ABSTRACT
Security issues for traditional wireless networks have been considered as a very important research area, and have taken a considerable attention for several years due to the broadcast nature of the wireless medium, which makes attacks more likely to happen than in wireline systems. Most of the studies in this area focus on the security in the higher layers in the protocol stack via the use of cryptography and key management. The main idea of these security approaches is based on the limited computational power of the eavesdroppers. With the advent of the infrastructureless networks such as mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), further challenges have appeared which make the nodes more vulnerable to attacks. Among these challenges are the absence of centralized hardware for security problems, the multihop routes that the transmitted information should follow, and the power-limited terminals [152]. Therefore, to cope with these limitations, physical layer security (or informationtheoretic security) has gained a considerable attention in the last few years. The goal of physical layer security is to allow the source to confidentially communicate with the legitimate destination, while the eavesdropper cannot interpret the source information, without any assumption for the eavesdropper nodes such as the computational power, or the available information. From an information-theoretic standpoint, the achieved source-destination confidential rate is called the achievable secrecy rate.
