Double-Directional Information Azimuth Spectrum and Relay Network Tomography for a Decentralized Wireless Relay Network

A novel channel representation for a two-hop decentralized wireless relay network (DWRN) is proposed, where the relays operate in a completely distributive fashion. The modeling paradigm applies an analogous approach to the description method for a double-directional multipath propagation channel, and takes into account the finite system spatial resolution and the extended relay listening/transmitting time. Specifically, the double-directional information azimuth spectrum (IAS) is formulated to provide a compact representation of information flows in a DWRN. The proposed channel representation is then analyzed from a geometrically-based statistical modeling perspective. Finally, we look into the problem of relay network tomography (RNT), which solves an inverse problem to infer the internal structure of a DWRN by using the instantaneous doubledirectional IAS recorded at multiple measuring nodes exterior to the relay region

On the Existence of MDS Codes Over Small Fields With Constrained Generator Matrices

We study the existence over small fields of Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) codes with generator matrices having specified supports (i.e. having specified locations of zero entries). This problem unifies and simplifies the problems posed in recent works of Yan and Sprintson (NetCod'13) on weakly secure cooperative data exchange, of Halbawi et al. (arxiv'13) on distributed Reed-Solomon codes for simple multiple access networks, and of Dau et al. (ISIT'13) on MDS codes with balanced and sparse generator matrices. We conjecture that there exist such $[n,k]_q$ MDS codes as long as $q \geq n + k - 1$, if the specified supports of the generator matrices satisfy the so-called MDS condition, which can be verified in polynomial time. We propose a combinatorial approach to tackle the conjecture, and prove that the conjecture holds for a special case when the sets of zero coordinates of rows of the generator matrix share with each other (pairwise) at most one common element. Based on our numerical result, the conjecture is also verified for all $k \leq 7$. Our approach is based on a novel generalization of the well-known Hall's marriage theorem, which allows (overlapping) multiple representatives instead of a single representative for each subset.Comment: 8 page

Weakly Secure MDS Codes for Simple Multiple Access Networks

We consider a simple multiple access network (SMAN), where $k$ sources of unit rates transmit their data to a common sink via $n$ relays. Each relay is connected to the sink and to certain sources. A coding scheme (for the relays) is weakly secure if a passive adversary who eavesdrops on less than $k$ relay-sink links cannot reconstruct the data from each source. We show that there exists a weakly secure maximum distance separable (MDS) coding scheme for the relays if and only if every subset of $\ell$ relays must be collectively connected to at least $\ell+1$ sources, for all $0 < \ell < k$. Moreover, we prove that this condition can be verified in polynomial time in $n$ and $k$. Finally, given a SMAN satisfying the aforementioned condition, we provide another polynomial time algorithm to trim the network until it has a sparsest set of source-relay links that still supports a weakly secure MDS coding scheme.Comment: Accepted at ISIT'1