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

Distributed spectrum leasing via cooperation

“Cognitive radio” networks enable the coexistence of primary (licensed) and secondary (unlicensed) terminals. Conventional frameworks, namely commons and property-rights models, while being promising in certain aspects, appear to have significant drawbacks for implementation of large-scale distributed cognitive radio networks, due to the technological and theoretical limits on the ability of secondary activity to perform effective spectrum sensing and on the stringent constraints on protocols and architectures. To address the problems highlighted above, the framework of distributed spectrum leasing via cross-layer cooperation (DiSC) has been recently proposed as a basic mechanism to guide the design of decentralized cognitive radio networks. According to this framework, each primary terminal can ”lease” a transmission opportunity to a local secondary terminal in exchange for cooperation (relaying) as long as secondary quality-of-service (QoS) requirements are satisfied. The dissertation starts by investigating the performance bounds from an information-theoretical standpoint by focusing on the scenario of a single primary user and multiple secondary users with private messages. Achievable rate regions are derived for discrete memoryless and Gaussian models by considering Decode-and-Forward (DF), with both standard and parity-forwarding techniques, and Compress-and-Forward (CF), along with superposition coding at the secondary nodes. Then a framework is proposed that extends the analysis to multiple primary users and multiple secondary users by leveraging the concept of Generalized Nash Equilibrium. Accordingly, multiple primary users, each owning its own spectral resource, compete for the cooperation of the available secondary users under a shared constraint on all spectrum leasing decisions set by the secondary QoS requirements. A general formulation of the problem is given and solutions are proposed with different signaling requirements among the primary users. The novel idea of interference forwarding as a mechanism to enable DiSC is proposed, whereby primary users lease part of their spectrum to the secondary users if the latter assist by forwarding information about the interference to enable interference mitigation at the primary receivers. Finally, an application of DiSC in multi-tier wireless networks such as femtocells overlaid by macrocells whereby the femtocell base station acts as a relay for the macrocell users is presented. The performance advantages of the proposed application are evaluated by studying the transmission reliability of macro and femto users for a quasi-static fading channel in terms of outage probability and diversity-multiplexing trade-off for uplink and, more briefly, for downlink

Dynamic Spectrum Sharing in Cognitive Radio and Device-to-Device Systems

abstract: Cognitive radio (CR) and device-to-device (D2D) systems are two promising dynamic spectrum access schemes in wireless communication systems to provide improved quality-of-service, and efficient spectrum utilization. This dissertation shows that both CR and D2D systems benefit from properly designed cooperation scheme. In underlay CR systems, where secondary users (SUs) transmit simultaneously with primary users (PUs), reliable communication is by all means guaranteed for PUs, which likely deteriorates SUs’ performance. To overcome this issue, cooperation exclusively among SUs is achieved through multi-user diversity (MUD), where each SU is subject to an instantaneous interference constraint at the primary receiver. Therefore, the active number of SUs satisfying this constraint is random. Under different user distributions with the same mean number of SUs, the stochastic ordering of SU performance metrics including bit error rate (BER), outage probability, and ergodic capacity are made possible even without observing closed form expressions. Furthermore, a cooperation is assumed between primary and secondary networks, where those SUs exceeding the interference constraint facilitate PU’s transmission by relaying its signal. A fundamental performance trade-off between primary and secondary networks is observed, and it is illustrated that the proposed scheme outperforms non-cooperative underlay CR systems in the sense of system overall BER and sum achievable rate. Similar to conventional cellular networks, CR systems suffer from an overloaded receiver having to manage signals from a large number of users. To address this issue, D2D communications has been proposed, where direct transmission links are established between users in close proximity to offload the system traffic. Several new cooperative spectrum access policies are proposed allowing coexistence of multiple D2D pairs in order to improve the spectral efficiency. Despite the additional interference, it is shown that both the cellular user’s (CU) and the individual D2D user's achievable rates can be improved simultaneously when the number of D2D pairs is below a certain threshold, resulting in a significant multiplexing gain in the sense of D2D sum rate. This threshold is quantified for different policies using second order approximations for the average achievable rates for both the CU and the individual D2D user.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Electrical Engineering 201

Collaborative Distributed Beamforming for Spectrum-Sharing Systems

The scarcity of bandwidth has always been the main obstacle for providing reliable high date-rate wireless links, which are in great demand to accommodate nowadays and immediate future wireless applications. In addition, recent reports have showed inefficient usage and under-utilization of the available bandwidth. Cognitive radio (CR) has recently emerged as a promising solution to enhance the spectrum utilization, where it offers the ability for unlicensed users to access the licensed spectrum opportunistically. On one hand, by allowing opportunistic spectrum access, the overall spectrum utilization can be improved. On the other hand, transmission from cognitive nodes can cause severe interference to the licensed users of the spectrum. This requires cognitive radio networks (CRNs) to consider two essential design targets, namely, maximizing the spectrum utilization and minimizing the interference caused to the primary users (PUs). Such interference can be reduced through proper resource allocation, power control or other degrees of freedom techniques such as beamforming. In this thesis, we aim to use joint distributed beamforming and cooperative relaying in spectrum-sharing systems in an effort to enhance the spectrum efficiency and improve the performance of the secondary system. We investigate a one-way cooperative spectrum-sharing system in the presence of one PU and multiple PUs. We study two relaying schemes, namely, decode-and-forward (DF) and amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying in conjunction with distributed optimal beamforming. We employ zero forcing beamforming (ZFB) as a sub-optimal scheme, and compare both approaches through simulations. For both schemes, we derive closed-form expressions and asymptotic expressions for the outage probability and bit error rate (BER) over independent and identically distributed Rayleigh fading channels for binary phase shift keying (BPSK) and M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM) schemes. Numerical results show the effectiveness of the combination of the cooperative diversity and distributed beamforming in compensating for the loss in the secondary system's performance due to the primary user's co-channel interference (CCI). To further improve the spectrum efficiency, we employ distributed beamforming in two-way AF cooperative spectrum-sharing systems in the presence of multiple PUs. For this system, we investigate the transmission protocols over two, three and four time-slots. Our results show that the three time-slot protocol outperforms the two time-slot and four time-slot protocols in certain scenarios where it offers a good compromise between bandwidth efficiency and system performance. We extend the two-way relaying system to the DF scheme, where two practical two-way relaying strategies are investigated, namely, DF-XORing (bit-wise level) and DF-superposition (symbol-wise level). For each relaying strategy, we derive general optimal beamforming vectors and sup-optimal ZFB vectors at the relays. Employing ZFB, we present an analytical framework of the secondary system considering the effect of the primary-secondary mutual CCIs. Our results show that, when the received signals at the relays are weighted equally, the DF-XOR always outperforms both DF-superposition and AF relaying. In the last part of the thesis, we consider a limited feedback system model by assuming partial channel state information (CSI) of the interference channel between the secondary relays and primary receiver. In particular, the CSI feedback is limited only to the quantized channel direction information (CDI). To investigate the effect of the quantized CDI on the secondary system's performance, we derive closed-form expressions for the outage probability and the BER considering the mutual secondary-primary CCI. In the simulation results, we compare the system performance of the limited feedback with the perfect CSI. Our results show that the performance improves as the number of feedback bits increases

Cognitive Multiple Access Network with Outage Margin in the Primary System

This paper investigates the problem of spectrally efficient operation of a multiuser uplink cognitive radio system in the presence of a single primary link. The secondary system applies opportunistic interference cancelation (OIC) and decode the primary signal when such an opportunity is created. We derive the achievable rate in the secondary system when OIC is used. This scheme has a practical significance, since it enables rate adaptation without requiring any action from the primary system. The \emph{exact} expressions for outage probability of the primary user are derived, when the primary system is exposed to interference from secondary users. Moreover, approximated formulas and tight lower and upper bounds for the ergodic sum-rate capacity of the secondary network are found. Next, the power allocation is investigated in the secondary system for maximizing the sum-rate under an outage constraint at the primary system. We formulate the power optimization problem in various scenarios depending on the availability of channel state information and the type of power constraints, and propose a set of simple solutions. Finally, the analytical results are confirmed by simulations, indicating both the accuracy of the analysis, and the fact that the spectral-efficient, low-complexity, flexible, and high-performing cognitive radio can be designed based on the proposed schemes