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

Some MIMO applications in cognitive radio networks

In the last decade, the wireless communication technology has witnessed a rapid development, which led to a rapid growth in wireless applications and services. However, the radio spectrum resources scarcity resulting from using the traditional methods of fixed spectrum resources allocation has potential constraints on this wireless services rapid growth. Consequently, cognitive radio has been emerged as a possible solution for alleviating this spectrum scarcity problem by employing dynamic resource allocation strategies in order to utilize the available spectrum in a more efficient way so that finding opportunities for new wireless application services could be achieved. In cognitive radio networks, the radio spectrum resources utilization is improved by allowing unlicensed users, known as secondary users, to share the spectrum with licensed users, known as primary users, as long as this sharing do not induce harmful interference on the primary users, which completely entitled to utilize the spectrum. Motivated by MIMO techniques that have been used in practical systems as a means for high data rate transmission and a source for spatial diversity, and by its ease implementation with OFDM, different issues in multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) in both the uplink and downlink in the context of cognitive radio are studied in this thesis. More specifically, in the first thrust of this thesis, the spectrum spatial holes which could exist in an uplink MU-MIMO cell as a result of the possible free spatial dimensions resulted from the sparse activity of the primary users is studied; a modified sensing algorithm for these spectrum spatial holes that exploit both the block structure of the OFDM signals and the correlation of their activity states along time are proposed. The second thrust is concerned with cognitive radio relaying in the physical layer where the cognitive radio base station (CBS) relays the PU signal while transmitting its own signals to its SUs. We define secondary users with different priorities (different quality of service requirements); the different levels of priority for SUs are achieved by a newly proposed simple linear scheme based on zero forcing called Hierarchal Priority Zero Forcing scheme HPZF

A Survey of Physical Layer Security Techniques for 5G Wireless Networks and Challenges Ahead

Physical layer security which safeguards data confidentiality based on the information-theoretic approaches has received significant research interest recently. The key idea behind physical layer security is to utilize the intrinsic randomness of the transmission channel to guarantee the security in physical layer. The evolution towards 5G wireless communications poses new challenges for physical layer security research. This paper provides a latest survey of the physical layer security research on various promising 5G technologies, including physical layer security coding, massive multiple-input multiple-output, millimeter wave communications, heterogeneous networks, non-orthogonal multiple access, full duplex technology, etc. Technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends of physical layer security in 5G and beyond are discussed.Comment: To appear in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication

AirSync: Enabling Distributed Multiuser MIMO with Full Spatial Multiplexing

The enormous success of advanced wireless devices is pushing the demand for higher wireless data rates. Denser spectrum reuse through the deployment of more access points per square mile has the potential to successfully meet the increasing demand for more bandwidth. In theory, the best approach to density increase is via distributed multiuser MIMO, where several access points are connected to a central server and operate as a large distributed multi-antenna access point, ensuring that all transmitted signal power serves the purpose of data transmission, rather than creating "interference." In practice, while enterprise networks offer a natural setup in which distributed MIMO might be possible, there are serious implementation difficulties, the primary one being the need to eliminate phase and timing offsets between the jointly coordinated access points. In this paper we propose AirSync, a novel scheme which provides not only time but also phase synchronization, thus enabling distributed MIMO with full spatial multiplexing gains. AirSync locks the phase of all access points using a common reference broadcasted over the air in conjunction with a Kalman filter which closely tracks the phase drift. We have implemented AirSync as a digital circuit in the FPGA of the WARP radio platform. Our experimental testbed, comprised of two access points and two clients, shows that AirSync is able to achieve phase synchronization within a few degrees, and allows the system to nearly achieve the theoretical optimal multiplexing gain. We also discuss MAC and higher layer aspects of a practical deployment. To the best of our knowledge, AirSync offers the first ever realization of the full multiuser MIMO gain, namely the ability to increase the number of wireless clients linearly with the number of jointly coordinated access points, without reducing the per client rate.Comment: Submitted to Transactions on Networkin

Weighted sum rate maximization for cognitive MISO broadcast channel: Large system analysis

This paper considers the ergodic weighted sum rate (WSR) maximization problem for an underlay cognitive radio MISO broadcast channel, where a secondary network, consisting of a base-station with M transmit antennas and K single-antenna secondary users (SUs), is allowed to share the same spectrum with a primary user (PU), under an average transmit sum power (ATTP) constraint P av and an average interference power (AIP) constraint on the PU. We show that the ATTP constraint is always active, and as P av → ∞, the ergodic WSR approaches infinity similar to the conventional non-CR network case. A low-complexity suboptimal beamforming scheme (called partially-projected regularized zero-forcing beamforming `PP-RZFBF') with a closed-form beamformer is proposed. Due to the non-convexity of PP-RZFBF scheme, a large system analysis is conducted in the limit as M and K approach infinity with a fixed finite ratio r = K/M. We derive deterministic limiting approximations for the PP-RZFBF problem which enables us to determine asymptotically optimal beamformers for PP-RZFBF. Numerical simulations illustrate that the asymptotically optimal beamformers turn out to be quite effective even for small M, K