Dispensing with channel estimation: differentially modulated cooperative wireless communications

As a benefit of bypassing the potentially excessive complexity and yet inaccurate channel estimation, differentially encoded modulation in conjunction with low-complexity noncoherent detection constitutes a viable candidate for user-cooperative systems, where estimating all the links by the relays is unrealistic. In order to stimulate further research on differentially modulated cooperative systems, a number of fundamental challenges encountered in their practical implementations are addressed, including the time-variant-channel-induced performance erosion, flexible cooperative protocol designs, resource allocation as well as its high-spectral-efficiency transceiver design. Our investigations demonstrate the quantitative benefits of cooperative wireless networks both from a pure capacity perspective as well as from a practical system design perspective

Multi-Antenna Assisted Virtual Full-Duplex Relaying with Reliability-Aware Iterative Decoding

In this paper, a multi-antenna assisted virtual full-duplex (FD) relaying with reliability-aware iterative decoding at destination node is proposed to improve system spectral efficiency and reliability. This scheme enables two half-duplex relay nodes, mimicked as FD relaying, to alternatively serve as transmitter and receiver to relay their decoded data signals regardless the decoding errors, meanwhile, cancel the inter-relay interference with QR-decomposition. Then, by deploying the reliability-aware iterative detection/decoding process, destination node can efficiently mitigate inter-frame interference and error propagation effect at the same time. Simulation results show that, without extra cost of time delay and signalling overhead, our proposed scheme outperforms the conventional selective decode-and-forward (S-DF) relaying schemes, such as cyclic redundancy check based S-DF relaying and threshold based S-DF relaying, by up to 8 dB in terms of bit-error-rate.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, conference paper has been submitte

A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances and Future Trends

This paper examines the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity, confidentiality, integrity and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state-of-the-art in physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer. We also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their counter-measures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive jammer, adaptive jammer and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.Comment: 36 pages. Accepted to Appear in Proceedings of the IEEE, 201

EM based channel estimation in an amplify-and-forward relaying network

Cooperative communication offers a way to obtain spatial diversity in a wireless network without increasing hardware demands. The different cooperation protocols proposed in the literature [1] are often studied under the assumption that all channel state information is available at the destination. In a practical scenario, channel estimates need to be derived from the broadcasted signals. In this paper, we study the Amplify-and-Forward protocol and use the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm to obtain the channel estimates in an iterative way. Our results show that the performance of the system that knows the channels can be approached at the cost of an increased computational complexity. In case a small constellation is used, a low complexity approximation is proposed with a similar performance