Physical layer security in heterogeneous networks with pilot attack : a stochastic geometry approach

• Main Authors: Wang, Wei, Teh, Kah Chan, Luo, Sheng, Li, Kwok Hung
• Other Authors: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2020
• Subjects: Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering; Massive MIMO; Millimeter Wave
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/137166
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

In this paper, we investigate physical layer security in a two-tier heterogeneous network with sub-6 GHz massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) macro cells and millimeter wave (mmWave) small cells. By considering pilot attacks from the eavesdroppers, we analyze the coverage and secrecy performance using stochastic geometry. For the sub-6 GHz tier, we show that increasing the number of BS antennas is more effective than increasing BS density in improving the coverage performance, whereas densifying BS is more effective for security enhancement. For the mmWave tier, we first derive the success probability of beam alignment based on a beam sweeping-based channel training model. It is shown that the mmWave tier may outperform the sub-6 GHz counterpart in terms of both coverage and secrecy through densifying the base stations. Our results also reveal that the mmWave small cell can provide better coverage performance in the high transmission rate region, and can achieve higher security in the low redundant rate region, which reveals the advantage of using mmWave for secure communication. Numerical results verify the analysis.