Location-Based Secure Transmission for Wiretap Channels

Location information has been shown to be useful for a wide variety of applications in wireless networks, while its role in physical layer security has so far drawn little attention. In this work, we propose a new location-based secure transmission scheme for wiretap channels, where the accurate locations of the sources, destinations and any other authorized transceivers are known, but only an estimate of the eavesdropper's location is available. We outline how such an estimate of the eavesdropper's location can still allow for quantitative assessment of key security metrics. To provide focus, we describe how optimization of the effective secrecy throughput of a relay wiretap channel is obtained in our scheme, and investigate in detail the impact of the location uncertainty on the system performance. The work reported here provides insights into the design of new location-based physical layer security schemes in which the only information available on an eavesdropper is a noisy estimate of her location.