Information reuse in dynamic spectrum access

Dynamic spectrum access (DSA), where the permission to use slices of radio spectrum is dynamically shifted (in time an in different geographical areas) across various communications services and applications, has been an area of interest from technical and public policy perspectives over the last decade. The underlying belief is that this will increase spectrum utilization, especially since many spectrum bands are relatively unused, ultimately leading to the creation of new and innovative services that exploit the increase in spectrum availability. Determining whether a slice of spectrum, allocated or licensed to a primary user, is available for use by a secondary user at a certain time and in a certain geographic area is a challenging task. This requires 'context information' which is critical to the operation of DSA. Such context information can be obtained in several ways, with different costs, and different quality/usefulness of the information. In this paper, we describe the challenges in obtaining this context information, the potential for the integration of various sources of context information, and the potential for reuse of such information for related and unrelated purposes such as localization and enforcement of spectrum sharing. Since some of the infrastructure for obtaining finegrained context information is likely to be expensive, the reuse of this infrastructure/information and integration of information from less expensive sources are likely to be essential for the economical and technological viability of DSA. © 2013 IEEE

Secure Data Collection and Analysis in Smart Health Monitoring

Smart health monitoring uses real-time monitored data to support diagnosis, treatment, and health decision-making in modern smart healthcare systems and benefit our daily life. The accurate health monitoring and prompt transmission of health data are facilitated by the ever-evolving on-body sensors, wireless communication technologies, and wireless sensing techniques. Although the users have witnessed the convenience of smart health monitoring, severe privacy and security concerns on the valuable and sensitive collected data come along with the merit. The data collection, transmission, and analysis are vulnerable to various attacks, e.g., eavesdropping, due to the open nature of wireless media, the resource constraints of sensing devices, and the lack of security protocols. These deficiencies not only make conventional cryptographic methods not applicable in smart health monitoring but also put many obstacles in the path of designing privacy protection mechanisms. In this dissertation, we design dedicated schemes to achieve secure data collection and analysis in smart health monitoring. The first two works propose two robust and secure authentication schemes based on Electrocardiogram (ECG), which outperform traditional user identity authentication schemes in health monitoring, to restrict the access to collected data to legitimate users. To improve the practicality of ECG-based authentication, we address the nonuniformity and sensitivity of ECG signals, as well as the noise contamination issue. The next work investigates an extended authentication goal, denoted as wearable-user pair authentication. It simultaneously authenticates the user identity and device identity to provide further protection. We exploit the uniqueness of the interference between different wireless protocols, which is common in health monitoring due to devices\u27 varying sensing and transmission demands, and design a wearable-user pair authentication scheme based on the interference. However, the harm of this interference is also outstanding. Thus, in the fourth work, we use wireless human activity recognition in health monitoring as an example and analyze how this interference may jeopardize it. We identify a new attack that can produce false recognition result and discuss potential countermeasures against this attack. In the end, we move to a broader scenario and protect the statistics of distributed data reported in mobile crowd sensing, a common practice used in public health monitoring for data collection. We deploy differential privacy to enable the indistinguishability of workers\u27 locations and sensing data without the help of a trusted entity while meeting the accuracy demands of crowd sensing tasks

Sparse Signal Processing Concepts for Efficient 5G System Design

As it becomes increasingly apparent that 4G will not be able to meet the emerging demands of future mobile communication systems, the question what could make up a 5G system, what are the crucial challenges and what are the key drivers is part of intensive, ongoing discussions. Partly due to the advent of compressive sensing, methods that can optimally exploit sparsity in signals have received tremendous attention in recent years. In this paper we will describe a variety of scenarios in which signal sparsity arises naturally in 5G wireless systems. Signal sparsity and the associated rich collection of tools and algorithms will thus be a viable source for innovation in 5G wireless system design. We will discribe applications of this sparse signal processing paradigm in MIMO random access, cloud radio access networks, compressive channel-source network coding, and embedded security. We will also emphasize important open problem that may arise in 5G system design, for which sparsity will potentially play a key role in their solution.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in IEEE Acces

Soft-Defined Heterogeneous Vehicular Network: Architecture and Challenges

Heterogeneous Vehicular NETworks (HetVNETs) can meet various quality-of-service (QoS) requirements for intelligent transport system (ITS) services by integrating different access networks coherently. However, the current network architecture for HetVNET cannot efficiently deal with the increasing demands of rapidly changing network landscape. Thanks to the centralization and flexibility of the cloud radio access network (Cloud-RAN), soft-defined networking (SDN) can conveniently be applied to support the dynamic nature of future HetVNET functions and various applications while reducing the operating costs. In this paper, we first propose the multi-layer Cloud RAN architecture for implementing the new network, where the multi-domain resources can be exploited as needed for vehicle users. Then, the high-level design of soft-defined HetVNET is presented in detail. Finally, we briefly discuss key challenges and solutions for this new network, corroborating its feasibility in the emerging fifth-generation (5G) era

Mean-Field-Type Games in Engineering

A mean-field-type game is a game in which the instantaneous payoffs and/or the state dynamics functions involve not only the state and the action profile but also the joint distributions of state-action pairs. This article presents some engineering applications of mean-field-type games including road traffic networks, multi-level building evacuation, millimeter wave wireless communications, distributed power networks, virus spread over networks, virtual machine resource management in cloud networks, synchronization of oscillators, energy-efficient buildings, online meeting and mobile crowdsensing.Comment: 84 pages, 24 figures, 183 references. to appear in AIMS 201

Selected Papers from the 5th International Electronic Conference on Sensors and Applications

This Special Issue comprises selected papers from the proceedings of the 5th International Electronic Conference on Sensors and Applications, held on 15–30 November 2018, on sciforum.net, an online platform for hosting scholarly e-conferences and discussion groups. In this 5th edition of the electronic conference, contributors were invited to provide papers and presentations from the field of sensors and applications at large, resulting in a wide variety of excellent submissions and topic areas. Papers which attracted the most interest on the web or that provided a particularly innovative contribution were selected for publication in this collection. These peer-reviewed papers are published with the aim of rapid and wide dissemination of research results, developments, and applications. We hope this conference series will grow rapidly in the future and become recognized as a new way and venue by which to (electronically) present new developments related to the field of sensors and their applications