A Direct and Generalized Construction of Polyphase Complementary Set with Low PMEPR and High Code-Rate for OFDM System

A major drawback of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems is their high peak-to-mean envelope power ratio (PMEPR). The PMEPR problem can be solved by adopting large codebooks consisting of complementary sequences with low PMEPR. In this paper, we present a new construction of polyphase complementary sets (CSs) using generalized Boolean functions (GBFs), which generalizes Schmidt's construction in 2007, Paterson's construction in 2000 and Golay complementary pairs (GCPs) given by Davis and Jedwab in 1999. Compared with Schmidt's approach, our proposed CSs lead to lower PMEPR with higher code-rate for sequences constructed from higher-order ($\geq 3$) GBFs. We obtain polyphase complementary sequences with maximum PMEPR of $2^{k+1}$ and $2^{k+2}-2M$ where $k,M$ are non-negative integers that can be easily derived from the GBF associated with the CS

Physical Layer Securities in Wireless Communication Systems

Due to the tremendous advancement in the semiconductor and microelectronics technologies, wireless technologies have blossomed in the recent decades. The large scale deployment of wireless networks have revolutionized the way people live. They bring a great deal of convenience and enjoyment to us. Undoubtedly, we have become more and more dependent on these wireless technologies. These include cellular and radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies. However, with great technologies also come great risks and threats. Unlike wired transmissions, the nature of wireless transmissions result in the transmitted signals over the channel can be easily intercepted and eavesdropped by malicious adversaries. Therefore, security and privacy of the employed wireless communication system are easily compromised compared to the wired communication system. Consequently, securing wireless network has attracted a lot of attention in the recent years and it has huge practical implications. Securing wireless networks can be and indeed are performed at all layers of a network protocol stack. These include application, network, data link and physical (PHY) layers. The primary focus of our research is on the PHY layer approaches for securing and attacking wireless networks. In this thesis, we identify three research topics and present our results. They are: 1) PHY layer phase encryption (P-Enc) vs XOR encryption (XOR-Enc); 2) PHY layer signaling scheme to ensure the confidentiality of the transmitted messages from the tag to the reader in RFID systems. 3) Active eavesdropping attack framework under frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) RFID systems. In the first work, we introduce a new OFDM encryption scheme which we call OFDM-Enc, different from convectional XOR-Enc, OFDM-Enc encrypts data by multiplying each of in-phase and quadrature component of the time domain OFDM symbol by a keystream bit. We then perform an initial investigation on the security of OFDM-Enc. We show it is secure against all attacks that are considered in this work. Moreover, depending on the modulation type, OFDM would potentially reduce the keystream size required for encryption, while still achieving the required security level. We also conduct simulations to compare OFDM-Enc with conventional XOR-Enc. We show indeed OFDM-Enc is viable and can achieve good performances. Then we extend OFDM-Enc to general communication systems. Since the encryption is essentially done by changing the phase of the data constellations, we just adopt the term P-Enc. In addition, we form mathematical formulations in order to compare between P-Enc and XOR-Enc in terms of efficiency, security and hardware complexity. Furthermore, we show P-Enc at the PHY layer can prevent traffic analysis attack, which cannot be prevented with the upper layer encryptions. Finally, simulations are conducted again to compare the performance of P-Enc and XOR-Enc. In the second work, we are interested in protecting tag's data from leaking or being compromised to malicious adversaries. As discussed earlier, due to the nature of wireless channels, communications between the tag and the reader is susceptible to eavesdropping. The conventional method uses encryption for confidentiality protection of transmitted messages. However, this requires to pre-share keys between the reader and the tag. As a result, a key management and distribution system needs to be put in place. This introduces heavy system overhead. In this work, we first propose a new PHY layer RFID privacy protection method which requires no pre-shared keys and would achieve the same goal. We also perform theoretical analysis to first validate of our proposed scheme. Finally, we conduct experiments to further verify the feasibility our proposed scheme under the passive eavesdropping attack model. In the third work, we present a new attack on the FHSS RFID system called active eavesdropping attack. In most semi-passive and passive RFID systems, tag to reader communications are accomplished via backscattering modulation. This implies the tag is not required to identify the frequency of the legitimate reader's transmitted signal, it simply responds to a reader's query by setting its impedance in the circuitry to low and high to represent bit 1 and 0. The attacker exploits this design weakness of the tag and broadcasts his own continuous wave (CW) at a different frequency. Consequently, the eavesdropper receives two copies of responses: one from his own broadcasted CW and one from reader's CW. We perform theoretical analysis to show the optimal strategy for the attacker in terms of the decoding error probability. Finally, we conduct simulations and experiments to verify with our theoretical results

Low-PMEPR Preamble Sequence Design for Dynamic Spectrum Allocation in OFDMA Systems

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) with Dynamic spectrum allocation (DSA) is able to provide a wide range of data rate requirements. This paper is focused on the design of preamble sequences in OFDMA systems with low peak-to-mean envelope power ratio (PMEPR) property in the context of DSA. We propose a systematic preamble sequence design which gives rise to low PMEPR for possibly non-contiguous spectrum allocations. With the aid of Golay-Davis-Jedwab (GDJ) sequences, two classes of preamble sequences are presented. We prove that their PMEPRs are upper bounded by 4 for any DSA over a chunk of four contiguous resource blocks

Optimal Z -Complementary Code Set From Generalized Reed-Muller Codes

Z-complementary code set (ZCCS), an extension of perfect CCs, refers to a set of 2-D matrices having zero correlation zone properties. ZCCS can be used in various multi-channel systems to support, for example, quasi-synchronous interference-free multicarrier code-division multiple access communication and optimal channel estimation in multiple-input multiple-output systems. Traditional constructions of ZCCS heavily rely on a series of sequence operations which may not be feasible for rapid hardware generation particularly for long ZCCSs. In this paper, we propose a direct construction of ZCCS using the second-order Reed-Muller codes with efficient graphical representation. Our proposed construction, valid for any number of isolated vertices present in the graph, is capable of generating optimal ZCCS meeting the set size upper bound

Peak-to-Average Power Ratio Reduction of DOCSIS 3.1 Downstream Signals

Tone reservation (TR) is an attractive and widely used method for peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) reduction of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals, where both transmitter and receiver agree upon a number of subcarriers or tones to be reserved to generate a peak canceling signal that can reduce the peak power of the transmitted signals. The tones are selected to be mutually exclusive with the tones used for data transmission, which allows the receiver to extract the data symbols without distortions. This thesis presents two novel PAPR reduction algorithms for OFDM signals based on the TR principle, which do not distort the transmitted signals. The first proposed algorithm is performed in the time domain, whereas the second algorithm is a new clipping-and-filtering method. Both algorithms consist of two stages. The first stage, which is done off-line, creates a set of canceling signals based on the settings of the OFDM system. In particular, these signals are constructed to cancel signals at different levels of maximum instantaneous power that are above a predefined threshold. The second stage, which is online and iterative, reduces the signal peaks by using the canceling signals constructed in the first stage. The precalculated canceling signals can be updated when different tone sets are selected for data transmission, accommodating many practical applications. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms achieve slightly better PAPR reduction performance than the conventional algorithms. Moreover, such performance is achieved with much lower computational complexity in terms of numbers of multiplications and additions per iteration. Among the two proposed algorithms, the time-domain algorithm gives the best peak reduction performance but the clipping-and-filtering algorithm requires considerably less number of multiplications per iteration and can be efficiently implemented using the fast Fourier transform (FFT)/inverse fast Fourier transform (IFFT) structure