Enhancing Physical Layer Security in Internet of Things via Feedback: A General Framework

In this article, a general framework for enhancing the physical layer security (PLS) in the Internet of Things (IoT) systems via channel feedback is established. To be specific, first, we study the compound wiretap channel (WTC) with feedback, which can be viewed as an ideal model for enhancing the PLS in the downlink transmission of IoT systems via feedback. A novel feedback strategy is proposed and a corresponding lower bound on the secrecy capacity is constructed for this ideal model. Next, we generalize the ideal model (i.e., the compound WTC with feedback) by considering channel states and feedback delay, and this generalized model is called the finite state compound WTC with delayed feedback. The lower bounds on the secrecy capacities of this generalized model with or without delayed channel output feedback are provided, and they are constructed according to variations of the previously proposed feedback scheme for the ideal model. Finally, from a Gaussian fading example, we show that the delayed channel output feedback enhances the achievable secrecy rate of the finite state compound WTC with only delayed state feedback, which implies that feedback helps to enhance the PLS in the downlink transmission of the IoT systems.