Exploiting programmable architectures for WiFi/ZigBee inter-technology cooperation

The increasing complexity of wireless standards has shown that protocols cannot be designed once for all possible deployments, especially when unpredictable and mutating interference situations are present due to the coexistence of heterogeneous technologies. As such, flexibility and (re)programmability of wireless devices is crucial in the emerging scenarios of technology proliferation and unpredictable interference conditions. In this paper, we focus on the possibility to improve coexistence performance of WiFi and ZigBee networks by exploiting novel programmable architectures of wireless devices able to support run-time modifications of medium access operations. Differently from software-defined radio (SDR) platforms, in which every function is programmed from scratch, our programmable architectures are based on a clear decoupling between elementary commands (hard-coded into the devices) and programmable protocol logic (injected into the devices) according to which the commands execution is scheduled. Our contribution is two-fold: first, we designed and implemented a cross-technology time division multiple access (TDMA) scheme devised to provide a global synchronization signal and allocate alternating channel intervals to WiFi and ZigBee programmable nodes; second, we used the OMF control framework to define an interference detection and adaptation strategy that in principle could work in independent and autonomous networks. Experimental results prove the benefits of the envisioned solution

ErrorSense: Characterizing WiFi Error Patterns for Detecting ZigBee Interference

Recent years have witnessed the increasing adoption of heterogeneous wireless networks working in unlicensed ISM bands, thus creating serious problems of spectrum overcrowding. Although ZigBee, Bluetooth and WiFi networks have been natively designed for working in presence of interference, it has been observed that several performance impairments may occur because of heterogeneous sensitivity to detect or react to the presence of other technologies. In this paper we focus on the WiFi capability to detect interfering ZigBee links. Despite of the narrowband transmissions performed by ZigBee, in emerging scenarios ZigBee interference can have a significant impact on WiFi performance. Therefore, interference detection is essential for improving coexistence strategies in heterogeneous networks. In our work we show how such a detection can be performed on commodity cards working on time and frequency domain and also analysing data in the error domain. Errors are monitored and classified into error patterns observed in the network in terms of occurrence probability and temporal clustering of different error events. Through statistical analysis we are able to detect the presence of ZigBee transmissions measuring the errors raised by the WiFi card

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

All-Digital Self-interference Cancellation Technique for Full-duplex Systems

Full-duplex systems are expected to double the spectral efficiency compared to conventional half-duplex systems if the self-interference signal can be significantly mitigated. Digital cancellation is one of the lowest complexity self-interference cancellation techniques in full-duplex systems. However, its mitigation capability is very limited, mainly due to transmitter and receiver circuit's impairments. In this paper, we propose a novel digital self-interference cancellation technique for full-duplex systems. The proposed technique is shown to significantly mitigate the self-interference signal as well as the associated transmitter and receiver impairments. In the proposed technique, an auxiliary receiver chain is used to obtain a digital-domain copy of the transmitted Radio Frequency (RF) self-interference signal. The self-interference copy is then used in the digital-domain to cancel out both the self-interference signal and the associated impairments. Furthermore, to alleviate the receiver phase noise effect, a common oscillator is shared between the auxiliary and ordinary receiver chains. A thorough analytical and numerical analysis for the effect of the transmitter and receiver impairments on the cancellation capability of the proposed technique is presented. Finally, the overall performance is numerically investigated showing that using the proposed technique, the self-interference signal could be mitigated to ~3dB higher than the receiver noise floor, which results in up to 76% rate improvement compared to conventional half-duplex systems at 20dBm transmit power values.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication