The authors incorporate Alamouti space-time block coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) with signal space diversity (SSD) in order to significantly strengthen the physical layer security of the communication network. The coordinate interleaving step of SSD is performed amongst OFDM subcarriers, according to distinct strategies that make the correlation coefficients between the subcarrier channel gains equal to zero. The proposed system model can improve the security by enabling a legitimate user to have much less error than an eavesdropper, even under the worst-case scenario where the unauthorised receiver somehow captures the interleaving strategy compromised by the transmitter and legitimate receiver. It is shown that a legitimate user with the introduced scheme can provide up to 14% more performance gain as compared to an unauthorised receiver for a bit error rate (BER) of 10 −4 under worst-case scenarios with different parameters. An exact closedform expression of the BER is derived for the legitimate user and shown to match with the simulation results. Finally, it is demonstrated that the system is also capable of enhancing the resistance against channel estimation errors at the receiver. The proposed system does not require high complexity or additional bandwidth or time resources.
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