Secure pre-coding and post-coding for OFDM systems along with hardware implementation

An effective and hardware-friendly physical layer security design, composed of a channel-based frequency pre-coder and a post-coder for OFDM-based systems, is proposed. The design is achieved by decomposing the diagonal matrix of the channel frequency amplitude of the legitimate receiver in order to obtain two unitary orthonormal matrices. The first matrix is used as a pre-coder just before the IFFT process at the transmitter, while the second matrix is used as a post-coder just after the FFT process at the receiver. Besides security, the presented design is interestingly found out to work as a shuffler or inter-leaver, which does not only provide secrecy, but also enhances the performance against burst errors. Moreover, a new channel calibration technique is developed to overcome the effect of channel reciprocity mismatch on the proposed scheme. The provided simulations and USRP hardware testbed implementation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed design in achieving practical and reliable secrecy with just minor modifications on the OFDM structure.Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)IEEE Spanish SectionPolytechnic University of Valenci

A Semiblind Two-Way Training Method for Discriminatory Channel Estimation in MIMO Systems

Discriminatory channel estimation (DCE) is a recently developed strategy to enlarge the performance difference between a legitimate receiver (LR) and an unauthorized receiver (UR) in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless system. Specifically, it makes use of properly designed training signals to degrade channel estimation at the UR which in turn limits the UR's eavesdropping capability during data transmission. In this paper, we propose a new two-way training scheme for DCE through exploiting a whitening-rotation (WR) based semiblind method. To characterize the performance of DCE, a closed-form expression of the normalized mean squared error (NMSE) of the channel estimation is derived for both the LR and the UR. Furthermore, the developed analytical results on NMSE are utilized to perform optimal power allocation between the training signal and artificial noise (AN). The advantages of our proposed DCE scheme are two folds: 1) compared to the existing DCE scheme based on the linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) channel estimator, the proposed scheme adopts a semiblind approach and achieves better DCE performance; 2) the proposed scheme is robust against active eavesdropping with the pilot contamination attack, whereas the existing scheme fails under such an attack.Comment: accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Communication

Channel Related Optimization of Wireless Communication Systems

This thesis deals with different optimization problems in the design of wireless communication systems. It is mainly directed to the design of systems based on multicarrier techniques and orthogonal frequency division multiplex, OFDM, but some of the problems apply to single carrier systems as well. The influence of different pilot patterns is analyzed when pilot symbol assisted modulation, PSAM, is used in OFDM systems. It is desirable to decrease the number of required pilot symbols and it is shown that the pilot pattern used plays a major role to enable reliable channel estimates from a small amount of pilot symbols. Rearrangement of the pilot pattern enables a reduction in the number of needed pilot symbols up to a factor 10, still retaining the same bit error performance. The effect of the number of sub-channels used in an OFDM system is analyzed with respect to resulting bit error rate. An analytical expression for the bit error rate on Rayleigh fading channels when interchannel interference, ICI, caused by channel changes during a symbol and energy loss due to the cyclic prefix are regarded. This expression is used to optimize the number of sub-channels, and thereby the sub-channel bandwidth (sub-channel spacing) in the system. It is argued that the system can be optimized neglecting the effect of imperfect channel estimation and on a worst case assumption for the Doppler frequency and signal to noise ratio. The benefits of using pre-compensation (precoding) in wireless time division duplex, TDD, systems are also investigated. The uplink channel estimate is used to compensate the channel impact on the downlink symbols. This enables less complex receiver structures in the mobile terminal since channel equalization is performed in the base station. Three different methods where amplitude and/or phase are adjusted are analyzed in terms of performance limits. Closed-form expressions for the QPSK bit error rate are given assuming a fully known channel. It is shown that pre-compensation is an attractive alternative to differential decoding. Phase-only compensation is preferred at low signal to noise ratios, while at high signal to noise ratios an order of magnitude improvement in the bit error rate can be obtained by including amplitude pre-compensation. All the analyses and optimizations are general and can be applied to any OFDM system

Hardware Impairments Aware Transceiver Design for Bidirectional Full-Duplex MIMO OFDM Systems

In this paper we address the linear precoding and decoding design problem for a bidirectional orthogonal frequencydivision multiplexing (OFDM) communication system, between two multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) full-duplex (FD) nodes. The effects of hardware distortion as well as the channel state information error are taken into account. In the first step, we transform the available time-domain characterization of the hardware distortions for FD MIMO transceivers to the frequency domain, via a linear Fourier transformation. As a result, the explicit impact of hardware inaccuracies on the residual selfinterference (RSI) and inter-carrier leakage (ICL) is formulated in relation to the intended transmit/received signals. Afterwards, linear precoding and decoding designs are proposed to enhance the system performance following the minimum-mean-squarederror (MMSE) and sum rate maximization strategies, assuming the availability of perfect or erroneous CSI. The proposed designs are based on the application of alternating optimization over the system parameters, leading to a necessary convergence. Numerical results indicate that the application of a distortionaware design is essential for a system with a high hardware distortion, or for a system with a low thermal noise variance.Comment: Submitted to IEEE for publicatio