A Software Defined Radio Implementation of Physical Layer Security Using MIMO-SVD

Abstract

In the current technological era, 5G and 6G mobile networks are trusted to provide crucial services for our daily lives and society as a whole. Therefore, these technologies must be resilient to potential security breaches by malicious users. In fact, due to the nature of wireless communications, the signal transmitted between legitimate users can be listened to by any other non legitimate user, which can be exploited by a passive eavesdropping user to steal data. It is therefore desirable to employ transmission techniques that provide a Physical Layer security (PLS) to reduce the effectiveness of an eavesdropper attack.The effectiveness of the PLS techniques should be accessed in a practical communication scenario using real hardware. However, the development of a Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) transceiver can be significantly expensive. Alternatively, the algorithms can be implemented in a Software Defined Radio (SDR) platform, which allows for a cheaper and faster development of custom signal processing algorithms. In this work, we seek to answer the research question "Can a wireless system that utilizes channel information for PLS, be implemented efficiently in an SDR platform?", showing that such a system can be easily and efficiently implemented using modern SDR peripherals and the Gnuradio development framework. It is demonstrated that the proposed prototype achieves excellent levels of PLS, while maintaining a high data rate.