Physical layer security in multi-user wireless networks

Abstract

In this thesis, we study the physical layer security in downlink multi-user wireless networks. Traditionally, security has been addressed by cryptography at the higher layers of the communication stack. Security at the physical layer has been a major research topic in recent years. We study two different precoder designs alongside artificial noise (AN) to mitigate multi-user interference and deteriorate reception at the eavesdropper (Eve). We study the large scale analysis to calculate the secrecy sum-rate for these two cases and analyze the effect of AN on the system. First, we consider the worst case scenario, when eavesdropper's (Eve's) rate is not deteriorated by the interference caused by the legitimate users. Later, we investigate how interference from legitimate users would affect the large scale security sum rate. At the end, we assume more practical situation where the channel state information at the transmitter is not perfect due to feedback limitation and estimation error. We first study block diagonalization (BD) precoding. We derive the asymptotic secrecy sum-rate of BD for physical layer security in downlink multi-user wireless networks using artificial noise (AN). We first derive the secrecy sum-rate assuming that the channel of the eavesdropper is not known at the transmitter and derive the asymptotic secrecy sum-rate. Then we derive the optimum power allocation for asymptotic secrecy sum-rate. We design the system based on large scale analysis for different special cases. Simulation results show that the proposed precoders outperform channel inversion (CI) and regularized channel inversion (RCI) schemes at all SNRs. We also show that as the number of receive antennas of each user increases, the sum-rate gap between the proposed scheme and existing methods increases. We, then, study two methods of regularized block diagonalization (RBD) precoding using artificial noise (AN) for physical layer security in downlink multi-user MIMO wireless networks. We compare the complexity analysis of these two methods in terms of floating point operations per second (FLOPS). We derive the secrecy and asymptotic secrecy sum-rates for these schemes. We also derive closed form expressions for the asymptotic optimal power allocation to the AN signal and legitimate users. Simulations show RBD precoding outperform regularized channel inversion (RCI) in terms of secrecy sum-rate with a margin of 0.5 bits/s/Hz. Also, simulation results show our closed-form asymptotic secrecy sum-rates matches closely with the simulations for perfect and imperfect CSIT. We also study the effect of interference on BD precoding scheme. In the first two studies the worst case scenarios was considered and the effect of interference was not considered at the eavesdropper. We first derive the closed-form secrecy and asymptotic secrecy sum-rates for this scheme. Then, we derive the optimum power allocation. Using the derived optimum power allocation, we determine the conditions under which adding AN helps. We also investigate the optimum number of users, number of antennas at the eavesdropper, and the number of transmit antennas to fully study the conditions where using AN improves performance. We show that as the number of users increases or the number of receive antennas at the eavesdropper decreases, improved performance is achieved by allocating a smaller fraction of the total power to transmit the AN. The closed form expressions for the secrecy sum rate (SSR) and optimum power allocation closely match our simulation results. In Chapter 5, we study the effect of imperfect channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) for each case studied in earlier chapters. We first study the effect of imperfect CSIT for BD precoding in both scenarios when interference does and does not exist at eavesdropper. We show that the imperfect CSI play the same role as interference for the desired users. Then, we study the effect of imperfect CSIT for RBD precoding when interference does not exist at eavesdropper. We show as channel estimation error increases, the secrecy sum-rate decreases. This is due to the fact that channel estimation error just affects the desired users' rate and has no effect on eavesdropper's performance. Finally, in the last chapter, we conclude our thesis and provide some road map for future--Author's abstract