Embracing corruption burstiness: Fast error recovery for ZigBee under wi-Fi interference

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the publisher via the DOI in this record.The ZigBee communication can be easily and severely interfered by Wi-Fi traffic. Error recovery, as an important means for ZigBee to survive Wi-Fi interference, has been extensively studied in recent years. The existing works add upfront redundancy to in-packet blocks for recovering a certain number of random corruptions. Therefore the bursty nature of ZigBee in-packet corruptions under Wi-Fi interference is often considered harmful, since some blocks are full of errors which cannot be recovered and some blocks have no errors but still requiring redundancy. As a result, they often use interleaving to reshape the bursty errors, before applying complex FEC codes to recover the re-shaped random distributed errors. In this paper, we take a different view that burstiness may be helpful. With burstiness, the in-packet corruptions are often consecutive and the requirement for error recovery is reduced as ”recovering any k consecutive errors” instead of ”recovering any random k errors”. This lowered requirement allows us to design far more efficient code than the existing FEC codes. Motivated by this implication, we exploit the corruption burstiness to design a simple yet effective error recovery code using XOR operations (called ZiXOR). ZiXOR uses XOR code and the delay is significantly reduced. More, ZiXOR uses RSSI-hinted approach to detect in packet corruptions without CRC, incurring almost no extra transmission overhead. The testbed evaluation results show that ZiXOR outperforms the state-of-the-art works in terms of the throughput (by 47%) and latency (by 22%)This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61602095 and No. 61472360), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. ZYGX2016KYQD098 and No. 2016FZA5010), National Key Technology R&D Program (Grant No. 2014BAK15B02), CCFIntel Young Faculty Researcher Program, CCF-Tencent Open Research Fund, China Ministry of Education—China Mobile Joint Project under Grant No. MCM20150401 and the EU FP7 CLIMBER project under Grant Agreement No. PIRSES-GA- 2012-318939. Wei Dong is the corresponding author

List Decoding of Polar Codes

Channel coding is an important instrument used in communication to correct errors that occur on channels. It is interesting to find the best-suited channel code for different communication systems. Polar codes have been in the spotlight lately for their simple structure and performance when in combination with list decoding and cyclic redundancy check code. Polar codes have a recursive structure that makes them interesting to implement in hardware, and they have lately been chosen as a standard for short code communication in 5G to correct bit errors. However, polar codes by themselves are shown to work poorly for practical block lengths, and it is therefore of interest to research them further. This thesis investigates polar codes with a suggested combination of list decoding and CRC. The combination is shown to improve short polar codes enough to compete with the best-known channel codes today for short block lengths. This thesis investigates why this combination works so well with polar codes. The focus lies on the selection of frozen bits in polar codes, in comparison with the similar Reed-Muller codes, and on the size and bit-placement of the CRCs. All investigations focus on codes with length 128 bits and code rate 0.5. We find that a slightly modified frozen bit selection can result in huge performance changes of polar codes. We also find how the use of a list decoder with a large list size improves Reed-Muller codes such that they challenge polar codes both with and without added CRCs. We study if a long CRC is preferred, or if the code performance can be improved by dividing it into several shorter CRCs spread out over the polar code. Results from different modifications to polar codes are presented and discussed.Polar codes have recently been selected as standard to be implemented in 5G for short messages, but they only perform well for short messages after some modifications. This thesis compares variations of those modifications. Assume that you want to send data between two devices. The optimal outcome would be that the receiver receives your message unmodified. A problem that occurs when data is transmitted is that transmission channels are subject to noise, which can result in bit errors in your data. Channel codes are used to solve this issue. They add redundancy to your message in shape of more bits before it gets transmitted on the channel, in a way such that the receiver can use these added bits to detect or correct errors that occurred on the channel. Polar codes are recently discovered channel codes. They have many desirable properties, such as low error rates and a low complexity encoder and decoder. They are fast, do not need much computing power, and are simple to implement in hardware. Unfortunately, the codes do not perform well for short messages of up to a few thousand bits. However, recent research found that this could be changed if the code is combined with a more complex list decoder and another channel code called CRC. The CRC is added to aid the decoder in its last step to find the correct message in a list. Polar codes have recently been selected to be used as a standard in 5G for short messages. This thesis investigates how this relatively poorly performing code can be improved enough to compete with the best codes for short code communication, focusing on 128-bit codes. Polar codes polarize channels so that some become reliable and other unreliable. The set of reliable channels is used to send data on, and all other are called frozen. With the improved polar codes, three variables are not uniquely specified. They are the selection of frozen bits, the list decoder size, and the CRC polynomial. We investigate how these three variables change the code performance. The frozen bit selection is compared with that of the similar Reed-Muller code. Results include the observation that the Reed-Muller codes under some circumstances perform better than polar codes in combination with list decoding and CRC. We also observe that the selection of frozen bits is crucial for finding the best performing short polar code, but not trivial. The CRC is constructed to detect long burst errors, but we do not know if that is the type of errors that occur in the polar code, and therefore not if a CRC is an optimal code to use in the list decoder. Interesting results show that two shorter CRCs spread out over the decoder sometimes improve the code compared to one stronger CRC at the end. Results and conclusions can be used when constructing polar codes for implementation in 5G. The divided CRC can, for example, be used to compensate for a lower complexity decoder. Conclusions include that polar codes should be tested and compared before implementation since finding the best polar code is not trivial for short codes. Further research should include a closer look at CRCs

An Improved Modular Addition Checksum Algorithm

This paper introduces a checksum algorithm that provides a new point in the performance/complexity/effectiveness checksum tradeoff space. It has better fault detection properties than single-sum and dual-sum modular addition checksums. It is also simpler to compute efficiently than a cyclic redundancy check (CRC) due to exploiting commonly available hardware and programming language support for unsigned integer division. The key idea is to compute a single running sum, but introduce a left shift by the size (in bits) of the modulus before performing the modular reduction after each addition step. This approach provides a Hamming Distance of 3 for longer data word lengths than dual-sum approaches such as the Fletcher checksum. Moreover, it provides this capability using a single running sum that is only twice the size of the final computed check value, while providing fault detection capabilities even better than large-block variants of dual-sum approaches that require larger division operations.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figure

Design and implementation of single bit error correction linear block code system based on FPGA

Linear block code (LBC) is an error detection and correction code that is widely used in communication systems. In this paper a special type of LBC called Hamming code was implemented and debugged using FPGA kit with integrated software environments ISE for simulation and tests the results of the hardware system. The implemented system has the ability to correct single bit error and detect two bits error. The data segments length was considered to give high reliability to the system and make an aggregation between the speed of processing and the hardware ability to be implemented. An adaptive length of input data has been consider, up to 248 bits of information can be handled using Spartan 3E500 with 43% as a maximum slices utilization. Input/output data buses in FPGA have been customized to meet the requirements where 34% of input/output resources have been used as maximum ratio. The overall hardware design can be considerable to give an optimum hardware size for the suitable information rate

Automated and intelligent hacking detection system

Dissertação de mestrado integrado em Informatics EngineeringThe Controller Area Network (CAN) is the backbone of automotive networking, connecting many Electronic ControlUnits (ECUs) that control virtually every vehicle function from fuel injection to parking sensors. It possesses,however, no security functionality such as message encryption or authentication by default. Attackers can easily inject or modify packets in the network, causing vehicle malfunction and endangering the driver and passengers. There is an increasing number of ECUs in modern vehicles, primarily driven by the consumer’s expectation of more features and comfort in their vehicles as well as ever-stricter government regulations on efficiency and emissions. Combined with vehicle connectivity to the exterior via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or cellular, this raises the risk of attacks. Traditional networks, such as Internet Protocol (IP), typically have an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) analysing traffic and signalling when an attack occurs. The system here proposed is an adaptation of the traditional IDS into the CAN bus using a One Class Support Vector Machine (OCSVM) trained with live, attack-free traffic. The system is capable of reliably detecting a variety of attacks, both known and unknown, without needing to understand payload syntax, which is largely proprietary and vehicle/model dependent. This allows it to be installed in any vehicle in a plug-and-play fashion while maintaining a large degree of accuracy with very few false positives.A Controller Area Network (CAN) é a principal tecnologia de comunicação interna automóvel, ligando muitas Electronic Control Units (ECUs) que controlam virtualmente todas as funções do veículo desde injeção de combustível até aos sensores de estacionamento. No entanto, não possui por defeito funcionalidades de segurança como cifragem ou autenticação. É possível aos atacantes facilmente injetarem ou modificarem pacotes na rede causando estragos e colocando em perigo tanto o condutor como os passageiros. Existe um número cada vez maior de ECUs nos veículos modernos, impulsionado principalmente pelas expectativas do consumidores quanto ao aumento do conforto nos seus veículos, e pelos cada vez mais exigentes regulamentos de eficiência e emissões. Isto, associada à conexão ao exterior através de tecnologias como o Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, ou redes móveis, aumenta o risco de ataques. Redes tradicionais, como a rede Internet Protocol (IP), tipicamente possuem um Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) que analiza o tráfego e assinala a presença de um ataque. O sistema aqui proposto é uma adaptação do IDS tradicional à rede CAN utilizando uma One Class Support Vector Machine (OCSVM) treinada com tráfego real e livre de ataques. O sistema é capaz de detetar com fiabilidade uma variedade de ataques, tanto conhecidos como desconhecidos, sem a necessidade de entender a sintaxe do campo de dados das mensagens, que é maioritariamente proprietária. Isto permite ao sistema ser instalado em qualquer veículo num modo plug-and-play enquanto mantém um elevado nível de desempenho com muito poucos falsos positivos

MIoTy Overview: a Mathematical Description of the Physical layer

MIoTy is a relatively new Low Power Wide Area Network system. The aim of the thesis is to get an overall understanding of the system and an in-depth understanding of the Physical Layer. In particular, a mathematical description of the physical layer is the final aim, Telegram Splitting Multiple Access (TSMA) is the main invention in the MIoTy the technology uses an algorithm to parse the data packets to be transmitted into small sub-packets at the transmission source. MIoTy is based on the protocol family telegram splitting ultra narrowband (TS-UNB) of the ETSI TS 103 357 standards. These TSMA systems have a data rate of 512 bit/s. The UNB telegram is divided at the physical layer into multiple sub-packets, each equal in size. Each of which is randomly sent on a different carrier frequency and at a different time. The sub-packets are much smaller than the original telegram and only require an on-air time of 16 ms. The total air-time of all the sub-packets for a 10-byte telegram is about 390 ms. The risk of suffering data loss resulting from interference is substantially reduced due to a combination of the virtually random distribution of sub-packet transmissions through time and varying frequencies. And, as a result of the use of sophisticated forward error correction (FEC) techniques, the receiver needs only about 50% of the packets to reconstruct the original telegram completely.MIoTy is a relatively new Low Power Wide Area Network system. The aim of the thesis is to get an overall understanding of the system and an in-depth understanding of the Physical Layer. In particular, a mathematical description of the physical layer is the final aim, Telegram Splitting Multiple Access (TSMA) is the main invention in the MIoTy the technology uses an algorithm to parse the data packets to be transmitted into small sub-packets at the transmission source. MIoTy is based on the protocol family telegram splitting ultra narrowband (TS-UNB) of the ETSI TS 103 357 standards. These TSMA systems have a data rate of 512 bit/s. The UNB telegram is divided at the physical layer into multiple sub-packets, each equal in size. Each of which is randomly sent on a different carrier frequency and at a different time. The sub-packets are much smaller than the original telegram and only require an on-air time of 16 ms. The total air-time of all the sub-packets for a 10-byte telegram is about 390 ms. The risk of suffering data loss resulting from interference is substantially reduced due to a combination of the virtually random distribution of sub-packet transmissions through time and varying frequencies. And, as a result of the use of sophisticated forward error correction (FEC) techniques, the receiver needs only about 50% of the packets to reconstruct the original telegram completely