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International Journal of Satellite Communications and Networking

Energy‐efficient physical layer security schemes for low Earth orbit satellite systems

Satya Chan, Sooyoung Kim, Hee Wook Kim, Bon‐Jun Ku, Dae-Sub Oh

Published May 9, 2024• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Summary This paper introduces four proposals to enhance physical layer security (PLS) in low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite systems. The first proposal leverages the Alamouti code aided by artificial noise (AN) and involves the collaborative use of two LEO satellites, ensuring secure downlink transmission. Its efficiency is further enhanced when implementing a power‐balanced Alamouti code. The second PLS proposal capitalizes on an reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) to introduce interference to potential eavesdroppers. As the RIS manages the reflected channel, this security measure is achieved without necessitating additional transmit power or receiver operations. The third proposal integrates the first and second solutions, resulting in improved secrecy rates compared to the individual proposals, nearly reaching the maximum achievable rate. The fourth proposal is based on a relay‐based method, securing all transmission links from the satellite to the relay and from the satellite and relay to the legitimate user. The secrecy performance simulation results presented in the paper demonstrate the remarkable effectiveness of the proposed solutions.

DOI
10.1002/sat.1519

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Summary This paper introduces four proposals to enhance physical layer security (PLS) in low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite systems. The first proposal leverages the Alamouti code aided by artificial noise (AN) and involves the collaborative use of two LEO satellites, ensuring secure downlink transmission. Its efficiency is further enhanced when implementing a power‐balanced Alamouti code. The second PLS proposal capitalizes on an reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) to introduce interference to potential eavesdroppers. As the RIS manages the reflected channel, this security measure is achieved without necessitating additional transmit power or receiver operations. The third proposal integrates the first and second solutions, resulting in improved secrecy rates compared to the individual proposals, nearly reaching the maximum achievable rate. The fourth proposal is based on a relay‐based method, securing all transmission links from the satellite to the relay and from the satellite and relay to the legitimate user. The secrecy performance simulation results presented in the paper demonstrate the remarkable effectiveness of the proposed solutions.
Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite communications are vulnerable to eavesdropping due to open wireless links. To address this issue, a simplified artificial noise (AN)-aided physical layer security scheme is proposed. A practical system model including a multi-antenna LEO satellite, a single-antenna ground user, and multiple eavesdroppers is established, considering shadowed Rician fading and imperfect channel state information (CSI). The AN is projected into the null space of the legitimate user’s channel to avoid interference, while suppressing eavesdroppers. A fixed power allocation strategy is adopted for easy implementation. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms traditional methods in secrecy rate and secrecy outage probability (SOP) with low computational complexity, making it suitable for resource-constrained LEO satellite systems.
Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite communications are vulnerable to eavesdropping over open wireless links. This paper proposes a simplified artificial noise (AN)-aided physical layer security scheme. A system model with a multi-antenna LEO satellite, a single-antenna ground user, and multiple eavesdroppers is built under shadowed-Rician fading and imperfect channel state information. AN is projected into the null space of the legitimate channel to avoid interference, and fixed power allocation is adopted for low complexity. Simulations show the scheme achieves better secrecy rate and secrecy outage probability than traditional methods, suitable for resource-constrained LEO satellite systems.
This study examines physical layer security in a cognitive satellite-terrestrial network where a ground user (GU) transmits confidential data to a Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) satellite via an untrusted Low Earth Orbit (LEO) relay adopting the Amplify-and-Forward (AF) relay strategy. To counter eavesdropping risks from the relaying LEO satellite, a friendly LEO jammer emits artificial noise. The secrecy rate is analyzed under cognitive radio constraints, considering interference thresholds, relay gain, and GU-LEO link shadowing. Numerical results show that increasing the interference threshold initially improves the secrecy rate but saturates when the maximum transmit power constraint at the GU is reached. When this maximum power constraint is removed, the interference threshold can be adjusted to optimize the secrecy rate. Additionally, we observe that lighter shadowing conditions generally enhance the secrecy rate, even though they improve the untrusted relay's channel. These findings offer valuable insights into optimizing security in cognitive satellite-terrestrial networks.
Satellite communication has become essential for achieving seamless global connectivity in the 5 G and the future 6G networks. However, preventing eavesdropping attacks on data transmission remains a challenge due to the broadcasting nature of radio signals. Physical layer security (PLS) is a promising approach that can offer a lightweight solution suitable for satellites with hardware constraints such as limited computing and processing power. Recent studies considering PLS techniques have investigated secrecy performance in various satellite communication environments such as non-orthogonal multiple access but multi-satellite scheduling problems have been less highlighted. Particularly, in this paper, we investigate secrecy outage probability in low Earth orbit satellite networks by jointly considering multi-satellite scheduling for data and artificial noise transmissions against eavesdropping attacks. We propose a novel multi-satellite scheduling scheme and derive a closed-form of secrecy outage probability over Nakagami-mmmfading channels. We verify our analysis and evaluate our proposed scheme compared to several baseline schemes through extensive simulations.
In this paper, we consider a low earth orbit satellite communication system with a legitimate user and an eavesdropper and investigate its secrecy performance. Considering the beam coverage of the satellites, we propose a system where a friendly jammer satellite transmits artificial noise signals only to eavesdroppers. We obtain the cumulative distribution functions (CDFs) of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratios taking into account the Nakagami-𝑚 fading and the positions of ground users and satellites. The CDFs are used to derive the analytical forms of the probability of non-zero secrecy capacity, secrecy capacity outage probability, and average secrecy capacity. In addition, for tractability and insight, asymptotic forms are also investigated at a high-power regime. Finally, we present the numerical results to validate the obtained expressions and show the diversity order of the secrecy capacity.
Low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite systems provide global coverage and low latency, yet their rapid motion induces severe channel variations, rendering full-service-period physical layer security design prohibitively costly and inefficient. To address this issue, we investigate a high-altitude platform (HAP)-assisted secure transmission scheme, where the HAP transmits artificial noise (AN) to enhance satellite communication security and improve user fairness. Specifically, we formulate a minimum secrecy rate maximization problem with joint power allocation and the HAP beamforming vector as optimization variables. Due to the non-convexity nature of the problem, solving it for a single time slot is computationally intensive, and directly extending the optimization across all time slots incurs prohibitive overhead. Therefore, we propose a learning-based framework that first optimizes key time slots and then trains a kernel ridge regression (KRR) model. In particular, the number of training samples is adaptively adjusted based on the minimum distance between eavesdroppers and legitimate users, while a warm-start strategy is used to accelerate optimization over the sampled slots. The trained KRR model learns the mapping from satellite angular positions to secure transmission parameters and predicts suitable solutions for the remaining time slots. Simulation results show that the proposed method achieves secrecy and user fairness performance comparable to per-slot optimization with much lower computational complexity, offering a scalable and efficient solution for secure LEO satellite communications.