Boundaries as an Enhancement Technique for Physical Layer Security

TL;DR

This paper investigates how physical boundaries, like corners, can enhance security in wireless communications by analyzing receiver performance in different deployment scenarios with and without eavesdropper CSI.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of using physical boundaries as a technique to improve physical layer security, especially at high data rates, through analytical comparisons.

Findings

Corner placement benefits high-rate secure connectivity without CSI.

Corner placement increases average secrecy capacity with CSI, even with higher interferer density.

Boundaries can serve as an effective secrecy enhancement in wireless networks.

Abstract

In this paper, we study the receiver performance with physical layer security in a Poisson field of interferers. We compare the performance in two deployment scenarios: (i) the receiver is located at the corner of a quadrant, (ii) the receiver is located in the infinite plane. When the channel state information (CSI) of the eavesdropper is not available at the transmitter, we calculate the probability of secure connectivity using the Wyner coding scheme, and we show that hiding the receiver at the corner is beneficial at high rates of the transmitted codewords and detrimental at low transmission rates. When the CSI is available, we show that the average secrecy capacity is higher when the receiver is located at the corner, even if the intensity of interferers in this case is four times higher than the intensity of interferers in the bulk. Therefore boundaries can also be used as a secrecy enhancement technique for high data rate applications.