| NSF Org: |
CCF Division of Computing and Communication Foundations |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | August 26, 2015 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | August 10, 2020 |
| Award Number: | 1525705 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Phillip Regalia
pregalia@nsf.gov (703)292-2981 CCF Division of Computing and Communication Foundations CSE Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering |
| Start Date: | September 1, 2015 |
| End Date: | August 31, 2021 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $175,000.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $175,000.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
77 MASSACHUSETTS AVE CAMBRIDGE MA US 02139-4301 (617)253-1000 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
77 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge MA US 02139-4307 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | Comm & Information Foundations |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.070 |
ABSTRACT
The ability to exchange secret information, to guarantee privacy, and to provide authenticity forms the basis for trust in today's information society. In contrast to communications via wires, the use of a wireless medium is highly susceptible to eavesdropping due to its broadcast nature. To overcome this challenge, it is imperative to exploit the intrinsic properties of the wireless propagation medium. A key observation for exploiting such properties is that the broadcast nature generates contrasting effects: it makes the secrecy information from a certain legitimate transmitter vulnerable to malicious interception, but at the same time, it enables other legitimate partners to impede the capability of eavesdropping receivers via interference. However, the concurrent effect of interference on both eavesdropping receivers and legitimate receivers has not been thoroughly investigated. This calls for research on carefully engineering the network interference to fully harness its potential for wireless secrecy.
This project aims at developing cooperative interference engineering strategies that coordinate the transmission and reception of multiple legitimate partners to generate desirable aggregate interference for wireless secrecy protection. New techniques will be designed to impede the eavesdropper's capability while having little effect on the legitimate receivers. Specifically, this research aims to: (1) characterize the fundamental limit of cooperative interference engineering for controlling the aggregate interference injected into a wireless network; (2) set up a theoretical foundation for the design of cooperative interference engineering techniques; and (3) evaluate the performance of cooperative interference engineering techniques and their benefits to network secrecy. The proposed research combines various theories in communication, information, algebraic geometry, and stochastic geometry, serving as a foundation for the design of wireless networks with a new level of secrecy protection.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
This research focuses on providing an additional level of secrecy to complement the already existent methods for secrecy in wireless communications by exploiting the physical nature of the wireless propagation medium. Due to the broadcast nature of the channel, the use of the wireless medium is highly susceptible to eavesdropping. However, the broadcast nature also generates a contrasting effect: it enables legitimate nodes to impede the eavesdropping receivers via interference. The goal of this project is to engineer network interference for secrecy protection.
In the first part of the project, we have developed a theoretical framework to analyze the feasibility of interference engineering strategies, that is, to analyze and quantify the impact of interference signals on eavesdropping receivers. Moreover, we evaluated the tradeoff between the disruption of eavesdroppers and the effect on legitimate receivers of the interference signals. Subsequently, we proposed an interference engineering strategy that unifies various existing strategies, such as zero-forcing beamforming, artificial noise generation, cooperative jamming, and interference alignment to efficiently protect information secrecy in networks with heterogenous topology and node capability. We analyzed the performance of the proposed interference engineering strategy for large-scale stochastic networks.
In the second part of the project, we developed a framework for the design and analysis of inhomogeneous wireless networks with intrinsic secrecy. We characterized the impact of network interference as a function of received signal-to-interference ratio for different receiver selection strategies. Based on this characterization, we introduced local and global secrecy metrics for characterizing the level of intrinsic secrecy in inhomogeneous wireless networks from a link and a network perspective. Moreover, we combined stochastic geometry and queueing theory to develop a spatiotemporal model for the design and analysis of uncoordinated massive wireless networks.
In the last part of the project, we analyzed and proposed strategies for the mitigation of interference on legitimate nodes in the network. These serve as a complement to our previously developed secrecy strategies, that are of general use for massive wireless networks. As the number of nodes increases, the contention over communication resources, such as bandwidth and time slots, becomes stronger, leading to potential interference among different nodes. Interference causes symbol detection errors, packet losses, and communication delays, thus degrading the network performance significantly. Therefore, it is important to manage the contention and interference carefully. Based on time-division and code-division techniques, we devised strategies that reduce the occurrences of network interference and/or reduce the impact of these on legitimate nodes in the network. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed mitigation strategies can effectively reduce the occurrence of interference in the radar network, and provide improved tracking performance.
Last Modified: 12/07/2021
Modified by: Moe Win
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