Physical Layer Security of Cognitive Ambient Backscatter Communications for Green Internet-of-Things

TLDR

Sixth‑generation (6G) wireless networks aim for massive, energy‑efficient connectivity, and cognitive ambient backscatter communication (C‑AmBC) has emerged as a green IoT paradigm that lets backscatter devices share spectrum and RF sources, yet the broadcast nature of the channel exposes them to eavesdropping. This paper proposes a C‑AmBC network framework that explicitly addresses eavesdropping by unlicensed adversaries. The authors analyze the framework’s reliability and security by deriving outage probability and intercept probability expressions and studying their asymptotic behavior in high‑SNR and high‑MER regimes. Analytical and simulation results show that at high SNR the outage probability reaches a non‑zero floor, the reliability–security trade‑off can be tuned via system parameters, and increasing the main‑to‑eavesdropper ratio improves the legitimate user’s security while weakening that of the backscatter device.

Abstract

The future sixth generation (6G) wireless communication networks will face the challenges of large-scale connections green communication. To meet these requirements, cognitive ambient backscatter communication (C-AmBC) has been proposed as a new spectrum paradigm for the green Internet-of-Things (IoT) with stringent energy and spectrum constraints, in which the backscatter device (BD) can achieve communications by simultaneously sharing both spectrum and radio-frequency (RF) sources. However, due to the broadcasting nature of wireless communication channels, BD is vulnerable to eavesdropping from unlicensed eavesdroppers. To address this, this paper proposes a framework of C-AmBC networks in the presence of an unlicensed eavesdropper. Specifically, we investigate the reliability and security of the proposed framework by invoking the outage probability (OP) and intercept probability (IP) with analytical derivations. In addition, the asymptotic behaviors are conducted for the OP in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime and IP in the high main-to-eavesdropper ratio (MER) regime. Extensive analytical and computer simulated performance evaluation results show that: 1) when the considered system is under high SNR, the OP of the legitimate user and BD tends to be a non-zero fixed constant, indicating that the existence of error floors for the diversity orders; 2) the performance trade-off of reliability and security can be optimized by adjusting various parameters of the considered system; 3) with the increase of MER, the security of the legitimate user increases, while that of BD decreases.