EAACKA Secure Intrusion-Detection System for MANETs

The migration to wireless network from wired network has been a global trend in the past few decades. The mobility and scalability brought by wireless network made it possible in many applications. Among all the contemporary wireless networks, Mobile Ad hoc NETwork (MANET) is one of the most important and unique applications. On the contrary to traditional network architecture, MANET does not require a fixed network infrastructure; every single node works as both a transmitter and a receiver. Nodes communicate directly with each other when they are both within the same communication range. Otherwise, they rely on their neighbors to relay messages. The self-configuring ability of nodes in MANET made it popular among critical mission applications like military use or emergency recovery. However, the open medium and wide distribution of nodes make MANET vulnerable to malicious attackers. In this case, it is crucial to develop efficient intrusion-detection mechanisms to protect MANET from attacks. With the improvements of the technology and cut in hardware costs, we are witnessing a current trend of expanding MANETs into industrial applications. To adjust to such trend, we strongly believe that it is vital to address its potential security issues. In this paper, we propose and implement a new intrusiondetection system named Enhanced Adaptive ACKnowledgment (EAACK) specially designed for MANETs. Compared to contemporary approaches, EAACK demonstrates higher malicious-behavior-detection rates in certain circumstances while does not greatly affect the network performances.

Self-Organization in Small Cell Networks: A Reinforcement Learning Approach Date of publication: July 2013
In this paper, a decentralized and self-organizing mechanism for small cell networks (such as micro-, femto- and picocells) is proposed. In particular, an application to the case in which small cell networks aim to mitigate the interference caused to the macrocell network, while maximizing their own spectral efficiencies, is presented. The proposed mechanism is based on new notions of reinforcement learning (RL) through which small cells jointly estimate their time-average performance and optimize their probability distributions with which they judiciously choose their transmit configurations. Here, a minimum signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) is guaranteed at the macrocell user equipment (UE), while the small cells maximize their individual performances. The proposed RL procedure is fully distributed as every small cell base station requires only an observation of its instantaneous performance which can be obtained from its UE. Furthermore, it is shown that the proposed mechanism always converges to an epsilon Nash equilibrium when all small cells share the same interest. In addition, this mechanism is shown to possess better convergence properties and incur less overhead than existing techniques such as best response dynamics, fictitious play or classical RL. Finally, numerical results are given to validate the theoretical findings, highlighting the inherent tradeoffs facing small cells, namely exploration/exploitation, myopic/foresighted behavior and complete/incomplete information.

Multiple Access and Data Reconstruction in Wireless Sensor Networks Based on Compressed Sensing
Date of Publication: July 2013 This paper considers the application of compressed sensing (CS) to a wireless sensor network for data measurement communication and reconstruction, where N sensor nodes compete for medium access to a single receiver. Sparsity of the sensor data in three domains due to time correlation, space correlation and multiple access are being utilized. We first provide an in-depth analysis on the CS-based medium access control schemes from a physical layer perspective and reveal the impact of communication signal-to-noise ratio on the reconstruction performance. We show the process of the sensor data converted to the modulated symbols for physical layer transmission and how the modulated symbols being recovered via compressed sensing. This paper further identifies the decision problem of distinguishing between active and inactive transmitters after symbol recovery and shows a comprehensive performance comparison between carrier sense multiple access and the proposed CS-based scheme. Second, a network data recovery scheme that exploits both spatial and temporal correlations is proposed. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of communication throughput and show that enhanced performance can be obtained by utilizing the sensed signal's temporal and spatial correlations.

A Feedback- Soft Sensing-Based Access Scheme for Cognitive Radio Networks

Date of Publication: July 2013 In this paper, we examine a cognitive spectrum access scheme in which secondary users exploit the primary feedback information. We consider an overlay secondary network employing a random access scheme in which secondary users access the channel by certain access probabilities that are functions of the spectrum sensing metric. In setting our problem, we assume that secondary users can eavesdrop on the primary link's feedback. We study the cognitive radio network from a queuing theory point of view. Access probabilities are determined by solving a secondary throughput maximization problem subject to a constraint on the primary queues' stability. First, we formulate our problem which is found to be non-convex. Yet, we solve it efficiently by exploiting the structure of the secondary throughput equation. Our scheme yields improved results in, both, the secondary user throughput and the primary user packet delay as compared to the scheme where no feedback information is exploited. In addition, it comes very close to the optimal genie-aided scheme in which secondary users act upon the presumed perfect knowledge of the primary users' activity.

Two-Phase Scheduling and Leakage-Based Precoding in Wireless Cellular Networks

Date of Publication: July 2013 We consider the downlink of a wireless cellular network where the base stations are equipped with multiple antennas and operate in the same frequency band. Since scheduling changes the spatial transmit signal processing with each time slot, information from neighboring base stations is required for data encoding. This can, in theory, be accomplished by a high-capacity backhaul network through which the base stations exchange channel state information (CSI) and other control signals. In reality, however, the temporal granularity of the scheduler does not allow for timely distribution of CSI among base stations. We propose a two-phase scheduler which optimizes the precoding in the first phase and allows the users to feed back their instantaneous interference power in the second phase. For the single-user case, we present a practical scheme that combines twophase scheduling with precoders that maximize the signal-to-leakage-plus-noise ratio. If the users feed back the interference power together with a supported rate, communication between base stations can be limited to integers. By comparing the performance to multiuser two-phase scheduling with dirty paper coding and to algorithms that share CSI among base stations we show that two-phase scheduling is a technically and practically feasible solution to deal with non-stationary intercell interference.

Optimal Distributed Scheduling under Time-Varying Conditions: A Fast-CSMA Algorithm with Applications
Date of Publication: July 2013 Recently, low-complexity and distributed Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA)-based scheduling algorithms have attracted extensive interest due to their throughput-optimal characteristics in general network topologies. However, these algorithms are not well-suited for time-varying environments (i.e., serving real-time traffic under time-varying channel conditions in wireless networks) for two reasons: (1) the mixing time of the underlying CSMA Markov Chain grows with the size of the network, which, for large networks, generates unacceptable delay for deadline-constrained traffic; (2) since the dynamic CSMA parameters are influenced by the arrival and channel state processes, the underlying CSMA Markov Chain may not converge to a steady-state under strict deadline constraints and fading channel conditions. In this paper, we attack the problem of distributed scheduling for time-varying environments. Specifically, we propose a Fast-CSMA (FCSMA) policy in fullyconnected topologies, which converges much faster than the existing CSMA algorithms and thus yields significant advantages for time-varying applications. Then, we design optimal policies based on FCSMA techniques in two challenging and important scenarios in wireless networks for scheduling inelastic traffic with/without channel state information (CSI) over wireless fading channels.