Secrecy Wireless Information and Power Transfer in Fading Wiretap Channel

Simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) has recently drawn significant interests for its dual use of radio signals to provide wireless data and energy access at the same time. However, a challenging secrecy communication issue arises as the messages sent to the information receivers (IRs) may be eavesdropped by the energy receivers (ERs), which are presumed to harvest energy only from the received signals. To tackle this problem, we propose in this paper an artificial noise (AN) aided transmission scheme to facilitate the secrecy information transmission to IRs and yet meet the energy harvesting requirement for ERs, under the assumption that the AN can be cancelled at IRs but not at ERs. Specifically, the proposed scheme splits the transmit power into two parts, to send the confidential message to the IR and an AN to interfere with the ER, respectively. Under a simplified three-node wiretap channel setup, the transmit power allocations and power splitting ratios over fading channels are jointly optimized to minimize the outage probability for delay-limited secrecy information transmission, or to maximize the average rate for no-delay-limited secrecy information transmission, subject to a combination of average and peak power constraints at the transmitter as well as an average energy harvesting constraint at the ER. Both the secrecy outage probability minimization and average rate maximization problems are shown to be non-convex, for each of which we propose the optimal solution based on the dual decomposition as well as suboptimal solution based on the alternating optimization. Furthermore, two benchmark schemes are introduced for comparison. Finally, the performances of proposed schemes are evaluated by simulations in terms of various trade-offs for wireless (secrecy) information versus energy transmissions.Comment: to appear in IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technolog

Energy-Secrecy Trade-offs for Wireless Communication

This chapter investigates the secrecy-energy trade-offs for communication in wireless networks. It is shown that privacy requirements for applications such as image or video transmissions do not require perfect secrecy, and the level of privacy can be quantified using a Rate-Distortion metric. Using information theoretic analysis, the chapter formulates analytic secrecy trade-offs for various communication channel models. In particular we analyze the advantage of partial secrecy for the Gaussian and Rayleigh fading channel models and the MIMO channel. The impact of secrecy requirements and the inherent secrecy-energy-connectivity trade-offs are also analyzed for networks of wireless nodes

Secrecy Wireless Information and Power Transfer with MISO Beamforming

The dual use of radio signals for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) has recently drawn significant attention. To meet the practical requirement that energy receivers (ERs) operate with significantly higher received power as compared to information receivers (IRs), ERs need to be deployed in more proximity to the transmitter than IRs. However, due to the broadcast nature of wireless channels, one critical issue arises that the messages sent to IRs can be eavesdropped by ERs, which possess better channels from the transmitter. In this paper, we address this new secrecy communication problem in a multiuser multiple-input single-output (MISO) SWIPT system where one multi-antenna transmitter sends information and energy simultaneously to an IR and multiple ERs, each with one single antenna. To optimally design transmit beamforming vectors and their power allocation, two problems are investigated with different aims: the first problem maximizes the secrecy rate for IR subject to individual harvested energy constraints of ERs, while the second problem maximizes the weighted sum-energy transferred to ERs subject to a secrecy rate constraint for IR. We solve these two non-convex problems optimally by reformulating each of them into a two-stage problem. First, by fixing the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) target for ERs (for the first problem) or IR (for the second problem), we obtain the optimal beamforming and power allocation solution by applying the technique of semidefinite relaxation (SDR). Then, the original problems are solved by a one-dimension search over the optimal SINR target for ERs or IR. Furthermore, for each of the two studied problems, suboptimal solutions of lower complexity are also proposed in which the information and energy beamforming vectors are separately designed with their power allocation.Comment: accepted by IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. Longer version of arXiv:1306.096

A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances and Future Trends

This paper examines the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity, confidentiality, integrity and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state-of-the-art in physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer. We also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their counter-measures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive jammer, adaptive jammer and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.Comment: 36 pages. Accepted to Appear in Proceedings of the IEEE, 201