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

Generalized Adaptive Network Coding Aided Successive Relaying Based Noncoherent Cooperation

A generalized adaptive network coding (GANC) scheme is conceived for a multi-user, multi-relay scenario, where the multiple users transmit independent information streams to a common destination with the aid of multiple relays. The proposed GANC scheme is developed from adaptive network coded cooperation (ANCC), which aims for a high flexibility in order to: 1) allow arbitrary channel coding schemes to serve as the cross-layer network coding regime; 2) provide any arbitrary trade-off between the throughput and reliability by adjusting the ratio of the source nodes and the cooperating relay nodes. Furthermore, we incorporate the proposed GANC scheme in a novel successive relaying aided network (SRAN) in order to recover the typical 50% half-duplex relaying-induced throughput loss. However, it is unrealistic to expect that in addition to carrying out all the relaying functions, the relays could additionally estimate the source-to-relay channels. Hence noncoherent detection is employed in order to obviate the power-hungry channel estimation. Finally, we intrinsically amalgamate our GANC scheme with the joint network-channel coding (JNCC) concept into a powerful three-stage concatenated architecture relying on iterative detection, which is specifically designed for the destination node (DN). The proposed scheme is also capable of adapting to rapidly time-varying network topologies, while relying on energy-efficient detection

DMT Optimality of LR-Aided Linear Decoders for a General Class of Channels, Lattice Designs, and System Models

The work identifies the first general, explicit, and non-random MIMO encoder-decoder structures that guarantee optimality with respect to the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT), without employing a computationally expensive maximum-likelihood (ML) receiver. Specifically, the work establishes the DMT optimality of a class of regularized lattice decoders, and more importantly the DMT optimality of their lattice-reduction (LR)-aided linear counterparts. The results hold for all channel statistics, for all channel dimensions, and most interestingly, irrespective of the particular lattice-code applied. As a special case, it is established that the LLL-based LR-aided linear implementation of the MMSE-GDFE lattice decoder facilitates DMT optimal decoding of any lattice code at a worst-case complexity that grows at most linearly in the data rate. This represents a fundamental reduction in the decoding complexity when compared to ML decoding whose complexity is generally exponential in rate. The results' generality lends them applicable to a plethora of pertinent communication scenarios such as quasi-static MIMO, MIMO-OFDM, ISI, cooperative-relaying, and MIMO-ARQ channels, in all of which the DMT optimality of the LR-aided linear decoder is guaranteed. The adopted approach yields insight, and motivates further study, into joint transceiver designs with an improved SNR gap to ML decoding.Comment: 16 pages, 1 figure (3 subfigures), submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Optimizing Pilot Overhead for Ultra-Reliable Short-Packet Transmission

In this paper we optimize the pilot overhead for ultra-reliable short-packet transmission and investigate the dependence of this overhead on packet size and error probability. In particular, we consider a point-to-point communication in which one sensor sends messages to a central node, or base-station, over AWGN with Rayleigh fading channel. We formalize the optimization in terms of approximate achievable rates at a given block length, pilot length, and error probability. This leads to more accurate pilot overhead optimization. Simulation results show that it is important to take into account the packet size and the error probability when optimizing the pilot overhead.Comment: To be published on IEEE ICC 2017 Communication Theory Symposiu