Xiangyun Zhou

Relaying Protocols for Wireless Energy Harvesting and Information Processing

An emerging solution for prolonging the lifetime of energy constrained relay nodes in wireless networks is to avail the ambient radio-frequency (RF) signal and to simultaneously harvest energy and process information. In this paper, an amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying network is considered, where an energy constrained relay node harvests energy from the received RF signal and uses that harvested energy to forward the source information to the destination. Based on the time switching and power splitting receiver architectures, two relaying protocols, namely, i) time switching-based relaying (TSR) protocol and ii) power splitting-based relaying (PSR) protocol are proposed to enable energy harvesting and information processing at the relay. In order to determine the throughput, analytical expressions for the outage probability and the ergodic capacity are derived for delay-limited and delay-tolerant transmission modes, respectively. The numerical analysis provides practical insights into the effect of various system parameters, such as energy harvesting time, power splitting ratio, source transmission rate, source to relay distance, noise power, and energy harvesting efficiency, on the performance of wireless energy harvesting and information processing using AF relay nodes. In particular, the TSR protocol outperforms the PSR protocol in terms of throughput at relatively low signal-to-noise-ratios and high transmission rates.

Secure Transmission With Artificial Noise Over Fading Channels: Achievable Rate and Optimal Power Allocation

We consider the problem of secure communication with multiantenna transmission in fading channels. The transmitter simultaneously transmits an information-bearing signal to the intended receiver and artificial noise to the eavesdroppers. We obtain an analytical closed-form expression of an achievable secrecy rate and use it as the objective function to optimize the transmit power allocation between the information signal and the artificial noise. Our analytical and numerical results show that equal power allocation is a simple yet near-optimal strategy for the case of noncolluding eavesdroppers. When the number of colluding eavesdroppers increases, more power should be used to generate the artificial noise. We also provide an upper bound on the SNR, above which, the achievable secrecy rate is positive and shows that the bound is tight at low SNR. Furthermore, we consider the impact of imperfect channel state information (CSI) at both the transmitter and the receiver and find that it is wise to create more artificial noise to confuse the eavesdroppers than to increase the signal strength for the intended receiver if the CSI is not accurately obtained.

Rethinking the Secrecy Outage Formulation: A Secure Transmission Design Perspective

This letter studies information-theoretic security without knowing the eavesdroppers channel fading state. We present an alternative secrecy outage formulation to measure the probability that message transmissions fail to achieve perfect secrecy. Using this formulation, we design two transmission schemes that satisfy the given security requirement while achieving good throughput performance.

On the Throughput Cost of Physical Layer Security in Decentralized Wireless Networks

This paper studies the throughput of large-scale decentralized wireless networks with physical layer security constraints. In particular, we are interested in the question of how much throughput needs to be sacrificed for achieving a certain level of security. We consider random networks where the legitimate nodes and the eavesdroppers are distributed according to independent two-dimensional Poisson point processes. The transmission capacity framework is used to characterize the area spectral efficiency of secure transmissions with constraints on both the quality of service (QoS) and the level of security. This framework illustrates the dependence of the network throughput on key system parameters, such as the densities of legitimate nodes and eavesdroppers, as well as the QoS and security constraints. One important finding is that the throughput cost of achieving a moderate level of security is quite low, while throughput must be significantly sacrificed to realize a highly secure network. We also study the use of a secrecy guard zone, which is shown to give a significant improvement on the throughput of networks with high security requirements.

On the Design of Artificial-Noise-Aided Secure Multi-Antenna Transmission in Slow Fading Channels

In this paper, we investigate the design of artificial-noise-aided secure multi-antenna transmission in slow fading channels. The primary design concerns include the transmit power allocation and the rate parameters of the wiretap code. We consider two scenarios with different complexity levels: 1) the design parameters are chosen to be fixed for all transmissions; and 2) they are adaptively adjusted based on the instantaneous channel feedback from the intended receiver. In both scenarios, we provide explicit design solutions for achieving the maximal throughput subject to a secrecy constraint, given by a maximum allowable secrecy outage probability. We then derive accurate approximations for the maximal throughput in both scenarios in the high signal-to-noise ratio region, and give new insights into the additional power cost for achieving a higher security level while maintaining a specified target throughput. In the end, the throughput gain of adaptive transmission over non-adaptive transmission is also quantified and analyzed.

Wireless-Powered Relays in Cooperative Communications: Time-Switching Relaying Protocols and Throughput Analysis

We consider wireless-powered amplify-and-forward and decode-and-forward relaying in cooperative communications, where an energy constrained relay node first harvests energy through the received radio-frequency signal from the source and then uses the harvested energy to forward the source information to the destination node. We propose time-switching based energy harvesting (EH) and information transmission (IT) protocols with two modes of EH at the relay. For continuous time EH, the EH time can be any percentage of the total transmission block time. For discrete time EH, the whole transmission block is either used for EH or IT. The proposed protocols are attractive because they do not require channel state information at the transmitter side and enable relay transmission with preset fixed transmission power. We derive analytical expressions of the achievable throughput for the proposed protocols. The derived expressions are verified by comparison with simulations and allow the system performance to be determined as a function of the system parameters. Finally, we show that the proposed protocols outperform the existing fixed time duration EH protocols in the literature, since they intelligently track the level of the harvested energy to switch between EH and IT in an online fashion, allowing efficient use of resources.

Pilot Contamination for Active Eavesdropping

Existing studies on physical layer security often assume the availability of perfect channel state information (CSI) and overlook the importance of channel training needed for obtaining the CSI. In this letter, we discuss how an active eavesdropper can attack the training phase in wireless communication to improve its eavesdropping performance. We derive a new security attack from the pilot contamination phenomenon, which targets at systems using reverse training to obtain the CSI at the transmitter for precoder design. This attack changes the precoder used by the legitimate transmitter in a controlled manner to strengthen the signal reception at the eavesdropper during data transmission. Furthermore, we discuss an efficient use of the transmission energy of an advanced full-duplex eavesdropper to simultaneously achieve a satisfactory eavesdropping performance whilst degrading the detection performance of the legitimate receiver.

Secure Wireless Network Connectivity with Multi-Antenna Transmission

Information-theoretic security constraints reduce the connectivity of wireless networks in the presence of eavesdroppers, which motivates better modeling of such networks and the development of techniques that are robust to eavesdropping. In this letter, we are concerned with the existence of secure connections from a typical transmitter to the legitimate receiver(s) over fading channels, where the legitimate nodes and eavesdroppers are all randomly located. We consider non-colluding and colluding eavesdroppers, and derive the network secure connectivity for both eavesdropper strategies. We mathematically show how nodes with multiple transmit antenna elements can improve secure connectivity by forming a directional antenna or using eigen-beamforming. Compared with single antenna transmission, a large connectivity improvement can be achieved by both multi-antenna transmission techniques even with a small number of antennas.

Secure Communication With a Wireless-Powered Friendly Jammer

In this paper, we propose using a wireless-powered friendly jammer to enable secure communication between a source node and destination node, in the presence of an eavesdropper. We consider a two-phase communication protocol with fixed-rate transmission. In the first phase, wireless power transfer is conducted from the source to the jammer. In the second phase, the source transmits the information-bearing signal under the protection of a jamming signal sent by the jammer using the harvested energy in the first phase. We analytically characterize the long-term behavior of the proposed protocol and derive a closed-form expression for the throughput. We further optimize the rate parameters for maximizing the throughput subject to a secrecy outage probability constraint. Our analytical results show that the throughput performance differs significantly between the single-antenna jammer case and the multiantenna jammer case. For instance, as the source transmit power increases, the throughput quickly reaches an upper bound with single-antenna jammer, while the throughput grows unbounded with multiantenna jammer. Our numerical results also validate the derived analytical results.

Physical layer security with artificial noise: Secrecy capacity and optimal power allocation

We consider the problem of secure communication in wireless fading channels in the presence of non-colluding passive eavesdroppers. The transmitter has multiple antennas and is able to simultaneously transmit an information bearing signal to the intended receiver and artificial noise to the eavesdroppers. We obtain an analytical closed-form lower bound for secrecy capacity, which is used as the objective function to optimize transmit power allocation between the information signal and the artificial noise. Our analytical and numerical results show that equal power allocation is a simple and generic strategy which achieves near optimal capacity performance. We also find that adaptive power allocation based on each channel realization provides no or insignificant capacity improvement over equal power allocation.