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.
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.
We present an optimized secure multi-antenna transmission approach based on artificial-noise-aided beamforming, with limited feedback from a desired single-antenna receiver. To deal with beamformer quantization errors as well as unknown eavesdropper channel characteristics, our approach is aimed at maximizing throughput under dual performance constraints-a connection outage constraint on the desired communication channel and a secrecy outage constraint to guard against eavesdropping. We propose an adaptive transmission strategy that judiciously selects the wiretap coding parameters, as well as the power allocation between the artificial noise and the information signal. This optimized solution reveals several important differences with respect to solutions designed previously under the assumption of perfect feedback. We also investigate the problem of how to most efficiently utilize the feedback bits. The simulation results indicate that a good design strategy is to use approximately 20% of these bits to quantize the channel gain information, with the remainder to quantize the channel direction, and this allocation is largely insensitive to the secrecy outage constraint imposed. In addition, we find that 8 feedback bits per transmit antenna is sufficient to achieve approximately 90% of the throughput attainable with perfect feedback.
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.
With the rapid development of wireless communications, security becomes extremely important. In many applications, each transmitter desires to send independent and confidential message to its intended receiver while ensuring mutual information-theoretic secrecy. In this dissertation, I study strategies for enhanced secrecy in wireless communication systems with limited rate feedback and transmitter cooperation. The two-user Gaussian channel model is considered under different scenarios. The transmitters both require channel state information (CSI), which is quantized at the receiver and fed back through the sum-rate-limited feedback channels. The quantization errors reduce the beamforming gain from the direct transmitter, and cause interference leakage from the cross transmitter. In the first scenario, I introduce the wiretap channel model where one receiver is a known eavesdropper, and a second transmitter is used to send a cooperative jamming signal to degrade the eavesdropper's channel. I consider two cases, one where no information about the eavesdroppers is available, and one where statistical CSI is available. With no information about the eavesdroppers, I show how to choose the allocation of feedback bits to the transmitters in order to maximize the amount of jamming power available to interfere with the eavesdroppers, subject to maintaining the lower bound on the rate at a minimum quality-of-service level. For the case of statistical CSI, I derive an approximate lower bound on the average secrecy rate, and optimize the bound to find a suitable bit allocation and the transmit power allocated to the transmitters. In the second scenario, I consider the interference channel model where the two transmitters are amenable to cooperation for improving the overall secrecy performance of the system. I derive an approximation for the average secrecy rate of each link, and optimize the sum secrecy rate over the transmit power and feedback bits allocated to the transmitters. Interestingly, increasing the transmit power beyond a certain point decreases the secrecy performance. When the transmitters have the same number of antennas, I derive the results in closed form. Simulations validate the theoretical analysis and demonstrate the significant performance gains that result from the use of optimal transmit power control and intelligent feedback bit allocation.
Security has become an increasingly significant and urgent issue in wireless networks. The growing computational capability of the eavesdropper (Eve) and more and more complicated secure key management in large scale and heterogeneous networks, pose more and more stringent requirement to the cryptographic protocols. As a new design paradigm, physical layer security has been recognised as a promising solution to enhance the security of wireless links relying on the channel properties and advanced signal processing, and can act as either an alternative or a complementary solution to the conventional cryptographic methods. Without complicated secure key generation and management, physical layer security is quite suitable for the large scale distributed networks. In this thesis, we aim to improve the secrecy performance in emerging wireless communication systems relying on different physical layer security techniques. Firstly, the security of an amplify-and-forward successive relaying network with multiple untrusted relay nodes is investigated, where the conventional detrimental inter-relay interference is exploited to jam the untrusted nodes without assistance of external helpers. Considering different complexity requirements, several relay selection schemes are proposed, and the closed-form expressions of the lower bound of the secrecy outage probability and the maximum secrecy diversity order are derived accordingly. It is shown that the maximum secrecy diversity order of N-1 can be achieved for an N relay nodes network. Secondly, the artificial noise (AN) aided secure transmission strategy for a multiple-input single-output multiple-Eve (MISOME) system with a secure user (Bob) and a normal user (NU) is investigated. The power allocations among Bob, NU and AN, as well as the wiretap code rates, are jointly optimized to maximize the effective secrecy throughput (EST), under the average throughput constraint of NU. An alternative optimization algorithm with guaranteed convergence is proposed to obtain the optimal parameters. It is shown that the EST increases with the transmitting power and the number of transmit antennas, and decreases with the throughput constraint of NU, and the EST can be improved through injecting AN and concurrent transmission of Bob and NU. Thirdly, physical layer security in a multi-antenna small-cell network is investigated, where the multi-antenna base stations (BSs), cellular users, and Eves are all randomly distributed according to independent Poisson point processes. Stochastic geometry is applied to analyze the connection and secrecy outage probabilities and the average achievable secrecy rate. The impact of different parameters, including power allocation, BS and Eve density, and the adaptive eavesdropping or jamming on the secrecy performance is analyzed. It is shown that the average secrecy rate is a quasi-concave function of the power allocation factor and monotonically decreases with the ratio of the Eve-BS density. Finally, we study the physical layer security in a large-scale heterogeneous network consisting of both sub-6 GHz massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) macro cells and millimeter wave (mmWave) small cells. By considering pilot spoofing attacks from the Eves, the coverage and secrecy probabilities are derived using stochastic geometry and the conditions under which the millimeter wave tier outperforms the sub-6 GHz counterpart are discussed in terms of both coverage and secrecy.It is shown that the mmWave small cell can provide better coverage performance in the high transmission code-rate region, and the secrecy performance of the mmWave system outperforms the sub-6 GHz counterpart in the low redundant rate region, which reveals the advantage of using mmWave for secure communication.
In this dissertation, we present novel physical (PHY) and cross-layer design guidelines and resource adaptation algorithms to improve the security and user experience in the future wireless networks. Physical and cross-layer wireless security measures can provide stronger overall security with high efficiency and can also provide better flexibility in response to the typically time-varying wireless environment. To better utilize limited wireless resources, we present approaches and techniques based on new performance criteria for wireless system optimization by thoroughly exploiting user information including its Quality of Service (QoS) requests and channel state information (CSI) to improve network throughput and security.
In recent years, there has been a growing research interest in wireless system security from PHY layer perspective. In a wiretap channel model introduced in the seminal work by Wyner, a sender “Alice” wishes to transmit a secret message to the intended receiver “Bob” in presence of a passive eavesdropper “Eve”. Existing works have characterized maximum achievable secrecy rate or secrecy capacity for single- and multiple-antenna systems by applying Gaussian signaling and secrecy code. Despite the impracticality of Gaussian input, its compact closed-form expression of mutual information motivated the wide use of Gaussian input assumption in theoretical analysis. In contrast to the Gaussian codebook, practical wiretap codes must consist of finite-alphabet symbols. Because of this constraint, the achievable secrecy rate for a finite-alphabet input scenario would differ from the secrecy rate achievable by a Gaussian codebook. In this thesis, we quantify the effect of finite discrete-constellation on instantaneous and ergodic secrecy rate of multiple-antenna wire-tap channels. Our results demonstrate substantial performance difference between systems involving finite-alphabet inputs and systems with Gaussian inputs. In addition, we investigate the secrecy performance of multi-terminal wiretap systems when a codebook based transmission beamforming is implemented. We characterize the secrecy outage probability of a communication link under eavesdropping. We consider a limited feedback scenario where the transmitter uses a pre-defined codebook known to both the transmitter and the receiver for beamforming, and analyze the secrecy outage probability of the link when it being eavesdropped.
Next, we consider the security of wireless multi-hop networks. Certainly, network security is an overarching issue that transcends all layers of communication protocol stack. Therefore, we tackle the problem of network security by proper user scheduling, routing, and resource management. Our approach of secrecy is complementary to the traditional cryptography based techniques. Together, they can provide stronger overall security and flexibility in selecting the desired solution and can reduce bandwidth and energy overhead as much as possible. Multi-hop wireless networks frequently employ the traditional routing and resource allocation strategies. Such strategies often fail to take into account the additional need for protection against security vulnerabilities due to the wireless medium. Thus, to address security concerns, we investigate the problem of eavesdropping control by proposing security-aware power allocation strategies and routing algorithms for multi-hop networks.
The future wireless infrastructure will consists of a plethora of heterogeneous collections of applications and services. A differentiated service structure would therefore be an essential part of the future wireless infrastructure. In addition to the security consideration of wireless network, we focus on the heterogeneous structure of the network. We study the problem of cross-layer resource allocation and admission control in a multiuser heterogeneous OFDMA network providing both QoS-constrained user servicesand best-effort services. Such heterogeneous networks provide service to both High-Priority (HP) users and Best-Effort (BE) users. By clustering subcarriers, efficient algorithms for cluster and power allocation have been proposed. Our strategy maximizes the total network utility of the BE users while satisfying the QoS request for maximum number of HP users. The feasibility of the resource allocation problem depends on the number of HP users in the network. Since a large number of demanding HP users would render the resource allocation problem infeasible, a joint admission control and resource allocation scheme could be an efficient way of tackling both problems with less overhead. By incorporating admission control, we propose an efficient and optimal joint admission control and resource allocation algorithm.