Securing OFDM-Based Wireless Links Using Temporal Artificial-Noise Injection

Abstract: We investigate the physical layer security of wireless single-input single-output orthogonal-division multiplexing (OFDM) when a transmitter, which we refer to as Alice, sends her information to a receiver, which we refer to as Bob, in the presence of an eavesdropping node, Eve. To prevent information leakage, Alice sends an artificial-noise (AN) signal superimposed over her information signal. We investigate the impact of the channel delay spread, OFDM cyclic prefix, information/AN power allocation, and information and AN precoders design on the achievable average secrecy rate. We consider the two cases of known and unknown channel state information (CSI) at Alice. Furthermore, we compare both cases of per-sub-channel processing and joint sub-channels processing at Eve's receiver. Our numerical results show the gain of AN injection in terms of average secrecy rate for different OFDM operating conditions. Moreover, based on our new insights, we demonstrate that the AN-aided scheme is effective and achieves almost the same average secrecy rate as the full-CSI case without the need for Eve's instantaneous CSI at Alice.