We study physical-layer security in wireless ad hoc networks and investigate two types of multi-antenna transmission schemes for providing secrecy enhancements. To establish secure transmission against malicious eavesdroppers, we consider the generation of artificial noise with either sectoring or beamforming. For both approaches, we provide a statistical characterization and tradeoff analysis of the outage performance of the legitimate communication and the eavesdropping links. We then investigate the network-wide secrecy throughput performance of both schemes in terms of the secrecy transmission capacity, and study the optimal power allocation between the information signal and the artificial noise. Our analysis indicates that, under transmit power optimization, the beamforming scheme outperforms the sectoring scheme, except for the case where the number of transmit antennas are sufficiently large. Our study also reveals some interesting differences between the optimal power allocation for the sectoring and beamforming schemes.
We study physical-layer security in wireless ad hoc networks and investigate two types of multi-antenna transmission schemes for providing secrecy enhancements. To establish secure transmission against malicious eavesdroppers, we consider the generation of artificial noise with either sectoring or beamforming. For both approaches, we provide a statistical characterization and tradeoff analysis of the outage performance of the legitimate communication and the eavesdropping links. We then investigate the network-wide secrecy throughput performance of both schemes in terms of the secrecy transmission capacity, and study the optimal power allocation between the information signal and the artificial noise. Our analysis indicates that, under transmit power optimization, the beamforming scheme outperforms the sectoring scheme, except for the case where the number of transmit antennas are sufficiently large. Our study also reveals some interesting differences between the optimal power allocation for the sectoring and beamforming schemes.
Abstract—We study physical-layer security in wireless ad hoc networks and investigate two types of multi-antenna transmission schemes for providing secrecy enhancements. To establish secure transmission against malicious eavesdroppers, we consider the generation of artificial noise with either sectoring or beamform-ing. For both approaches, we provide a statistical characterization and tradeoff analysis of the outage performance of the legitimate communication and the eavesdropping links. We then investi-gate the networkwide secrecy throughput performance of both schemes in terms of the secrecy transmission capacity, and study the optimal power allocation between the information signal and the artificial noise. Our analysis indicates that, under transmit power optimization, the beamforming scheme outperforms the sectoring scheme, except for the case where the number of transmit antennas are sufficiently large. Our study also reveals some interesting differences between the optimal power allocation for the sectoring and beamforming schemes. Index Terms—Physical-layer security, ad hoc networks, multi-antenna transmission, artificial noise, power allocation, outage probability, throughput optimization. I.
Exploiting the randomness embedded in wireless channels, the physical-layer security techniques can provide additional security robustness against malicious eavesdropping at the physical layer of communication systems. To further this line of study, this thesis focuses on developing advanced multi-antenna transmission strategies for enhancing the secrecy performance of wireless communication systems. Assuming perfect channel feedback from the desired receiver and none from the eavesdropper, we consider beamforming with smartly injected artificial noise, aiming to confuse the eavesdropper whilst leaving the desired receiver unaffected. The system parameters are either chosen to be fixed for all transmissions, or adaptively adjusted based on the channel feedback from the desired receiver. For both cases, we provide novel and explicit design solutions for achieving the maximum throughput subject to a secrecy outage constraint. We then derive accurate approximations for the maximum throughput, and give new insights into the additional power cost for achieving a higher security level and the throughput gain of adaptive transmission over non-adaptive transmission. Having investigated the perfect feedback scenario, we then relax the feedback assumption and consider practical effects imposed by limited feedback constraints on the channel from the desired receiver to the transmitter. To deal with quantization error due to limited feedback whilst also accounting for unknown channel of the eavesdropper, we specify a connection outage constraint to guarantee the reliability of desired communication and a secrecy outage constraint to guard against malicious eavesdropping. Under dual outage constraints, we derive a novel optimized rate-adaptive transmission design to maximize the average secrecy throughput. New insights regarding the optimal power/feedback allocation and the number of feedback bits required for efficient quantization are obtained through our analysis. Our preceding study focused on isolated point-to-point transmission without any interference. However, the performance of contemporary wireless networks is often limited by interference from concurrent transmissions. To characterize the impact of interference on secure communication, we consider an interference-limited large-scale network. To confuse the malicious eavesdroppers, in addition to information-bearing signals, the transmitters are designed to generate artificial noise through either beamforming or antenna sectoring in a distributed manner. For both cases, using tools from stochastic geometry, we provide a statistical characterization of the reliability performance of desired communication and the secrecy performance against eavesdropping. We then investigate the networkwide secrecy throughput performance and optimize the transmit power allocation. Our analysis reveals interesting differences between the beamforming and sectoring approaches in terms of the optimal power allocation and the maximum networkwide secrecy throughput.
In this paper, we combine sectorized transmission with artificial noise to establish secrecy in decentralized wireless networks. The locations of the legitimate nodes and the eavesdroppers are both modeled by homogeneous Poisson point processes. Using sectorized antennas, each legitimate transmitter sends an information signal in the sector which contains its intended receiver, while simultaneously emitting artificial noise in other sectors, in order to provide secrecy against the eavesdroppers. We first separately characterize the reliability performance of the legitimate link and the secrecy performance against malicious eavesdropping. Then, we derive the secrecy transmission capacity to measure the networkwide secrecy throughput. To facilitate the practical system design, we provide a sufficient condition, in terms of the system parameters and constraints, under which a positive secrecy transmission capacity is achievable. The optimal transmit power allocation between the information signal and the artificial noise for achieving the maximal secrecy transmission capacity is also investigated. Our analysis indicates that sectorized transmission provides significant secrecy enhancements in decentralized wireless networks.
In this thesis, we study the physical layer security in downlink multi-user wireless networks. Traditionally, security has been addressed by cryptography at the higher layers of the communication stack. Security at the physical layer has been a major research topic in recent years. We study two different precoder designs alongside artificial noise (AN) to mitigate multi-user interference and deteriorate reception at the eavesdropper (Eve). We study the large scale analysis to calculate the secrecy sum-rate for these two cases and analyze the effect of AN on the system. First, we consider the worst case scenario, when eavesdropper's (Eve's) rate is not deteriorated by the interference caused by the legitimate users. Later, we investigate how interference from legitimate users would affect the large scale security sum rate. At the end, we assume more practical situation where the channel state information at the transmitter is not perfect due to feedback limitation and estimation error. We first study block diagonalization (BD) precoding. We derive the asymptotic secrecy sum-rate of BD for physical layer security in downlink multi-user wireless networks using artificial noise (AN). We first derive the secrecy sum-rate assuming that the channel of the eavesdropper is not known at the transmitter and derive the asymptotic secrecy sum-rate. Then we derive the optimum power allocation for asymptotic secrecy sum-rate. We design the system based on large scale analysis for different special cases. Simulation results show that the proposed precoders outperform channel inversion (CI) and regularized channel inversion (RCI) schemes at all SNRs. We also show that as the number of receive antennas of each user increases, the sum-rate gap between the proposed scheme and existing methods increases. We, then, study two methods of regularized block diagonalization (RBD) precoding using artificial noise (AN) for physical layer security in downlink multi-user MIMO wireless networks. We compare the complexity analysis of these two methods in terms of floating point operations per second (FLOPS). We derive the secrecy and asymptotic secrecy sum-rates for these schemes. We also derive closed form expressions for the asymptotic optimal power allocation to the AN signal and legitimate users. Simulations show RBD precoding outperform regularized channel inversion (RCI) in terms of secrecy sum-rate with a margin of 0.5 bits/s/Hz. Also, simulation results show our closed-form asymptotic secrecy sum-rates matches closely with the simulations for perfect and imperfect CSIT. We also study the effect of interference on BD precoding scheme. In the first two studies the worst case scenarios was considered and the effect of interference was not considered at the eavesdropper. We first derive the closed-form secrecy and asymptotic secrecy sum-rates for this scheme. Then, we derive the optimum power allocation. Using the derived optimum power allocation, we determine the conditions under which adding AN helps. We also investigate the optimum number of users, number of antennas at the eavesdropper, and the number of transmit antennas to fully study the conditions where using AN improves performance. We show that as the number of users increases or the number of receive antennas at the eavesdropper decreases, improved performance is achieved by allocating a smaller fraction of the total power to transmit the AN. The closed form expressions for the secrecy sum rate (SSR) and optimum power allocation closely match our simulation results. In Chapter 5, we study the effect of imperfect channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) for each case studied in earlier chapters. We first study the effect of imperfect CSIT for BD precoding in both scenarios when interference does and does not exist at eavesdropper. We show that the imperfect CSI play the same role as interference for the desired users. Then, we study the effect of imperfect CSIT for RBD precoding when interference does not exist at eavesdropper. We show as channel estimation error increases, the secrecy sum-rate decreases. This is due to the fact that channel estimation error just affects the desired users' rate and has no effect on eavesdropper's performance. Finally, in the last chapter, we conclude our thesis and provide some road map for future--Author's abstract
This paper investigates secure multi-antenna transmission in slow fading channels without the eavesdropper's channel state information. The use of multiple transmit antennas enables the transmitter to strengthen the signal reception at the intended receiver while simultaneously confusing the eavesdropper by delivering artificial noise. A recently developed secrecy outage formulation, which can separately measure the quality of service and the level of security, is used to characterize the security performance. We show that an arbitrarily low secrecy outage probability cannot be achieved by adding more transmit antennas alone without optimizing other system parameters. To facilitate the practical system design, we present an on-off transmission scheme with optimal artificial noise power allocation, which minimizes the secrecy outage probability whilst guaranteeing a minimum required quality of service.
We study secure multi-antenna transmission with limited feedback from the intended receiver and no feedback from the malicious eavesdropper. Our system uses the artificial-noise-aided beamforming approach to enhance secrecy, considering slow fading channels with outage constraints on the reliability performance of legitimate communication and the secrecy performance against eavesdropping. Our analytical results provide conditions on the minimum number of feedback bits and the minimum strength of the intended channel for making secure transmission possible. We observe that strengthening the secrecy outage constraint puts higher requirements on the number of feedback bits and the strength of the intended channel. To maximize the achievable secrecy rate, the optimal transmit power allocation between the information signal and the artificial noise is also derived in closed form.