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

MIMO for ATSC 3.0

"(c) 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.")This paper provides an overview of the optional MIMO (Multiple-Input Multiple-Output) antenna scheme adopted in ATSC 3.0 to improve robustness or increase capacity via additional spatial diversity and multiplexing by sending two data streams in a single radio frequency channel. Although it is not directly specified, it is expected in practice to use cross-polarized 2x2 MIMO (i.e., horizontal and vertical polarization) to retain multiplexing capabilities in line-of-sight conditions. MIMO allows overcoming the channel capacity limit of single antenna wireless communications in a given channel bandwidth without any increase in the total transmission power. But in the U.S. MIMO can actually provide a larger comparative gain because it would be allowed to increase the total transmit power, by transmitting the nominal transmit power in each polarization. Hence, in addition to the MIMO gains (array, diversity and spatial multiplexing), MIMO could exploit an additional 3 dB power gain. The MIMO scheme adopted in ATSC 3.0 re-uses the SISO (Single-Input Single-Output) antenna baseline constellations, and hence it introduces the use of MIMO with non-uniform constellations.Gómez Barquero, D.; Vargas, D.; Fuentes Muela, M.; Klenner, P.; Moon, S.; Choi, J.; Schneider, D.... (2016). MIMO for ATSC 3.0. IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting. 62(1):298-305. doi:10.1109/TBC.2015.2505399S29830562

Communication Theoretic Data Analytics

Widespread use of the Internet and social networks invokes the generation of big data, which is proving to be useful in a number of applications. To deal with explosively growing amounts of data, data analytics has emerged as a critical technology related to computing, signal processing, and information networking. In this paper, a formalism is considered in which data is modeled as a generalized social network and communication theory and information theory are thereby extended to data analytics. First, the creation of an equalizer to optimize information transfer between two data variables is considered, and financial data is used to demonstrate the advantages. Then, an information coupling approach based on information geometry is applied for dimensionality reduction, with a pattern recognition example to illustrate the effectiveness. These initial trials suggest the potential of communication theoretic data analytics for a wide range of applications.Comment: Published in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Jan. 201

Network lifetime extension, power conservation and interference suppression for next generation mobile wireless networks

Two major focus research areas related to the design of the next generation multihop wireless networks are network lifetime extension and interference suppression. In this dissertation, these two issues are addressed. In the area of interference suppression, a new family of projection multiuser detectors, based on a generalized, two-stage design is proposed. Projection multiuser detectors provide efficient protection against undesired interference of unknown power, while preserving simple design, with closed-form solution for error probabilities. It is shown that these detectors are linearly optimal, if the interference power is unknown. In the area of network lifetime extension, a new approach to minimum energy routing for multihop wireless networks in Rayleigh fading channels is proposed. It is based on the concept of power combining, whereby two users transmit same signal to the destination user, emulating transmit diversity with two transmit antennas. Analytical framework for the evaluation of the benefits of power combining, in terms of the total transmit power reduction, is defined. Simulation results, which match closely the analytical results, indicate that significant improvements, in terms of transmit power reduction and network lifetime extension, are achievable. The messaging load, generated by the new scheme, is moderate, and can be further optimized

Exact ZF Analysis and Computer-Algebra-Aided Evaluation in Rank-1 LoS Rician Fading

We study zero-forcing detection (ZF) for multiple-input/multiple-output (MIMO) spatial multiplexing under transmit-correlated Rician fading for an N_R X N_T channel matrix with rank-1 line-of-sight (LoS) component. By using matrix transformations and multivariate statistics, our exact analysis yields the signal-to-noise ratio moment generating function (m.g.f.) as an infinite series of gamma distribution m.g.f.'s and analogous series for ZF performance measures, e.g., outage probability and ergodic capacity. However, their numerical convergence is inherently problematic with increasing Rician K-factor, N_R , and N_T. We circumvent this limitation as follows. First, we derive differential equations satisfied by the performance measures with a novel automated approach employing a computer-algebra tool which implements Groebner basis computation and creative telescoping. These differential equations are then solved with the holonomic gradient method (HGM) from initial conditions computed with the infinite series. We demonstrate that HGM yields more reliable performance evaluation than by infinite series alone and more expeditious than by simulation, for realistic values of K , and even for N_R and N_T relevant to large MIMO systems. We envision extending the proposed approaches for exact analysis and reliable evaluation to more general Rician fading and other transceiver methods.Comment: Accepted for publication by the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, on April 7th, 2016; this is the final revision before publicatio