Artificial Noise for In-Home PLC Networks Under the Presence of PLC and Wireless Eavesdroppers

This paper investigates if an artificial noise designed based on the degrees of freedom of the cyclic prefix can increase the security of in-home power line communication (PLC) networks for Internet of Things applications. The artificial noise is generated to impair the decoding capacity of diverse eavesdroppers, which can be PLC or wireless nodes, while not af-fecting the communication between two PLC nodes. We carefully describe the artificial noise design and derive expressions for the signal-to-noise ratio of the legitimate receiver and eavesdroppers. Numerical results derived from measured data show that the considered artificial noise technique is more effective in the most threatening scenarios of PLC networks, which refer to those with PLC eavesdroppers close to the legitimate transmitter.