to collaborate with each other but also to communicate "effectively'' over a noisy channel. Moreover, we show that this framework generalizes both the semantic and technical problems. In both instances, we show that the resultant communication scheme is superior to one where the communication is considered separately from the underlying semantic or goal of the problem.Open Acces