Artificial noise has been considered as an effective and efficient way to improve the secrecy of wireless communications. However, most existing papers have been focused on the analysis of a single communication link between a transmitter and a legitimate receiver with some eavesdroppers. In this paper, we investigate the impact of artificial noise to the secrecy of a large scale decentralized wireless network where channels are modeled as Rayleigh fading and locations of legitimate nodes and eavesdroppers follow Poisson point processes. To study network throughput versus system parameters, we derive the secrecy transmission capacity and show how it is related to the number of transmitting antennas and the power allocation ratio between data and artificial noise. Analytical results provide insights on how system parameters can be designed to improve secrecy transmission capacity of a wireless network.
Artificial noise has been considered as an effective and efficient way to improve the secrecy of wireless communications. However, most existing papers have been focused on the analysis of a single communication link between a transmitter and a legitimate receiver with some eavesdroppers. In this paper, we investigate the impact of artificial noise to the secrecy of a large scale decentralized wireless network where channels are modeled as Rayleigh fading and locations of legitimate nodes and eavesdroppers follow Poisson point processes. To study network throughput versus system parameters, we derive the secrecy transmission capacity and show how it is related to the number of transmitting antennas and the power allocation ratio between data and artificial noise. Analytical results provide insights on how system parameters can be designed to improve secrecy transmission capacity of a wireless network.
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.
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.
Recent research on physical security of wireless systems focus on artificial noise aided security. The main metric for analysis of such systems is the secrecy capacity of the system. Most of the AN schemes proposed in recent research are based on an hypothesis that the number of transmit antennas is larger than that of the receiver antennas. Under this assumption the system can utilize all eigen-subchannels, equal to number of receiver antennas, of a MIMO system to send messages, and use remaining null spaces for transmitting AN signals. These AN signals null out at the legitimate receivers and degrade illegitimate receiver's channels. However, this strategy can significantly impair the secrecy capacity of the system if number of transmit antennas is constrained or even smaller than number of receive antennas. Recently, a new strategy has been proposed, where messages are encoded in s (which is a variable) strongest eigen-subchannels based on ordered eigenvalues of Wishart matrices, while AN signals are generated in remaining spaces. In this paper, this strategy has been extended to Rician channels. The transmitter-receiver link is supposed to be effected by Rician fading while the illegitimate link is experiencing Rayleigh fading and consequently the secrecy capacity of such system is computed.
We consider the problem of secure communication in wireless fading channels in the presence of non-colluding passive eavesdroppers. The transmitter has multiple antennas and is able to simultaneously transmit an information bearing signal to the intended receiver and artificial noise to the eavesdroppers. We obtain an analytical closed-form lower bound for secrecy capacity, which is used as the objective function to optimize transmit power allocation between the information signal and the artificial noise. Our analytical and numerical results show that equal power allocation is a simple and generic strategy which achieves near optimal capacity performance. We also find that adaptive power allocation based on each channel realization provides no or insignificant capacity improvement over equal power allocation.
Due to the nature of a wireless medium, a wireless channel is susceptible to malicious nodes, which encourages the consideration of secrecy in many applications such as satellite networks, social networking services, etc. Motivated by the social characteristic that makes nodes more likely to communicate with nearby neighbors, we study the secrecy capacity of large-scale wireless networks with social relationships. We consider two distributions of legitimate nodes: They are homogeneously placed based on a Poisson point process (PPP), or they are inhomogeneously distributed as multiclustering topology. In particular, we consider two scenarios: 1) the noncolluding case, where each eavesdropper decodes its receiving message independently; and 2) the colluding case, where eavesdroppers can cooperate to decode the message. We adopt a rank-based model to describe the social characteristic and investigate its impact on the secrecy capacity using the technique of self-interference cancelation. We employ a passive attack model, where eavesdroppers can only listen to transmissions among legitimate nodes. Our important findings include the following: 1) In the noncolluding case, secrecy capacity is not influenced by eavesdroppers in order sense, but it varies with the density of eavesdroppers and social impacts in the colluding case. 2) The proposed scheme can achieve optimal secrecy throughput neglecting polylogarithmic factor in homogeneous wireless networks.
Physical-layer secrecy in wireless fading channels has been studied extensively in recent years to ensure reliable communication between the transmitter and the receiver subject to constraints on the information attainable by the eavesdropper. With multiple antennas at the transmitter, Goel and Negi proposed the use of artificial noise (AN) in the null space of the receiver's channel to corrupt the eavesdropper's reception, which helps guarantee secrecy without knowledge of the eavesdropper's channel. It has been shown that the secrecy capacity can be made arbitrarily large by increasing the transmission power, when perfect knowledge of the receiver's channel direction information (CDI) is available. However, in practice, this is not possible due to rate-limitations on the feedback channel. This paper studies the impact of quantized channel feedback on the secrecy capacity achievable with artificial noise.We show that, with imperfect CDI at the transmitter, the AN that was originally intended only for the eavesdropper may leak into the receiver's channel and limit the achievable secrecy rate. To maintain a constant performance degradation, the number of feedback bits must increase at least logarithmically with the transmission power. Moreover, we observe that the portion of power allocated to the transmission of AN should decrease as the number of quantization bits decreases to alleviate the degradation due to noise leakage.