Secured Communication over Frequency-Selective Fading Channels: a practical Vandermonde precoding

TL;DR

This paper introduces a practical Vandermonde precoding method for secure communication over frequency-selective channels, achieving optimal degrees of freedom and applicable to multiuser scenarios without specialized secrecy encoding.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel Vandermonde precoding scheme for frequency-selective channels that achieves optimal secrecy degrees of freedom and can be integrated with existing encoding methods.

Findings

Achieves the optimal degree of freedom region for the considered channels.

Enables simultaneous transmission of confidential and common messages.

Applicable to multiuser frequency-selective broadcast channels.

Abstract

In this paper, we study the frequency-selective broadcast channel with confidential messages (BCC) in which the transmitter sends a confidential message to receiver 1 and a common message to receivers 1 and 2. In the case of a block transmission of N symbols followed by a guard interval of L symbols, the frequency-selective channel can be modeled as a N * (N+L) Toeplitz matrix. For this special type of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels, we propose a practical Vandermonde precoding that consists of projecting the confidential messages in the null space of the channel seen by receiver 2 while superposing the common message. For this scheme, we provide the achievable rate region, i.e. the rate-tuple of the common and confidential messages, and characterize the optimal covariance inputs for some special cases of interest. It is proved that the proposed scheme achieves the optimal degree of freedom (d.o.f) region. More specifically, it enables to send l <= L confidential messages and N-l common messages simultaneously over a block of N+L symbols. Interestingly, the proposed scheme can be applied to secured multiuser scenarios such as the K+1-user frequency-selective BCC with K confidential messages and the two-user frequency-selective BCC with two confidential messages. For each scenario, we provide the achievable secrecy degree of freedom (s.d.o.f.) region of the corresponding frequency-selective BCC and prove the optimality of the Vandermonde precoding. One of the appealing features of the proposed scheme is that it does not require any specific secrecy encoding technique but can be applied on top of any existing powerful encoding schemes.