Evaluation of Interleaving-based PLS Scheme for Satellite Communications

Physical layer security (PLS) schemes exploit the randomness and unpredictability of a wireless channel to establish secure communication links, and they can be considered as one of the effective techniques to provide security protection. On the other hand, satellite systems have difficulties of fully exploiting randomness and often have consistent spatial channel characteristics due to a long round trip delay and wide coverage areas, which make it difficult to apply the same PLS techniques developed originally for the terrestrial systems. This paper first reviews several PLS techniques developed for multi-antenna systems and evaluates their applicability to satellite systems, particularly dynamic interleaving-based PLS techniques. The results presented in this paper reveal that the examined PLS scheme effectively degrades the eavesdropper's decoding capability under dynamically changing satellite channel conditions.