Physical-layer security in MU-MISO downlink networks against potential eavesdroppers

Abstract

Recently, wireless security has been highlighted as one of the most important techniques for 6G mobile communication systems. Many researchers have tried to improve the Physical-Layer Security (PLS) performance such as Secrecy Outage Probability (SOP) and Secrecy Energy-Efficiency (SEE). The SOP indicates the outage probability that the data transmission between legitimate devices does not guarantee a certain reliability level, and the SEE is defined as the ratio between the achievable secrecy-rate and the consumed transmit power. In this paper, we consider a Multi-User Multi-Input Single-Output (MU-MISO) downlink cellular network where a legitimate Base Station (BS) equipped with multiple transmit antennas sends secure information to multiple legitimate Mobile Stations (MSs), and multiple potential eavesdroppers (EVEs) equipped with a single receive antenna try to eavesdrop on this information. Each potential EVE tries to intercept the secure information, i.e., the private message, from the legitimate BS to legitimate MSs with a certain eavesdropping probability. To securely receive the private information, each legitimate MS feeds back its effective channel gain to the legitimate BS only when the effective channel gain is higher than a certain threshold, i.e., the legitimate MSs adopt an Opportunistic Feedback (OF) strategy. In such eavesdropping channels, both SOP and SEE are analyzed as performance measures of PLS and their closed-form expressions are derived mathematically. Based on the analytical results, it is shown that the SOP of the OF strategy approaches that of a Full Feedback (FF) strategy as the number of legitimate MSs or the number of antennas at the BS increases. Furthermore, the trade-off between SOP and SEE as a function of the channel feedback threshold in the OF strategy is investigated. The analytical results and related observations are verified by numerical simulations.

Keywords

Physical-layer security / Opportunistic feedback / Potential eavesdroppers / Secrecy outage probability / Secrecy energy-efficiency

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Woong Son: Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Software, Writing - original draft. Minkyu Oh: Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources, Software. Heejung Yu: Investigation, Supervision, Validation, Writing - review & editing. Bang Chul Jung: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Project administration, Supervision, Validation, Writing - review & editing.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This work is supported in part by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Korea government (MSIT) under Grant NRF-2022R1I1A3073740, in part by the Institute for Information and Communications Technology Promotion (IITP) Grant funded by the Korea Government (MSIP, Development of Cube Satellites Based on Core Technologies in Low Earth Orbit Satellite Communications) under Grant RS-2024-00396992, and in part by Institute of Information & communications Technology Planning & Evaluation (IITP) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (2022-0-0070

References

[1] A.D. Wyner, The wire-tap channel, Bell Syst. Tech. J. 54 (8) (1975) 1355-1387.

[2] Y. Zou, J. Zhu, X. Wang, L. Hanzo, A survey on wireless security: technical chal-lenges, recent advances, and future trends, Proc. IEEE 104 (9) (2016) 1727-1765.

[3] S.K. Leung-Yan-Cheong, M.E. Hellman, The Gaussian wire-tap channel, IEEE Trans. Inf. Technol. IT-24 (4) (1978) 451-456.

[4] M. Bloch, J. Barros, M.R.D. Rodrigues, S.W. McLaughlin, Wireless information-theoretic security, IEEE Trans. Inf. Technol. 54 (6) (2008) 2515-2534.

[5] Y. Liang, H.V. Poor, Multiple-access channels with confidential messages, IEEE Trans. Inf. Technol. 54 (3) (2008) 976-1002.

[6] A. Khisti, G.W. Wornell, Secure transmission with multiple antennas I: the MISOME wiretap channel, IEEE Trans. Inf. Technol. 56 (7) (2010) 3088-3104.

[7] A. Khisti, G.W. Wornell, Secure transmission with multiple antennas—Part II: the MIMOME wiretap channel, IEEE Trans. Inf. Technol. 56 (11) (2010) 5515-5532.

[8] H. Yu, J. Joung, Secure IoT communications using HARQ-based beamforming for MISOSE channels, IEEE Int. Things J. 8 (23) (2021) 17211-17226.

[9] H. Yu, J. Joung, Design of the power and dimension of artificial noise for secure communication systems, IEEE Trans. Commun. 69 (6) (2021) 4001-4010.

[10] H. Yu, T. Kim, Training and data structures for AN-aided secure communication, IEEE Syst. J. 13 (3) (2019) 2869-2872.

[11] H. Yu, T. Kim, H. Jafarkhani, Wireless secure communication with beamforming and jamming in time-varying wiretap channels, IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur. 13 (8) (2018) 2087-2100.

[12] L. Mucchi, S. Jayousi, S. Caputo, E. Panayirci, S. Shahabuddin, J. Bechtold, I. Morales, R.-A. Stoica, G. Abreu, H. Haas, Physical-layer security in 6G networks, IEEE Open J. Commun. Soc. 2 (2021) 1901-1914.

[13] P. Porambage, G. Gür, D.P.M. Osorio, M. Liyanage, A. Gurtov, M. Ylianttila, The roadmap to 6G security and privacy, IEEE Open J. Commun. Soc. 2 (2021) 1094-1122.

[14] W. Khalid, H. Yu, Security improvement with QoS provisioning using service priority and power allocation for NOMA-IoT networks, IEEE Access 9 (2021) 9937-9948.

[15] W. Khalid, H. Yu, D.-T. Do, Z. Kaleem, S. Noh, RIS-aided physical layer security with full-duplex jamming in underlay D2D networks, IEEE Access 9 (2021) 99667-99679.

[16] H. Yu, I.-G. Lee, Physical layer security based on NOMA and AJ for MISOSE channels with an untrusted relay, Future Gener. Comput. Syst. 102 (2020) 611-618.

[17] S.M.S. Shahriyer, A.S.M. Badrudduza, S. Shabab, M.K. Kundu, H. Yu, Opportunistic relay in multicast channels with generalized shadowed fading effects: a physical layer security perspective, IEEE Access 9 (2021) 155726-155739.

[18] S.H. Islam, A.S.M. Badrudduza, S.M.R. Islam, F.I. Shahid, I.S. Ansari, M.K. Kundu, H. Yu, Impact of correlation and pointing error on secure outage performance over arbitrary correlated Nakagami-𝑚 and M-turbulent fading mixed rf-fso channel, IEEE Photonics J. 13 (2) (2021) 1-17.

[19] A.S.M. Badrudduza, M. Ibrahim, S.M.R. Islam, M.S. Hossen, M.K. Kundu, I.S. Ansari, H. Yu, Security at the physical layer over GG fading and mEGG turbulence induced RF-UOWC mixed system, IEEE Access 9 (2021) 18123-18136.

[20] M.A. Abbas, H. Song, J.-P. Hong, Opportunistic scheduling for average secrecy rate enhancement in fading downlink channel with potential eavesdroppers, IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur. 14 (4) (2019) 969-980.

[21] W. Son, H. Nam, W.-Y. Shin, B.C. Jung, Secrecy outage analysis of multiuser down-link wiretap networks with potential eavesdroppers, IEEE Syst. J. 15 (2) (2021) 3093-3096.

[22] H. Jin, W.-Y. Shin, B.C. Jung, On the multi-user diversity with secrecy in uplink wiretap networks, IEEE Commun. Lett. 17 (9) (2013) 1778-1781.

[23] H. He, X. Luo, J. Weng, K. Wei, Secure transmission in multiple access wiretap channel: cooperative jamming without sharing CSI, IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur. 16 (2021) 3401-3411.

[24] A. Hamyani, F.E. Bouanani, Y. Miftah, Jamming-assisted multi-user multi-eavesdropper broadcast network: PHY layer security analysis, IEEE Access 9 (2021) 118051-118064.

[25] J. Choi, J. Joung, B.C. Jung, Space-time line code for enhancing physical layer secu-rity of multiuser MIMO uplink transmission, IEEE Syst. J. 15 (3) (2021) 3336-3347.

[26] Z. Tang, L. Sun, X. Tian, D. Niyato, Y. Zhang, Artificial-noise-aided coordinated secure transmission design in multi-cell multi-antenna networks with limited feed-back, IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol. 71 (2) (2022) 1750-1765.

[27] Y. Wu, A. Khisti, C. Xiao, G. Caire, K.-K. Wong, X. Gao, A survey of physical layer security techniques for 5G wireless networks and challenges ahead, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun. 36 (4) (2018) 679-695.

[28] J.M. Hamamreh, H.M. Furqan, H. Arslan, Classifications and applications of physical layer security techniques for confidentiality: a comprehensive survey, IEEE Com-mun. Surv. Tutor. 21 (2) (2019) 1773-1828.

[29] J. Qiu, K. Xu, X. Xia, Z. Shen, W. Xie, D. Zhang, M. Wang, Secure transmission scheme based on fingerprint positioning in cell-free massive MIMO systems, IEEE Trans. Signal Inf. Process. Netw. 8 (2022) 92-105.

[30] I. Bang, B.C. Jung, Secrecy rate analysis of opportunistic user scheduling in uplink networks with potential eavesdroppers, IEEE Access 7 (2019) 127078-127089.

[31] W. Son, H.S. Jang, B.C. Jung, A pseudo-random beamforming technique for improv-ing physical-layer security of MIMO cellular networks, MDPI Entropy 21 (11) (2019) 1038.

[32] J. Youn, W. Son, B.C. Jung, Physical-layer security improvement with reconfigurable intelligent surfaces for 6G wireless communication systems, MDPI Sensors 21 (4) (2021) 1439.

[33] M.T. Mamaghani, Y. Hong, Terahertz meets untrusted UAV-relaying: minimum se-crecy energy efficiency maximization via trajectory and communication co-design, IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol. 71 (5) (2022) 4991-5006.

[34] N. Su, F. Liu, C. Masouros, Secure radar-communication systems with malicious targets: integrating radar, communications and jamming functionalities, IEEE Trans. Wirel. Commun. 20 (1) (2021) 83-95.

[35] J. Joung, J. Choi, B.C. Jung, S. Yu, Artificial noise injection and its power loading methods for secure space-time line coded systems, MDPI Entropy 21 (5) (2019) 515.

[36] I.S. Gradshteyn, I.M. Ryzhik, Table of Integrals, Series and Products seventh ed., Academic, 2007.

[37] J. Farhat, G. Brante, R.D. Souza, On the secure energy efficiency of TAS/MRC with relaying and jamming strategies, IEEE Signal Process. Lett. 24 (8) (2017) 1228-1232.