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

Globally Optimal Energy-Efficient Power Control and Receiver Design in Wireless Networks

The characterization of the global maximum of energy efficiency (EE) problems in wireless networks is a challenging problem due to the non-convex nature of investigated problems in interference channels. The aim of this work is to develop a new and general framework to achieve globally optimal solutions. First, the hidden monotonic structure of the most common EE maximization problems is exploited jointly with fractional programming theory to obtain globally optimal solutions with exponential complexity in the number of network links. To overcome this issue, we also propose a framework to compute suboptimal power control strategies characterized by affordable complexity. This is achieved by merging fractional programming and sequential optimization. The proposed monotonic framework is used to shed light on the ultimate performance of wireless networks in terms of EE and also to benchmark the performance of the lower-complexity framework based on sequential programming. Numerical evidence is provided to show that the sequential fractional programming framework achieves global optimality in several practical communication scenarios.Comment: Accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin

Linear Precoders for Non-Regenerative Asymmetric Two-way Relaying in Cellular Systems

Two-way relaying (TWR) reduces the spectral-efficiency loss caused in conventional half-duplex relaying. TWR is possible when two nodes exchange data simultaneously through a relay. In cellular systems, data exchange between base station (BS) and users is usually not simultaneous e.g., a user (TUE) has uplink data to transmit during multiple access (MAC) phase, but does not have downlink data to receive during broadcast (BC) phase. This non-simultaneous data exchange will reduce TWR to spectrally-inefficient conventional half-duplex relaying. With infrastructure relays, where multiple users communicate through a relay, a new transmission protocol is proposed to recover the spectral loss. The BC phase following the MAC phase of TUE is now used by the relay to transmit downlink data to another user (RUE). RUE will not be able to cancel the back-propagating interference. A structured precoder is designed at the multi-antenna relay to cancel this interference. With multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) nodes, the proposed precoder also triangulates the compound MAC and BC phase MIMO channels. The channel triangulation reduces the weighted sum-rate optimization to power allocation problem, which is then cast as a geometric program. Simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed protocol over conventional solutions.Comment: 30 pages, 7 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication