Non-Orthogonal Waveforms in Secure Communications

Abstract: This work investigates the possibility of using non-orthogonal multi-carrier waveforms to defend against eavesdropping attacks. The sophisticated detection required for non-orthogonal signals provides a natural defence mechanism in secure communications. However, brute-force tactics such as maximum likelihood detection would break the defence by attempting all possible solutions. Thus, a waveform scaling strategy is proposed to scale up the number of non-orthogonally packed sub-carriers, which complicates signal detections and prevents eavesdropping. In addition, a waveform tuning strategy is proposed to intentionally tune waveform parameters to enhance feature similarity. Therefore, eavesdroppers would be confused to misidentify signals resulting in subsequent detection failures.