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

Power Efficient and Secure Full-Duplex Wireless Communication Systems

In this paper, we study resource allocation for a full-duplex (FD) radio base station serving multiple half-duplex (HD) downlink and uplink users simultaneously. The considered resource allocation algorithm design is formulated as a non-convex optimization problem taking into account minimum required receive signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratios (SINRs) for downlink and uplink communication and maximum tolerable SINRs at potential eavesdroppers. The proposed optimization framework enables secure downlink and uplink communication via artificial noise generation in the downlink for interfering the potential eavesdroppers. We minimize the weighted sum of the total downlink and uplink transmit power by jointly optimizing the downlink beamformer, the artificial noise covariance matrix, and the uplink transmit power. We adopt a semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation approach to obtain a tractable solution for the considered problem. The tightness of the SDP relaxation is revealed by examining a sufficient condition for the global optimality of the solution. Simulation results demonstrate the excellent performance achieved by the proposed scheme and the significant transmit power savings enabled optimization of the artificial noise covariance matrix.Comment: 6 pages, invited paper, IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS) 2015 in Florence, Italy, on September 30, 201

Physical Layer Service Integration in 5G: Potentials and Challenges

High transmission rate and secure communication have been identified as the key targets that need to be effectively addressed by fifth generation (5G) wireless systems. In this context, the concept of physical-layer security becomes attractive, as it can establish perfect security using only the characteristics of wireless medium. Nonetheless, to further increase the spectral efficiency, an emerging concept, termed physical-layer service integration (PHY-SI), has been recognized as an effective means. Its basic idea is to combine multiple coexisting services, i.e., multicast/broadcast service and confidential service, into one integral service for one-time transmission at the transmitter side. This article first provides a tutorial on typical PHY-SI models. Furthermore, we propose some state-of-the-art solutions to improve the overall performance of PHY-SI in certain important communication scenarios. In particular, we highlight the extension of several concepts borrowed from conventional single-service communications, such as artificial noise (AN), eigenmode transmission etc., to the scenario of PHY-SI. These techniques are shown to be effective in the design of reliable and robust PHY-SI schemes. Finally, several potential research directions are identified for future work.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure

Energy-Efficient Wireless Communications with Distributed Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces

This paper investigates the problem of resource allocation for a wireless communication network with distributed reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs). In this network, multiple RISs are spatially distributed to serve wireless users and the energy efficiency of the network is maximized by dynamically controlling the on-off status of each RIS as well as optimizing the reflection coefficients matrix of the RISs. This problem is posed as a joint optimization problem of transmit beamforming and RIS control, whose goal is to maximize the energy efficiency under minimum rate constraints of the users. To solve this problem, two iterative algorithms are proposed for the single-user case and multi-user case. For the single-user case, the phase optimization problem is solved by using a successive convex approximation method, which admits a closed-form solution at each step. Moreover, the optimal RIS on-off status is obtained by using the dual method. For the multi-user case, a low-complexity greedy searching method is proposed to solve the RIS on-off optimization problem. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves up to 33\% and 68\% gains in terms of the energy efficiency in both single-user and multi-user cases compared to the conventional RIS scheme and amplify-and-forward relay scheme, respectively