Guaranteeing wireless communication secrecy via a WFRFT-based cooperative system

In this paper, a weighted fractional Fourier transform (WFRFT) based cooperative overlay system, aiming to guarantee physical layer (PHY) security, is proposed. The paper elaborates how WFRFT and physical layer properties of the wireless medium are collaborated to guarantee the secrecy of wireless transmissions. In the proposed system, WFRFT is first preform on the secret data, such that the transmitted signal is distorted and can only be neutralized by inverse-WFRFT with the same parameter. And then two streams of the transformed sequences that bearing different messages are cooperatively and simultaneously transmitted to two legitimate receivers via a beamforming-liked method, respectively. In general, both the rapid spatial decorrelation property and the inherent security features of WFRFT are leveraged, such that only the eavesdropper's is degraded, and hence, the wireless communication secrecy is reliably guaranteed. Numerical simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed system in terms of the average bit error rate and the secrecy capacity.