A Survey on Security of Ultra/Hyper Reliable Low Latency Communication: Recent Advancements, Challenges, and Future Directions

TL;DR

This survey addresses securing ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC) under finite blocklength constraints by surveying physical layer security (PLS) approaches across 5G enabling technologies and 6G futures. It analyzes security threats (jamming, eavesdropping, pilot contamination) and the impact of finite blocklength, CSI, and pilot design on PLS performance, introducing URLLC-specific metrics such as secrecy rate, secrecy throughput, secrecy outage probability, secrecy gap, and secure energy efficiency. It surveys PLS enhancements in MIMO/mMIMO, NOMA, cooperative relaying, UAV and IRS deployments, and ML-enabled security, and extends to 6G directions including quantum-enabled security, machine unlearning, and blockchain-enabled security with a focus on HRLLC. The paper highlights open challenges (QoS vs security trade-offs, CSI dependence, edge computing, mobility, and ML limitations) and proposes future research directions toward lightweight, adaptive, and energy-efficient PLS for secure HRLLC in 6G. Overall, it provides a structured, in-depth reference for researchers and practitioners aiming to design secure, low-latency wireless systems under stringent URLLC requirements.

Abstract

Ultra-reliable low latency communication (URLLC) is an innovative service offered by fifth-generation (5G) wireless systems. URLLC enables various mission-critical applications by facilitating reliable and low-latency signal transmission to support extreme Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. Apart from reliability and latency, ensuring secure data transmission for URLLC has been a prominent issue for researchers in recent years. Using finite blocklength signals to achieve the stringent reliability and latency criteria in URLLC eliminates the possibility of using conventional complex cryptographic security enhancement techniques based on encoding and decoding of secret keys. Thus, the development of lightweight security mechanisms is of paramount importance for URLLC. Recently, Physical-Layer Security (PLS) techniques have emerged as a powerful alternative to the complex cryptography-based security approaches for facilitating secure URLLC by exploiting the randomness of the wireless channel. Therefore, in this survey, we present a comprehensive and in-depth review of the state-of-the-art PLS enhancements utilized to unleash secure URLLC while analyzing the impact of various system design parameters on its performance. Moreover, the survey incorporates a detailed overview of the recent advancements in ensuring secure URLLC using PLS in various mission-critical applications, and 5G URLLC enabling technologies like non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), multi-antenna systems, cooperative communication using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), and intelligent reflective surfaces (IRS). Apart from this, we briefly discuss the role of advanced Machine Learning (ML) techniques in designing robust and intelligent PLS schemes for URLLC service.

Figures (12)

• Figure 1: An illustration of IMT-2030 recommended Usage Scenarios
• Figure 2: The organizational structure of the survey
• Figure 3: Jamming using Artificial Noise signal
• Figure 4: Average Secrecy Throughput vs. Blocklength $(N)$.
• Figure 5: Average Secrecy Throughput vs. Transmitted information bits.