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

Secure Beamforming for MIMO Two-Way Communications with an Untrusted Relay

This paper studies the secure beamforming design in a multiple-antenna three-node system where two source nodes exchange messages with the help of an untrusted relay node. The relay acts as both an essential signal forwarder and a potential eavesdropper. Both two-phase and three-phase two-way relay strategies are considered. Our goal is to jointly optimize the source and relay beamformers for maximizing the secrecy sum rate of the two-way communications. We first derive the optimal relay beamformer structures. Then, iterative algorithms are proposed to find source and relay beamformers jointly based on alternating optimization. Furthermore, we conduct asymptotic analysis on the maximum secrecy sum-rate. Our analysis shows that when all transmit powers approach infinity, the two-phase two-way relay scheme achieves the maximum secrecy sum rate if the source beamformers are designed such that the received signals at the relay align in the same direction. This reveals an important advantage of signal alignment technique in against eavesdropping. It is also shown that if the source powers approach zero the three-phase scheme performs the best while the two-phase scheme is even worse than direct transmission. Simulation results have verified the efficiency of the secure beamforming algorithms as well as the analytical findings.Comment: 10 figures, Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin

Joint Source and Relay Precoding Designs for MIMO Two-Way Relaying Based on MSE Criterion

Properly designed precoders can significantly improve the spectral efficiency of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relay systems. In this paper, we investigate joint source and relay precoding design based on the mean-square-error (MSE) criterion in MIMO two-way relay systems, where two multi-antenna source nodes exchange information via a multi-antenna amplify-and-forward relay node. This problem is non-convex and its optimal solution remains unsolved. Aiming to find an efficient way to solve the problem, we first decouple the primal problem into three tractable sub-problems, and then propose an iterative precoding design algorithm based on alternating optimization. The solution to each sub-problem is optimal and unique, thus the convergence of the iterative algorithm is guaranteed. Secondly, we propose a structured precoding design to lower the computational complexity. The proposed precoding structure is able to parallelize the channels in the multiple access (MAC) phase and broadcast (BC) phase. It thus reduces the precoding design to a simple power allocation problem. Lastly, for the special case where only a single data stream is transmitted from each source node, we present a source-antenna-selection (SAS) based precoding design algorithm. This algorithm selects only one antenna for transmission from each source and thus requires lower signalling overhead. Comprehensive simulation is conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of all the proposed precoding designs.Comment: 32 pages, 10 figure

Grassmannian Beamforming for MIMO Amplify-and-Forward Relaying

In this paper, we derive the optimal transmitter/ receiver beamforming vectors and relay weighting matrix for the multiple-input multiple-output amplify-and-forward relay channel. The analysis is accomplished in two steps. In the first step, the direct link between the transmitter (Tx) and receiver (Rx) is ignored and we show that the transmitter and the relay should map their signals to the strongest right singular vectors of the Tx-relay and relay-Rx channels. Based on the distributions of these vectors for independent identically distributed (i.i.d.) Rayleigh channels, the Grassmannian codebooks are used for quantizing and sending back the channel information to the transmitter and the relay. The simulation results show that even a few number of bits can considerably increase the link reliability in terms of bit error rate. For the second step, the direct link is considered in the problem model and we derive the optimization problem that identifies the optimal Tx beamforming vector. For the i.i.d Rayleigh channels, we show that the solution to this problem is uniformly distributed on the unit sphere and we justify the appropriateness of the Grassmannian codebook (for determining the optimal beamforming vector), both analytically and by simulation. Finally, a modified quantizing scheme is presented which introduces a negligible degradation in the system performance but significantly reduces the required number of feedback bits.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Communications, Special Issue on Exploiting Limited Feedback in Tomorrows Wireless Communication Network

Nonregenerative MIMO Relaying with Optimal Transmit Antenna Selection

We derive optimal SNR-based transmit antenna selection rules at the source and relay for the nonregenerative half duplex MIMO relay channel. While antenna selection is a suboptimal form of beamforming, it has the advantage that the optimization is tractable and can be implemented with only a few bits of feedback from the destination to the source and relay. We compare the bit error rate of optimal antenna selection at both the source and relay to other proposed beamforming techniques and propose methods for performing the necessary limited feedback