Physical-Layer Security Enhancement for SIMO-MBM Systems

Media-based modulation (MBM) has become a promising technology for wireless communications, which offers significant throughput enhancement and superior performance due to the channel diversity gain achieved by RF mirrors. In this paper, the physical-layer security (PLS) issue is investigated for the single-input-multiple-output MBM (SIMO-MBM) system, and a secure SIMO-MBM system is proposed. Especially, by considering time-division duplexing (TDD) mode, based on its channel reciprocity property, both the data symbol bits and the index bits are protected from the eavesdropper by using the amplitude and phase information of the legitimate channel states as the secret key. For performance evaluation, the bit error rate (BER) of the eavesdropper as well as the system secrecy mutual information are investigated, and Monte Carlo simulations are carried out. Simulation results demonstrate that, the proposed secure SIMO-MBM system is capable of efficiently preventing data leakage whilst ensuring reliable data transmission.