Penn State College of Communications

About: Penn State College of Communications is a based out in . It is known for research contribution in the topics: Relay & Cognitive radio. The organization has 2106 authors who have published 2119 publications receiving 24693 citations.

Blockchain-Based Secure Spectrum Trading for Unmanned-Aerial-Vehicle-Assisted Cellular Networks: An Operator’s Perspective

Abstract: Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are envisioned to be widely deployed as an integral component in the next generation cellular networks, where spectrum sharing between the aerial and terrestrial communication systems will play an important role. However, there exist significant security and privacy challenges due to the untrusted broadcast features and wireless transmission of the UAV networks. This article endeavors to resolve the security issues through proposing a novel privacy-preserving secure spectrum trading and sharing scheme based on blockchain technology. Specifically, from the operator’s perspective, a pricing-based incentive mechanism is first introduced, in which a primary mobile network operator (MNO) leases its owned spectrum to a secondary UAV network in exchange for some revenue from the UAV operators. To address the potential security issues, a spectrum blockchain framework is then proposed to illustrate detailed operations of how the blockchain helps to improve the spectrum trading environment. Under this framework, a Stackelberg game is formulated to jointly maximize the profits of the MNO and the UAV operators considering uniform and nonuniform pricing schemes. Security assessment and numerical results confirm the security and efficiency of our schemes for spectrum sharing in UAV-assisted cellular networks.

Milling and Public Warnings

Abstract: Given the potential of modern warning technology to save lives, discovering whether it is possible to craft mobile alerts for imminent events in a way that reduces people’s tendency to seek and con

Joint Beamforming for Secure Communication in Cognitive Satellite Terrestrial Networks

Abstract: This paper investigates the secure communication of a cognitive satellite terrestrial network with software-defined architecture, where a gateway is acting as a control center to offer the resource allocation for the wireless systems. Specifically, we propose beamforming (BF) schemes to utilize the interference from the terrestrial network as a green source to enhance the physical-layer security for the satellite network, provided that the two networks share the portion of millimeter-wave frequencies. Supposing that the satellite employs multibeam antenna while the base station is equipped with a uniform planar array, we first formulate a constrained joint optimization problem to minimize the total transmit power while satisfying both the quality-of-service requirement of the terrestrial user and the secrecy rate (SR) requirements of the satellite users. Since the formulated optimization problem is nonconvex and mathematically intractable, we then propose two BF schemes to obtain the optimal solutions with high computational efficiency. For the case of one eavesdropper (Eve), we present a method to convert the nonconvex SR constraint to a second-order cone one and then adopt a penalty function approach to obtain the BF weight vectors. In the case of multiple Eves, by introducing a list of auxiliary variables, we propose a two-layer iterative BF scheme using penalty function approach together with gradient-based method to calculate the BF weight vectors. Finally, simulation results are given to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed BF schemes.

Optimal power allocation and user scheduling in multicell networks: Base station cooperation using a game-theoretic approach

Abstract: This paper proposes a novel base station (BS) coordination approach for intercell interference mitigation in the orthogonal frequency-division multiple access based cellular networks. Specifically, we first propose a new performance metric for evaluating end user's quality of experience (QoE), which jointly considers spectrum efficiency, user fairness, and service satisfaction. Interference graph is applied here to capture and analyze the interactions between BSs. Then, a QoE-oriented resource allocation problem is formulated among BSs as a local cooperation game, where BSs are encouraged to cooperate with their peer nodes in the adjacent cells in user scheduling and power allocation. The existence of the joint-strategy Nash equilibrium (NE) has been proved, in which no BS player would unilaterally change its own strategy in user scheduling or power allocation. Furthermore, the NE in the formulated game is proved to lead to the global optimality of the network utility. Accordingly, we design an iterative searching algorithm to obtain the global optimum (i.e., the best NE) with an arbitrarily high probability in a decentralized manner, in which only local information exchange is needed. Theoretical analysis and simulation results both validate the convergence and optimality of the proposed algorithm with fairness improvement.

Quality-Aware Sensing Coverage in Budget-Constrained Mobile Crowdsensing Networks

Abstract: Mobile crowdsensing has shown elegant capacity in data collection and has given rise to numerous applications. In the sense of coverage quality, marginal works have considered the efficient (less cost) and effective (considerable coverage) design for mobile crowdsensing networks. We investigate the optimal quality-aware coverage in mobile crowdsensing networks. The difference between ours and the conventional coverage problem is that we only select a subset of mobile users so that the coverage quality is maximized with constrained budget. To address this new problem, which is proved to be NP-hard, we first prove that the set function of coverage quality is nondecreasing submodular. By leveraging the favorable property in submodular optimization, we then propose an $(\text{1}-(\text{1}/e))$ approximation algorithm with $O(n^{k+2})$ time complexity, where $k$ is an integer that is greater than or equal to 3. Finally, we conduct extensive simulations for the proposed scheme, and the results demonstrate that ours outperforms the random selection scheme and one of the state of the art in terms of total coverage quality by, at most, 2.4× and 1.5× and by, on average, 1.4× and 1.3×, respectively. Additionally, ours achieves a near-optimal solution, compared with the brute-force search results.