Sustainability and Scalability of Physical Layer Security in Next-Generation Networks
Pin-Hsun Lin, Karl-Ludwig Besser, Eduard Axel Jorswieck · 2025
Physical layer security (PLS) has emerged as a promising approach to ensure data confidentiality in next-generation wireless networks. As these networks transition toward 6G and beyond, two pivotal design considerations are sustainability—the ability to maintain secure communications under limited resources—and scalability—the capacity to accommodate a massive number of users and devices without compromising performance. In this paper, we explore four critical issues that can hamper the sustainable and scalable deployment of PLS: superfluous protection of non-sensitive data, non-uniform resource utilization, outages caused by limited channel information, and the rigidity of reliability–secrecy tradeoffs in finite blocklength scenarios. We propose solutions for each challenge, including schemes that protect only latent sensitive content, opportunistic scheduling of secret key generation during off-peak hours, correlation shaping to enable zero-outage secrecy even under slow fading, and neural-network-based coding to flexibly balance reliability and secrecy. Numerical and experimental results show that these approaches can significantly improve energy efficiency, resource utilization, and secrecy performance. Our findings pave the way for more sustainable and scalable PLS strategies in future large-scale wireless deployments.