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Electronics, Communications, and Computing Summit

Secure Physical Layer Communication Techniques for Wireless Sensor Networks

Jinfe Regash

Published Jun 13, 2026• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

The applications of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are widespread in areas such as environmental monitoring, industrial automation, healthcare and smart infrastructures, where secure and reliable wireless communication is essential. The nature of a wireless channel, however, lends itself to the problem of eavesdropper-directed wireless sensor networking, interception and unauthorized access. This paper presents a secure physical layer communication system featuring the combination of channel estimator, physical layer key generator, artificial noise generator and adaptive power allocator to increase the confidentiality of physical layer communications and simultaneously achieve energy efficiency. A hybrid security mechanism is used, which takes advantage of the channel characteristics to create secret keys and to make the eavesdropper's signal reception worse by introducing controlled artificial noise. Key performance parameters considered for simulation-based evaluation are secrecy capacity, BER, PDR, Throughput, Energy consumption and Network lifetime. Results show that the secrecy capacity is 6.3 bps/Hz, the packet delivery ratio is 98.7%, the bit error rate is 10⁻⁶, and the network lifetime is 1675 rounds. The proposed framework is much more effective in terms of both communication security and energy efficiency than the traditional WSNs security schemes.

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The applications of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are widespread in areas such as environmental monitoring, industrial automation, healthcare and smart infrastructures, where secure and reliable wireless communication is essential. The nature of a wireless channel, however, lends itself to the problem of eavesdropper-directed wireless sensor networking, interception and unauthorized access. This paper presents a secure physical layer communication system featuring the combination of channel estimator, physical layer key generator, artificial noise generator and adaptive power allocator to increase the confidentiality of physical layer communications and simultaneously achieve energy efficiency. A hybrid security mechanism is used, which takes advantage of the channel characteristics to create secret keys and to make the eavesdropper's signal reception worse by introducing controlled artificial noise. Key performance parameters considered for simulation-based evaluation are secrecy capacity, BER, PDR, Throughput, Energy consumption and Network lifetime. Results show that the secrecy capacity is 6.3 bps/Hz, the packet delivery ratio is 98.7%, the bit error rate is 10⁻⁶, and the network lifetime is 1675 rounds. The proposed framework is much more effective in terms of both communication security and energy efficiency than the traditional WSNs security schemes.
The environment of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) makes the communication not only have the broadcast nature of wireless transmission, but also be limited to the low power and communication capability of sensor equipment. Both of them make it hard to ensure the confidentiality of communication. In this paper, we propose a cluster-based cooperative jamming scheme based on physical layer security for WSNs. The mathematical principle of the scheme is based on the design principle of code division multiple access. By using the orthogonality of orthogonal vectors, the legitimate receiver can effectively eliminate the noise, which is generated by the cooperative jamming nodes to disturb the eavesdropper. This scheme enables the legitimate receiver to ensure a strong communication confidentiality even if there is no location or channel advantage comparing with eavesdroppers. Through extensive simulations, the security performance of the proposed scheme is investigated in terms of secrecy rate.
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are widely used in different disciplines, including transportation systems, agriculture field environment monitoring, healthcare systems, and industrial monitoring. The security challenge of the wireless communication link between sensor nodes is critical in WSNs. In this paper, we propose a new physical layer secret-key generation scheme for transportation security sensor network. The scheme is based on the cooperation of all the sensor nodes, thus avoiding the key distribution process, which increases the security of the system. Different passive and active attack models are analyzed in this paper. We also prove that when the cooperative node number is large enough, even when the eavesdropper is equipped with multiple antennas, the secret-key is still secure. Numerical results are performed to show the efficiency of the proposed scheme.
Information security has been a very important issue in wireless networks. With the ever-increasing amount of data being exchanged over wireless networks, the confidentiality of information needs to be protected from unauthorized users called eavesdropper. Due to the broadcast nature of the wireless medium, the transmissions between legitimate users maybe overheard and intercepted by the unauthorized parties, which makes wireless transmission vulnerable to potential eavesdropping attacks. The security of wireless communications plays an increasingly important role in the cybercrime defense against unauthorized activities. We consider the wireless physical layer security which has been explored for the sake of enhancing the protection of wireless communications against eavesdroppers. We consider the problem of secret communication through Rayleigh fading channel in the presence of an eavesdropper in which the transmitter knows the channel state information of both the main and eavesdropper channel. Then, we analyze the average capacity of the main channel and eavesdropper channel from which an expression of secrecy capacity is derived based on the cumulative distribution function and probability density function of the signal to noise ratio. We also analyze an expression for the symbol error rate of the main channel, and the outage probability is obtained for the main transmission. Finally, we perform the numerical results in MATLAB.
Physical layer security has been widely read up for decades to use physical layer qualities like unconventionality in wireless channels, motion toward clamor ratio hole, conscious sticking, and so on, to secure wireless correspondences. Secret rate is essential to define secure communication transmission rate in the presence of an eavesdropper. WSNs need secure communications since sensors send data to a fusion center. The most common cryptography techniques have been considered, but most of them are too computationally and energy-intensive for WSNs. Digital telecommunications networks sharing resources are called data networks. There are two networks: wired and wireless. Wireless networks are very popular due to its wireless setup and many household, business, and telecommunications networking applications. WSN were created when sensors detected physical or environmental conditions like pressure, temperature, or beam. WSN are elastic, easy, and straightforward. They grow because they're cheap and efficient. Wireless Sensor Networks have multiple sensor nodes scattered across a field that can measure, sense, compute, communicate, and send results to a base station. With increasing competence, security is also improving. Though the network was designed to be safe, hackers and attackers always find a way in and attack.
Security functionality handled by higher layers of OSI model is a costly affair due to key management and complex mathematical encryption-decryption mechanisms in the scalable networks like wireless sensor networks (WSNs). WSN consists of resource constrained tiny sensor nodes for which battery is their lifetime. Physical layer security is the cost effective solution for such adhoc networks. The cooperative diversity mechanism makes use of the benefits of wireless sensor network scalability in terms of cooperative resource sharing in which multiple diversity channels are created which results into improved wireless connectivity. Cooperative jamming principle is used where the source transmits the encoded signal and at the same time relay transmits the weighted jamming signal to increase the equivocation of the eavesdropper. This work proposes a novel cooperative jamming mechanism for scalable networks like Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) which makes use of friendly interference to confuse the eavesdropper and increase its uncertainty about the source message. Channel fading is exploited to achieve perfect secrecy. The full communication link is built with the help of Information theoretic source and channel coding mechanisms. The whole idea is to make use of normally inactive relay nodes in the selective Decode and Forward cooperative communication and make them work as cooperative jamming sources to increase the equivocation of the eavesdropper. In this work, eavesdropper’s channel’s equivocation is compared with the main channel in terms of mutual information and secrecy capacity.
The backscatter communication system has tremendous potential in commercial applications, still very less work has been done to study the benefits of it. Backscatter communication system is the backbone of many low cost and low power distributed wireless systems. The data transmission between various nodes in wireless communication system always comes with the risk of third party interception. This leads to privacy and security breaches of the information. In this paper, physical layer security of backscatter wireless system for multiple eavesdropper, single tag, and single reader case is studied. Unique characteristics of the channel are used to provide security to signal transmission. In order to degrade the reception of the signal by eavesdropper, a noise injection scheme is proposed. The advantages of this approach are discussed for various cases while evaluating the impact of the key factors like antenna gain and location of the eavesdropper on the secrecy of the transmission. Analytical results indicate that if properly employed, the noise injection scheme improves the performance of backscatter wireless system.