Information Theory and Reliable Communication

This paper considers the transmission of confidential data over wireless channels. Based on an information-theoretic formulation of the problem, in which two legitimates partners communicate over a quasi-static fading channel and an eavesdropper observes their transmissions through a second independent quasi-static fading channel, the important role of fading is characterized in terms of average secure communication rates and outage probability. Based on the insights from this analysis, a practical secure communication protocol is developed, which uses a four-step procedure to ensure wireless information-theoretic security: (i) common randomness via opportunistic transmission, (ii) message reconciliation, (iii) common key generation via privacy amplification, and (iv) message protection with a secret key. A reconciliation procedure based on multilevel coding and optimized low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes is introduced, which allows to achieve communication rates close to the fundamental security limits in several relevant instances. Finally, a set of metrics for assessing average secure key generation rates is established, and it is shown that the protocol is effective in secure key renewal-even in the presence of imperfect channel state information.

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Wireless Information-Theoretic Security

The capacity of the Gaussian wiretap channel model is analyzed when there are multiple antennas at the sender, intended receiver and eavesdropper. The associated channel matrices are fixed and known to all the terminals. A computable characterization of the secrecy capacity is established as the saddle point solution to a minimax problem. The converse is based on a Sato-type argument used in other broadcast settings, and the coding theorem is based on Gaussian wiretap codebooks. At high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the secrecy capacity is shown to be attained by simultaneously diagonalizing the channel matrices via the generalized singular value decomposition, and independently coding across the resulting parallel channels. The associated capacity is expressed in terms of the corresponding generalized singular values. It is shown that a semi-blind "masked" multi-input multi-output (MIMO) transmission strategy that sends information along directions in which there is gain to the intended receiver, and synthetic noise along directions in which there is not, can be arbitrarily far from capacity in this regime. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the secrecy capacity to be zero are provided, which simplify in the limit of many antennas when the entries of the channel matrices are independent and identically distributed. The resulting scaling laws establish that to prevent secure communication, the eavesdropper needs three times as many antennas as the sender and intended receiver have jointly, and that the optimum division of antennas between sender and intended receiver is in the ratio of 2:1.

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Secure Transmission With Multiple Antennas—Part II: The MIMOME Wiretap Channel

Physical (PHY) layer security approaches for wireless communications can prevent eavesdropping without upper layer data encryption. However, they are hampered by wireless channel conditions: absent feedback, they are typically feasible only when the source-destination channel is better than the source-eavesdropper channel. Node cooperation is a means to overcome this challenge and improve the performance of secure wireless communications. This paper addresses secure communications of one source-destination pair with the help of multiple cooperating relays in the presence of one or more eavesdroppers. Three cooperative schemes are considered: decode-and-forward (DF), amplify-and-forward (AF), and cooperative jamming (CJ). For these schemes, the relays transmit a weighted version of a reencoded noise-free message signal (for DF), a received noisy source signal (for AF), or a common jamming signal (for CJ). Novel system designs are proposed, consisting of the determination of relay weights and the allocation of transmit power, that maximize the achievable secrecy rate subject to a transmit power constraint, or, minimize the transmit power subject to a secrecy rate constraint. For DF in the presence of one eavesdropper, closed-form optimal solutions are derived for the relay weights. For other problems, since the optimal relay weights are difficult to obtain, several criteria are considered leading to suboptimal but simple solutions, i.e., the complete nulling of the message signals at all eavesdroppers (for DF and AF), or the complete nulling of jamming signal at the destination (for CJ). Based on the designed relay weights, for DF in the presence of multiple eavesdroppers, and for CJ in the presence of one eavesdropper, the optimal power allocation is obtained in closed-form; in all other cases the optimal power allocation is obtained via iterative algorithms. Numerical evaluation of the obtained secrecy rate and transmit power results show that the proposed design can significantly improve the performance of secure wireless communications.

Improving Wireless Physical Layer Security via Cooperating Relays

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the domain of physical layer security in multiuser wireless networks. The essential premise of physical layer security is to enable the exchange of confidential messages over a wireless medium in the presence of unauthorized eavesdroppers, without relying on higher-layer encryption. This can be achieved primarily in two ways: without the need for a secret key by intelligently designing transmit coding strategies, or by exploiting the wireless communication medium to develop secret keys over public channels. The survey begins with an overview of the foundations dating back to the pioneering work of Shannon and Wyner on information-theoretic security. We then describe the evolution of secure transmission strategies from point-to-point channels to multiple-antenna systems, followed by generalizations to multiuser broadcast, multiple-access, interference, and relay networks. Secret-key generation and establishment protocols based on physical layer mechanisms are subsequently covered. Approaches for secrecy based on channel coding design are then examined, along with a description of inter-disciplinary approaches based on game theory and stochastic geometry. The associated problem of physical layer message authentication is also briefly introduced. The survey concludes with observations on potential research directions in this area.

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Principles of Physical Layer Security in Multiuser Wireless Networks: A Survey

We consider the secure transmission of information over an ergodic fading channel in the presence of an eavesdropper. Our eavesdropper can be viewed as the wireless counterpart of Wyner's wiretapper. The secrecy capacity of such a system is characterized under the assumption of asymptotically long coherence intervals. We first consider the full channel state information (CSI) case, where the transmitter has access to the channel gains of the legitimate receiver and the eavesdropper. The secrecy capacity under this full CSI assumption serves as an upper bound for the secrecy capacity when only the CSI of the legitimate receiver is known at the transmitter, which is characterized next. In each scenario, the perfect secrecy capacity is obtained along with the optimal power and rate allocation strategies. We then propose a low-complexity on/off power allocation strategy that achieves near-optimal performance with only the main channel CSI. More specifically, this scheme is shown to be asymptotically optimal as the average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) goes to infinity, and interestingly, is shown to attain the secrecy capacity under the full CSI assumption. Overall, channel fading has a positive impact on the secrecy capacity and rate adaptation, based on the main channel CSI, is critical in facilitating secure communications over slow fading channels.

On the Secrecy Capacity of Fading Channels

We consider the secure transmission of information over an ergodic fading channel in the presence of an eavesdropper. Our eavesdropper can be viewed as the wireless counterpart of Wyner's wiretapper. The secrecy capacity of such a system is characterized under the assumption of asymptotically long coherence intervals. We first consider the full Channel State Information (CSI) case, where the transmitter has access to the channel gains of the legitimate receiver and the eavesdropper. The secrecy capacity under this full CSI assumption serves as an upper bound for the secrecy capacity when only the CSI of the legitimate receiver is known at the transmitter, which is characterized next. In each scenario, the perfect secrecy capacity is obtained along with the optimal power and rate allocation strategies. We then propose a low-complexity on/off power allocation strategy that achieves near-optimal performance with only the main channel CSI. More specifically, this scheme is shown to be asymptotically optimal as the average SNR goes to infinity, and interestingly, is shown to attain the secrecy capacity under the full CSI assumption. Remarkably, our results reveal the positive impact of fading on the secrecy capacity and establish the critical role of rate adaptation, based on the main channel CSI, in facilitating secure communications over slow fading channels.

We consider the secure transmission of information over an ergodic fading channel in the presence of an eavesdropper. Our eavesdropper can be viewed as the wireless counterpart of Wyner's wiretapper. The secrecy capacity of such a system is characterized under the assumption of asymptotically long coherence intervals. We analyze the full channel state information (CSI) case, where the transmitter has access to the channel gains of the legitimate receiver and eavesdropper, and the main channel CSI scenario, where only the legitimate receiver channel gain is known at the transmitter. In each scenario, the secrecy capacity is obtained along with the optimal power and rate allocation strategies. We then propose a low-complexity on/off power allocation strategy that achieves near-optimal performance with only the main channel CSI. More specifically, this scheme is shown to be asymptotically optimal as the average SNR goes to infinity, and interestingly, is shown to attain the secrecy capacity under the full CSI assumption. Remarkably, our results reveal the positive impact of fading on the secrecy capacity and establish the critical role of rate adaptation, based on the main channel CSI, in facilitating secure communications over slow fading channels.

In this paper, we adopt a cross layer design approach for analyzing the throughput-delay tradeoff of the multicast channel in a single cell system. To illustrate the main ideas, we start with the single group case, i.e., pure multicast, where a common information stream is requested by all the users. We consider three classes of scheduling algorithms with progressively increasing complexity. The first class strives for minimum complexity by resorting to a static scheduling strategy along with memoryless decoding. Our analysis for this class of scheduling algorithms reveals the existence of a static scheduling policy that achieves the optimal scaling law of the throughput at the expense of a delay that increases exponentially with the number of users. The second scheduling policy resorts to a higher complexity incremental redundancy encoding/decoding strategy to achieve a superior throughput-delay tradeoff. The third, and most complex, scheduling strategy benefits from the cooperation between the different users to minimize the delay while achieving the optimal scaling law of the throughput. In particular, the proposed cooperative multicast strategy is shown to simultaneously achieve the optimal scaling laws of both throughput and delay. Then, we generalize our scheduling algorithms to exploit the multi-group diversity available when different information streams are requested by different subsets of the user population. Finally, we discuss the effect of the potential gains of equipping the base station with multi-transmit antennas and present simulation results that validate our theoretical claims.

On the Throughput-Delay Tradeoff in Cellular Multicast

In this paper, we adopt a cross layer design approach for analyzing the throughput-delay tradeoff of the multicast channel in a single cell system. To illustrate the main ideas, we start with the single group case, i.e., pure multicast, where a common information stream is requested by all the users. We consider three classes of scheduling algorithms with progressively increasing complexity. The first class strives for minimum complexity by resorting to a static scheduling strategy along with memoryless decoding. Our analysis for this class of scheduling algorithms reveals the existence of a static scheduling policy that achieves the optimal scaling law of the throughput at the expense of a delay that increases exponentially with the number of users. The second scheduling policy resorts to a higher complexity incremental redundancy encoding/decoding strategy to achieve a superior throughput-delay tradeoff. The third, and most complex, scheduling strategy benefits from the cooperation between the different users to minimize the delay while achieving the optimal scaling law of the throughput. In particular, the proposed cooperative multicast strategy is shown to simultaneously achieve the optimal scaling laws of both throughput and delay. Then, we generalize our scheduling algorithms to exploit the multi-group diversity available when different information streams are requested by different subsets of the user population. Finally, we discuss the potential gains of equipping the base station with multiple transmit antennas and present simulation results that validate our theoretical claims.

Praveen Kumar Gopala

Papers

On the Secrecy Capacity of Fading Channels

On the Secrecy Capacity of Fading Channels

On the Secrecy Capacity of Fading Channels

On the Throughput-Delay Tradeoff in Cellular Multicast

On the throughput-delay tradeoff in cellular multicast