Defending Against Randomly Located Eavesdroppers by Establishing a Protecting Region.

Tao Li,Octavia A Dobre,Chaozheng Xue,Yongzhao Li

doi:10.3390/s20020438

Tao Li, Octavia A Dobre + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/s20020438

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Abstract

The security problem in wireless sensor networks faces severe challenges, due to the openness of the sensor network channel and the mobility and diversity of the terminals. When facing randomly located eavesdroppers, the situation is much more complex. This paper studies the security performance of a wireless sensor network where randomly located passive and active eavesdroppers are both considered. Compared to a passive eavesdropper, an active eavesdropper can perform both eavesdropping and malicious jamming simultaneously in a wireless sensor network. Based on beamforming and artificial noise (AN), we propose a practical way to defend against the eavesdropper by establishing a protecting region. An appropriate metric, the hybrid outage probability, which takes both the transmission outage probability and the secrecy outage probability into consideration, is utilized to evaluate the security performance. In addition, the concept of safe transmission range is defined to evaluate the security performance. Simulation results are provided to depict the insecure region and verify the harm of the active eavesdropper to the transmission in the wireless sensor network.

Highlights

Along with the emergence of numerous wireless devices and various wireless services, wireless security has become a critical design issue in the implementation and operation of wireless sensor networks [1,2,3,4]
Inspired by the above works, we propose a practical way to defend against an active eavesdropper by establishing a protecting region to restrict the location of an active eavesdropper in a wireless sensor network
From (1) and (2), the signal-to-interference-noise ratio (SINR) at Bob and active Eve can be respectively calculated as

Summary

Introduction

Along with the emergence of numerous wireless devices and various wireless services, wireless security has become a critical design issue in the implementation and operation of wireless sensor networks [1,2,3,4]. The eavesdropper attacked the training phase to cause pilot contamination in wireless communication to improve its eavesdropping performance [14,15,16] An optimal relay selection scheme was developed to improve the security performance with an active eavesdropper in cooperative wireless networks in [23,24]. In [29], both the legitimate receiver and transmitter generated AN to impair the eavesdropper’s channel, and the insecure region was defined by the average secrecy capacity to characterise the security performance when the eavesdropper’s channel was unknown. Inspired by the above works, we propose a practical way to defend against an active eavesdropper by establishing a protecting region to restrict the location of an active eavesdropper in a wireless sensor network. Our analysis can be used in various practical sensor networks to provide valuable basis for establishing the protecting region and achieve secure transmission

System Model

Insecure Region Analysis

Hybrid Outage Probability

Insecure Region and Safe Transmission Range

Numerical Results

Conclusions