Reliable Physical Layer Network Coding

When two or more users in a wireless network transmit simultaneously, their electromagnetic signals are linearly superimposed on the channel. As a result, a receiver that is interested in one of these signals sees the others as unwanted interference. This property of the wireless medium is typically viewed as a hindrance to reliable communication over a network. However, using a recently developed coding strategy, interference can in fact be harnessed for network coding. In a wired network, (linear) network coding refers to each intermediate node taking its received packets, computing a linear combination over a finite field, and forwarding the outcome towards the destinations. Then, given an appropriate set of linear combinations, a destination can solve for its desired packets. For certain topologies, this strategy can attain significantly higher throughputs over routing-based strategies. Reliable physical layer network coding takes this idea one step further: using judiciously chosen linear error-correcting codes, intermediate nodes in a wireless network can directly recover linear combinations of the packets from the observed noisy superpositions of transmitted signals. Starting with some simple examples, this survey explores the core ideas behind this new technique and the possibilities it offers for communication over interference-limited wireless networks.Comment: 19 pages, 14 figures, survey paper to appear in Proceedings of the IEE

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

Diversity analysis, code design, and tight error rate lower bound for binary joint network-channel coding

Joint network-channel codes (JNCC) can improve the performance of communication in wireless networks, by combining, at the physical layer, the channel codes and the network code as an overall error-correcting code. JNCC is increasingly proposed as an alternative to a standard layered construction, such as the OSI-model. The main performance metrics for JNCCs are scalability to larger networks and error rate. The diversity order is one of the most important parameters determining the error rate. The literature on JNCC is growing, but a rigorous diversity analysis is lacking, mainly because of the many degrees of freedom in wireless networks, which makes it very hard to prove general statements on the diversity order. In this article, we consider a network with slowly varying fading point-to-point links, where all sources also act as relay and additional non-source relays may be present. We propose a general structure for JNCCs to be applied in such network. In the relay phase, each relay transmits a linear transform of a set of source codewords. Our main contributions are the proposition of an upper and lower bound on the diversity order, a scalable code design and a new lower bound on the word error rate to assess the performance of the network code. The lower bound on the diversity order is only valid for JNCCs where the relays transform only two source codewords. We then validate this analysis with an example which compares the JNCC performance to that of a standard layered construction. Our numerical results suggest that as networks grow, it is difficult to perform significantly better than a standard layered construction, both on a fundamental level, expressed by the outage probability, as on a practical level, expressed by the word error rate

Weak Secrecy in the Multi-Way Untrusted Relay Channel with Compute-and-Forward

We investigate the problem of secure communications in a Gaussian multi-way relay channel applying the compute-and-forward scheme using nested lattice codes. All nodes employ half-duplex operation and can exchange confidential messages only via an untrusted relay. The relay is assumed to be honest but curious, i.e., an eavesdropper that conforms to the system rules and applies the intended relaying scheme. We start with the general case of the single-input multiple-output (SIMO) L-user multi-way relay channel and provide an achievable secrecy rate region under a weak secrecy criterion. We show that the securely achievable sum rate is equivalent to the difference between the computation rate and the multiple access channel (MAC) capacity. Particularly, we show that all nodes must encode their messages such that the common computation rate tuple falls outside the MAC capacity region of the relay. We provide results for the single-input single-output (SISO) and the multiple-input single-input (MISO) L-user multi-way relay channel as well as the two-way relay channel. We discuss these results and show the dependency between channel realization and achievable secrecy rate. We further compare our result to available results in the literature for different schemes and show that the proposed scheme operates close to the compute-and-forward rate without secrecy.Comment: submitted to JSAC Special Issue on Fundamental Approaches to Network Coding in Wireless Communication System

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

Pairwise Check Decoding for LDPC Coded Two-Way Relay Block Fading Channels

Partial decoding has the potential to achieve a larger capacity region than full decoding in two-way relay (TWR) channels. Existing partial decoding realizations are however designed for Gaussian channels and with a static physical layer network coding (PLNC). In this paper, we propose a new solution for joint network coding and channel decoding at the relay, called pairwise check decoding (PCD), for low-density parity-check (LDPC) coded TWR system over block fading channels. The main idea is to form a check relationship table (check-relation-tab) for the superimposed LDPC coded packet pair in the multiple access (MA) phase in conjunction with an adaptive PLNC mapping in the broadcast (BC) phase. Using PCD, we then present a partial decoding method, two-stage closest-neighbor clustering with PCD (TS-CNC-PCD), with the aim of minimizing the worst pairwise error probability. Moreover, we propose the minimum correlation optimization (MCO) for selecting the better check-relation-tabs. Simulation results confirm that the proposed TS-CNC-PCD offers a sizable gain over the conventional XOR with belief propagation (BP) in fading channels.Comment: to appear in IEEE Trans. on Communications, 201