Improving security for future wireless networks through friendly jamming

• Main Author: Adams, Mark M.
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2017
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/61768

As the number of connected devices and the importance of mobile communications continue to increase, a greater emphasis must be placed on security. Due to the broadcast nature of wireless communications, wireless networks are very exposed to eavesdropping. While this can be addressed above the physical layers using encryption, this still allows the attacker to receive the message and future work may allow decryption. Physical layer security is an approach to security which exploits the wireless channel to prevent the attacker from decoding the message. This thesis examines the use of friendly jamming, in which some nodes in a network broadcast white noise in order to degrade the channel between the legitimate transmitter and the eavesdropper. We address two problems related to the use of friendly jamming to improve physical layer security. The first problem is routing a signal through a network while using the remaining nodes as jammers to secure the signal. This is solved as two convex problems of allocating power to the jammers and routing the signal using those jammers to secure the transmission. This is shown to be a feasible method to increase security in a network. The second problem is estimating the self-interference channel (SIC) without using a calibration period for full-duplex jamming receivers. As the transmitter cannot transmit while the receiver estimates its SIC using a half duplex pilot signal, eliminating the calibration period can represent a significant capacity gain. Estimating the channel while receiving the desired signal causes it to act as an additional noise source, but this is shown to be overcome through the use of long estimation times. Our proposed scheme is able to increase the secrecy capacity of the system over that of calibration based estimation. === Applied Science, Faculty of === Electrical and Computer Engineering, Department of === Graduate