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

On the optimization of distributed compression in multirelay cooperative networks

In this paper, we consider multirelay cooperative networks for the Rayleigh fading channel, where each relay, upon receiving its own channel observation, independently compresses it and forwards the compressed information to the destination. Although the compression at each relay is distributed using Wyner-Ziv coding, there exists an opportunity for jointly optimizing compression at multiple relays to maximize the achievable rate. Considering Gaussian signaling, a primal optimization problem is formulated accordingly. We prove that the primal problem can be solved by resorting to its Lagrangian dual problem, and an iterative optimization algorithm is proposed. The analysis is further extended to a hybrid scheme, where the employed forwarding scheme depends on the decoding status of each relay. The relays that are capable of successful decoding perform a decode-and-forward (DF) scheme, and the rest conduct distributed compression. The hybrid scheme allows the cooperative network to adapt to the changes of the channel conditions and benefit from an enhanced level of flexibility. Numerical results from both spectrum and energy efficiency perspectives show that the joint optimization improves efficiency of compression and identify the scenarios where the proposed schemes outperform the conventional forwarding schemes. The findings provide important insights into the optimal deployment of relays in a realistic cellular network

Dispensing with channel estimation: differentially modulated cooperative wireless communications

As a benefit of bypassing the potentially excessive complexity and yet inaccurate channel estimation, differentially encoded modulation in conjunction with low-complexity noncoherent detection constitutes a viable candidate for user-cooperative systems, where estimating all the links by the relays is unrealistic. In order to stimulate further research on differentially modulated cooperative systems, a number of fundamental challenges encountered in their practical implementations are addressed, including the time-variant-channel-induced performance erosion, flexible cooperative protocol designs, resource allocation as well as its high-spectral-efficiency transceiver design. Our investigations demonstrate the quantitative benefits of cooperative wireless networks both from a pure capacity perspective as well as from a practical system design perspective