Securing Untrusted RF-EH Relay Networks Using Cooperative Jamming Signals

We propose a new scheme to secure a wireless-powered untrusted cooperative-communication network, where a legitimate source node (Alice) transmits her information messages to a legitimate destination node (Bob) through the multiple amplify-and-forward untrusted relays. The relay nodes are assumed to be honest but curious nodes; hence, they are trusted at the service level but are untrusted at the information level. To reduce the energy consumption of the network, only one relay node is selected in each time slot to forward Alice's information signal. We assume a power-splitting-based energy-harvesting scheme, where each relay node splits its received signal into information and energy streams. Since the relay nodes are assumed to be untrusted at the information level, they attempt to decode the information intended to Bob while harvesting energy at the same time. When the relaying mode is selected, the scheme is realized over two non-overlapping time phases. To prevent any information leakage to the untrusted relay nodes, Bob and a cooperative jammer (John) inject jamming (artificial noise) signals during the first phase. During the second phase, the untrusted relay nodes that will not be forwarding the information signal must harvest energy to accumulate more energy to help Alice in future time slots. Moreover, the cooperative jammer will jam the untrusted relays to further power their batteries and prevent them from decoding the information-forwarding relay signal in case they decided to cheat and decode it. We model the battery state transitions at each relay as a finite-state Markov chain and analyze it. Our numerical results show the security gains of our proposed scheme relative to two benchmark schemes.This work was supported by NPRP from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of Qatar Foundation) under Grant 8-627-2-260. The statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the authors.Scopu

Secure Communication with a Wireless-Powered Friendly Jammer

In this paper, we propose to use a wireless-powered friendly jammer to enable secure communication between a source node and destination node, in the presence of an eavesdropper. We consider a two-phase communication protocol with fixed-rate transmission. In the first phase, wireless power transfer is conducted from the source to the jammer. In the second phase, the source transmits the information-bearing signal under the protection of a jamming signal sent by the jammer using the harvested energy in the first phase. We analytically characterize the long-time behavior of the proposed protocol and derive a closed-form expression for the throughput. We further optimize the rate parameters for maximizing the throughput subject to a secrecy outage probability constraint. Our analytical results show that the throughput performance differs significantly between the single-antenna jammer case and the multi-antenna jammer case. For instance, as the source transmit power increases, the throughput quickly reaches an upper bound with single-antenna jammer, while the throughput grows unbounded with multi-antenna jammer. Our numerical results also validate the derived analytical results.Comment: accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication

Relaying in the Internet of Things (IoT): A Survey

The deployment of relays between Internet of Things (IoT) end devices and gateways can improve link quality. In cellular-based IoT, relays have the potential to reduce base station overload. The energy expended in single-hop long-range communication can be reduced if relays listen to transmissions of end devices and forward these observations to gateways. However, incorporating relays into IoT networks faces some challenges. IoT end devices are designed primarily for uplink communication of small-sized observations toward the network; hence, opportunistically using end devices as relays needs a redesign of both the medium access control (MAC) layer protocol of such end devices and possible addition of new communication interfaces. Additionally, the wake-up time of IoT end devices needs to be synchronized with that of the relays. For cellular-based IoT, the possibility of using infrastructure relays exists, and noncellular IoT networks can leverage the presence of mobile devices for relaying, for example, in remote healthcare. However, the latter presents problems of incentivizing relay participation and managing the mobility of relays. Furthermore, although relays can increase the lifetime of IoT networks, deploying relays implies the need for additional batteries to power them. This can erode the energy efficiency gain that relays offer. Therefore, designing relay-assisted IoT networks that provide acceptable trade-offs is key, and this goes beyond adding an extra transmit RF chain to a relay-enabled IoT end device. There has been increasing research interest in IoT relaying, as demonstrated in the available literature. Works that consider these issues are surveyed in this paper to provide insight into the state of the art, provide design insights for network designers and motivate future research directions

Optimization of a Power Splitting Protocol for Two-Way Multiple Energy Harvesting Relay System

Energy harvesting (EH) combined with cooperative communications constitutes a promising solution for future wireless technologies. They enable additional efficiency and increased lifetime to wireless networks. This paper investigates a multiple-relay selection scheme for an EH-based two-way relaying (TWR) system. All relays are considered as EH nodes that harvest energy from renewable energy and radio frequency (RF) sources. Some of them are selected to forward data to the destinations. The power splitting (PS) protocol, by which the EH node splits the input RF signal into two components for EH and information transmission, is adopted at the relay nodes. The objective is to jointly optimize i) the set of selected relays, ii) their PS ratios, and iii) their transmit power levels in order to maximize data rate-based utilities over multiple coherent time slots. A joint-optimization solution based on geometric programming (GP) and binary particle swarm optimization is proposed to solve non-convex problems for two utility functions reflecting the level of fairness in the TWR transmission. Numerical results illustrate the system's behavior versus various parameters and show that the performance of the proposed scheme is very close to that of the optimal branch-and-bound method and that GP outperforms the dual problem-based method

Securing internet of medical things with friendly-jamming schemes

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)-enabled e-healthcare can complement traditional medical treatments in a flexible and convenient manner. However, security and privacy become the main concerns of IoMT due to the limited computational capability, memory space and energy constraint of medical sensors, leading to the in-feasibility for conventional cryptographic approaches, which are often computationally-complicated. In contrast to cryptographic approaches, friendly jamming (Fri-jam) schemes will not cause extra computing cost to medical sensors, thereby becoming potential countermeasures to ensure security of IoMT. In this paper, we present a study on using Fri-jam schemes in IoMT. We first analyze the data security in IoMT and discuss the challenges. We then propose using Fri-jam schemes to protect the confidential medical data of patients collected by medical sensors from being eavesdropped. We also discuss the integration of Fri-jam schemes with various communication technologies, including beamforming, Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer (SWIPT) and full duplexity. Moreover, we present two case studies of Fri-jam schemes in IoMT. The results of these two case studies indicate that the Fri-jam method will significantly decrease the eavesdropping risk while leading to no significant influence on legitimate transmission

A Survey on Security and Privacy of 5G Technologies: Potential Solutions, Recent Advancements, and Future Directions

Security has become the primary concern in many telecommunications industries today as risks can have high consequences. Especially, as the core and enable technologies will be associated with 5G network, the confidential information will move at all layers in future wireless systems. Several incidents revealed that the hazard encountered by an infected wireless network, not only affects the security and privacy concerns, but also impedes the complex dynamics of the communications ecosystem. Consequently, the complexity and strength of security attacks have increased in the recent past making the detection or prevention of sabotage a global challenge. From the security and privacy perspectives, this paper presents a comprehensive detail on the core and enabling technologies, which are used to build the 5G security model; network softwarization security, PHY (Physical) layer security and 5G privacy concerns, among others. Additionally, the paper includes discussion on security monitoring and management of 5G networks. This paper also evaluates the related security measures and standards of core 5G technologies by resorting to different standardization bodies and provide a brief overview of 5G standardization security forces. Furthermore, the key projects of international significance, in line with the security concerns of 5G and beyond are also presented. Finally, a future directions and open challenges section has included to encourage future research.European CommissionNational Research Tomsk Polytechnic UniversityUpdate citation details during checkdate report - A

Wireless Communication Networks Powered by Energy Harvesting

This thesis focuses on the design, analysis and optimization of various energy-constrained wireless communication systems powered by energy harvesting (EH). In particular, we consider ambient EH wireless sensor networks, wireless power transfer (WPT) assisted secure communication network, simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) systems, and WPT-based backscatter communication (BackCom) systems. First, we study the delay issue in ambient EH wireless sensor network for status monitoring application scenarios. Unlike most existing studies on the delay performance of EH sensor networks that only consider the energy consumption of transmission, we consider the energy costs of both sensing and transmission. To comprehensively study the delay performance, we consider two complementary metrics and analyze their statistics: (i) update age - measuring how timely the updated information at the sink is, and (ii) update cycle - measuring how frequently the information at the sink is updated. We show that the consideration of sensing energy cost leads to an important tradeoff between the two metrics: more frequent updates result in less timely information available at the sink. Second, we study WPT-assisted secure communication network. Specifically, we propose to use a wireless-powered friendly jammer to enable low-complexity secure communication between a source node and a destination node, in the presence of an eavesdropper. We propose a WPT-assisted secure communication protocol, and analytically characterize its long-term behavior. We further optimize the encoding-rate parameters for maximizing the throughput subject to a secrecy outage probability constraint. We show that the throughput performance differs fundamentally between the single-antenna jammer case and the multi-antenna jammer case. Third, exploiting the fact that the radio-frequency (RF) signal can carry both information and energy, we study a point-to-point simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) system adopting practical M-ary modulation for both the power-splitting (PS) and the time-switching (TS) receiver architectures. Unlike most existing studies, we take into account the receiver’s sensitivity level of the RF-EH circuit. We show several interesting results, such as for the PS scheme, modulations with high peak-to-average power ratio achieve better EH performance. Then, inspired by the PS-based SWIPT receiver, we propose a novel information receiver, which involves joint processing of coherently and non-coherently received signals, and hence, creates a three-dimensional received signal space. We show that the achievable rate of a splitting receiver provides a 50% rate gain compared to either the conventional coherent or non-coherent receiver in the high SNR regime. Last, we propose the design of WPT-based full-duplex backscatter communication (BackCom) networks for energy-constrained Internet-of-Things applications, where a novel multiple-access scheme based on time-hopping spread-spectrum (TH-SS) is designed to enable both one-way power transfer and two-way information transmission in coexisting backscatter reader-tag links. Comprehensive performance analysis of BackCom networks is presented. We show some interesting design insights, such as: a longer TH-SS sequence reduces the bit error rates (BERs) of the two-way information transmission but results in lower energy-harvesting rate at the tag; a larger number of BackCom links improves the energy-harvesting rate at the tags but also increase the BERs for the information transmission

Radio Resource Management for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Assisted Wireless Communications and Networking

In recent years, employing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as aerial communication platforms or users is envisioned as a promising solution to enhance the performance of the existing wireless communication systems. However, applying UAVs for information technology applications also introduces many new challenges. This thesis focuses on the UAV-assisted wireless communication and networking, and aims to address the challenges through exploiting and designing efficient radio resource management methods. Specifically, four research topics are studied in this thesis. Firstly, to address the constraint of network heterogeneity and leverage the benefits of diversity of UAVs, a hierarchical air-ground heterogeneous network architecture enabled by software defined networking is proposed, which integrates both high and low altitude platforms into conventional terrestrial networks to provide additional capacity enhancement and expand the coverage of current network systems. Secondly, to address the constraint of link disconnection and guarantee the reliable communications among UAVs as aerial user equipment to perform sensing tasks, a robust resource allocation scheme is designed while taking into account the dynamic features and different requirements for different UAV transmission connections. Thirdly, to address the constraint of privacy and security threat and motivate the spectrum sharing between cellular and UAV operators, a blockchain-based secure spectrum trading framework is constructed where mobile network operators and UAV operators can share spectrum in a distributed and trusted environment based on blockchain technology to protect users' privacy and data security. Fourthly, to address the constraint of low endurance of UAV and prolong its flight time as an aerial base station for delivering communication coverage in a disaster area, an energy efficiency maximization problem jointly optimizing user association, UAV's transmission power and trajectory is studied in which laser charging is exploited to supply sustainable energy to enable the UAV to operate in the sky for a long time