A Hybrid Artificial-Noise and Secret-Key Scheme for Securing OFDM Transmissions in V2G Networks

Abstract: We propose a new scheme to enhance the physical-layer security of wireless single-input single-output orthogonal-frequency division-multiplexing (OFDM) transmissions from an electric vehicle, Alice, to the aggregator, Bob, in the presence of an eavesdropper, Eve. To prevent information leakage to Eve, Alice exploits the wireless channel randomness to extract secret key symbols that are used to encrypt some data symbols which are then multiplexed in the frequency domain with the remaining unencrypted data symbols. To secure the unencrypted data symbols, Alice transmits an artificial-noise (AN) signal superimposed over her data signal. We propose a three-level optimization procedure to increase the average secrecy rate of this wiretap channel by optimizing the transmit power allocation between the encrypted data symbols, unencrypted data symbols and the AN symbols. Our numerical results show that the proposed scheme achieves considerable secrecy rate gains compared to the benchmark cases