Wireless physical layer security approaches can prevent eavesdropping without upper layer data encryption. But such techniques are hampered by time-varying wireless channel conditions and they are typically feasible only when the legitimate partners in the Wyner's wire-tap channel model have an advantage over the source-eavesdropper channels. Source rate adaptation and/or node cooperation strategies can be exploited to enhance the performance of secure wireless communications. However, these contributions rather limited to AWGN and Rayleigh channels. This article thus seeks to develop a unified analytical framework for assessing the ergodic secrecy rate of the classical Wyner wire-tap channel in generalized fading environments with independent but non-identically distributed (i.n.d) channel fading statistics and also establish the utility of node cooperations for improving the ergodic secrecy rate when the channel state information is available only at the receiver.
Wireless physical layer security approaches can prevent eavesdropping without upper layer data encryption. But such techniques are hampered by time-varying wireless channel conditions and they are typically feasible only when the legitimate partners in the Wyner's wire-tap channel model have an advantage over the source-eavesdropper channels. Source rate adaptation and/or node cooperation strategies can be exploited to enhance the performance of secure wireless communications. However, these contributions rather limited to AWGN and Rayleigh channels. This article thus seeks to develop a unified analytical framework for assessing the ergodic secrecy rate of the classical Wyner wire-tap channel in generalized fading environments with independent but non-identically distributed (i.n.d) channel fading statistics and also establish the utility of node cooperations for improving the ergodic secrecy rate when the channel state information is available only at the receiver.
In this article, we develop a unified analytical framework for investigation of the ergodic secrecy rates of cooperative decode-and-forward relay networks in a myriad of fading environments. We utilized an exponential-type integral representation for the logarithmic function to derive an approximate expression for the ergodic secrecy rates of cooperative decode-and-forward relay networks only in terms of the moment generating function (MGF) of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). We show that cooperative relays can be exploited to enhance the wireless physical layer security of the classical Wyner wire-tap channel. Numerical results are presented to investigate the impact of channel fading statistics, location of the relays, number of eavesdroppers as well as power allocation on the achievable ergodic secrecy rate.
Two unified analytical frameworks that facilitate the evaluation of the ergodic secrecy rates of Wyner wiretap channel in generalized fading environments without/with diversity receivers are developed. In contrast to prior work that is limited to only the Rayleigh fading environment, our new formulas expressed in terms of only the moment generating function (MGF) or the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of fading signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) random variables allow us to investigate the role of fading (i.e., Effects of the amount of fading and non-identical fade distributions) between the main and the eavesdropper links as well as the impact of diversity receivers on the ergodic secrecy rate performance metric. Numerical results show that non-zero ergodic secrecy rate can be achieved even if the link quality of the main channel is worse than the eavesdropper's channel. We also show that the fundamental limit of secure communication rate can be greatly improved by understanding the role of dissimilar fading statistics and by exploiting/mitigating channel effects via diversity reception.
The study of the physical layer has offered a new perspective to the problem of communication security. This led to the development of a vast set of ideas and techniques rooted in information theory which can be employed in practice to provide unbreakable security. The information-theoretic approach relies mainly on the physical nature of the communication medium. In a wireless medium, the unique features of the wireless communication channel, such as its fading and broadcast nature, can be exploited to achieve higher secure information rates. In this dissertation, we study the secure transmission problem in wireless channels from an information-theoretic perspective. We first consider the fading multiple access wiretap channel. We give two new achievable schemes that use the time-varying (fading) nature of the channel to align the interference from different users at the eavesdropper perfectly in a one-dimensional space while creating a higher-dimensional space for the interfering signals at the legitimate receiver hence allowing for better chance of recovery. While we achieve this alignment through signal scaling at the transmitters in our first scheme (scaling based alignment), we let nature provide this alignment through the ergodicity of the channel coefficients in the second scheme (ergodic secret alignment). For each scheme, we show that the achievable secrecy rates scale logarithmically with the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Next, we study the security gains that can be achieved in a wireless network by employing cooperation among the nodes which is possible due to the broadcast nature of the wireless channel. We investigate the role of passive (also known as deaf) cooperation in improving the achievable secrecy rates in a Gaussian multiple relay network with an external eavesdropper. We distinguish between two modes of deaf cooperation, namely, cooperative jamming (CJ) and noise forwarding (NF). We derive the conditions in which each mode of deaf cooperation achieves secrecy rates that are higher than the secrecy capacity of the original Gaussian wiretap channel. As a result, we show that a deaf helper cannot be a useful cooperative jammer and noise forwarder at the same time. We derive the optimal power control policy for each mode. We consider the deaf helper selection problem where a fixed-size set of deaf helpers (possibly operating in different modes) are to be selected from the set of available relays so that the achievable secrecy rate is maximized. We propose a simple and efficient suboptimal strategy for selection which is shown to be optimal when only one helper is selected. Furthermore, we study the role of a multi-antenna deaf helper. Unlike the single antenna case, we show that, in general, it is useful to split the helper's power between cooperative jamming and noise forwarding. Hence, we propose a deaf cooperation strategy for this model and derive its optimal power control policy. We also show, for specific class of relay-eavesdropper channels, that a simple cooperative jamming strategy yields a secrecy rate that approaches the secrecy capacity as the helper's power is increased. Finally, we consider the role of active cooperation for secrecy in the multiple relay networks. We propose several relaying strategies for secure communication and derive the achievable secrecy rate for each strategy. In our strategies the relays decode the source signal and then forward it to the destination either in a single-hop or a multi-hop fashion. Each relay scales its transmitted signal in a way that ensures that signal components from different relays are canceled out at the eavesdropper.
The prominence of the wireless communication has been urging the monotonically increasing demand of security and privacy. In wireless systems, the notion of perfect secrecy of information with respect to illegitimate nodes can be ensured via physical layer security (PLS) techniques. Unfortunately, they can be made less effective if source- eavesdropper wiretap channel is better than the main source-receiver channel. The various node cooperation schemes can be employed to combat this limitation where a relay node assists the communication to improve the performance significantly. In this paper, a four node wireless communication system consisting of a source, a destination, a relay and an eavesdropper as wire-tapper has been considered. The performance of the traditional cooperation schemes in terms of secrecy rate has been investigated with a different scenario where relay node helps the eavesdropper to deteriorate the secrecy rate. In addition, since legitimate receiver can overhear the transmission of relay, it favours the achievable secrecy rate. We formulate an analytical expression of conditional secrecy outage probability for the investigated system. From the obtained simulation results, it has been observed that secrecy rate is monotonically increases with path loss index. Furthermore, the proper selection of the system parameters leads to enhance the secrecy performance of the system even if relay pertains to degrade the performance. Amplify-and-forward, cooperation, decode-and-Forward, secrecy rate, relay.
The inherent openness of wireless medium makes information security one of the most important and difficult problems in wireless networks.Physical layer security, which achieves the information-theoretic security by exploiting the differences between the physical properties of signal channels such that a degraded signal at an eavesdropper is always ensured and thus the original data can be hardly recovered regardless of how the signal is processed at the eavesdropper, has been studied as a promising approach to providing a strong form of security.By now, many research works have been devoted to understand the fundamental performance limits of physical layer security under different wire-tap channel models.It is notable that among different wire-tap channel models, the fading channel model has been an important model to efficiently capture the basic time-varying properties of wireless channels.Available works related to physical layer security study of the fading wire-tap channel are mainly based on the assumption that the channel from a transmitter to a legitimate receiver is independent of the one from the transmitter to an eavesdropper.In practice, however, the correlation among channels from a transmitter to different receivers has been frequently observed.Therefore, understanding the performance of physical layer security under the more practical correlated fading channels is of great importance for practical applications of physical layer security in wireless networks.In this thesis, we aim to provide a comprehensive study on the fundamental performance limits of physical layer security under a fading wire-tap channel, where the channel from transmitter to legitimate receiver is correlated with the one from transmitter to eavesdropper.We start the study from the scenario when the transmission power is asymptotically infinite.In particular, we first provide an informationtheoretic formulation of secure transmission over wireless fading channels at one realization of coherence interval in the high transmission power regime and show that the secrecy capacity is limited by the channel gain ratio of the main and eavesdropper channels rather than the transmission power, which is different from the Shannon's capacity that increases with transmission power.We next characterize the asymptotic outage probability and also asymptotic outage secrecy capacity for the correlated fading wire-tap channel as the transmission power goes to infinity.We then analyze the performance of physical layer security under correlated fading wire-tap channel with a limited transmission power, a more complicate scenario compared with the one with asymptotic-infinite power.Specifically, we provide theoretical modeling for the secrecy capacity, transmission outage probability and secrecy outage probability of such systems.In particular, we first derive a simple closedform expression of secrecy capacity based on the typical Marcum Q function.This is achieved by exploring the symmetry property between the main channel and eavesdropper channel such that some complicated integration operations involved in the secrecy capacity analysis can be significantly simplified.We then derive the transmission outage probability and secrecy outage probability to depict the reliability and security performances of the concerned wire-tap channel.Finally, extensive numerical results are provided to illustrate the inherent performance tradeoffs under i I am truly and deeply indebted to so many people that there is no way to acknowledge them all, or even any of them properly.Without their support, help and encouragement, this work would not and could not haven been done.I extend my deepest gratitude to all.
Wireless systems are susceptible to eavesdropping as an unwelcome result of the broadcast nature of the wireless medium. Fortunately, the wireless medium also provides endowments including the temporal dispersion, the capability of signal superposition and other properties, to facilitate defending against eavesdropping. The focus of the thesis is to provide schemes for utilizing these properties at the physical layer and their performance analysis from an information-theoretic secrecy perspective. The work is based on Wyner's results on the wire-tap channel, in which the transmission between two legitimate users (Alice and Bob) is eavesdropped upon by Eve. The secrecy level is measured by the equivocation rate at Eve. The system performance is measured by the secrecy capacity. This is the maximum rate at which a message can be sent from Alice to Bob, while constraining the equivocation rate at Eve equal to the communication rate, and thus ensuring that Eve cannot deduce any useful information asymptotically. First, the scenario where a secret message needs to be delivered to the intended receiver within a given delay constraint and without the knowledge of the channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter is considered. In particular, hybrid automatic retransmission request (HARQ) protocols are revisited for a block-fading wire-tap channel via a joint consideration of channel coding, secrecy coding, and retransmission protocols. Two secure HARQ protocols: a repetition time diversity (RTD) scheme with maximal-ratio combining, and an incremental redundancy (INR) scheme based on ratecompatible Wyner secrecy codes are analyzed via an outage-based formulation. The throughput of RTD and INR protocols under probabilistic outage requirements is derived. Asymptotic analysis and numerical computations are given to demonstrate both the benefits of HARQ protocols and the tradeoff between reliability and confidentiality in delay-constrained communications. Second, the effects of interference on information-theoretic secret communication is considered. More specifically, the wiretap channel with a helping interferer (WT-HI) is proposed and studied. Here, an interferer, which does not know the confidential message, helps in ensuring the secrecy of the message by sending independent signals. Achievable secrecy rates and upper bounds on the secrecy capacity are given for both discrete memoryless and Gaussian channels. Interference has conventionally been regarded as a harmful phenomenon that leads to decreasing the rate and the reliability performance of wireless systems. In this work, it is shown that interference can be exploited to assist wireless secrecy. Lastly, the problem of secret key generation over fading channels, in which there exists an additional authenticated, public and error-free feedback channel from Bob to Alice, is considered. A key generation scheme consisting of a communication phase and a key-generation phase is presented. The communication phase is based on layered broadcast coding, which adapts the decoded rate at Bob to the actual channel state without requiring CSI available at Alice. The key-generation phase is based on the messages decoded by Bob after the communication phase and the public feedback. The achievable secrecy key rate and the optimal power distribution over coded layers for maximizing the secrecy key rate are characterized. Theoretical and numerical results show that the broadcast approach outperforms the single-level-coding based approach significantly, and hence demonstrate the role of introducing self-interference in facilitating secret-key generation over slowly fading channels when transmit CSI is not available.