Conventional Directional Modulation (DM) can produce phase disturbances in the direction of the eavesdropper to enhance communication security. However, it does not take into account the benefits to security that arise from the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the received signal, nor does it consider the energy efficiency of the transmitted signal, resulting in a high security energy consumption. This paper proposes an optimization objective based on the concept of secrecy information rate, that comprehensively considers the energy of the received signal by legitimate user and the distortion of constellation points by the eavesdropper. The improved DM accounts for environmental noise and signal attenuation over distance, as well as the influence of interfering signal phases in the eavesdropping direction on secure communication performance. Finally, it provides a relationship curve between the optimized secure capacity and energy efficiency, which is beneficial for better balancing secure communication requirements in terms of distance and angle in practical scenarios.
Conventional Directional Modulation (DM) can produce phase disturbances in the direction of the eavesdropper to enhance communication security. However, it does not take into account the benefits to security that arise from the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the received signal, nor does it consider the energy efficiency of the transmitted signal, resulting in a high security energy consumption. This paper proposes an optimization objective based on the concept of secrecy information rate, that comprehensively considers the energy of the received signal by legitimate user and the distortion of constellation points by the eavesdropper. The improved DM accounts for environmental noise and signal attenuation over distance, as well as the influence of interfering signal phases in the eavesdropping direction on secure communication performance. Finally, it provides a relationship curve between the optimized secure capacity and energy efficiency, which is beneficial for better balancing secure communication requirements in terms of distance and angle in practical scenarios.
Directional modulation (DM) refers to a class of efficient techniques for enhancing the physical layer security of wireless communications. However, conventional DM approaches cannot guarantee the transmission security when eavesdroppers are located close to the legitimate user. In this paper, to mitigate this problem, a new DM scheme with cooperative receivers (DM-CR) is proposed for secrecy communications. Specifically, the legitimate user employs multiple cooperative receivers, and a predefined distortion factor set is introduced to the beamforming vector. The proposed DM-CR scheme is able to guarantee transmission security regardless of the direction or location of the eavesdroppers. Furthermore, the average bit error probability of the proposed DM-CR scheme is investigated. Both analytical and simulation results are presented to show that the proposed DM-CR scheme significantly outperforms the benchmark in terms of the bit error rate, so as to provide secure transmission toward future wireless communications.
Secrecy capacity of a multiple-antenna wiretap channel is studied in the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. Expressions for the first and second derivatives of the secrecy capacity with respect to SNR at SNR = 0 are derived. Transmission strategies required to achieve these derivatives are identified. In particular, it is shown that it is optimal in the low-SNR regime to transmit in the maximum-eigenvalue eigenspace of Phi = HmdaggerHm- Nm/NeHedaggerHewhere Hmand Hedenote the channel matrices associated with the legitimate receiver and eavesdropper, respectively, and Nmand Neare the noise variances at the receiver and eavesdropper, respectively. Energy efficiency is analyzed by finding the minimum bit energy required for secure and reliable communications, and the wideband slope. Increased bit energy requirements under secrecy constraints are quantified. Finally, the impact of fading is investigated.
Wireless broadcast allows widespread and easy information transfer. However, it may expose the information to unintended receivers, which could include eavesdroppers. As a solution, cryptography at the higher network levels has been used to encrypt and protect data. Cryptography relies on the fact that the computational power of the adversary is not enough to break the encryption. However, due to increasing computing power, the adversary power also increases. To further strengthen the security and complement the encryption, the concept of physical layer security has been introduced and surged an enormous amount of research. Widely speaking, the research in physical layer security can be divided into two directions: the information-theoretic and signal processing paradigms. This thesis starts with an overview of the physical layer security literature and continues with the contributions which are divided into the two following parts. In the first part, we investigate the information-theoretic secrecy rate. In the first scenario, we study the confidentiality of a bidirectional satellite network consisting of two mobile users who exchange two messages via a multibeam satellite using the XOR network coding protocol. We maximize the sum secrecy rate by designing the optimal beamforming vector along with optimizing the return and forward link time allocation. In the second scenario, we study the effect of interference on the secrecy rate. We investigate the secrecy rate in a two-user interference network where one of the users, namely user 1, requires to establish a confidential connection. User 1 wants to prevent an unintended user of the network to decode its transmission. User 1 has to adjust its transmission power such that its secrecy rate is maximized while the quality of service at the destination of the other user, user 2, is satisfied. We obtain closed-form solutions for optimal joint power control. In the third scenario, we study secrecy rate over power ratio, namely ``secrecy energy efficiency''. We design the optimal beamformer for a multiple-input single-output system with and without considering the minimum required secrecy rate at the destination. In the second part, we follow the signal processing paradigm to improve the security. We employ the directional modulation concept to enhance the security of a multi-user multiple-input multiple-output communication system in the presence of a multi-antenna eavesdropper. Enhancing the security is accomplished by increasing the symbol error rate at the eavesdropper without the eavesdropper's CSI. We show that when the eavesdropper has less antennas than the users, regardless of the received signal SNR, it cannot recover any useful information; in addition, it has to go through extra noise enhancing processes to estimate the symbols when it has more antennas than the users. Finally, we summarize the conclusions and discuss the promising research directions in the physical layer security.
In this paper, directional modulation (DM) is investigated to enhance physical layer security. Practical transmitter designs are exploited under imperfect channel state information (CSI) and hardware constraints, such as finite-resolution phase shifters (PSs) and per-antenna power budget. Tailored for the practical issues in realizing DM, a series of practical scenarios are investigated. Starting from the scenario where eavesdroppers (Eve)s' information is completely unknown, corresponding designs are proposed to optimize legitimate users (LU)s' receiving performance while randomizing the Eves' received signal. When the Eves' CSI is imperfectly known, in the second scenario, the Eves' receiving performance is further deteriorated by imposing destructive interference to the Eves. For each scenario, three algorithms are proposed under hardware constraints and imperfect CSI, i.e., one direct-mapping algorithm suitable for high/moderate number of bits in PSs, one heuristic algorithm with improved receiving performance at the cost of complexity, and one iterative-closed-form algorithm with enhanced practicality of symbol-level based DM. Simulation demonstrates that the algorithms achieve lower symbol error rate (SER) at the LUs while significantly deteriorating the Eves' SER, leading to an improved secrecy throughput over the benchmarks.
Secrecy capacity of a multiple-antenna wiretap channel is studied in the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. Expressions for the first and second derivatives of the secrecy capacity with respect to SNR at SNR = 0 are derived. Transmission strategies required to achieve these derivatives are identified. In particular, it is shown that it is optimal in the low-SNR regime to transmit in the maximal-eigenvalue eigenspace of φ = Hm†Hm- Nm/NeHe†Hewhere Hmand Hedenote the channel matrices associated with the legitimate receiver and eavesdropper, respectively, and Nmand Neare the noise variances at the receiver and eavesdropper, respectively. Energy efficiency is analyzed by finding the minimum bit energy required for secure and reliable communications, and the wideband slope. Increased bit energy requirements under secrecy constraints are quantified. Finally, the impact of fading is investigated, and the benefits of fading in terms of energy efficiency are shown.
Random frequency diverse array (RFDA) based directional modulation (DM) was proposed as a promising technology in secure communications to achieve a precise transmission of confidential messages, and artificial noise (AN) was considered as an important helper in RFDA-DM. Compared with previous works that only focus on the spot of the desired receiver, in this work, we investigate a secrecy region around the desired receiver, that is, a specific range and angle resolution around the desired receiver. Firstly, the minimum number of antennas and the bandwidth needed to achieve a secrecy region are derived. Moreover, based on the lower bound of the secrecy capacity in RFDA-DM-AN scheme, we investigate the performance impact of AN on the secrecy capacity. From this work, we conclude that: 1) AN is not always beneficial to the secure transmission. Specifically, when the number of antennas is sufficiently large and the transmit power is smaller than a specified value, AN will reduce secrecy capacity due to the consumption of limited transmit power. 2) Increasing bandwidth will enlarge the set for randomly allocating frequencies and thus lead to a higher secrecy capacity. 3) The minimum number of antennas increases as the predefined secrecy transmission rate increases.