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

Decode-and-Forward Relaying via Standard AWGN Coding and Decoding

A framework is developed for decode-and-forward based relaying using standard coding and decoding that are good for the single-input single-output (SISO) additive white Gaussian noise channel. The framework is applicable to various scenarios and demonstrated for several important cases. Each of these scenarios is transformed into an equivalent Gaussian multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) common-message broadcast problem, which proves useful even when all links are SISO ones. Over the effective MIMO broadcast channel, a recently developed Gaussian MIMO common-message broadcast scheme is applied. This scheme transforms the MIMO links into a set of parallel SISO channels with no loss of mutual information, using linear pre- and post-processing combined with successive decoding. Over these resulting SISO channels, “off-the-shelf” scalar codes may be used