In satellite communication downlinks, physical layer security is challenging to achieve due to their broadcasting nature and Line-of-Sight channel characteristics. This paper provides a precoding algorithm to secure the downlinks of multiple users against multiple eavesdroppers with optimization of the minimum secrecy capacity. By the use of artificial noise, a positive secrecy capacity is achievable even if the number of eavesdroppers is higher than the number of beams. We demonstrate that a multiple-reflector antenna design provides a significantly higher secrecy and throughput performance when compared to a single-reflector design due to additional degrees of freedom, exhibited by the signal phases. The total vulnerability region is introduced as a new figure of merit with respect to unidentified eavesdroppers.
In satellite communication downlinks, physical layer security is challenging to achieve due to their broadcasting nature and Line-of-Sight channel characteristics. This paper provides a precoding algorithm to secure the downlinks of multiple users against multiple eavesdroppers with optimization of the minimum secrecy capacity. By the use of artificial noise, a positive secrecy capacity is achievable even if the number of eavesdroppers is higher than the number of beams. We demonstrate that a multiple-reflector antenna design provides a significantly higher secrecy and throughput performance when compared to a single-reflector design due to additional degrees of freedom, exhibited by the signal phases. The total vulnerability region is introduced as a new figure of merit with respect to unidentified eavesdroppers.
In satellite communications physical layer security is rather challenging to achieve due to the broadcasting nature of satellite downlinks. We investigate how the advances in multiuser multiple-input multiple-output satellite communications can protect downlinks from eavesdropping. The additional degrees of freedom in multi-antenna systems can not only be utilized for higher spectral efficiency but also to improve the security of the links. Our analysis shows that the area where a hostile interceptor is able to capture the signal is small due to the interference of other user signals. Moreover, the area can be tuned by applying a modified precoding matrix.
In multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MUMIMO) systems for beyond-5G, many user groups are served by the same transmitter in a time-based scheduling. Considering all unscheduled users as eavesdroppers puts a high complexity on algorithms to achieve physical layer security (PLS). Moreover, due to the Line-of-Sight channel properties, PLS is even more challenging to achieve in satellite communication (SATCOM) downlinks. In multibeam MU-MIMO satellite systems, which will be part of beyond-5G networks, the spatial degrees of freedom can be used for both throughput and secrecy improvements. We extend a user-fairness zero-forcing algorithm with artificial noise to achieve secure precoding even if the channel state information of the eavesdroppers is unknown. We define the secrecy outage probability for Line-of-Sight MU-MIMO SATCOM channels and analyze how it can be reduced by the aforementioned algorithm. Moreover, we introduce a trade-off between a high system throughput and a low secrecy outage probability for the cost-effectiveness considerations of PLS.
Security threats introduced due to the vulnerability of the transmission medium may hinder the proliferation of Ka band multibeam satellite systems for civil and military data applications. This paper sets the analytical framework and then studies physical layer security techniques for fixed legitimate receivers dispersed throughout multiple beams, each possibly surrounded by multiple (passive) eavesdroppers. The design objective is to minimize via transmit beamforming the costly total transmit power on board the satellite, while satisfying individual intended users' secrecy rate constraints. Assuming state-of-the-art satellite channel models, when perfect channel state information (CSI) about the eavesdroppers is available at the satellite, a partial zero-forcing approach is proposed for obtaining a low-complexity sub-optimal solution. For the optimal solution, an iterative algorithm combining semi-definite programming relaxation and the gradient-based method is devised by studying the convexity of the problem. Furthermore, the use of artificial noise as an additional degree-of-freedom for protection against eavesdroppers is explored. When only partial CSI about the eavesdroppers is available, we study the problem of minimizing the eavesdroppers' received signal to interference-plus-noise ratios. Simulation results demonstrate substantial performance improvements over existing approaches.
In this paper, we focus on the physical-layer security of a multiuser cellular downlink system. A multi-antenna base station (BS) communicates with several legitimate users, where a target user is overheard by an eavesdropper in the downlink transmission. We aim at designing linear precoders for the BS to maximize the secrecy rate of target user under the condition that a certain Quality-of- Service (QoS) is guaranteed for the other legitimate users. To solve the non-convex optimization problem, we propose an iterative algorithm to transform the original problem into a sequence of approximate convex problems, which can be solved using interior point method. Simulation results reveal that compared with two other methods dealing with the similar optimization problem in previous works, our proposed method can achieve a higher secrecy rate.
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
We consider secure downlink multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) communications between a transmitter and multiple users when there exists a passive eavesdropper. A downlink main channel between the transmitter and a user is estimated through uplink pilot symbols in a time-division duplex mode. On the other hand, to hinder an eavesdropper from estimating the eavesdropper channel between the transmitter and the eavesdropper, the transmitter does not send any pilot symbols. The main channel is hence available at the transmitter only, while the eavesdropper channel is unavailable at any node. Assuming these channel state information (CSI) conditions, we propose a MIMO transmission method using space–time line code (STLC) with artificial noise (AN) for enhancing the physical layer security. The STLC enables noncoherent detection at the receiver, i.e., a user, without CSI and achieves full spatial diversity. We derive the lower bound of the secrecy sum rate for the proposed STLC transmission method without AN, with AN, and with AN and imperfect CSI. Moreover, numerical results verify that the proposed STLC scheme outperforms the conventional eigen-beamforming and the precoding space-time block code in terms of secrecy sum rate regardless of the signal-to-noise ratio, the number of transmit antennas, and the CSI uncertainty.