Abstract:The proliferation of sixth-generation (6G) networks and the massive Internet of Things (IoT) demand wireless communication technologies that are ultra-low-power, secure, and covert. Noise-based communication has emerged as a transformative paradigm that meets these demands by encoding information directly into the statistical properties of noise, rather than using traditional deterministic carriers. This survey provides a comprehensive synthesis of this field, systematically exploring its fundamental principles and key methodologies, including thermal noise modulation (TherMod), noise modulation (NoiseMod) and its variants, and the Kirchhoff-law-Johnson-noise (KLJN) secure key exchange. We address critical practical challenges such as channel estimation and hardware implementation, and highlight emerging applications in simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA). Our analysis confirms that noise-based systems offer unparalleled advantages in energy efficiency and covertness, and we conclude by outlining future research directions to realize their potential for enabling the next generation of autonomous and secure wireless networks.
Abstract:This paper investigates the physical layer security (PLS) performance of $\alpha$-$\mathcal{F}$ fading channels with pointing errors under passive and active eavesdropping scenarios. Novel analytical expressions are derived for key PLS metrics, including the probability of strictly positive secrecy capacity, the average secrecy capacity, and the secure outage probability. An asymptotic analysis is also investigated to provide further insights into the system behavior under high signal-to-noise ratio conditions. The analytical results are validated through Monte Carlo simulations, with several performance curves presented for a range of channel and system parameters. All expressions derived in this work are original and have not been previously published.