Opportunistic secure transmission for wireless relay networks with modify-and-forward protocol

This paper investigates the security at the physical layer in cooperative wireless networks (CWNs) where the data transmission between nodes can be realised via either direct transmission (DT) or relaying transmission (RT) schemes. Inspired by the concept of physical-layer network coding (PNC), a secure PNC-based modify-and-forward (SPMF) is developed to cope with the imperfect shared knowledge of the message modification between relay and destination in the conventional modify-and-forward (MF). In this paper, we first derive the secrecy outage probability (SOP) of the SPMF scheme, which is shown to be a general expression for deriving the SOP of any MF schemes. By comparing the SOPs of various schemes, the usage of the relay is shown to be not always necessary and even causes a poorer performance depending on target secrecy rate and quality of channel links. To this extent, we then propose an opportunistic secure transmission protocol to minimise the SOP of the CWNs. In particular, an optimisation problem is developed in which secrecy rate thresholds (SRTs) are determined to find an optimal scheme among various DT and RT schemes for achieving the lowest SOP. Furthermore, the conditions for the existence of SRTs are derived with respect to various channel conditions to determine if the relay could be relied on in practice

Editorial: Emerging techniques and applications for 5G networks and beyond

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Stabilization Control of the Differential Mobile Robot Using Lyapunov Function and Extended Kalman Filter

This paper presents the design of a control model to navigate the differential mobile robot to reach the desired destination from an arbitrary initial pose. The designed model is divided into two stages: the state estimation and the stabilization control. In the state estimation, an extended Kalman filter is employed to optimally combine the information from the system dynamics and measurements. Two Lyapunov functions are constructed that allow a hybrid feedback control law to execute the robot movements. The asymptotical stability and robustness of the closed loop system are assured. Simulations and experiments are carried out to validate the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed approach.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1611.07112, arXiv:1611.0711

On the handover security key update and residence management in LTE networks

In LTE networks, key update and residence management have been investigated as an effective solution to cope with desynchronization attacks in mobility management entity (MME) handovers. In this paper, we first analyse the impacts of the key update interval (KUI) and MME residence interval (MRI) on the handover performance in terms of the number of exposed packets (NEP) and signaling overhead rate (SOR). By deriving the bounds of the NEP and SOR over the KUI and MRI, it is shown that there exists a tradeoff between the NEP and the SOR, while our aim is to minimise both of them simultaneously. This accordingly motivates us to propose a multiobjective optimisation problem to find the optimal KUI and MRI that minimise both the NEP and SOR. By introducing a relative importance factor between the SOR and NEP along with their derived bounds, we further transform the proposed optimisation problem into a single-objective optimisation problem which can be solved via a simple numerical method. In particular, the results show that a higher accuracy of up to 1 second is achieved with the proposed approach while requiring a lower complexity compared to the conventional approach employing iterative searches

A secure cooperative image super-resolution transmission with decode-and-forward relaying over Rayleigh fading channels

In addition to susceptibility to performance degradation due to hardware malfunctions and environmental influences, wireless image transmission poses risks of information exposure to eavesdroppers. This paper delves into the image communications within wireless relay networks (WRNs) and proposes a secure cooperative relaying (SCR) protocol over Rayleigh fading channels. In this protocol, a source node (referred to as Alice) transmits superior-resolution (SR) images to a destination node (referred to as Bob) with the assistance of a mediating node (referred to as Relay) operating in decode-and-forward mode, all while contending with the presence of an eavesdropper (referred to as Eve). In order to conserve transmission bandwidth, Alice firstly reduces the size of the original SR images before transmitting them to Relay and Bob. Subsequently, random linear network coding (RLNC) is employed by both Alice and Relay on the down- scaled poor-resolution (PR) images to obscure the original images from Eve, thereby bolstering the security of the image communications. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed SCR protocol surpasses both secure relaying transmission without a direct link and secure direct transmission without relaying links. Additionally, a slight reduction in image quality can be achieved by increasing the scaling factor for saving transmission bandwidth. Furthermore, the results highlight the SCR protocol’s superior effectiveness at Bob’s end when compared to Eve’s, which is due to Eve’s lack of access to the RLNC coefficient matrices and reference images utilised by Alice and Relay in the RLNC process. Finally, the evaluation of reference images, relay allocations and diversity reception over Rayleigh fading channels confirms the effectiveness of the SCR protocol for secure image communications in the WRNs

Enhancing security of MME handover via fractional programming and Firefly algorithm

Key update and residence management have been investigated as an effective solution to cope with desynchronisation attacks in Mobility Management Entity (MME) handovers. In this paper, we first analyse the impacts of the Key Update Interval (KUI) and MME Residence Interval (MRI) on handover processes and their secrecy performance in terms of the Number of Exposed Packets (NEP), Signaling Overhead Rate (SOR) and Outage Probability of Vulnerability (OPV). Specifically, the bounds of the derived NEP and SOR not only capture their behaviours at the boundary of the KUI and MRI, but also show the trade-off between the NEP and SOR. Additionally, through the analysis of the OPV, it is shown that the handover security can be enhanced by shortening the KUI and the desynchonisation attacks can be avoided with high-mobility users. The above facts accordingly motivate us to propose a Multi- objective Optimisation (MO) problem to find the optimal KUI and MRI that minimise both the NEP and SOR subject to the constraint on the OPV. To this end, two scalarisation techniques are adopted to transform the proposed MO problem into single- objective optimisation problems, i.e., an achievement-function method via Fractional Programming (FP) and a weighted-sum method. Based on the derived bounds on NEP and SOR, the FP approach can be optimally solved via a simple numerical method. For the weighted-sum method, the Firefly Algorithm (FA) is utilised to find the optimal solution. The results show that both techniques can solve the proposed MO problem with a significantly reduced searching complexity compared to the conventional heuristic iterative search technique