Secrecy Transmission on Parallel Channels: Theoretical Limits and Performance of Practical Codes

• Type: Article in International Scientific Journal
• Date: 2014

Authors

Baldi, M (Author) Other; Chiaraluce, F (Author) Other; Laurenti, N (Author) Other; Tomasin, S (Author) Other; Renna, F (Author) FEUP

Journal

Title: IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security

Vol. 9

Pages: 1765-1779

ISSN: 1556-6013

Publisher: IEEE

Indexing

ISI Web of Knowledge - 30 Citations

Scopus - 36 Citations

Other information

Authenticus ID: P-009-V8V

DOI: 10.1109/tifs.2014.2348915

Abstract (EN): We consider a system where an agent (Alice) aims at transmitting a message to a second agent (Bob) over a set of parallel channels, while keeping it secret from a third agent (Eve) by using physical layer security techniques. We assume that Alice perfectly knows the set of channels with respect to Bob, but she has only a statistical knowledge of the channels with respect to Eve. We derive bounds on the achievable outage secrecy rates, by considering coding either within each channel or across all parallel channels. Transmit power is adapted to the channel conditions, with a constraint on the average power over the whole transmission. We also focus on the maximum cumulative outage secrecy rate that can be achieved. Moreover, in order to assess the performance in a real life scenario, we consider the use of practical error correcting codes. We extend the definitions of security gap and equivocation rate, previously applied to the single additive white Gaussian noise channel, to Rayleigh distributed parallel channels, on the basis of the error rate targets and the outage probability. Bounds on these metrics are also derived, considering the statistics of the parallel channels. Numerical results are provided, that confirm the feasibility of the considered physical layer security techniques.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

No. of pages: 15