Coexistence of RF-powered IoT and a Primary Wireless Network with Secrecy Guard Zones

This paper studies the secrecy performance of a wireless network (primary network) overlaid with an ambient RF energy harvesting IoT network (secondary network). The nodes in the secondary network are assumed to be solely powered by ambient RF energy harvested from the transmissions of the primary network. We assume that the secondary nodes can eavesdrop on the primary transmissions due to which the primary network uses secrecy guard zones. The primary transmitter goes silent if any secondary receiver is detected within its guard zone. Using tools from stochastic geometry, we derive the probability of successful connection of the primary network as well as the probability of secure communication. Two conditions must be jointly satisfied in order to ensure successful connection: (i) the SINR at the primary receiver is above a predefined threshold, and (ii) the primary transmitter is not silent. In order to ensure secure communication, the SINR value at each of the secondary nodes should be less than a predefined threshold. Clearly, when more secondary nodes are deployed, more primary transmitters will remain silent for a given guard zone radius, thus impacting the amount of energy harvested by the secondary network. Our results concretely show the existence of an optimal deployment density for the secondary network that maximizes the density of nodes that are able to harvest sufficient amount of energy. Furthermore, we show the dependence of this optimal deployment density on the guard zone radius of the primary network. In addition, we show that the optimal guard zone radius selected by the primary network is a function of the deployment density of the secondary network. This interesting coupling between the two networks is studied using tools from game theory. Overall, this work is one of the few concrete works that symbiotically merge tools from stochastic geometry and game theory

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

Optimization of secure wireless communications for IoT networks in the presence of eavesdroppers

The problem motivates this paper is that securing the critical data of 5G based wireless IoT network is of significant importance. Wireless 5G IoT systems consist of a large number of devices (low-cost legitimate users), which are of low complexity and under strict energy constraints. Physical layer security (PLS) schemes, along with energy harvesting, have emerged as a potential candidate that provides an effective solution to address this issue. During the data collection process of IoT, PHY security techniques can exploit the characteristics of the wireless channel to ensure secure communication. This paper focuses on optimizing the secrecy rate for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) IoT system, considering that the malicious eavesdroppers can intercept the data. In particular, the main aim is to optimize the secrecy rate of the system under signal to interference noise ratio (SINR), energy harvesting (EH), and total transmits power constraints. We model our design as an optimization problem that advocates the use of additional noise to ensure secure communication and guarantees efficient wireless energy transfer. The primary problem is non-convex due to complex objective functions in terms of transmit beamforming matrix and power splitting ratios. We have considered both the perfect channel state information (CSI) and the imperfect CSI scenarios. To circumvent the non-convexity of the primary problem in perfect CSI case, we proposed a solution based on the concave-convex procedure (CCCP) iterative algorithm, which results in a maximum local solution for the secrecy rate. In the imperfect CSI scenario, we facilitate the use of S-procedure and present a solution based on the iterative successive convex approximation (SCA) approach. Simulation results present the validations of the proposed algorithms. The results provide an insightful view that the proposed iterative method based on the CCCP algorithm achieves higher secrecy rates and lower computational complexity in comparison to the other algorithms