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

Spectrum sharing systems for improving spectral efficiency in cognitive cellular network

Since spectrum is the invisible infrastructure that powers the wireless communication, the demand has been exceptionally increasing in recent years after the implementation of 4G and immense data requirements of 5G due to the applications, such as Internet-of-Things (IoT). Therefore, the effective optimization of the use of spectrum is immediately needed than ever before. The spectrum sensing is the prerequisite for optimal resource allocation in cognitive radio networks (CRN). Therefore, the spectrum sensing in wireless system with lower latency requirements is proposed first. In such systems with high spatial density of the base stations and users/objects, spectrum sharing enables spectrum reuse across very small regions. The proposed method in this Thesis is a multi-channel cooperative spectrum sensing technique, in which an independent network of sensors, namely, spectrum monitoring network, detects the spectrum availability. The locally aggregated decision in each zone associated with the zone aggregator (ZA) location is then passed to a decision fusion centre (DFC). The secondary base station (SBS) accordingly allocates the available channels to secondary users to maximize the spectral efficiency. The function of the DFC is formulated as an optimization problem with the objective of maximizing the spectral efficiency. The optimal detection threshold is obtained for different cases with various spatial densities of ZAs and SBSs. It is further shown that the proposed method reduces the spectrum sensing latency and results in a higher spectrum efficiency. Furthermore, a novel power allocation scheme for multicell CRN is proposed where the subchannel power allocation is performed by incorporating network-wide primary system communication activity. A collaborative subchannel monitoring scheme is proposed to evaluate the aggregated subchannel activity index (ASAI) to indicate the activity levels of primary users. Two utility functions are then defined to characterize the spectral efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE) as a function of ASAI to formulate a utility maximization problem. The optimal transmit power allocation is then obtained with the objective of maximizing the total utility at the SBS, subject to maximum SBS transmit power and collision probability constraint at the primary receivers. Since optimal EE and SE are two contradicting objectives to obtain the transmit power allocation, the design approach to handle both EE and SE as a function of common network parameter, i.e., ASAI, is provided which ultimately proves the quantitative insights on efficient system design. Extensive simulation results confirm the analytical results and indicate a significant improvement in sensing latency and accuracy and a significant gain against the benchmark models on the rate performance, despite the proposed methods perform with lower signalling overhead