Generalized anti-eavesdropping space-time network coding for cooperative communications

Physical (PHY) layer security has recently become a hot issue in wireless communication. In this paper, an approach to a generalized anti-eavesdropping space-time network coding (GAE-STNC) for cooperative communications is proposed to achieve the physical layer security and overcome the problem of imperfect synchronization while still guaranteeing full diversity. Based on the assumption of channel reciprocity, the basic idea is to exploit the channel state information (CSI) between the legitimate transmitters and the receiver, which is used to generate the secret key. With this secret key, the transmitters introduce pseudo random interferences by adding an anti-eavesdropping matrix to the initial system. Since the eavesdropper´s channel is typically independent of the legitimate channel, the channel between the legitimate transmitters-receiver pair, the signal received by the eavesdropper is interfered. While the receiver can effectively decode the signal by utilizing the global CSI, the eavesdroppers can not decode the received signal correctly. Then, two specific schemes derived from the GAE-STNC are proposed. Numerical analysis and simulation results are presented to illustrate the proposed GAE-STNC schemes.