Amplify-and-forward compressed sensing as a PHY-layer secrecy solution in wireless sensor networks

Results in distributed compressed sensing show that this technique can be applied to wireless sensor networks in order to reduce the power consumption and the amount of channel uses. In this paper we extend such results with the study of the physical layer secrecy performance. In particular, we focus on an amplify-and-forward compressed sensing scheme (AF-CS) for the case when malicious eavesdropping nodes are listening. We demonstrate that this scheme achieves perfect secrecy in presence of one eavesdropper (and also for a small number of them). We also show that a very high number of eavesdropping nodes are required to perfectly recover the signal in comparison to other distributed compressed sensing schemes in the literature.