Secure pre-coding and post-coding for OFDM systems along with hardware implementation

Abstract

An effective and hardware-friendly physical layer security design, composed of a channel-based frequency pre-coder and a post-coder for OFDM-based systems, is proposed. The design is achieved by decomposing the diagonal matrix of the channel frequency amplitude of the legitimate receiver in order to obtain two unitary orthonormal matrices. The first matrix is used as a pre-coder just before the IFFT process at the transmitter, while the second matrix is used as a post-coder just after the FFT process at the receiver. Besides security, the presented design is interestingly found out to work as a shuffler or inter-leaver, which does not only provide secrecy, but also enhances the performance against burst errors. Moreover, a new channel calibration technique is developed to overcome the effect of channel reciprocity mismatch on the proposed scheme. The provided simulations and USRP hardware testbed implementation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed design in achieving practical and reliable secrecy with just minor modifications on the OFDM structure.