SCIM: Incorporating secure communication and interference management in one operation

Due to the broadcast nature of wireless communications, users’ data transmitted wirelessly is susceptible to security/privacy threats. Meanwhile, as a result of the limitation of spectrum resources, massive wireless connections will incur serious interference, which may damage the efficiency of data transmission. Therefore, improving both efficiency and secrecy of data transmission is of research significance. In this paper, we propose a wireless transmission scheme by taking both Secure Communication (SC) and Interference Management (IM) into account, namely SCIM. With this scheme, an SCIM signal is generated by the legitimate transmitter (Tx) and sent along with the desired signal, so that the SCIM signal can interact with and suppress the environmental interference at the legitimate receiver (Rx). Meanwhile, the SCIM signal may interfere with the eavesdropper in the coverage of legitimate transmission so as to deteriorate the eavesdropping performance. Therefore, the secrecy of desired transmission is improved. In this way, both the transmission efficiency and privacy are enhanced. Then, by taking various transmission preferences into account, we develop different implementations of SCIM, including Interference Suppression First SCIM (ISF-SCIM), Data Transmission First SCIM (DTF-SCIM), Anti-Eavesdropping First SCIM (AEF-SCIM), and Secrecy Rate Maximization SCIM (SRM-SCIM). Our in-depth simulation results have shown the proposed methods to effectively improve the efficiency and secrecy of the legitimate transmission.