Securing Wireless Communications of the Internet of Things from the Physical Layer, An Overview

The security of the Internet of Things (IoT) is receiving considerable interest as the low power constraints and complexity features of many IoT devices are limiting the use of conventional cryptographic techniques. This article provides an overview of recent research efforts on alternative approaches for securing IoT wireless communications at the physical layer, specifically the key topics of key generation and physical layer encryption. These schemes can be implemented and are lightweight, and thus offer practical solutions for providing effective IoT wireless security. Future research to make IoT-based physical layer security more robust and pervasive is also covered

Algorithm Development and VLSI Implementation of Energy Efficient Decoders of Polar Codes

With its low error-floor performance, polar codes attract significant attention as the potential standard error correction code (ECC) for future communication and data storage. However, the VLSI implementation complexity of polar codes decoders is largely influenced by its nature of in-series decoding. This dissertation is dedicated to presenting optimal decoder architectures for polar codes. This dissertation addresses several structural properties of polar codes and key properties of decoding algorithms that are not dealt with in the prior researches. The underlying concept of the proposed architectures is a paradigm that simplifies and schedules the computations such that hardware is simplified, latency is minimized and bandwidth is maximized. In pursuit of the above, throughput centric successive cancellation (TCSC) and overlapping path list successive cancellation (OPLSC) VLSI architectures and express journey BP (XJBP) decoders for the polar codes are presented. An arbitrary polar code can be decomposed by a set of shorter polar codes with special characteristics, those shorter polar codes are referred to as constituent polar codes. By exploiting the homogeneousness between decoding processes of different constituent polar codes, TCSC reduces the decoding latency of the SC decoder by 60% for codes with length n = 1024. The error correction performance of SC decoding is inferior to that of list successive cancellation decoding. The LSC decoding algorithm delivers the most reliable decoding results; however, it consumes most hardware resources and decoding cycles. Instead of using multiple instances of decoding cores in the LSC decoders, a single SC decoder is used in the OPLSC architecture. The computations of each path in the LSC are arranged to occupy the decoder hardware stages serially in a streamlined fashion. This yields a significant reduction of hardware complexity. The OPLSC decoder has achieved about 1.4 times hardware efficiency improvement compared with traditional LSC decoders. The hardware efficient VLSI architectures for TCSC and OPLSC polar codes decoders are also introduced. Decoders based on SC or LSC algorithms suffer from high latency and limited throughput due to their serial decoding natures. An alternative approach to decode the polar codes is belief propagation (BP) based algorithm. In BP algorithm, a graph is set up to guide the beliefs propagated and refined, which is usually referred to as factor graph. BP decoding algorithm allows decoding in parallel to achieve much higher throughput. XJBP decoder facilitates belief propagation by utilizing the specific constituent codes that exist in the conventional factor graph, which results in an express journey (XJ) decoder. Compared with the conventional BP decoding algorithm for polar codes, the proposed decoder reduces the computational complexity by about 40.6%. This enables an energy-efficient hardware implementation. To further explore the hardware consumption of the proposed XJBP decoder, the computations scheduling is modeled and analyzed in this dissertation. With discussions on different hardware scenarios, the optimal scheduling plans are developed. A novel memory-distributed micro-architecture of the XJBP decoder is proposed and analyzed to solve the potential memory access problems of the proposed scheduling strategy. The register-transfer level (RTL) models of the XJBP decoder are set up for comparisons with other state-of-the-art BP decoders. The results show that the power efficiency of BP decoders is improved by about 3 times

Algorithm Development and VLSI Implementation of Energy Efficient Decoders of Polar Codes

With its low error-floor performance, polar codes attract significant attention as the potential standard error correction code (ECC) for future communication and data storage. However, the VLSI implementation complexity of polar codes decoders is largely influenced by its nature of in-series decoding. This dissertation is dedicated to presenting optimal decoder architectures for polar codes. This dissertation addresses several structural properties of polar codes and key properties of decoding algorithms that are not dealt with in the prior researches. The underlying concept of the proposed architectures is a paradigm that simplifies and schedules the computations such that hardware is simplified, latency is minimized and bandwidth is maximized. In pursuit of the above, throughput centric successive cancellation (TCSC) and overlapping path list successive cancellation (OPLSC) VLSI architectures and express journey BP (XJBP) decoders for the polar codes are presented. An arbitrary polar code can be decomposed by a set of shorter polar codes with special characteristics, those shorter polar codes are referred to as constituent polar codes. By exploiting the homogeneousness between decoding processes of different constituent polar codes, TCSC reduces the decoding latency of the SC decoder by 60% for codes with length n = 1024. The error correction performance of SC decoding is inferior to that of list successive cancellation decoding. The LSC decoding algorithm delivers the most reliable decoding results; however, it consumes most hardware resources and decoding cycles. Instead of using multiple instances of decoding cores in the LSC decoders, a single SC decoder is used in the OPLSC architecture. The computations of each path in the LSC are arranged to occupy the decoder hardware stages serially in a streamlined fashion. This yields a significant reduction of hardware complexity. The OPLSC decoder has achieved about 1.4 times hardware efficiency improvement compared with traditional LSC decoders. The hardware efficient VLSI architectures for TCSC and OPLSC polar codes decoders are also introduced. Decoders based on SC or LSC algorithms suffer from high latency and limited throughput due to their serial decoding natures. An alternative approach to decode the polar codes is belief propagation (BP) based algorithm. In BP algorithm, a graph is set up to guide the beliefs propagated and refined, which is usually referred to as factor graph. BP decoding algorithm allows decoding in parallel to achieve much higher throughput. XJBP decoder facilitates belief propagation by utilizing the specific constituent codes that exist in the conventional factor graph, which results in an express journey (XJ) decoder. Compared with the conventional BP decoding algorithm for polar codes, the proposed decoder reduces the computational complexity by about 40.6%. This enables an energy-efficient hardware implementation. To further explore the hardware consumption of the proposed XJBP decoder, the computations scheduling is modeled and analyzed in this dissertation. With discussions on different hardware scenarios, the optimal scheduling plans are developed. A novel memory-distributed micro-architecture of the XJBP decoder is proposed and analyzed to solve the potential memory access problems of the proposed scheduling strategy. The register-transfer level (RTL) models of the XJBP decoder are set up for comparisons with other state-of-the-art BP decoders. The results show that the power efficiency of BP decoders is improved by about 3 times

Spectrally and Energy Efficient Wireless Communications: Signal and System Design, Mathematical Modelling and Optimisation

This thesis explores engineering studies and designs aiming to meeting the requirements of enhancing capacity and energy efficiency for next generation communication networks. Challenges of spectrum scarcity and energy constraints are addressed and new technologies are proposed, analytically investigated and examined. The thesis commences by reviewing studies on spectrally and energy-efficient techniques, with a special focus on non-orthogonal multicarrier modulation, particularly spectrally efficient frequency division multiplexing (SEFDM). Rigorous theoretical and mathematical modelling studies of SEFDM are presented. Moreover, to address the potential application of SEFDM under the 5th generation new radio (5G NR) heterogeneous numerologies, simulation-based studies of SEFDM coexisting with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) are conducted. New signal formats and corresponding transceiver structure are designed, using a Hilbert transform filter pair for shaping pulses. Detailed modelling and numerical investigations show that the proposed signal doubles spectral efficiency without performance degradation, with studies of two signal formats; uncoded narrow-band internet of things (NB-IoT) signals and unframed turbo coded multi-carrier signals. The thesis also considers using constellation shaping techniques and SEFDM for capacity enhancement in 5G system. Probabilistic shaping for SEFDM is proposed and modelled to show both transmission energy reduction and bandwidth saving with advantageous flexibility for data rate adaptation. Expanding on constellation shaping to improve performance further, a comparative study of multidimensional modulation techniques is carried out. A four-dimensional signal, with better noise immunity is investigated, for which metaheuristic optimisation algorithms are studied, developed, and conducted to optimise bit-to-symbol mapping. Finally, a specially designed machine learning technique for signal and system design in physical layer communications is proposed, utilising the application of autoencoder-based end-to-end learning. Multidimensional signal modulation with multidimensional constellation shaping is proposed and optimised by using machine learning techniques, demonstrating significant improvement in spectral and energy efficiencies

Security and Privacy for Modern Wireless Communication Systems

The aim of this reprint focuses on the latest protocol research, software/hardware development and implementation, and system architecture design in addressing emerging security and privacy issues for modern wireless communication networks. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to, the following: deep-learning-based security and privacy design; covert communications; information-theoretical foundations for advanced security and privacy techniques; lightweight cryptography for power constrained networks; physical layer key generation; prototypes and testbeds for security and privacy solutions; encryption and decryption algorithm for low-latency constrained networks; security protocols for modern wireless communication networks; network intrusion detection; physical layer design with security consideration; anonymity in data transmission; vulnerabilities in security and privacy in modern wireless communication networks; challenges of security and privacy in node–edge–cloud computation; security and privacy design for low-power wide-area IoT networks; security and privacy design for vehicle networks; security and privacy design for underwater communications networks

An Investigation of Orthogonal Wavelet Division Multiplexing Techniques as an Alternative to Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex Transmissions and Comparison of Wavelet Families and Their Children

Recently, issues surrounding wireless communications have risen to prominence because of the increase in the popularity of wireless applications. Bandwidth problems, and the difficulty of modulating signals across carriers, represent significant challenges. Every modulation scheme used to date has had limitations, and the use of the Discrete Fourier Transform in OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex) is no exception. The restriction on further development of OFDM lies primarily within the type of transform it uses in the heart of its system, Fourier transform. OFDM suffers from sensitivity to Peak to Average Power Ratio, carrier frequency offset and wasting some bandwidth to guard successive OFDM symbols. The discovery of the wavelet transform has opened up a number of potential applications from image compression to watermarking and encryption. Very recently, work has been done to investigate the potential of using wavelet transforms within the communication space. This research will further investigate a recently proposed, innovative, modulation technique, Orthogonal Wavelet Division Multiplex, which utilises the wavelet transform opening a new avenue for an alternative modulation scheme with some interesting potential characteristics. Wavelet transform has many families and each of those families has children which each differ in filter length. This research consider comprehensively investigates the new modulation scheme, and proposes multi-level dynamic sub-banding as a tool to adapt variable signal bandwidths. Furthermore, all compactly supported wavelet families and their associated children of those families are investigated and evaluated against each other and compared with OFDM. The linear computational complexity of wavelet transform is less than the logarithmic complexity of Fourier in OFDM. The more important complexity is the operational complexity which is cost effectiveness, such as the time response of the system, the memory consumption and the number of iterative operations required for data processing. Those complexities are investigated for all available compactly supported wavelet families and their children and compared with OFDM. The evaluation reveals which wavelet families perform more effectively than OFDM, and for each wavelet family identifies which family children perform the best. Based on these results, it is concluded that the wavelet modulation scheme has some interesting advantages over OFDM, such as lower complexity and bandwidth conservation of up to 25%, due to the elimination of guard intervals and dynamic bandwidth allocation, which result in better cost effectiveness

Optical Communication

Optical communication is very much useful in telecommunication systems, data processing and networking. It consists of a transmitter that encodes a message into an optical signal, a channel that carries the signal to its desired destination, and a receiver that reproduces the message from the received optical signal. It presents up to date results on communication systems, along with the explanations of their relevance, from leading researchers in this field. The chapters cover general concepts of optical communication, components, systems, networks, signal processing and MIMO systems. In recent years, optical components and other enhanced signal processing functions are also considered in depth for optical communications systems. The researcher has also concentrated on optical devices, networking, signal processing, and MIMO systems and other enhanced functions for optical communication. This book is targeted at research, development and design engineers from the teams in manufacturing industry, academia and telecommunication industries

先進ITSのための中継アシスト車車間通信技術の研究

Wireless vehicular communications for advanced Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) have the potential to support safety driving, enhance the efficiency of transportation and play an important role in the future automated driving system. The vehicle-to-vehicle(V2V), vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) and vehicle-to-pedestrian (V2P) communications in the advanced ITS enable safety support applications that can predict potential traffic accidents, warn drivers and, in some cases, directly control vehicles to prevent collisions. Such applications require highly reliable broadcast communications. However, the reliability of wireless communication in vehicular environments suffers from fast fading due to multipath propagation, shadowing , and distance-dependent path loss. In addition, hidden terminal (HT) problem is a great concern in CSMA/CA based wireless networks due to its distributed access nature. The packet delivery rate (PDR) of V2V communications rapidly decreases especially under non-line-of-sight (NLOS) environments such as intersections. A vehicle-roadside-vehicle relay-assisted V2V communication scheme has been proposed to improve the reliability of V2V communications. In the scheme, packets sent from a vehicle can be directly received by other vehicles or relayed by a relay station (RS) to the other vehicles. Then path diversity effect can be obtained that improves PDR of V2V communications. However, when the V2V traffic becomes higher, the number of packets that RS has to retransmit becomes larger. This leads to a large number of packets waiting in the transmit queue of RS and packet congestion happens. If the normal relay scheme is employed, thepackets may be dropped due to the limited queue size. Then the gain obtained by relay-assist may be decreased. A packet payload combining relay (PCRL) scheme is proposed to deal with the congestion issue. In the scheme, multiple V2V packet payloads are combined into a single packet and the resultant packet is rebroadcasted once the channel becomes idle. Analytical and simulated results show that the proposed PCRL scheme can remarkably alleviate the congestion issue and improve the relaying performance.The PCRL scheme, however, still suffers from HT problem. In the intersection environments where LOS propagation between VSs is often unavailable, the packet collision frequently happens due to HTs when RS receives V2V packets. If RS cannot receive V2V packets, the advantage of relay-assist becomes smaller. Therefore an improved PCRL scheme with sectorized receiving RS (SR-V2VC/PCRL) is proposed to mitigate the effect of HT problem as well as alleviating the congestion issue. An analytical model is then developed to analyze the performance of SR-V2VC/PCRL scheme considering a single intersection scenario. Numerical results show that the reliability of V2V communications is significantly improved by the proposed scheme. Furthermore, performance of the SR-V2VC/PCRL scheme is discussed for an urban environment with multiple intersections. In such environment, RSs at intersections should cooperate with each other to obtain the largest diversity gain. After theoretically analyzing the performance of the sectorized receiving scheme under multiple interference sources, large-scale simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of SR-V2VC/PCRL scheme. It is shown that the SR-V2VC/PCRL remarkably improves the reliability of V2V communications. SR-V2VC/PCRL scheme even performs better when employing higher data rate modulation for V2V and relay transmissions.The aforementioned proposals can remarkably improve the reliability of V2V communications. In order to improve the performance of relay-assist ed scheme when traffic load becomes even higher, a network coding(NC)based PCRL scheme (PCRL-NC) with a payload sorting and selection algorithm is proposed to adapt multiple node environment in an intersection. It is shown that the scheme can benefit from NC in alleviating the congestion issue while effectively mitigating the disadvantage of NC. As a result, the introduction of PCRL-NC to the proposed SR-V2VC/PCRL scheme can remarkably improve the reliability of V2V communications under various traffic environments.　近年，先進的なITS (Intelligent Transport Systems: 高度道路交通システム)のための通信技術への期待が高まっている．これには，車両がその位置や速度などの情報を交換する車車間通信，路側機が車両へ信号状態や道路規制などの情報を提供する路車間通信，車両と歩行者の間で情報の交換を行う歩車間通信などがある．これらにブロードキャスト通信を活用することで，各車両では潜在的な交通事故を予測して運転手に警告し，さらには制動を行うことにより事故を未然に回避できる．さらにこの情報を利用して車両を自動制御することで，交通流を意識した協調型自動走行を実現することが可能になるものと期待されている． 車車間通信を用いて安全運転支援およびより高度な自動走行システムを実現するためには，高信頼，かつ低遅延の無線通信技術が要求される．しかしながら道路上の移動通信では，多重波伝搬によるフェージングや建物によるシャドウイング，さらに自律分散通信システム特有の問題である隠れ端末問題による干渉などの影響で，通信の信頼度が低下する．特に事故発生確率の高い交差点ではその影響が顕著である．　本論文では車車間通信の品質を改善することを目的として，交差点等に中継局(Relay Station; RS)を設置し，車車間通信パケットを転送中継する中継アシスト車車間通信に関する諸技術が提案されている．中継局は交差点付近の信号機などに併設され，高いアンテナ高を有することと，他の車載局に対して見通し内(Line-of-Sight; LOS)伝搬環境にあるため，中継アシストシステムはシャドウイングやフェージングの問題の軽減に有効であることが既に示されている．しかしながら，トラヒックが増加するにつれて中継局での輻輳問題が発生し，中継効果が低下するという課題があった．そこで本論文では中継によるエアトラヒックの増加を抑える方法として，中継送信時に複数のパケットペイロードをまとめて１つのパケットに再構成して送信するペイロード合成中継法を提案する．本提案法により中継局での輻輳問題が解決でき，中継効果が向上することを解析結果から明らかにした．　交差点における中継アシスト車車間通信のもう1つの課題として，中継局受信時に隠れ端末問題の影響で受信成功率が低下することがある．この課題に対しては中継局受信時にセクタアンテナを用いることが有効であることが示されているが，本研究ではペイロード合成中継法にセクタ化受信を組合せたセクタ化受信ペイロード合成中継法を提案し，その効果を理論解析およびシミュレーションにより示した．セクタ化受信によって中継局での受信成功率を改善すると中継すべきパケット数が増加するが，提案法ではペイロード合成によって中継パケットの送信効率を高めることができるので，結果として中継効果を高めて平均パケット伝送成功率を大幅に向上できることを明らかにした．　さらに，複数交差点からなる市街地環境におけるセクタ化受信ペイロード合成中継法の効果を，大規模ネットワークシミュレーションを用いてブロードキャスト配信成功率として総合的に評価した．他の車両および離れた中継局など干渉源が複数存在する市街地環境においても，提案法を用いることによって隠れ端末問題の影響が有効に回避できること，隣接する中継局間で互いに棲分け中継をすることで非常に高い中継効果が得られることを明らかにした．　以上のように提案法は中継アシスト車車間通信の特性を大幅に改善できるが，通信トラヒックがさらに高い環境に対処するため，中継パケットのエアトラヒックをさらに圧縮できる方法として，複数ノード環境に適したネットワークコーディング法を用いたペイロード合成中継法を提案する．本提案法では，車車間ペイロードのソーティングと合成対象パケットの選択アルゴリズムによって複数ノード環境でのネットワークコーディングの弱点を抑えつつ，輻輳問題に有効に対処できることを示した．結果として本提案法をセクタ化受信と組合せることで，幅広い通信トラヒック条件においてブロードキャスト配信成功率が大きく向上することを明らかにした．電気通信大学201

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

Journal of Telecommunications and Information Technology, 2017, nr 4

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