Steganography-based secure communication via single carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) transceiver

In the past few decades, wireless communications have empowered communication between people. The communication has been achieved through various transmission systems, of which single-carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) is one prominently featured among them. It is an enhanced version of the orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) system with low PAPR and high-power capabilities. Despite SC-FDMA being one of the best means for transmission, it requires inalienable safety efforts from intruders. Information that is imparted remotely is less safe as opposed to wired communication. Thus, the security of SC-FDMA turns into vitality. Here modified-least significant bit (MLSB) algorithm has been proposed to incorporate security in the SC-FDMA system. The data is first embedded with the proposed algorithm and then is transmitted through the SC-FDMA system over an Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel. Then using the same algorithm, the information is rooted at the receiver end of SC-FDMA system. The performance of the proposed algorithm is analyzed through various parameters of image quality assessment and bit error rate (BER). The proposed method boasts higher PSNR and SSIM values of 68.9102 and 0.9995, respectively. MSE, AD, and NAE were observed to be far lesser, with the metrics being 0.0084, 0.00021, and 0.000060, respectively.