Secure and Robust MIMO Transceiver for Multicast Mission Critical Communications

Abstract

Mission-critical communications (MCC) involve all communications between people in charge of the safety of the civil society. MCC have unique requirements that include improved reliability, security and group communication support. In this paper, we propose secure and robust Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) transceivers, designed for multiple Base Stations (BS) supporting multicast MCC in presence of multiple eavesdroppers. We formulate minimization problems with the Sum-Mean-Square-Error (SMSE) at legitimate users as an objective function, and a lower bound for the MSE at eavesdroppers as a constraint. Security is achieved thanks to physical layer security mechanisms, namely MIMO beamforming and Artificial Noise (AN). Reliability is achieved by designing a system which is robust to two types of channel state information errors: stochastic and norm-bounded. We propose a coordinate descent-based algorithm and a worst-case iterative algorithm to solve these problems. Numerical results at physical layer and system level reveal the crucial role of robust designs for reliable MCC. We show the interest of both robust design and AN to improve the security gap. We also show that full BS cooperation in preferred for highly secured and reliable MCC but dynamic clustering allows to trade-off security and reliability against capacity.Index Terms-mission critical communication (MCC), physical layer security, robust transceiver design I. INTRODUCTIONMission critical communications (MCC) are all communications between people in charge of the security and the safety of the civil society. Employees of public safety services, like policemen, firemen, rescue teams and ambulance nurses, but also from large companies managing critical infrastructures in the energy or transportation sectors require MCC for their operations [1]. MCC are conveyed by dedicated Private Mobile Radio (PMR) networks [2] that offer a group (or multicast) communication service. This is a one-to-many or many-tomany communication [3], which is one of the most important features of PMR networks and is essential to manage teams of employees. In 5G New Radio, group communication will be supported for MCC from Release R17 onwards [4]. Due to the critical aspects of their missions, MCC users also inherently require highly reliable and secure communication. In particular, sensitive information should not leak to unintended receivers although the broadcast nature of the wireless channel makes the network vulnerable to malicious eavesdroppers.