Non-Systematic Codes for Physical Layer Security

Abstract: This paper is a first study on the topic of achieving physical layer security by exploiting non-systematic channel codes. The chance of implementing transmission security at the physical layer is known since many years in information theory, but it is now gaining an increasing interest due to its many possible applications. It has been shown that channel coding techniques can be effectively exploited for designing physical layer security schemes, able to ensure that an unauthorized receiver, experiencing a channel different from that of the the authorized receiver, is not able to gather any information. Recently, it has been proposed to exploit puncturing techniques in order to reduce the security gap between the authorized and unauthorized channels. In this paper, we show that the same target can also be achieved by using non-systematic codes, able to scramble information bits within the transmitted codeword.