Secure Degree of Freedom of Wireless Networks Using Collaborative Pilots

A wireless network of full-duplex nodes/users, using anti-eavesdropping channel estimation (ANECE) based on collaborative pilots, can yield a positive secure degree-of-freedom (SDoF) regardless of the number of antennas an eavesdropper may have. This article presents novel results on SDoF of ANECE by analyzing secret-key capacity (SKC) of each pair of nodes in a network of multiple collaborative nodes per channel coherence period. Each transmission session of ANECE has two phases: phase 1 is used for pilots, and phase 2 is used for random symbols. This results in two parts of SDoF of ANECE. Both lower and upper bounds on the SDoF of ANECE for any number of users are shown, and the conditions for the two bounds to meet are given. This leads to important discoveries, including: a) The phase-1 SDoF is the same for both multi-user ANECE and pair-wise ANECE while the former may require only a fraction of the number of time slots needed by the latter; b) For a three-user network, the phase-2 SDoF of all-user ANECE is generally larger than that of pair-wise ANECE; c) For a two-user network, a modified ANECE deploying square-shaped nonsingular pilot matrices yields a higher total SDoF than the original ANECE. The multi-user ANECE and the modified two-user ANECE shown in this article appear to be the best full-duplex schemes known today in terms of SDoF subject to each node using a given number of antennas for both transmitting and receiving.