Secure spatial multiple access using directional modulation

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a secure multiple access scheme, which exploits the multipath structure of the channel to create a multi-user interference environment. The generated interference enables legitimate users to share time and frequency resources over spatially secure communication links. Utilizing directional modulation, we ensure secrecy for legitimate users against eavesdropping while preserving mutual confidentiality between the legitimate users themselves. Moreover, we introduce a complementary scheme for covering the non-selective channel case. The scheme uses directional modulation in coordinated multi-point transmission to provide location-specific secure communication to legitimate users. We characterize the achievable performance using a newly defined metric called vulnerable region. We provide analysis for the achievable secrecy rate, secrecy outage probability, and channel correlation effect on the secrecy performance for the proposed scheme. Furthermore, the effect of the channel spatial diversity, channel estimation error, and the number of legitimate users on the secrecy performance is studied.