Ensuring secure wireless communications is crucial, given their vulnerability to a wide range of risks and attacks. Physical Layer Security (PLS) techniques offer an excellent complement to traditional cryptographic algorithms, enhancing overall security. This paper provides a brief overview of the theoretical foundations of PLS techniques, and presents the basic concept. Three models are simulated and analyzed: a basic model and two cooperative models involving one and two jammers. The performance for these models, in terms of secrecy rate and bit error rate, are evaluated. Finally, the paper concludes with insights into potential applications and the future prospects of PLS techniques in modern wireless communication systems.
Ensuring secure wireless communications is crucial, given their vulnerability to a wide range of risks and attacks. Physical Layer Security (PLS) techniques offer an excellent complement to traditional cryptographic algorithms, enhancing overall security. This paper provides a brief overview of the theoretical foundations of PLS techniques, and presents the basic concept. Three models are simulated and analyzed: a basic model and two cooperative models involving one and two jammers. The performance for these models, in terms of secrecy rate and bit error rate, are evaluated. Finally, the paper concludes with insights into potential applications and the future prospects of PLS techniques in modern wireless communication systems.
Physical layer security (PLS) has emerged as a promising approach to enhance the security of wireless communication systems. This paper provides a comprehensive review of PLS, including its basic concepts, key techniques, and recent developments. We begin by introducing the basic principles of PLS, including the concept of secrecy capacity and the key assumptions underlying PLS. We then discuss various techniques that have been proposed to enhance PLS, such as artificial noise, cooperative jamming, and beamforming. Next, we review recent research on PLS in different scenarios, including multi-user systems, cognitive radio networks, and wireless sensor networks. Finally, we conclude by discussing future research directions and open challenges in PLS.
The open nature of radio propagation enables ubiquitous wireless communication. This allows for seamless data transmission. However, unauthorized users may pose a threat to the security of the data being transmitted to authorized users. This gives rise to network vulnerabilities such as hacking, eavesdropping, and jamming of the transmitted information. Physical layer security (PLS) has been identified as one of the promising security approaches to safeguard the transmission from eavesdroppers in a wireless network. It is an alternative to the computationally demanding and complex cryptographic algorithms and techniques. PLS has continually received exponential research interest owing to the possibility of exploiting the characteristics of the wireless channel. One of the main characteristics includes the random nature of the transmission channel. The aforesaid nature makes it possible for confidential and authentic signal transmission between the sender and the receiver in the physical layer. We start by introducing the basic theories of PLS, including the wiretap channel, information-theoretic security, and a brief discussion of the cryptography security technique. Furthermore, an overview of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication is provided. The main focus of our review is based on the existing key-less PLS optimization techniques, their limitations, and challenges. The paper also looks into the promising key research areas in addressing these shortfalls. Lastly, a comprehensive overview of some of the recent PLS research in 5G and 6G technologies of wireless communication networks is provided.
Security has emerged as one of the critical requirements of future wireless networks. Unlike traditional cryptography-based security, physical layer security (PLS) tends to exploit various features of the random wireless channel to secure not only the information being communicated but the whole communication process from any type of attack. Due to the limited capability of the legacy wireless networks, only a few channel features could be effectively exploited for PLS. Future wireless networks are envisioned to feature advanced transceiver technologies, signal processing techniques, channel control, and sensing capabilities which will allow them to easily access and extract additional channel features that can be readily exploited for PLS. The novel use cases to be accommodated in future networks are also found to experience some peculiar channel characteristics which enrich the list of channel features that can be exploited for PLS. This article, thus, tends to highlight the opportunities and potential challenges of these new channel features from the PLS perspective. In the course of the article, the assessment of important qualities while selecting a certain channel feature for the PLS application is discussed. The importance of the channel control concept and sensing technologies for PLS is highlighted. Finally, the article discusses the challenges and vulnerabilities of the channel-based PLS concept from which future research directions are derived.
Abstract Due to the open nature of wireless communication systems, the data transmission over these networks are vulnerable to malicious attack. To safeguard the transmitted data, physical layer security (PLS) has been emerged as a promising technique because of its unique feature of utilizing randomness of the wireless channel to secure the information. The preeminent idea of utilizing the channel imperfections such as fading and noise into the security providing resource is the basic approach behind PLS. For exploiting the randomness of the propagation medium, the analysis of the secrecy performance over the fading channel is of utmost importance. With the explanation of basic theory and technology, this paper presents an elaborated survey on the PLS research over the fading channels. To exploit the performance gains, we discuss the optimization approaches in different network design problems, for example, secrecy rate maximization, power minimization, and secure energy efficiency problems. We present a comparative study of the expressions of various performance metrics of the PLS along with classification depending upon the channel state information of the eavesdropper. The application and challenges of the PLS in the emerging wireless technologies are also reviewed and discussed. This paper incorporates almost all the aspects of PLS implemented over the fading channels. Furthermore, the paper is concluded with open research directions for the PLS system in various fields that can be explored to design a flexible and robust security system to satisfy the security requirements of the next‐generation networks.
Physical layer security (PLS) has emerged as a new concept and powerful alternative that can complement and may even replace encryption-based approaches, which entail many hurdles and practical problems for future wireless systems. The basic idea of PLS is to exploit the characteristics of the wireless channel and its impairments including noise, fading, interference, dispersion, diversity, etc. in order to ensure the ability of the intended user to successfully perform data decoding while preventing eavesdroppers from doing so. Thus, the main design goal of PLS is to increase the performance difference between the link of the legitimate receiver and that of the eavesdropper by using well-designed transmission schemes. In this survey, we propose a conceptual, generic, and expandable framework for classifying the existing PLS techniques against wireless passive eavesdropping. In this flexible framework, the security techniques that we comprehensively review in this treatise are divided into two primary approaches: signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio-based approach and complexity-based approach. The first approach is classified into three major categories: first, secrecy channel codes-based schemes; second, security techniques based on channel adaptation; third, schemes based on injecting interfering artificial (noise/jamming) signals along with the transmitted information signals. The second approach (complexity-based), which is associated with the mechanisms of extracting secret sequences from the shared channel, is classified into two main categories based on which layer the secret sequence obtained by channel quantization is applied on. The techniques belonging to each one of these categories are divided and classified into three main signal domains: time, frequency and space. For each one of these domains, several examples are given and illustrated along with the review of the state-of-the-art security advances in each domain. Moreover, the advantages and disadvantages of each approach alongside the lessons learned from existing research works are stated and discussed. The recent applications of PLS techniques to different emerging communication systems such as visible light communication, body area network, power line communication, Internet of Things, smart grid, mm-Wave, cognitive radio, vehicular ad-hoc network, unmanned aerial vehicle, ultra-wideband, device-to-device, radio-frequency identification, index modulation, and 5G non-orthogonal multiple access based-systems, are also reviewed and discussed. The paper is concluded with recommendations and future research directions for designing robust, efficient and strong security methods for current and future wireless systems.
Security has emerged as one of the critical requirements in future wireless networks. Unlike traditional cryptography-based security, physical layer security (PLS) exploits various features of the random wireless channel to secure not only the information being communicated but the whole communication process from any type of attack. Future wireless networks are envisioned to feature new technologies such as re-configurable intelligent surfaces, massive multiple input multiple output, and sensing, to accommodate the emerging use-cases. Both, the new technologies and the new use-cases have been found to enrich the channel characteristics by unveiling some new channel features which can be readily exploited to facilitate PLS. This article surveys these new channel features to reveal their potential for PLS implementation. In the course of the article, the assessments of important qualities while selecting a certain channel feature for the PLS application are discussed. The importance of the channel control concept and sensing technologies that facilitate the accessibility of certain channel features are highlighted from the PLS perspective. Security attacks aimed at channel characteristics, rather than the communication itself, in order to disrupt PLS implementations are also discussed. Finally, the article summarizes the possible research direction for channel-based PLS.