A Survey on Artificial Noise for Physical Layer Security: Opportunities, Technologies, Guidelines, Advances, and Trends

TL;DR

This survey comprehensively reviews artificial noise techniques in physical-layer security, highlighting their evolution, applications, and future challenges to enhance wireless communication security.

Contribution

It provides an extensive overview of artificial noise methods, including recent advances, modeling, and integration with other technologies, offering valuable insights for future research.

Findings

Artificial noise effectively enhances wireless security by reducing wiretap channel capacity.

Various AN-empowered scenarios and technologies have been systematically surveyed.

Future challenges include technical issues in deploying AN for secure wireless communications.

Abstract

Due to the broadcast nature of wireless communications, physical-layer security has attracted increasing concerns from both academia and industry. Artificial noise (AN), as one of the promising physical-layer security techniques, is capable of utilizing the spatial degree-of-freedom of channels to effectively enhance the security of wireless communications. In contrast to other physicallayer security techniques, the key distinguishing feature of AN is to generate specific interfering signals according to channel characteristics, increasing the secrecy capacity by reducing the wiretap channel capacity without affecting the legitimate channel capacity. Hence, this paper provides the latest survey of AN, including its evolution, modeling, backgrounds, applications, and future trends. Initially, we introduce the development, fundamentals, and backgrounds of AN. Subsequently, we highlight a comprehensive survey of the current state of research on various AN-empowered scenarios and AN-combined technologies. Finally, we discuss some technical challenges to tackle for AN-aided wireless security in the future.