Cui, Yifan;
Wei, Zhongxiang;
Sun, Sumei;
Zhu, Xu;
Masouros, Christos;
Petropulu, Athina P;
(2025)
Physical Layer Anonymous Precoding under CSI and Hardware-Imperfections: A KLD-based Approach.
IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
10.1109/TWC.2025.3624112.
(In press).
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Abstract
With the emerging privacy sensitive applications, anonymity is recognized as an important attribute in privacy-preserving communications. Existing anonymous precoding approaches at the physical (PHY) layer aim to mask sender’s channel characteristic while overlooking the fact that other PHY characteristics contain information that can be traced back to the sender. In this paper, we first reveal that the sender’s in-phase and quadrature-phase imbalance (IQI) characteristic of its radio frequency (RF) front end can also be exploited as unique signature of the sender. Since the signal is transmitted through the RF front end and then is propagated through the channel, the received signal carries the composite characteristics of the IQI and channel which can be exploited to identify the sender. To prevent the sender detection enhanced by IQI, an IQI aware anonymous alias sender construction scheme is proposed with the concept of Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD). It manipulates the signaling of transmitted signal, so that from the perspective of detector, the detection statistic of the real sender is close to that of the alias. To mitigate the communication performance loss caused by the IQI, we exploit the IQI interference as a constructive element. While the constructive IQI design increases the degree of freedom of precoding design, it does not violate the sender anonymity requirement. Finally, an IQI aware anonymous precoder (IAA) is proposed. Simulation demonstrates that the anonymity and communication performance of the proposed IAA precoder is maintained at a high level and is robust to the IQI parameters, where existing approaches fail.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Physical Layer Anonymous Precoding under CSI and Hardware-Imperfections: A KLD-based Approach |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1109/TWC.2025.3624112 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1109/twc.2025.3624112 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions. |
| Keywords: | Physical layer anonymous communications, IQI, anonymous precoding, KL divergence, IQI interference utilization |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Electronic and Electrical Eng |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10217178 |
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