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

Coalitions in Cooperative Wireless Networks

Cooperation between rational users in wireless networks is studied using coalitional game theory. Using the rate achieved by a user as its utility, it is shown that the stable coalition structure, i.e., set of coalitions from which users have no incentives to defect, depends on the manner in which the rate gains are apportioned among the cooperating users. Specifically, the stability of the grand coalition (GC), i.e., the coalition of all users, is studied. Transmitter and receiver cooperation in an interference channel (IC) are studied as illustrative cooperative models to determine the stable coalitions for both flexible (transferable) and fixed (non-transferable) apportioning schemes. It is shown that the stable sum-rate optimal coalition when only receivers cooperate by jointly decoding (transferable) is the GC. The stability of the GC depends on the detector when receivers cooperate using linear multiuser detectors (non-transferable). Transmitter cooperation is studied assuming that all receivers cooperate perfectly and that users outside a coalition act as jammers. The stability of the GC is studied for both the case of perfectly cooperating transmitters (transferrable) and under a partial decode-and-forward strategy (non-transferable). In both cases, the stability is shown to depend on the channel gains and the transmitter jamming strengths.Comment: To appear in the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication, Special Issue on Game Theory in Communication Systems, 200

A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances and Future Trends

This paper examines the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity, confidentiality, integrity and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state-of-the-art in physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer. We also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their counter-measures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive jammer, adaptive jammer and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.Comment: 36 pages. Accepted to Appear in Proceedings of the IEEE, 201

Secure Multiuser Communications in Wireless Sensor Networks with TAS and Cooperative Jamming

In this paper, we investigate the secure transmission in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consisting of one multiple-antenna base station (BS), multiple single-antenna legitimate users, one single-antenna eavesdropper and one multiple-antenna cooperative jammer. In an effort to reduce the scheduling complexity and extend the battery lifetime of the sensor nodes, the switch-and-stay combining (SSC) scheduling scheme is exploited over the sensor nodes. Meanwhile, transmit antenna selection (TAS) is employed at the BS and cooperative jamming (CJ) is adopted at the jammer node, aiming at achieving a satisfactory secrecy performance. Moreover, depending on whether the jammer node has the global channel state information (CSI) of both the legitimate channel and the eavesdropper's channel, it explores a zero-forcing beamforming (ZFB) scheme or a null-space artificial noise (NAN) scheme to confound the eavesdropper while avoiding the interference to the legitimate user. Building on this, we propose two novel hybrid secure transmission schemes, termed TAS-SSC-ZFB and TAS-SSC-NAN, for WSNs. We then derive the exact closed-form expressions for the secrecy outage probability and the effective secrecy throughput of both schemes to characterize the secrecy performance. Using these closed-form expressions, we further determine the optimal switching threshold and obtain the optimal power allocation factor between the BS and jammer node for both schemes to minimize the secrecy outage probability, while the optimal secrecy rate is decided to maximize the effective secrecy throughput for both schemes. Numerical results are provided to verify the theoretical analysis and illustrate the impact of key system parameters on the secrecy performance.This work was supported by the National Science Foundation of China (No. 61501507), and the Jiangsu Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (No. BK20150719). The work of Nan Yang is supported by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project (DP150103905)