Due to the broadcast nature of radio propagation, the wireless air interface is open and accessible to both authorized and illegitimate users. This completely differs from a wired network, where communicating devices are physically connected through cables and a node without direct association is unable to access the network for illicit activities. The open communications environment makes wireless transmissions more vulnerable than wired communications to malicious attacks, including both the passive eavesdropping for data interception and the active jamming for disrupting legitimate transmissions. Therefore, this paper is motivated to examine the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity, confidentiality, integrity, and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state of the art in physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer. Several physical-layer security techniques are reviewed and compared, including information-theoretic security, artificial-noise-aided security, security-oriented beamforming, diversity-assisted security, and physical-layer key generation approaches. Since a jammer emitting radio signals can readily interfere with the legitimate wireless users, we also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their countermeasures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive jammer, adaptive jammer, and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.

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A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances, and Future Trends

In this chapter we deal with the following nonlinear fractional programming problem: 

$$P:\mathop{{\max }}\limits_{{x \in s}} q(x) = (f(x) + \alpha )/((x) + \beta )$$

where f, g: R n → R, α, β ∈ R, S ⊆ R n . To simplify things, and without restricting the generality of the problem, it is usually assumed that, g(x) + β + 0 for all x ∈ S,S is non-empty and that the objective function has a finite optimal value.

Nonlinear Fractional Programming

Focusing on two-antenna infrastructure relays employed for coverage extension, we develop hybrid techniques that switch opportunistically between full-duplex and half-duplex relaying modes. To rationalize the system design, the classic three-node full-duplex relay link is first amended by explicitly modeling residual relay self-interference, i.e., a loopback signal from the transmit antenna to the receive antenna remaining after cancellation. The motivation for opportunistic mode selection stems then from the fundamental trade-off determining the spectral efficiency: The half-duplex mode avoids inherently the self-interference at the cost of halving the end-to-end symbol rate while the full-duplex mode achieves full symbol rate but, in practice, suffers from residual interference even after cancellation. We propose the combination of opportunistic mode selection and transmit power adaptation for maximizing instantaneous and average spectral efficiency after noting that the trade-off favors alternately the modes during operation. The analysis covers both common relaying protocols (amplify-and-forward and decode-and-forward) as well as reflects the difference of downlink and uplink systems. The results show that opportunistic mode selection offers significant performance gain over system design that is confined to either mode without rationalization.

Hybrid Full-Duplex/Half-Duplex Relaying with Transmit Power Adaptation

This paper examines the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity, confidentiality, integrity and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state-of-the-art in physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer. We also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their counter-measures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive jammer, adaptive jammer and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.

/pdf/a-survey-on-wireless-security-technical-challenges-recent-k705wofne7.pdf

A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances and Future Trends

Physical layer security which safeguards data confidentiality based on the information-theoretic approaches has received significant research interest recently. The key idea behind physical layer security is to utilize the intrinsic randomness of the transmission channel to guarantee the security in physical layer. The evolution toward 5G wireless communications poses new challenges for physical layer security research. This paper provides a latest survey of the physical layer security research on various promising 5G technologies, including physical layer security coding, massive multiple-input multiple-output, millimeter wave communications, heterogeneous networks, non-orthogonal multiple access, full duplex technology, and so on. Technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends of physical layer security in 5G and beyond are discussed.

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A Survey of Physical Layer Security Techniques for 5G Wireless Networks and Challenges Ahead

In this paper, we consider a multi-relay cooperative communication network that consists of a source node transmitting to its destination with the help of multiple decode-and-forward (DF) relays. Specifically, the DF relays that succeed in decoding the source signal are allowed to re-transmit their decoded results simultaneously to the destination in a cooperative beamforming manner. In order to carry out the cooperative beamforming, the destination needs to send the quantized channel state information (CSI) to the relays through a limited feedback channel in the face of channel quantization errors (CQE). We propose a CQE oriented multi-relay beamforming (MRB) scheme, denoted CQE-MRB for short, for the sake of improving the throughput of relay-destination transmissions. An effective throughput defined as the difference between the transmission rate and the feedback rate is used to measure an outage probability of the source-destination transmission. Simulation results demonstrate that the outage performance of proposed CQE-MRB scheme is improved substantially with an increasing number of relays. Moreover, it is shown that the number of channel quantization bits can be further optimized to minimize the outage probability of proposed CQE-MRB scheme.

Cooperative beamforming for multi-relay networks with limited feedback

This paper investigates the secrecy energy efficiency (SEE) for a two-tier heterogeneous cellular network having a macro cell and multiple small cells, where the macro cell consists of a macro base station (MBS), a macro user and an eavesdropper and meanwhile each small cell comprises of a small base station (SBS), a small user and an eavesdropper. We consider the use of artificial noise (AN) signals emitted at MBS and SBSs at the expense of transmit power to defend against eavesdroppers. For the sake of obtaining a better balance between the secrecy rate (SR) and energy efficiency of heterogeneous cellular networks, we propose an SEE maximization (SEEM) scheme in small cells through jointly optimizing the beamformers of confidential signals and AN at MBS and SBSs, called joint beamforming based SEEM (JBF-SEEM) while guaranteeing the SR requirements and the power constraints for MBS and each SBS. However, the proposed JBF-SEEM problem is a complicated optimization problem because of the non-convex fractional form. Thus, we firstly transform the original objective function in fractional form into a subtractive one through applying the Dinkelbach's method, and then the non-convex subtractive form is approximated into a convex optimization problem by combining the penalty function and the difference of two-convex functions approach. Furthermore, we propose a two-tier iterative JBF-SEEM algorithm to obtain the near-optimal beamforming solution. Numerical results show that the JBF-SEEM algorithm is convergent while achieving a better SEE performance than conventional approaches.

Beamforming Aided Secrecy Energy Efficiency Maximization in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

In this paper, we consider a multi-input-multi-output cognitive radio (MIMO-CR) system which consists of one secondary user (SU) and one secondary destination (SD), in which one eavesdropper (E) attempts to tap the information from SU to SD. All of the aforementioned nodes are equipped with multiple antennas. For enhancing physical layer security, we propose so-called optimal antenna selection (OAS) and suboptimal antenna selection (SAS) schemes, which assume that the instantaneous wiretap channel information is known and unknown, respectively. We carry out the secrecy outage probability analysis for the proposed OAS and SAS schemes. In order to make a performance comparison, we also discuss the secrecy outage probability of single-input-single-output cognitive radio (SISO-CR) system. The secrecy outage performance of SAS is better than SISO but worse than OAS. Furthermore, as the numbers of antennas of SU and SD increase, the secrecy outage probability of OAS and SAS both have significant improvements.

Transmit antenna selection to improve physical layer security for MIMO-CR systems

In this paper, we examine the physical layer security for cooperative wireless networks with multiple intermediate nodes, where the decode-and-forward (DF) protocol is considered. We propose a new joint cooperative beamforming and jamming (JCBJ) scheme to protect wireless communication against eavesdropping, where the intermediate nodes which successfully decode the source signal are selected as the relays for simultaneously forwarding the source signal by employing a weight vector, and meanwhile, the others are used to act as the friendly jammers for broadcasting artificial noise to disturb the eavesdropper. We further investigate the optimal power allocation among the source, relays and friendly jammers for maximizing the secrecy rate of the proposed JCBJ scheme and derive a closed-form sub-optimal solution. Simulation results show that the proposed JCBJ scheme achieves obviously higher secrecy rate than the conventional generalized singular-value-decomposition (GSVD) based beamforming and pure jamming schemes. Additionally, the proposed optimal power allocation scheme performs much better than the equal power allocation scheme in terms of secrecy rate.

Optimal power allocation for joint cooperative beamforming and jamming assisted wireless networks

A new joint best relay and jammer selection (JBRJS) scheme is conceived for enhancing the physical layer security (PLS) of cooperative networks relying on multiple energy harvesting (EH) aided intermediate nodes, which accumulate energy based on the power splitting (PS) protocol. Specifically, we select the best intermediate node as the relay, whilst exploiting all the remaining nodes as friendly jammers. Furthermore, we investigate the joint optimization of the PS ratio and the relay-aided beamforming for maximizing the system’s secrecy rate and present a full channel state information (CSI) based joint PS and beamforming ( $\it {f}$ JPSB) scheme as the optimal solution by converting the optimization problem formulated into a single-variable optimization problem. We also propose a partial-CSI based JPSB ( $\it {p}$ JPSB) method for the scenario where only the main link’s CSI is available. Our numerical results show that the proposed JBRJS scheme beneficially enhances the PLS compared to the joint random relay and jammer selection (JRRJS) and to the pure best relay selection (PBRS) schemes. Moreover, the secrecy rate of the proposed $\it {f}$ JPSB and $\it {p}$ JPSB schemes is obviously higher than that of the fixed PS and beamforming (FPSB) method, and it further increases with the number of the relay’s transmit antennas.

/pdf/joint-optimization-of-power-splitting-and-beamforming-in-3sc68fa37u.pdf

Jia Zhu

Papers

Cooperative beamforming for multi-relay networks with limited feedback

Beamforming Aided Secrecy Energy Efficiency Maximization in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

Transmit antenna selection to improve physical layer security for MIMO-CR systems

Optimal power allocation for joint cooperative beamforming and jamming assisted wireless networks

Joint Optimization of Power Splitting and Beamforming in Energy Harvesting Cooperative Networks