Enhancing Information Security via Physical Layer Approaches in Heterogeneous IoT With Multiple Access Mobile Edge Computing in Smart City

Heterogeneous Internet of Things (IoT) and multi-access mobile edge computing (MA-MEC) are believed as supporting technologies for building a smart city. The advancement and flourish of IoT are facilitating the entry of human society into the Internet of Everything era, which lay the foundation of the smart city. To address the conflict between computation capability and low-cost mobile devices in IoT, the MA-MEC is available for supporting the resource-limited and computation-sensitive services and applications by computation offloading and distributed content delivery/caching. However, deploying cloud computing capability within the radio access network may face serious security threats, which stem from not only the existing technologies and networks but also the MA-MEC-based IoT itself. Therefore, in this paper, the solutions to address the security threats are investigated from physical layer perspectives, since physical layer security technologies have the advantages of achieving perfect secrecy, low-computational complexity, and resource consumption, and good adaptation for channel changes. Specifically, we investigate the secure wiretap coding, resource allocation, signal processing, and multi-node cooperation, along with physical layer key generation and authentication, to cope with the emerging security challenges. Finally, the paper is concluded with some possible future research directions.