Secure image transmission through LTE wireless communications systems

Abstract

Secure transmission of images over wireless communications systems can be done using RSA, the most known and efficient cryptographic algorithm, and OFDMA, the most preferred signal processing choice in wireless communications. This paper aims to investigate the performance of OFDMA system for wireless transmission of RSA-based encrypted images. In fact, the performance of OFDMA systems; based on different signal processing techniques, such as, discrete sine transforms (DST) and discrete cosine transforms (DCT), as well as the conventional discrete Fourier transforms (DFT) are tested for wireless transmission of gray-scale images with/without RSA encryption. The progress of transmitting the image is carried by firstly, encrypting the image with RSA algorithm. Then, the encrypted image is modulated with DFT-based, DCT-based, and DST-based OFDMA systems. After that, the modulated images are transmitted over a wireless multipath fading channel. The reverse operations will be carried at the receiver, in addition to the frequency domain equalization to overcome the channel effect. Exhaustive numbers of scenarios are performed for study and investigation of the performance of the different OFDMA systems in terms of PSNR and MSE, with different subcarriers mapping and modulation techniques, is done. Results indicate that the ability of different OFDMA systems for wireless secure transmission of images. However, the DCT-OFDMA system showed superiority over the DST-OFDMA and the conventional DFT-OFDMA systems.