Semantic communication-assisted physical layer security over fading wiretap channels

A novel semantic communication (SC)-assisted secrecy transmission framework is proposed. In particular, the legitimate transmitter (Tx) sends the superimposed semantic and bit stream to the legitimate receiver (Rx), where the information may be eavesdropped by the malicious node (EVE). As the EVE merely has the conventional bit-oriented communication structure, the semantic signal acts as the type of beneficial information-bearing artificial noise (AN), which not only keeps strictly confidential to the EVE but also interferes with the EVE. The ergodic (equivalent) secrecy rate over fading wiretap channels is maximized by jointly optimizing the transmit power, semantic-bit power splitting ratio, and the successive interference cancellation decoding order at the Tx, subject to both the instantaneous peak and long-term average power constraints. To address this non-convex problem, both the optimal and suboptimal algorithms are developed by employing the Lagrangian dual method and the successive convex approximation method, respectively. Numerical results show that the proposed SC-assisted secrecy transmission scheme can significantly enhance the physical layer security compared to the baselines using the conventional bit-oriented communication and no-information-bearing AN. It also shows that the proposed suboptimal algorithm can achieve a near-optimal performance.