MIMO-OFDM PHY Integrated (MOPI) Scheme for Confidential Wireless Transmission

Abstract

A MIMO-OFDM PHY Integrated (MOPI) scheme is proposed to provide confidentiality against eavesdroppers in wireless networks. The proposed MOPI scheme prevents any eavesdropper from learning the channel state information (CSI) of the wiretap channel and decoding the information being exchanged. This is achieved by the use of channel sounding combined with a novel physical-layer network coding (PNC) scheme such that the eavesdropper, due to lack of CSI, will suffer from very poor decoding performance. The security of the proposed MOPI scheme is verified by computer simulation. The simulation results show that confidentiality is guaranteed as long as the eavesdropper's channel realization is independent of the legal receiver's, which is usually the case in a typical wireless network.