Physical-Layer Security in Space Information Networks: A Survey

TLDR

Satellite communications have resurged recently, raising security concerns due to susceptibility to eavesdropping, and physical‑layer security (PLS) has emerged as a promising approach to leverage channel randomness for confidentiality and authentication. This survey reviews satellite communications with a focus on PLS and outlines open research problems for future work. The survey surveys satellite IoT, challenges, channel models, secrecy metrics, and categorizes state‑of‑the‑art PLS research across land mobile, hybrid, and integrated satellite‑terrestrial networks.

Abstract

Research and processing development on satellite communications has strongly re-emerged in recent years. Following the prosperity of various wireless services provided by satellite communications, the security issue has raised growing concerns since the space information network is susceptible to be eavesdropped by illegal adversaries in such a large-scale wireless network. Recently, the physical-layer security (PLS) has emerged as an alternative security paradigm that explores the randomness of the wireless channel to achieve confidentiality and authentication. The success story of the PLS technique now spans a decade and thrives to provide a layer of defense in satellite communications. With this position, a comprehensive survey of satellite communications is conducted in this article with an emphasis on PLS. We first briefly introduce essential background and the view of the satellite Internet of Things (IoT), as well as discuss related research challenges faced by the emerging integrated network architecture. Then, we revisit the most popular satellite channel model influenced by many factors and list the commonly used secrecy performance metrics. Also, we provide an exhaustive review of state-of-the-art research activity on PLS in satellite communications, which we categorize by different architectures including land mobile satellite communication networks, hybrid satellite-terrestrial relay networks, and satellite-terrestrial integrated networks. In addition, a number of open research problems are identified as possible future research directions.