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

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

Regularized Channel Inversion for Simultaneous Confidential Broadcasting and Power Transfer: A Large System Analysis

We propose for the first time new transmission schemes based on linear precoding to enable simultaneous confidential broadcasting and power transfer (SCBPT) in a multiuser multi-input single-output (MISO) network, where a BS with N antennas simultaneously transmits power and confidential messages to K single-antenna users. We first design two transmission schemes based on the rules of regularized channel inversion (RCI) for both power splitting (PS) and time switching (TS) receiver architectures, namely, RCI-PS and RCI-TS schemes. For each scheme, we derive channel-independent expressions to approximate the secrecy sum rate and the harvested power in the large-system regime where K, N → ∞ with a fixed ratio β = K/N. Based on the large-system results, we jointly optimize the regularization parameter of the RCI and the PS ratio or the TS ratio such that the secrecy sum rate is maximized subject to an energy-harvesting constraint. We then present the tradeoff between the secrecy sum rate and the harvested power achieved by each scheme, and find that neither scheme always outperforms the other one. Motivated by this fact, we design an RCI-hybrid scheme based on the RCI and a newly proposed hybrid receiver architecture. The hybrid receiver architecture takes advantages of both the PS and TS receiver architectures. We show that the RCI-hybrid scheme outperforms both the RCI-PS and RCI-TS schemes.ARC Discovery Projects Grant DP15010390

Rate-Energy Balanced Precoding Design for SWIPT based Two-Way Relay Systems

Simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) technique is a popular strategy to convey both information and RF energy for harvesting at receivers. In this regard, we consider a two-way relay system with multiple users and a multi-antenna relay employing SWIPT strategy, where splitting the received signal leads to a rate-energy trade-off. In literature, the works on transceiver design have been studied using computationally intensive and suboptimal convex relaxation based schemes. In this paper, we study the balanced precoder design using chordal distance (CD) decomposition, which incurs much lower complexity, and is flexible to dynamic energy requirements. It is analyzed that given a non-negative value of CD, the achieved harvested energy for the proposed balanced precoder is higher than that for the perfect interference alignment (IA) precoder. The corresponding loss in sum rates is also analyzed via an upper bound. Simulation results add that the IA schemes based on mean-squared error are better suited for the SWIPT maximization than the subspace alignment-based methods.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2101.1216

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