Statistical Analysis of a Posteriori Channel and Noise Distribution Based on HARQ Feedback

In response to a comment on one of our manuscript, this work studies the posterior channel and noise distributions conditioned on the NACKs and ACKs of all previous transmissions in HARQ system with statistical approaches. Our main result is that, unless the coherence interval (time or frequency) is large as in block-fading assumption, the posterior distribution of the channel and noise either remains almost identical to the prior distribution, or it mostly follows the same class of distribution as the prior one. In the latter case, the difference between the posterior and prior distribution can be modeled as some parameter mismatch, which has little impact on certain type of applications.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figures, 4 table

Coding with Scrambling, Concatenation, and HARQ for the AWGN Wire-Tap Channel: A Security Gap Analysis

This study examines the use of nonsystematic channel codes to obtain secure transmissions over the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) wire-tap channel. Unlike the previous approaches, we propose to implement nonsystematic coded transmission by scrambling the information bits, and characterize the bit error rate of scrambled transmissions through theoretical arguments and numerical simulations. We have focused on some examples of Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) and low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes to estimate the security gap, which we have used as a measure of physical layer security, in addition to the bit error rate. Based on a number of numerical examples, we found that such a transmission technique can outperform alternative solutions. In fact, when an eavesdropper (Eve) has a worse channel than the authorized user (Bob), the security gap required to reach a given level of security is very small. The amount of degradation of Eve's channel with respect to Bob's that is needed to achieve sufficient security can be further reduced by implementing scrambling and descrambling operations on blocks of frames, rather than on single frames. While Eve's channel has a quality equal to or better than that of Bob's channel, we have shown that the use of a hybrid automatic repeat-request (HARQ) protocol with authentication still allows achieving a sufficient level of security. Finally, the secrecy performance of some practical schemes has also been measured in terms of the equivocation rate about the message at the eavesdropper and compared with that of ideal codes.Comment: 29 pages, 10 figure

Collaborative HARQ Schemes for Cooperative Diversity Communications in Wireless Networks

Wireless technology is experiencing spectacular developments, due to the emergence of interactive and digital multimedia applications as well as rapid advances in the highly integrated systems. For the next-generation mobile communication systems, one can expect wireless connectivity between any devices at any time and anywhere with a range of multimedia contents. A key requirement in such systems is the availability of high-speed and robust communication links. Unfortunately, communications over wireless channels inherently suffer from a number of fundamental physical limitations, such as multipath fading, scarce radio spectrum, and limited battery power supply for mobile devices. Cooperative diversity (CD) technology is a promising solution for future wireless communication systems to achieve broader coverage and to mitigate wireless channels’ impairments without the need to use high power at the transmitter. In general, cooperative relaying systems have a source node multicasting a message to a number of cooperative relays, which in turn resend a processed version message to an intended destination node. The destination node combines the signal received from the relays, and takes into account the source’s original signal to decode the message. The CD communication systems exploit two fundamental features of the wireless medium: its broadcast nature and its ability to achieve diversity through independent channels. A variety of relaying protocols have been considered and utilized in cooperative wireless networks. Amplify and forward (AAF) and decode and forward (DAF) are two popular protocols, frequently used in the cooperative systems. In the AAF mode, the relay amplifies the received signal prior to retransmission. In the DAF mode, the relay fully decodes the received signal, re-encodes and forwards it to the destination. Due to the retransmission without decoding, AAF has the shortcoming that noise accumulated in the received signal is amplified at the transmission. DAF suffers from decoding errors that can lead to severe error propagation. To further enhance the quality of service (QoS) of CD communication systems, hybrid Automatic Repeat-reQuest (HARQ) protocols have been proposed. Thus, if the destination requires an ARQ retransmission, it could come from one of relays rather than the source node. This thesis proposes an improved HARQ scheme with an adaptive relaying protocol (ARP). Focusing on the HARQ as a central theme, we start by introducing the concept of ARP. Then we use it as the basis for designing three types of HARQ schemes, denoted by HARQ I-ARP, HARQ II-ARP and HARQ III-ARP. We describe the relaying protocols, (both AAF and DAF), and their operations, including channel access between the source and relay, the feedback scheme, and the combining methods at the receivers. To investigate the benefits of the proposed HARQ scheme, we analyze its frame error rate (FER) and throughput performance over a quasi-static fading channel. We can compare these with the reference methods, HARQ with AAF (HARQ-AAF) and HARQ with perfect distributed turbo codes (DTC), for which correct decoding is always assumed at the relay (HARQ-perfect DTC). It is shown that the proposed HARQ-ARP scheme can always performs better than the HARQ-AAF scheme. As the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the channel between the source and relay increases, the performance of the proposed HARQ-ARP scheme approaches that of the HARQ-perfect DTC scheme

Optimum Design of Spectral Efficient Green Wireless Communications

This dissertation focuses on the optimum design of spectral efficient green wireless communications. Energy efficiency (EE), which is defined as the inverse of average energy required to successfully deliver one information bit from a source to its destination, and spectral efficiency (SE), which is defined as the average data rate per unit bandwidth, are two fundamental performance metrics of wireless communication systems. We study the optimum designs of a wide range of practical wireless communication systems that can either maximize EE, or SE, or achieve a balanced tradeoff between the two metrics. There are three objectives in this dissertation. First, an accurate frame error rate (FER) expression is developed for practical coded wireless communication systems operating in quasi-static Rayleigh fading channels. The new FER expression enables the accurate modeling of EE and SE for various wireless communication systems. Second, the optimum designs of automatic repeat request (ARQ) and hybrid ARQ (HARQ) systems are performed to by using the EE and SE as design metrics. Specifically, a new metric of normalized EE, which is defined as the EE normalized by the SE, is proposed to achieve a balanced tradeoff between the EE and SE. Third, a robust frequency-domain on-off accumulative transmission (OOAT) scheme has been developed to achieve collision-tolerant media access control (CT-MAC) in a wireless network. The proposed frequency domain OOAT scheme can improve the SE and EE by allowing multiple users to transmit simultaneously over the same frequency bands, and the signal collisions at the receiver can be resolved by using signal processing techniques in the physical layer

Error Correction For Automotive Telematics Systems

One benefit of data communication over the voice channel of the cellular network is to reliably transmit real-time high priority data in case of life critical situations. An important implementation of this use-case is the pan-European eCall automotive standard, which has already been deployed since 2018. This is the first international standard for mobile emergency call that was adopted by multiple regions in Europe and the world. Other countries in the world are currently working on deploying a similar emergency communication system, such as in Russia and China. Moreover, many experiments and road tests are conducted yearly to validate and improve the requirements of the system. The results have proven that the requirements are unachievable thus far, with a success rate of emergency data delivery of only 70%. The eCall in-band modem transmits emergency information from the in-vehicle system (IVS) over the voice channel of the circuit switch real time communication system to the public safety answering point (PSAP) in case of a collision. The voice channel is characterized by the non-linear vocoder which is designed to compress speech waveforms. In addition, multipath fading, caused by the surrounding buildings and hills, results in severe signal distortion and causes delays in the transmission of the emergency information. Therefore, to reliably transmit data over the voice channels, the in-band modem modulates the data into speech-like (SL) waveforms, and employs a powerful forward error correcting (FEC) code to secure the real-time transmission. In this dissertation, the Turbo coded performance of the eCall in-band modem is first evaluated through the adaptive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel and the adaptive multi-rate (AMR) voice channel. The modulation used is biorthogonal pulse position modulation (BPPM). Simulations are conducted for both the fast and robust eCall modem. The results show that the distortion added by the vocoder is significantly large and degrades the system performance. In addition, the robust modem performs better than the fast modem. For instance, to achieve a bit error rate (BER) of 10^{-6} using the AMR compression rate of 7.4 kbps, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) required is 5.5 dB for the robust modem while a SNR of 7.5 dB is required for the fast modem. On the other hand, the fading effect is studied in the eCall channel. It was shown that the fading distribution does not follow a Rayleigh distribution. The performance of the in-band modem is evaluated through the AWGN, AMR and fading channel. The results are compared with a Rayleigh fading channel. The analysis shows that strong fading still exists in the voice channel after power control. The results explain the large delays and failure of the emergency data transmission to the PSAP. Thus, the eCall standard needs to re-evaluate their requirements in order to consider the impact of fading on the transmission of the modulated signals. The results can be directly applied to design real-time emergency communication systems, including modulation and coding

Error Correction For Automotive Telematics Systems

One benefit of data communication over the voice channel of the cellular network is to reliably transmit real-time high priority data in case of life critical situations. An important implementation of this use-case is the pan-European eCall automotive standard, which has already been deployed since 2018. This is the first international standard for mobile emergency call that was adopted by multiple regions in Europe and the world. Other countries in the world are currently working on deploying a similar emergency communication system, such as in Russia and China. Moreover, many experiments and road tests are conducted yearly to validate and improve the requirements of the system. The results have proven that the requirements are unachievable thus far, with a success rate of emergency data delivery of only 70%. The eCall in-band modem transmits emergency information from the in-vehicle system (IVS) over the voice channel of the circuit switch real time communication system to the public safety answering point (PSAP) in case of a collision. The voice channel is characterized by the non-linear vocoder which is designed to compress speech waveforms. In addition, multipath fading, caused by the surrounding buildings and hills, results in severe signal distortion and causes delays in the transmission of the emergency information. Therefore, to reliably transmit data over the voice channels, the in-band modem modulates the data into speech-like (SL) waveforms, and employs a powerful forward error correcting (FEC) code to secure the real-time transmission. In this dissertation, the Turbo coded performance of the eCall in-band modem is first evaluated through the adaptive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel and the adaptive multi-rate (AMR) voice channel. The modulation used is biorthogonal pulse position modulation (BPPM). Simulations are conducted for both the fast and robust eCall modem. The results show that the distortion added by the vocoder is significantly large and degrades the system performance. In addition, the robust modem performs better than the fast modem. For instance, to achieve a bit error rate (BER) of 10^{-6} using the AMR compression rate of 7.4 kbps, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) required is 5.5 dB for the robust modem while a SNR of 7.5 dB is required for the fast modem. On the other hand, the fading effect is studied in the eCall channel. It was shown that the fading distribution does not follow a Rayleigh distribution. The performance of the in-band modem is evaluated through the AWGN, AMR and fading channel. The results are compared with a Rayleigh fading channel. The analysis shows that strong fading still exists in the voice channel after power control. The results explain the large delays and failure of the emergency data transmission to the PSAP. Thus, the eCall standard needs to re-evaluate their requirements in order to consider the impact of fading on the transmission of the modulated signals. The results can be directly applied to design real-time emergency communication systems, including modulation and coding

Data-driven Predictive Latency for 5G: A Theoretical and Experimental Analysis Using Network Measurements

The advent of novel 5G services and applications with binding latency requirements and guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) hastened the need to incorporate autonomous and proactive decision-making in network management procedures. The objective of our study is to provide a thorough analysis of predictive latency within 5G networks by utilizing real-world network data that is accessible to mobile network operators (MNOs). In particular, (i) we present an analytical formulation of the user-plane latency as a Hypoexponential distribution, which is validated by means of a comparative analysis with empirical measurements, and (ii) we conduct experimental results of probabilistic regression, anomaly detection, and predictive forecasting leveraging on emerging domains in Machine Learning (ML), such as Bayesian Learning (BL) and Machine Learning on Graphs (GML). We test our predictive framework using data gathered from scenarios of vehicular mobility, dense-urban traffic, and social gathering events. Our results provide valuable insights into the efficacy of predictive algorithms in practical applications

Studies on the performance of some ARQ schemes

This thesis consists of a summary part and seven published articles. All the articles are about performance analysis of ARQ schemes. Two of the publications study the performance of an ARQ scheme with packet combining, called the EARQ (extended ARQ) scheme. In the packet combining algorithm, the bitwise modulo-2 sum of two erroneous copies of a packet is computed to locate the errors. The packet combining algorithm involves a straightforward search procedure, the computational complexity of which easily becomes prohibitive. As a solution to this, a modified scheme is proposed, where the search procedure is attempted only when there are at most Nmax 1s at the output of the modulo-2 adder. In one article, time diversity was utilized, whereas space diversity reception was considered in the other work. The remaining five publications study the throughput performance of adaptive selective-repeat and go-back-N ARQ schemes, where the switching between the transmission modes is done based on the simple algorithm proposed by Y.-D. Yao in 1995. In this method, α contiguous NACKs or β contiguous ACKs indicate changes from 'good' to 'bad' or from 'bad' to 'good' channel conditions, respectively. The numbers α and β are the two design parameters of the adaptive scheme. The time-varying forward channel is modelled by two-state Markov chains, known as Gilbert-Elliott channel models. The states are characterized by bit error rates, packet error rates or fading parameters. The performance of the adaptive ARQ scheme is measured by its average throughput over all states of the system model, which is a Markov chain. A useful upper bound for the achievable average throughput is provided by the performance of an (assumed) ideal adaptive scheme which is always in the 'correct' transmission mode. The optimization of α and β is done based on minimizing the mean-square distance between the actual and the ideal performance curves. Methods of optimizing the packet size(s) used in the adaptive selective-repeat scheme are also proposed.reviewe

Achievable secrecy enchancement through joint encryption and privacy amplification

In this dissertation we try to achieve secrecy enhancement in communications by resorting to both cryptographic and information theoretic secrecy tools and metrics. Our objective is to unify tools and measures from cryptography community with techniques and metrics from information theory community that are utilized to provide privacy and confidentiality in communication systems. For this purpose we adopt encryption techniques accompanied with privacy amplification tools in order to achieve secrecy goals that are determined based on information theoretic and cryptographic metrics. Every secrecy scheme relies on a certain advantage for legitimate users over adversaries viewed as an asymmetry in the system to deliver the required security for data transmission. In all of the proposed schemes in this dissertation, we resort to either inherently existing asymmetry in the system or proactively created advantage for legitimate users over a passive eavesdropper to further enhance secrecy of the communications. This advantage is manipulated by means of privacy amplification and encryption tools to achieve secrecy goals for the system evaluated based on information theoretic and cryptographic metrics. In our first work discussed in Chapter 2 and the third work explained in Chapter 4, we rely on a proactively established advantage for legitimate users based on eavesdropper’s lack of knowledge about a shared source of data. Unlike these works that assume an errorfree physical channel, in the second work discussed in Chapter 3 correlated erasure wiretap channel model is considered. This work relies on a passive and internally existing advantage for legitimate users that is built upon statistical and partial independence of eavesdropper’s channel errors from the errors in the main channel. We arrive at this secrecy advantage for legitimate users by exploitation of an authenticated but insecure feedback channel. From the perspective of the utilized tools, the first work discussed in Chapter 2 considers a specific scenario where secrecy enhancement of a particular block cipher called Data Encryption standard (DES) operating in cipher feedback mode (CFB) is studied. This secrecy enhancement is achieved by means of deliberate noise injection and wiretap channel encoding as a technique for privacy amplification against a resource constrained eavesdropper. Compared to the first work, the third work considers a more general framework in terms of both metrics and secrecy tools. This work studies secrecy enhancement of a general cipher based on universal hashing as a privacy amplification technique against an unbounded adversary. In this work, we have achieved the goal of exponential secrecy where information leakage to adversary, that is assessed in terms of mutual information as an information theoretic measure and Eve’s distinguishability as a cryptographic metric, decays at an exponential rate. In the second work generally encrypted data frames are transmitted through Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) protocol to generate a common random source between legitimate users that later on is transformed into information theoretically secure keys for encryption by means of privacy amplification based on universal hashing. Towards the end, future works as an extension of the accomplished research in this dissertation are outlined. Proofs of major theorems and lemmas are presented in the Appendix

A Very Brief Introduction to Machine Learning With Applications to Communication Systems

Given the unprecedented availability of data and computing resources, there is widespread renewed interest in applying data-driven machine learning methods to problems for which the development of conventional engineering solutions is challenged by modelling or algorithmic deficiencies. This tutorial-style paper starts by addressing the questions of why and when such techniques can be useful. It then provides a high-level introduction to the basics of supervised and unsupervised learning. For both supervised and unsupervised learning, exemplifying applications to communication networks are discussed by distinguishing tasks carried out at the edge and at the cloud segments of the network at different layers of the protocol stack