Intelligent Reflecting Surface Assisted Anti-Jamming Communications Based on Reinforcement Learning

Malicious jamming launched by smart jammer, which attacks legitimate transmissions has been regarded as one of the critical security challenges in wireless communications. Thus, this paper exploits intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) to enhance anti-jamming communication performance and mitigate jamming interference by adjusting the surface reflecting elements at the IRS. Aiming to enhance the communication performance against smart jammer, an optimization problem for jointly optimizing power allocation at the base station (BS) and reflecting beamforming at the IRS is formulated. As the jamming model and jamming behavior are dynamic and unknown, a win or learn fast policy hill-climbing (WoLF-PHC) learning approach is proposed to jointly optimize the anti-jamming power allocation and reflecting beamforming strategy without the knowledge of the jamming model. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed anti-jamming based-learning approach can efficiently improve both the IRS-assisted system rate and transmission protection level compared with existing solutions.Comment: This paper appears in the Proceedings of IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM) 2020. A full version appears in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. arXiv:2004.1253

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

Wireless communication, sensing, and REM: A security perspective

The diverse requirements of next-generation communication systems necessitate awareness, flexibility, and intelligence as essential building blocks of future wireless networks. The awareness can be obtained from the radio signals in the environment using wireless sensing and radio environment mapping (REM) methods. This is, however, accompanied by threats such as eavesdropping, manipulation, and disruption posed by malicious attackers. To this end, this work analyzes the wireless sensing and radio environment awareness mechanisms, highlighting their vulnerabilities and provides solutions for mitigating them. As an example, the different threats to REM and its consequences in a vehicular communication scenario are described. Furthermore, the use of REM for securing communications is discussed and future directions regarding sensing/REM security are highlighted