Existing Techniques in Physical Layer Security

Li Sun, Qinghe Du

5G network is expected to support massive user connections and exponentially increasing wireless services, which makes network security unprecedentedly important. Unlike traditional security-guaranteeing techniques which rely heavily on cryptographic approaches at upper layers of the protocol stack, physical-layer security (PLS) solutions fully take advantages of the characteristics of wireless channels to degrade the received signal qualities at the malicious users, and realize keyless secure transmission via signal design and signal processing techniques. PLS avoids the difficulties in the distribution and management of secret keys, and provides flexible security levels through adaptive transmission protocol design. Moreover, PLS techniques match the features of 5G networks well. Therefore, the application of PLS to 5G networks is a promising solution to address the security threats. This article presents a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art PLS techniques, and discusses their applications in 5G networks. We first summarize the principle and advantages of PLS techniques, and point out the reasons why PLS is suitable for 5G networks. Then, we review the existing PLS methods in literature, and highlight several PLS solutions that are expected to be applied in 5G networks. Finally, we conclude this article and figure out some further research directions.

Matthieu R. Bloch

Mohammed Ahmed Salem, Azlan Abd Aziz, Mohamad Yusoff Alias +1 more

The open broadcast nature of the wireless networks makes it vulnerable to the eavesdropper attacks. The physical layer security (PLS) is a grown research field that exploits the characteristics of the physical wireless channel to prevent the eavesdropper interruptions and attacks. The use of the cooperative relay transmission is a method to approach the physical layer security. This paper studies the secrecy performance metrics of the half-duplex two-way multi-relaying technique. A cooperative jamming protocol is proposed to enhance the physical layer security, where the destination sends jamming signals to the eavesdropper node to degrade its channel capacity. However, the relays can act as a jammer and send jamming signals to the eavesdropper node. Moreover, Simulations of the performance metrics namely the secrecy capacity (Cs) and the secrecy outage probability (SOP) applied on the technique are presented and discussed to measure the secrecy level of the proposed technique compared with an existing technique namely half-duplex one-way multi-relaying technique. Based on simulations and discussions the proposed technique outperforms the existing technique in term of secrecy performance.

Riccardo Rovatti

Ahmed Aladi

Wafaa Mohammed Ridha Shakir, Ruwaida A. A. Abdul Kareem

. Physical layer security (PLS) which protects data secrecy based on information-theoretic techniques, has lately received significant academic interest. The growth of wireless communications to 5G and beyond presents new difficulties for physical layer security research. As the existing Radio-Frequ