Transmitting an analog Gaussian source over a Gaussian wiretap channel under SNR mismatch

TL;DR

This paper investigates joint source-channel coding schemes for transmitting Gaussian sources over wiretap channels, focusing on minimizing distortion at the intended receiver while maintaining security, and demonstrates robustness under SNR mismatch.

Contribution

It proposes JSCC schemes that optimize source reconstruction quality and ensure graceful degradation under SNR mismatch in secure Gaussian wiretap channels.

Findings

Schemes achieve minimal distortion at the intended receiver.

Distortion degrades gracefully under SNR mismatch.

Maintains fixed information leakage to eavesdropper.

Abstract

In this work we study encoding/decoding schemes for the transmission of a discrete time analog Gaussian source over a Gaussian wiretap channel. The intended receiver is assumed to have a certain minimum signal to noise ratio (SNR) and the eavesdropper is assumed to have a strictly lower SNR compared to the intended receiver. For a fixed information leakage to the eavesdropper, we are interested in minimizing the distortion in source reconstruction at the intended receiver, and we propose joint source channel coding (JSCC) schemes for this setup. For a fixed information leakage to the eavesdropper, we also show that the schemes considered give a graceful degradation of distortion with SNR under SNR mismatch, i.e., when the actual channel SNR is observed to be different from the design SNR.