Near-Optimal Deviation-Proof Medium Access Control Designs in Wireless Networks

Distributed medium access control (MAC) protocols are essential for the proliferation of low cost, decentralized wireless local area networks (WLANs). Most MAC protocols are designed with the presumption that nodes comply with prescribed rules. However, selfish nodes have natural motives to manipulate protocols in order to improve their own performance. This often degrades the performance of other nodes as well as that of the overall system. In this work, we propose a class of protocols that limit the performance gain which nodes can obtain through selfish manipulation while incurring only a small efficiency loss. The proposed protocols are based on the idea of a review strategy, with which nodes collect signals about the actions of other nodes over a period of time, use a statistical test to infer whether or not other nodes are following the prescribed protocol, and trigger a punishment if a departure from the protocol is perceived. We consider the cases of private and public signals and provide analytical and numerical results to demonstrate the properties of the proposed protocols.Comment: 14 double-column pages, submitted to ACM/IEEE Trans Networkin

Optimal Fixed and Scalable Energy Management for Wireless Networks

In many devices, wireless network interfaces consume upwards of 30% of scarce portable system energy. Extending the system lifetime by minimizing communication power consumption has therefore become a priority. Conventional energy management techniques focus independently on minimizing the fixed energy consumption of the transceiver circuit or on scalable transmission control. Fixed energy consumption is reduced by maximizing the transceiver shutdown interval. In contrast, variable transmission rate, coding and power can be leveraged to minimize energy costs. These two energy management approaches present a tradeoff in minimizing the overall system energy. For example, variable energy costs are minimized by transmitting at a lower modulation rate and transmission power, but this also shortens the sleep duration thereby increasing fixed energy consumption. We present a methodology for energy-efficient resource allocation across the physical layer, communications layer and link layer. Our methodology is aimed at providing QoS for multiple users with bursty MPEG-4 video over a time-varying channel. We evaluate our scheme by exploiting control knobs of actual RF components over a modified IEEE 802.11 MAC. Our results indicate that the system lifetime is increased by a factor of 2 to 5 compared to the gains of conventional techniques

Codebook Based Hybrid Precoding for Millimeter Wave Multiuser Systems

In millimeter wave (mmWave) systems, antenna architecture limitations make it difficult to apply conventional fully digital precoding techniques but call for low cost analog radio-frequency (RF) and digital baseband hybrid precoding methods. This paper investigates joint RF-baseband hybrid precoding for the downlink of multiuser multi-antenna mmWave systems with a limited number of RF chains. Two performance measures, maximizing the spectral efficiency and the energy efficiency of the system, are considered. We propose a codebook based RF precoding design and obtain the channel state information via a beam sweep procedure. Via the codebook based design, the original system is transformed into a virtual multiuser downlink system with the RF chain constraint. Consequently, we are able to simplify the complicated hybrid precoding optimization problems to joint codeword selection and precoder design (JWSPD) problems. Then, we propose efficient methods to address the JWSPD problems and jointly optimize the RF and baseband precoders under the two performance measures. Finally, extensive numerical results are provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid precoders.Comment: 35 pages, 9 figures, to appear in Trans. on Signal Process, 201

Towards Social Autonomous Vehicles: Efficient Collision Avoidance Scheme Using Richardson's Arms Race Model

Background Road collisions and casualties pose a serious threat to commuters around the globe. Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) aim to make the use of technology to reduce the road accidents. However, the most of research work in the context of collision avoidance has been performed to address, separately, the rear end, front end and lateral collisions in less congested and with high inter-vehicular distances. Purpose The goal of this paper is to introduce the concept of a social agent, which interact with other AVs in social manners like humans are social having the capability of predicting intentions, i.e. mentalizing and copying the actions of each other, i.e. mirroring. The proposed social agent is based on a human-brain inspired mentalizing and mirroring capabilities and has been modelled for collision detection and avoidance under congested urban road traffic. Method We designed our social agent having the capabilities of mentalizing and mirroring and for this purpose we utilized Exploratory Agent Based Modeling (EABM) level of Cognitive Agent Based Computing (CABC) framework proposed by Niazi and Hussain. Results Our simulation and practical experiments reveal that by embedding Richardson's arms race model within AVs, collisions can be avoided while travelling on congested urban roads in a flock like topologies. The performance of the proposed social agent has been compared at two different levels.Comment: 48 pages, 21 figure

Byzantine Attack and Defense in Cognitive Radio Networks: A Survey

The Byzantine attack in cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS), also known as the spectrum sensing data falsification (SSDF) attack in the literature, is one of the key adversaries to the success of cognitive radio networks (CRNs). In the past couple of years, the research on the Byzantine attack and defense strategies has gained worldwide increasing attention. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey and tutorial on the recent advances in the Byzantine attack and defense for CSS in CRNs. Specifically, we first briefly present the preliminaries of CSS for general readers, including signal detection techniques, hypothesis testing, and data fusion. Second, we analyze the spear and shield relation between Byzantine attack and defense from three aspects: the vulnerability of CSS to attack, the obstacles in CSS to defense, and the games between attack and defense. Then, we propose a taxonomy of the existing Byzantine attack behaviors and elaborate on the corresponding attack parameters, which determine where, who, how, and when to launch attacks. Next, from the perspectives of homogeneous or heterogeneous scenarios, we classify the existing defense algorithms, and provide an in-depth tutorial on the state-of-the-art Byzantine defense schemes, commonly known as robust or secure CSS in the literature. Furthermore, we highlight the unsolved research challenges and depict the future research directions.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutoiral