Secure Massive MIMO Transmission with an Active Eavesdropper

In this paper, we investigate secure and reliable transmission strategies for multi-cell multi-user massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with a multi-antenna active eavesdropper. We consider a time-division duplex system where uplink training is required and an active eavesdropper can attack the training phase to cause pilot contamination at the transmitter. This forces the precoder used in the subsequent downlink transmission phase to implicitly beamform towards the eavesdropper, thus increasing its received signal power. Assuming matched filter precoding and artificial noise (AN) generation at the transmitter, we derive an asymptotic achievable secrecy rate when the number of transmit antennas approaches infinity. For the case of a single-antenna active eavesdropper, we obtain a closed-form expression for the optimal power allocation policy for the transmit signal and the AN, and find the minimum transmit power required to ensure reliable secure communication. Furthermore, we show that the transmit antenna correlation diversity of the intended users and the eavesdropper can be exploited in order to improve the secrecy rate. In fact, under certain orthogonality conditions of the channel covariance matrices, the secrecy rate loss introduced by the eavesdropper can be completely mitigated.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1505.0123

Jamming Detection in Massive MIMO Systems

This paper considers the physical layer security of a pilot-based massive multiple-input multiple-output (MaMIMO) system in presence of a multi-antenna jammer. To improve security of the network, we propose a new jamming detection method that makes use of a generalized likelihood ratio test over some coherence blocks. Our proposed method utilizes intentionally unused pilots in the network. The performance of the proposed detector improves by increasing the number of antennas at the base station, the number of unused pilots and also by the number of the coherence blocks that are utilized. Simulation results confirm our analyses and show that in the MaMIMO regime, perfect detection (i.e., correct detection probability is one) is achievable even with a small number of unused pilots.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, to appear in IEEE Wireless Communications Letter

On the Fundamental Limits of MIMO Massive Multiple Access Channels

In this paper, we study the multiple-antenna wireless communication networks, where a large number of devices simultaneously communicate with an access point. The capacity region of multiple-input multiple-output massive multiple access channels (MIMO mMAC) is investigated. While joint typicality decoding is utilized to establish the achievability of capacity region for conventional MAC with fixed number of users, the technique is not directly applicable for MIMO mMAC. Instead, an information-theoretic approach based on Gallager's error exponent analysis is exploited to characterize the \textcolor[rgb]{0,0,0}{finite dimension region} of MIMO mMAC. Theoretical results reveal that the finite dimension region of MIMO mMAC is dominated by sum rate constraint only, and the individual user rate is determined by a specific factor that corresponds to the allocation of sum rate. The rate in conventional MAC is not achievable with massive multiple access, which is due to the fact that successive interference cancellation cannot guarantee an arbitrary small error decoding probability for MIMO mMAC. The results further imply that, asymptotically, the individual user rate is independent of the number of transmit antennas, and channel hardening makes the individual user rate close to that when only statistic knowledge of channel is available at receiver. The finite dimension region of MIMO mMAC is a generalization of the symmetric rate in Chen \emph{et al.} (2017).Comment: Accepted by ICC'201

Joint Millimeter Wave and Microwave Wave Resource Allocation Design for Dual-Mode Base Stations

In this paper, we consider the design of joint resource blocks (RBs) and power allocation for dual-mode base stations operating over millimeter wave (mmW) band and microwave ($\mu$W) band. The resource allocation design aims to minimize the system energy consumption while taking into account the channel state information, maximum delay, load, and different types of user applications (UAs). To facilitate the design, we first propose a group-based algorithm to assign UAs to multiple groups. Within each group, low-power UAs, which often appear in short distance and experience less obstacles, are inclined to be served over mmW band. The allocation problem over mmW band can be solved by a greedy algorithm. Over $\mu$W band, we propose an estimation-optimal-descent algorithm. The rate of each UA at all RBs is estimated to initialize the allocation. Then, we keep altering RB's ownership until any altering makes power increases. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm offers an excellent tradeoff between low energy consumption and fair transmission.Comment: Accepted by IEEE WCNC'1

Secrecy Outage of Proactive Relay Selection by Eavesdropper

In this paper, we consider an active eavesdropping scenario in a cooperative system consisting of a source, a destination, and an active eavesdropper with multiple decode-and-forward relays. Considering an existing assumption in which an eavesdropper is also a part of network, a proactive relay selection by the eavesdropper is proposed. The best relay which maximizes the eavesdropping rate is selected by the eavesdropper. A relay selection scheme is also proposed to improve the secrecy of the system by minimizing the eavesdropping rate. Performances of these schemes are compared with two passive eavesdropping scenarios in which the eavesdropper performs selection and maximal ratio combining on the relayed links. A realistic channel model with independent non-identical links between nodes and direct links from the source to both the destination and eavesdropper are assumed. Closed-form expressions for the secrecy outage probability (SOP) of these schemes in Rayleigh fading channel are obtained. It is shown that the relay selection by the proactive eavesdropper is most detrimental to the system as not only the SOP increases with the increase in the number of relays, but its diversity also remains unchanged.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, conference- GLOBECOM 1

Secure Communications in NOMA System: Subcarrier Assignment and Power Allocation

Secure communication is a promising technology for wireless networks because it ensures secure transmission of information. In this paper, we investigate the joint subcarrier (SC) assignment and power allocation problem for non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) amplify-and-forward two-way relay wireless networks, in the presence of eavesdroppers. By exploiting cooperative jamming (CJ) to enhance the security of the communication link, we aim to maximize the achievable secrecy energy efficiency by jointly designing the SC assignment, user pair scheduling and power allocation. Assuming the perfect knowledge of the channel state information (CSI) at the relay station, we propose a low-complexity subcarrier assignment scheme (SCAS-1), which is equivalent to many-to-many matching games, and then SCAS-2 is formulated as a secrecy energy efficiency maximization problem. The secure power allocation problem is modeled as a convex geometric programming problem, and then solved by interior point methods. Simulation results demonstrate that the effectiveness of the proposed SSPA algorithms under scenarios of using and not using CJ, respectively

Multi-cell Hybrid Millimeter Wave Systems: Pilot Contamination and Interference Mitigation

In this paper, we investigate the system performance of a multi-cell multi-user (MU) hybrid millimeter wave (mmWave) communications in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) network. Due to the reuse of pilot symbols among different cells, the performance of channel estimation is expected to be degraded by pilot contamination, which is considered as a fundamental performance bottleneck of conventional multicell MU massive MIMO networks. To analyze the impact of pilot contamination to the system performance, we first derive the closed-form approximation of the normalized mean squared error (MSE) of the channel estimation algorithm proposed in [2] over Rician fading channels. Our analytical and simulation results show that the channel estimation error incurred by the impact of pilot contamination and noise vanishes asymptotically with an increasing number of antennas equipped at each radio frequency (RF) chain at the desired BS. Furthermore, by adopting zero-forcing (ZF) precoding in each cell for downlink transmission, we derive a tight closed-form approximation of the average achievable rate per user. Our results unveil that the intra-cell interference and inter-cell interference caused by pilot contamination over Rician fading channels can be mitigated effectively by simply increasing the number of antennas equipped at the desired BS.Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions on Communications. 15 pages, 7 figure

Safeguarding Wireless Network with UAVs: A Physical Layer Security Perspective

Integrating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into future wireless systems such as the fifth-generation (5G) cellular network is anticipated to bring significant benefits for both UAV and telecommunication industries. Generally speaking, UAVs can be used as new aerial platforms in the cellular network to provide communication services for terrestrial users, or become new aerial users of the cellular network served by the terrestrial base stations. Due to their high altitude, UAVs usually have dominant line-of-sight (LoS) channels with the ground nodes, which, however, pose new security challenges to future wireless networks with widely deployed UAVs. On one hand, UAV-ground communications are more prone than terrestrial communications to eavesdropping and jamming attacks by malicious nodes on the ground. On the other hand, compared to malicious ground nodes, malicious UAVs can launch more effective eavesdropping and jamming attacks to terrestrial communications. Motivated by the above, in this article, we aim to identify such new issues from a physical-layer security viewpoint and propose novel solutions to tackle them efficiently. Numerical results are provided to validate their effectiveness and promising directions for future research are also discussed.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Wireless Communications. In this article, we focus on addressing two new and challenging security issues arising from the LoS-dominant UAV-ground channels in future wireless networks, from a PHY design perspectiv

Data-Aided Secure Massive MIMO Transmission with Active Eavesdropping

In this paper, we study the design of secure communication for time division duplexing multi-cell multi-user massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with active eavesdropping. We assume that the eavesdropper actively attacks the uplink pilot transmission and the uplink data transmission before eavesdropping the downlink data transmission phase of the desired users. We exploit both the received pilots and data signals for uplink channel estimation. We show analytically that when the number of transmit antennas and the length of the data vector both tend to infinity, the signals of the desired user and the eavesdropper lie in different eigenspaces of the received signal matrix at the base station if their signal powers are different. This finding reveals that decreasing (instead of increasing) the desire user's signal power might be an effective approach to combat a strong active attack from an eavesdropper. Inspired by this result, we propose a data-aided secure downlink transmission scheme and derive an asymptotic achievable secrecy sum-rate expression for the proposed design. Numerical results indicate that under strong active attacks, the proposed design achieves significant secrecy rate gains compared to the conventional design employing matched filter precoding and artificial noise generation.Comment: Accepted by ICC'1

Optimal Transmit Antenna Selection for Massive MIMO Wiretap Channels

In this paper, we study the impacts of transmit antenna selection on the secrecy performance of massive MIMO systems. We consider a wiretap setting in which a fixed number of transmit antennas are selected and then confidential messages are transmitted over them to a multi-antenna legitimate receiver while being overheard by a multi-antenna eavesdropper. For this setup, we derive an accurate approximation of the instantaneous secrecy rate. Using this approximation, it is shown that in some wiretap settings under antenna selection the growth in the number of active antennas enhances the secrecy performance of the system up to some optimal number and degrades it when this optimal number is surpassed. This observation demonstrates that antenna selection in some massive MIMO settings not only reduces the RF-complexity, but also enhances the secrecy performance. We then consider various scenarios and derive the optimal number of active antennas analytically using our large-system approximation. Numerical investigations show an accurate match between simulations and the analytic results.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE JSAC special issue on "Physical Layer Security for 5G Wireless Networks"; 11 pages, 8 figure