A low complexity joint encryption-modulation method for iot sensor transceivers

Abstract

Physical layer encryption (PLE) is a new research trend for securing data in communication systems. However, conventional procedures in works on PLE are of high complexity and degrade the packet error rate (PER) performance of the system. They are therefore not yet suitable for IoT sensors’ transceiver, which has limited power and computational resource. In this paper, we propose a low complexity PLE method named as joint encryption-modulation (JEM) for small transceivers such as IoT sensors. In our JEM method, data is encrypted after modulation to preserve high security. Our JEM method does not make change the constellation of the modulation after encryption; therefore, the encryption does not degrade PER performance of the system as the conventional works do. Furthermore, the encryption is performed by XOR gates and multiplexers only. It is, therefore, low complexity. Our experiment results show that the JEM method improves about 3 dB of PER performance as compared with that of conventional works. JEM method can support multiple modulation types such as BPSK, QPSK, 16-256 QAM within a small hardware cost. Compared with conventional works, JEM’s hardware resource is reduced by 87.5% in terms of FPGA synthesis and 86.5% in terms of the ASIC circuit. ASIC static power consumption of JEM is reduced by 80.6%.