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

Piggybacking Codes for Network Coding: The High/Low SNR Regime

We propose a piggybacking scheme for network coding where strong source inputs piggyback the weaker ones, a scheme necessary and sufficient to achieve the cut-set upper bound at high/low-snr regime, a new asymptotically optimal operational regime for the multihop Amplify and Forward (AF) networks

On the Performance of the Relay-ARQ Networks

This paper investigates the performance of relay networks in the presence of hybrid automatic repeat request (ARQ) feedback and adaptive power allocation. The throughput and the outage probability of different hybrid ARQ protocols are studied for independent and spatially-correlated fading channels. The results are obtained for the cases where there is a sum power constraint on the source and the relay or when each of the source and the relay are power-limited individually. With adaptive power allocation, the results demonstrate the efficiency of relay-ARQ techniques in different conditions.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol. 201

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

Network Code Design for Orthogonal Two-hop Network with Broadcasting Relay: A Joint Source-Channel-Network Coding Approach

This paper addresses network code design for robust transmission of sources over an orthogonal two-hop wireless network with a broadcasting relay. The network consists of multiple sources and destinations in which each destination, benefiting the relay signal, intends to decode a subset of the sources. Two special instances of this network are orthogonal broadcast relay channel and the orthogonal multiple access relay channel. The focus is on complexity constrained scenarios, e.g., for wireless sensor networks, where channel coding is practically imperfect. Taking a source-channel and network coding approach, we design the network code (mapping) at the relay such that the average reconstruction distortion at the destinations is minimized. To this end, by decomposing the distortion into its components, an efficient design algorithm is proposed. The resulting network code is nonlinear and substantially outperforms the best performing linear network code. A motivating formulation of a family of structured nonlinear network codes is also presented. Numerical results and comparison with linear network coding at the relay and the corresponding distortion-power bound demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes and a promising research direction.Comment: 27 pages, 9 figures, Submited to IEEE Transaction on Communicatio

Spatially-Coupled LDPC Codes for Decode-and-Forward Relaying of Two Correlated Sources over the BEC

We present a decode-and-forward transmission scheme based on spatially-coupled low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) codes for a network consisting of two (possibly correlated) sources, one relay, and one destination. The links between the nodes are modeled as binary erasure channels. Joint source-channel coding with joint channel decoding is used to exploit the correlation. The relay performs network coding. We derive analytical bounds on the achievable rates for the binary erasure time-division multiple-access relay channel with correlated sources. We then design bilayer SC-LDPC codes and analyze their asymptotic performance for this scenario. We prove analytically that the proposed coding scheme achieves the theoretical limit for symmetric channel conditions and uncorrelated sources. Using density evolution, we furthermore demonstrate that our scheme approaches the theoretical limit also for non-symmetric channel conditions and when the sources are correlated, and we observe the threshold saturation effect that is typical for spatially-coupled systems. Finally, we give simulation results for large block lengths, which validate the DE analysis.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Communications, to appea