A Queueing Characterization of Information Transmission over Block Fading Rayleigh Channels in the Low SNR

Unlike the AWGN (additive white gaussian noise) channel, fading channels suffer from random channel gains besides the additive Gaussian noise. As a result, the instantaneous channel capacity varies randomly along time, which makes it insufficient to characterize the transmission capability of a fading channel using data rate only. In this paper, the transmission capability of a buffer-aided block Rayleigh fading channel is examined by a constant rate input data stream, and reflected by several parameters such as the average queue length, stationary queue length distribution, packet delay and overflow probability. Both infinite-buffer model and finite-buffer model are considered. Taking advantage of the memoryless property of the service provided by the channel in each block in the the low SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) regime, the information transmission over the channel is formulated as a \textit{discrete time discrete state} $D/G/1$ queueing problem. The obtained results show that block fading channels are unable to support a data rate close to their ergodic capacity, no matter how long the buffer is, even seen from the application layer. For the finite-buffer model, the overflow probability is derived with explicit expression, and is shown to decrease exponentially when buffer size is increased, even when the buffer size is very small.Comment: 29 pages, 11 figures. More details on the proof of Theorem 1 and proposition 1 can be found in "Queueing analysis for block fading Rayleigh channels in the low SNR regime ", IEEE WCSP 2013.It has been published by IEEE Trans. on Veh. Technol. in Feb. 201

Principles of Physical Layer Security in Multiuser Wireless Networks: A Survey

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the domain of physical layer security in multiuser wireless networks. The essential premise of physical-layer security is to enable the exchange of confidential messages over a wireless medium in the presence of unauthorized eavesdroppers without relying on higher-layer encryption. This can be achieved primarily in two ways: without the need for a secret key by intelligently designing transmit coding strategies, or by exploiting the wireless communication medium to develop secret keys over public channels. The survey begins with an overview of the foundations dating back to the pioneering work of Shannon and Wyner on information-theoretic security. We then describe the evolution of secure transmission strategies from point-to-point channels to multiple-antenna systems, followed by generalizations to multiuser broadcast, multiple-access, interference, and relay networks. Secret-key generation and establishment protocols based on physical layer mechanisms are subsequently covered. Approaches for secrecy based on channel coding design are then examined, along with a description of inter-disciplinary approaches based on game theory and stochastic geometry. The associated problem of physical-layer message authentication is also introduced briefly. The survey concludes with observations on potential research directions in this area.Comment: 23 pages, 10 figures, 303 refs. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1303.1609 by other authors. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, 201

Low-Density Parity-Check Codes for Nonergodic Block-Fading Channels

We solve the problem of designing powerful low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes with iterative decoding for the block-fading channel. We first study the case of maximum-likelihood decoding, and show that the design criterion is rather straightforward. Unfortunately, optimal constructions for maximum-likelihood decoding do not perform well under iterative decoding. To overcome this limitation, we then introduce a new family of full-diversity LDPC codes that exhibit near-outage-limit performance under iterative decoding for all block-lengths. This family competes with multiplexed parallel turbo codes suitable for nonergodic channels and recently reported in the literature.Comment: Submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Information Theor