Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is considered as a promising technology for improving the spectral efficiency in fifth-generation systems. In this correspondence, we study the benefit of NOMA ...in enhancing energy efficiency (EE) for a multiuser downlink transmission, wherein the EE is defined as the ratio of the achievable sum rate of the users to the total power consumption. Our goal is to maximize EE subject to a minimum required data rate for each user, which leads to a nonconvex fractional programming problem. To solve it, we first establish the feasible range of the transmitting power that is able to support each user's data rate requirement. Then, we propose an EE-optimal power allocation strategy that maximizes EE. Our numerical results show that NOMA has superior EE performance in comparison with conventional orthogonal multiple access.
The heterogeneous cellular network (HCN) is a promising approach to the deployment of 5G cellular networks. This paper comprehensively studies physical layer security in a multitier HCN where base ...stations (BSs), authorized users, and eavesdroppers are all randomly located. We first propose an access threshold-based secrecy mobile association policy that associates each user with the BS providing the maximum truncated average received signal power beyond a threshold. Under the proposed policy, we investigate the connection probability and secrecy probability of a randomly located user and provide tractable expressions for the two metrics. Asymptotic analysis reveals that setting a larger access threshold increases the connection probability while decreases the secrecy probability. We further evaluate the network-wide secrecy throughput and the minimum secrecy throughput per user with both connection and secrecy probability constraints. We show that introducing a properly chosen access threshold significantly enhances the secrecy throughput performance of a HCN.
In this paper, we study covert communications between a pair of legitimate transmitter-receiver against a watchful warden over slow fading channels. There coexist multiple friendly helper nodes who ...are willing to protect the covert communication from being detected by the warden. We propose an uncoordinated jammer selection scheme where those helpers whose instantaneous channel gains to the legitimate receiver fall below a pre-established selection threshold will be chosen as jammers radiating jamming signals to defeat the warden. By doing so, the detection accuracy of the warden is expected to be severely degraded while the desired covert communication is rarely affected. We then jointly design the optimal selection threshold and message transmission rate for maximizing covert throughput under the premise that the detection error of the warden exceeds a certain level. Numerical results are presented to validate our theoretical analyses. It is shown that the multi-jammer assisted covert communication outperforms the conventional single-jammer method in terms of covert throughput, and the maximal covert throughput improves significantly as the total number of helpers increases, which demonstrates the validity and superiority of our proposed scheme.
In this paper, we study the secure multiantenna transmission with artificial noise (AN) under imperfect channel state information (CSI) in the presence of spatially randomly distributed ...eavesdroppers. We derive the optimal solutions of the power allocation between the information signal and the AN for minimizing the secrecy outage probability (SOP) under a target secrecy rate and for maximizing the secrecy rate under an SOP constraint, respectively. Moreover, we provide an interesting insight that channel estimation error affects the optimal power allocation strategy in opposite ways for the two given objectives. When the estimation error increases, more power should be allocated to the information signal if we aim to decrease the rate-constrained SOP, whereas more power should be allocated to the AN if we aim to increase the SOP-constrained secrecy rate.
This paper studies multi-antenna-aided covert communications coexisting with randomly located wardens and interferers, considering both centralized and distributed antenna systems (CAS/DAS). The ...throughput performance of the covert communication is analyzed and optimized under a stochastic geometry framework, where the joint impact of the small-scale channel fading and the large-scale path loss is examined. To be specific, two probabilistic metrics, namely, the covert outage probability and the connectivity probability, are adopted to characterize the covertness and reliability of the transmission, respectively, and analytically tractable expressions for the two metrics are derived. The worst-case covert communication scenario is then investigated, where the wardens invariably can maximize the covert outage probability by adjusting the detection thresholds for their detectors. Afterward, the optimal transmit power and transmission rate are jointly designed to maximize the covert throughput subject to a covertness constraint. Interestingly, it is found that the maximal covert throughput for both the CAS and DAS is invariant to the density of interferers and the interfering power, regardless of the number of transmit antennas. The numerical results demonstrate that the CAS outperforms the DAS in terms of the covert throughput for the random network of interest, and the throughput gap between the two systems increases dramatically when the number of transmit antennas becomes higher.
Exploiting millimeter wave is an effective way to meet the data traffic demand in the 5G wireless communication system. In this paper, we study secure transmissions under slow fading channels with ...multipath propagation in millimeter wave systems. Concerning the new propagation characteristics of millimeter wave, we investigate three transmission schemes, namely, maximum ratio transmitting (MRT) beamforming, artificial noise (AN) beamforming, and partial MRT (PMRT) beamforming. We evaluate the secrecy performance by analyzing both the secrecy outage probability (SOP) and the secrecy throughput for each scheme. Particularly, for the AN scheme, we derive a closed-form expression for the optimal power allocation ratio of the information signal power to the total transmit power that minimizes the SOP, as well as obtain an explicit solution on the optimal transmission parameters that maximize the secrecy throughput. By comparing the secrecy performances achieved by different strategies, we demonstrate that the secrecy performance of the millimeter wave system is significantly influenced by the relationship between the legitimate user's and the eavesdropper's spatially resolvable paths, which is different from the wireless systems with statistically independent channel models. In the absence of the common path between the legitimate user and the eavesdropper, MRT beamforming is the best scheme. In the presence of common paths, AN beamforming and PMRT beamforming show their respective superiorities depending on the transmit power and the number of common paths. Numerical results are provided to verify our theoretical analysis.
This paper studies physical layer security in a wireless ad hoc network with numerous legitimate transmitter-receiver pairs and eavesdroppers. A hybrid full-duplex (FD)/half-duplex receiver ...deployment strategy is proposed to secure legitimate transmissions, by letting a fraction of legitimate receivers work in the FD mode sending jamming signals to confuse eavesdroppers upon their information receptions, and letting the other receivers work in the half-duplex mode just receiving their desired signals. The objective of this paper is to choose properly the fraction of FD receivers for achieving the optimal network security performance. Both accurate expressions and tractable approximations for the connection outage probability and the secrecy outage probability of an arbitrary legitimate link are derived, based on which the area secure link number, network-wide secrecy throughput, and network-wide secrecy energy efficiency are optimized, respectively. Various insights into the optimal fraction are further developed, and its closed-form expressions are also derived under perfect self-interference cancellation or in a dense network. It is concluded that the fraction of FD receivers triggers a non-trivial tradeoff between reliability and secrecy, and the proposed strategy can significantly enhance the network security performance.
In this paper, we study the benefits of full-duplex (FD) receiver jamming in enhancing the physical-layer security of a two-tier decentralized wireless network with each tier deployed with a large ...number of pairs of a single-antenna transmitter and a multi-antenna receiver. In the underlying tier, the transmitter sends unclassified information and the receiver works in the half-duplex (HD) mode receiving the desired signal. In the overlaid tier, the transmitter delivers confidential information in the presence of randomly located eavesdroppers, and the receiver works in the FD mode radiating jamming signals to confuse eavesdroppers and receiving the desired signal simultaneously. We provide a comprehensive performance analysis and network design under a stochastic geometry framework. Specifically, we consider the scenarios where each FD receiver uses single- and multi-antenna jamming, and analyze the connection probability and the secrecy outage probability of a typical FD receiver by deriving accurate expressions and more tractable approximations for the two probabilities. We also determine the optimal deployment density of the FD-mode tier to maximize the network-wide secrecy throughput subject to constraints including the given dual probabilities and the network-wide throughput of the HD-mode tier. Numerical results are demonstrated to verify our theoretical findings, and show that the network-wide secrecy throughput is significantly improved by properly deploying the FD-mode tier.
In this paper, we investigate physical-layer security of the uplink millimeter wave communications for a cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) network comprised of a large number of base stations ...(BSs) and different categories of V2X nodes, including vehicles, pedestrians, and road side units. Considering the dynamic change and randomness of the topology of the C-V2X network, we model the roadways, the V2X nodes on each roadway, and the BSs by a Poisson line process, a 1D Poisson point process (PPP), and a 2D PPP, respectively. We propose two uplink association schemes for a typical vehicle, namely, the smallest-distance association (SDA) scheme and the largest-power association (LPA) scheme, and we establish a tractable analytical framework to comprehensively assess the security performance of the uplink transmission, by leveraging the stochastic geometry theory. Specifically, for each association scheme, we first obtain new expressions for the association probability of the typical vehicle, and then derive the overall connection outage probability and secrecy outage probability by calculating the Laplace transform of the aggregate interference power. Numerical results are presented to validate our theoretical analysis, and we also provide interesting insights into how the security performance is influenced by various system parameters, including the densities of V2X nodes and BSs. Moreover, we show that the LPA scheme outperforms the SDA scheme in terms of secrecy throughput.
This paper investigates secure broadcast communications in intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided millimeter wave (mmWave) symbiotic radio (SR) networks, where the IRS and the base station (BS) ...are cooperating. Specifically, the IRS assists secure broadcasting for the BS by smartly reconfiguring the phase shifts of the signals from the BS, while delivering its own information to an Internet-of-Things device (IoD). We aim at maximizing the minimum secrecy rate of multiple users by jointly designing the hybrid precoder at the BS and the passive beamformer at the IRS, subject to the rate constraints of both the multiple users and the IoD. The design is formulated as a non-convex optimization problem, which is intractable. To handle it, we develop a computationally efficient iterative algorithm based on the successive convex approximation, the efficiency and superiority of which have been validated by simulation results.