Efficient Wireless Security Through Jamming, Coding and Routing

TL;DR

This paper extends physical layer security techniques to multi-hop wireless networks by integrating coding and routing, proposing algorithms for secure minimum energy routing that significantly reduce energy consumption.

Contribution

It introduces a novel multi-layer approach combining physical layer security with network layer routing and coding, along with efficient algorithms for secure energy-efficient routing.

Findings

Algorithms reduce energy consumption by half in simulations.

Exact and approximate solutions for NP-hard problem are developed.

Joint optimization of link selection and jamming enhances security and efficiency.

Abstract

There is a rich recent literature on how to assist secure communication between a single transmitter and receiver at the physical layer of wireless networks through techniques such as cooperative jamming. In this paper, we consider how these single-hop physical layer security techniques can be extended to multi-hop wireless networks and show how to augment physical layer security techniques with higher layer network mechanisms such as coding and routing. Specifically, we consider the secure minimum energy routing problem, in which the objective is to compute a minimum energy path between two network nodes subject to constraints on the end-to-end communication secrecy and goodput over the path. This problem is formulated as a constrained optimization of transmission power and link selection, which is proved to be NP-hard. Nevertheless, we show that efficient algorithms exist to compute both exact and approximate solutions for the problem. In particular, we develop an exact solution of pseudo-polynomial complexity, as well as an epsilon-optimal approximation of polynomial complexity. Simulation results are also provided to show the utility of our algorithms and quantify their energy savings compared to a combination of (standard) security-agnostic minimum energy routing and physical layer security. In the simulated scenarios, we observe that, by jointly optimizing link selection at the network layer and cooperative jamming at the physical layer, our algorithms reduce the network energy consumption by half.