Physical Layer Security in Terahertz Indoor Communication Networks

Abstract

Despite narrow beams with strong anti-interception capabilities, terahertz communications still face eavesdropping risks in short-range indoor networks. This paper investigates physical-layer security of downlink terahertz communications for indoor three-dimensional (3D) networks comprised of a large number of access points (APs), users, human blockages, and eavesdroppers. We propose two different artificial noise (AN)-assisted terahertz secure transmission schemes, namely the full-AN (F-AN) scheme and partial-AN (P-AN) scheme, under the nearest line-of-sight association (NLA) strategy. The F-AN scheme involves full APs emitting AN to deteriorate the reception of eavesdroppers, and the P-AN scheme selects only those APs with blocked links to the typical user to emit AN based on the unique blocking feature of terahertz. We first obtain the expression for association probability. Then, we determine the eavesdropping region covered by the 3D beam on the ground. We derive the connection outage probability and secrecy outage probability for the two schemes by calculating the Laplace transform of aggregate interference. Our results provide interesting insights into how the secrecy performance is influenced by various system parameters, including the densities of APs and blockages. Moreover, we show that the P-AN scheme outperforms the F-AN scheme regarding the average number of perfect links per unit area.