A novel multi-fold security framework for cognitive radio wireless ad-hoc networks

Cognitive Radio (CR) Technology has emerged as a smart and intelligent technology to address the problem of spectrum scarcity and its under-utilization. CR nodes sense the environment for vacant channels, exchange control information, and agree upon free channels list (FCL) to use for data transmission and conclusion. CR technology is heavily dependent on the control channel to dialogue on the exchanged control information which is usually in the Industrial-Scientific-Medical (ISM) band. As the ISM band is publically available this makes the CR network more prone to security vulnerabilities and flaws. In this paper a novel multi-fold security framework for cognitive radio wireless ad-hoc networks has been proposed. Multiple security levels, such as, encryption of beacon frame and privately exchanging the FCL, and the dynamic and adaptive behaviour of the framework makes the proposed protocol more resilient and secure against the traditional security attacks when compared with existing protocols

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

Bit error performance of diffuse indoor optical wireless channel pulse position modulation system employing artificial neural networks for channel equalisation

The bit-error rate (BER) performance of a pulse position modulation (PPM) scheme for non-line-of-sight indoor optical links employing channel equalisation based on the artificial neural network (ANN) is reported. Channel equalisation is achieved by training a multilayer perceptrons ANN. A comparative study of the unequalised `soft' decision decoding and the `hard' decision decoding along with the neural equalised `soft' decision decoding is presented for different bit resolutions for optical channels with different delay spread. We show that the unequalised `hard' decision decoding performs the worst for all values of normalised delayed spread, becoming impractical beyond a normalised delayed spread of 0.6. However, `soft' decision decoding with/without equalisation displays relatively improved performance for all values of the delay spread. The study shows that for a highly diffuse channel, the signal-to-noise ratio requirement to achieve a BER of 10−5 for the ANN-based equaliser is ~10 dB lower compared with the unequalised `soft' decoding for 16-PPM at a data rate of 155 Mbps. Our results indicate that for all range of delay spread, neural network equalisation is an effective tool of mitigating the inter-symbol interference