On Dependable Wireless Communications through Multi-Connectivity

The realization of wireless ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC) is one of the key challenges of the fifth generation (5G) of mobile communications systems and beyond. Ensuring ultra-high reliability together with a latency in the (sub-)millisecond range is expected to enable self-driving cars, wireless factory automation, and the Tactile Internet. In wireless communications, reliability is usually only considered as percentage of successful packet delivery, aiming for 1 − 10⁻⁵ up to 1 − 10⁻⁹ in URLLC

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

Closed-form Output Statistics of MIMO Block-Fading Channels

The information that can be transmitted through a wireless channel, with multiple-antenna equipped transmitter and receiver, is crucially influenced by the channel behavior as well as by the structure of the input signal. We characterize in closed form the probability density function (pdf) of the output of MIMO block-fading channels, for an arbitrary SNR value. Our results provide compact expressions for such output statistics, paving the way to a more detailed analytical information-theoretic exploration of communications in presence of block fading. The analysis is carried out assuming two different structures for the input signal: the i.i.d. Gaussian distribution and a product form that has been proved to be optimal for non-coherent communication, i.e., in absence of any channel state information. When the channel is fed by an i.i.d. Gaussian input, we assume the Gramian of the channel matrix to be unitarily invariant and derive the output statistics in both the noise-limited and the interference-limited scenario, considering different fading distributions. When the product-form input is adopted, we provide the expressions of the output pdf as the relationship between the overall number of antennas and the fading coherence length varies. We also highlight the relation between our newly derived expressions and the results already available in the literature, and, for some cases, we numerically compute the mutual information, based on the proposed expression of the output statistics.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figure

On Modeling Coverage and Rate of Random Cellular Networks under Generic Channel Fading

In this paper we provide an analytic framework for computing the expected downlink coverage probability, and the associated data rate of cellular networks, where base stations are distributed in a random manner. The provided expressions are in computable integral forms that accommodate generic channel fading conditions. We develop these expressions by modelling the cellular interference using stochastic geometry analysis, then we employ them for comparing the coverage resulting from various channel fading conditions namely Rayleigh and Rician fading, in addition to the fading-less channel. Furthermore, we expand the work to accommodate the effects of random frequency reuse on the cellular coverage and rate. Monte-Carlo simulations are conducted to validate the theoretical analysis, where the results show a very close match