Security performance and protocol consideration in optical communication system with optical layer security enabled by optical coding techniques

With the fast development of communication systems, network security issues have more and more impact on daily life. It is essential to construct a high degree of optical layer security to resolve the security problem once and for all. Three different techniques which can provide optical layer security are introduced and compared. Optical chaos can be used for fast random number generation. Quantum cryptography is the most promising technique for key distribution. And the optical coding techniques can be deployed to encrypt the modulated signal in the optical layer. A mathematical equation has been derived from information theory to evaluate the information-theoretic security level of the wiretap channel in optical coding schemes. And the merits and limitation of two coherent optical coding schemes, temporal phase coding and spectral phase coding, have been analysed. The security scheme based on a reconfigurable optical coding device has been introduced, and the corresponding security protocol has been developed. By moving the encryption operation from the electronic layer to the optical layer, the modulated signals become opaque to the unauthorised users. Optical code distribution and authentication is the one of the major challenges for our proposed scheme. In our proposed protocol, both of the operations are covered and defined in detail. As a preliminary draft of the optical code security protocol, it could be a useful guidance for further research

Unconditionally Secure Authentication and Integrity Protection for the Galileo Open Service Signal

The operational GNSSs do not offer authentication and integrity protection for the Open Service (OS) signal/message. But it is urgently needed, since several attacks can threat the OS user. By this reason the Galileo GNSS is working on this issue. This thesis contributes at the problem by adopting an approach as generic as possible, which outlines a theoretical bound on the key size. Therefore, the focus is providing data and signal unconditionally secure authentication and integrity pro

A New Cross-Layer FPGA-Based Security Scheme for Wireless Networks

This chapter presents a new cross-layer security scheme which deploys efficient coding techniques in the physical layer in an upper layer classical cryptographic protocol system. The rationale in designing the new scheme is to enhance security-throughput trade-off in wireless networks which is in contrast to existing schemes which either enhances security at the detriment of data throughput or vice versa. The new scheme is implemented using the residue number system (RNS), non-linear convolutional coding and subband coding at the physical layer and RSA cryptography at the upper layers. The RNS reduces the huge data obtained from RSA cryptography into small parallel data. To increase the security level, iterated wavelet-based subband coding splits the ciphertext into different levels of decomposition. At subsequent levels of decomposition, the ciphertext from the preceding level serves as data for encryption using convolutional codes. In addition, throughput is enhanced by transmitting small parallel data and the bit error correction capability of non-linear convolutional code. It is shown that, various passive and active attacks common to wireless networks could be circumvented. An FPGA implementation applied to CDMA could fit into a single Virtex-4 FPGA due to small parallel data sizes employed

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationA fundamental characteristic of wireless communications is in their broadcast nature, which allows accessibility of information without placing restrictions on a user’s location. However, the ease of accessibility also makes it vulnerable to eavesdropping. This dissertation considers the security issues of spread spectrum systems and in this context, a secure information transmission system compromised of two main parts is presented. The first component makes use of the principle of reciprocity in frequency-selective wireless channels to derive a pair of keys for two legitimate parties. The proposed key generation algorithm allows for two asynchronous transceivers to derive a pair of similar keys. Moreover, a unique augmentation - called strongest path cancellation (SPC) - is applied to the keys and has been validated through simulation and real-world measurements to significantly boost the security level of the design. In the second part of the secure information transmission system, the concept of artificial noise is introduced to multicarrier spread spectrum systems. The keys generated in the first part of the protocol are used as spreading code sequences for the spread spectrum system. Artificial noise is added to further enhance the security of the communication setup. Two different attacks on the proposed security system are evaluated. First, a passive adversary following the same steps as the legitimate users to detect confidential information is considered. The second attack studies a more sophisticated adversary with significant blind detection capabilities

Enabling Technologies for 5G and Beyond: Bridging the Gap between Vision and Reality

It is common knowledge that the fifth generation (5G) of cellular networks will come with drastic transformation in the cellular systems capabilities and will redefine mobile services. 5G (and beyond) systems will be used for human interaction, in addition to person-to-machine and machine-to-machine communications, i.e., every-thing is connected to every-thing. These features will open a whole line of new business opportunities and contribute to the development of the society in many different ways, including developing and building smart cities, enhancing remote health care services, to name a few. However, such services come with an unprecedented growth of mobile traffic, which will lead to heavy challenges and requirements that have not been experienced before. Indeed, the new generations of cellular systems are required to support ultra-low latency services (less than one millisecond), and provide hundred times more data rate and connectivity, all compared to previous generations such as 4G. Moreover, they are expected to be highly secure due to the sensitivity of the transmitted information. Researchers from both academia and industry have been concerting significant efforts to develop new technologies that aim at enabling the new generation of cellular systems (5G and beyond) to realize their potential. Much emphasis has been put on finding new technologies that enhance the radio access network (RAN) capabilities as RAN is considered to be the bottleneck of cellular networks. Striking a balance between performance and cost has been at the center of the efforts that led to the newly developed technologies, which include non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), millimeter wave (mmWave) technology, self-organizing network (SON) and massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO). Moreover, physical layer security (PLS) has been praised for being a potential candidate for enforcing transmission security when combined with cryptography techniques. Although the main concepts of the aforementioned RAN key enabling technologies have been well defined, there are discrepancies between their intended (i.e., vision) performance and the achieved one. In fact, there is still much to do to bridge the gap between what has been promised by such technologies in terms of performance and what they might be able to achieve in real-life scenarios. This motivates us to identify the main reasons behind the aforementioned gaps and try to find ways to reduce such gaps. We first focus on NOMA where the main drawback of existing solutions is related to their poor performance in terms of spectral efficiency and connectivity. Another major drawback of existing NOMA solutions is that transmission rate per user decreases slightly with the number of users, which is a serious issue since future networks are expected to provide high connectivity. To this end, we develop NOMA solutions that could provide three times the achievable rate of existing solutions while maintaining a constant transmission rate per user regardless of the number of connected users. We then investigate the challenges facing mmWave transmissions. It has been demonstrated that such technology is highly sensitive to blockage, which limits its range of communication. To overcome this obstacle, we develop a beam-codebook based analog beam-steering scheme that achieves near maximum beamforming gain performance. The proposed technique has been tested and verified by real-life measurements performed at Bell Labs. Another line of research pursued in this thesis is investigating challenges pertaining to SON. It is known that radio access network self-planning is the most complex and sensitive task due to its impact on the cost of network deployment, etc., capital expenditure (CAPEX). To tackle this issue, we propose a comprehensive self-planning solution that provides all the planning parameters at once while guaranteeing that the system is optimally planned. The proposed scheme is compared to existing solutions and its superiority is demonstrated. We finally consider the communication secrecy problem and investigated the potential of employing PLS. Most of the existing PLS schemes are based on unrealistic assumptions, most notably is the assumption of having full knowledge about the whereabouts of the eavesdroppers. To solve this problem, we introduce a radically novel nonlinear precoding technique and a coding strategy that together allow to establish secure communication without any knowledge about the eavesdroppers. Moreover, we prove that it is possible to secure communications while achieving near transmitter-receiver channel capacity (the maximum theoretical rate)

Waveform Design for 5G and beyond Systems

5G traffic has very diverse requirements with respect to data rate, delay, and reliability. The concept of using multiple OFDM numerologies adopted in the 5G NR standard will likely meet these multiple requirements to some extent. However, the traffic is radically accruing different characteristics and requirements when compared with the initial stage of 5G, which focused mainly on high-speed multimedia data applications. For instance, applications such as vehicular communications and robotics control require a highly reliable and ultra-low delay. In addition, various emerging M2M applications have sparse traffic with a small amount of data to be delivered. The state-of-the-art OFDM technique has some limitations when addressing the aforementioned requirements at the same time. Meanwhile, numerous waveform alternatives, such as FBMC, GFDM, and UFMC, have been explored. They also have their own pros and cons due to their intrinsic waveform properties. Hence, it is the opportune moment to come up with modification/variations/combinations to the aforementioned techniques or a new waveform design for 5G systems and beyond. The aim of this Special Issue is to provide the latest research and advances in the field of waveform design for 5G systems and beyond

Cellular, Wide-Area, and Non-Terrestrial IoT: A Survey on 5G Advances and the Road Towards 6G

The next wave of wireless technologies is proliferating in connecting things among themselves as well as to humans. In the era of the Internet of things (IoT), billions of sensors, machines, vehicles, drones, and robots will be connected, making the world around us smarter. The IoT will encompass devices that must wirelessly communicate a diverse set of data gathered from the environment for myriad new applications. The ultimate goal is to extract insights from this data and develop solutions that improve quality of life and generate new revenue. Providing large-scale, long-lasting, reliable, and near real-time connectivity is the major challenge in enabling a smart connected world. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on existing and emerging communication solutions for serving IoT applications in the context of cellular, wide-area, as well as non-terrestrial networks. Specifically, wireless technology enhancements for providing IoT access in fifth-generation (5G) and beyond cellular networks, and communication networks over the unlicensed spectrum are presented. Aligned with the main key performance indicators of 5G and beyond 5G networks, we investigate solutions and standards that enable energy efficiency, reliability, low latency, and scalability (connection density) of current and future IoT networks. The solutions include grant-free access and channel coding for short-packet communications, non-orthogonal multiple access, and on-device intelligence. Further, a vision of new paradigm shifts in communication networks in the 2030s is provided, and the integration of the associated new technologies like artificial intelligence, non-terrestrial networks, and new spectra is elaborated. Finally, future research directions toward beyond 5G IoT networks are pointed out.Comment: Submitted for review to IEEE CS&

Nonorthogonal Multiple Access for 5G and Beyond

This work was supported in part by the U.K. Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under Grant EP/N029720/1 and Grant EP/N029720/2. The work of L. Hanzo was supported by the ERC Advanced Fellow Grant Beam-me-up