2023 Open FPGA development and experimental analysis of beamforming and beam-tracking in 6G networks Supervisor: Arash Asadi Waqar Ahmed Millimeter-wave frequencies (30-300 GHz) will be dominating 6G communications, providing users with tens of Gbps data rates. However, communication at such high frequencies requires using highly directional beams to compensate for the propagation loss. In our group, we have access to unique software-defined radios capable of communication at 70 GHz with 4GHz of bandwidth. If you are interested in performing experimental studies in this area and contributing to the research in the next generation of mobile networks, this could be your topic. Research objective: Test and development of agile beamforming/tracking for 6G systems Expected gain of knowledge: Wireless communication, FPGA programming
2023 Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS 2023) Conference BeamSec: A Practical mmWave Physical Layer Security Scheme Against Strong Adversaries Afifa Ishtiaq Arash Asadi Ladan Khaloopour Waqar Ahmed Vahid Jamali Matthias Hollick BibTeX DOI: 10.1109/CNS59707.2023.10289003 Abstract The high directionality of millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication systems has proven effective in reducing the attack surface against eavesdropping, thus improving the physical layer security. However, even with highly directional beams, the system is still exposed to eavesdropping against adversaries located within the main lobe. In this paper, we propose BeamSec, a solution to protect the users even from adversaries located in the main lobe. The key feature of BeamSec are: (i) Operating without the knowledge of eavesdropper’s location/channel; (ii) Robustness against colluding eavesdropping attack and (iii) Standard compatibility, which we prove using experiments via our IEEE 802.11ad/ay-compatible 60 GHz phased-array testbed. Methodologically, BeamSec first identifies uncorrelated and diverse beampairs between the transmitter and receiver by analyzing signal characteristics available through standard-compliant procedures. Next, it encodes the information jointly over all selected beampairs to minimize information leakage. We study two methods for allocating transmission time among different beams, namely uniform allocation (no knowledge of the wireless channel) and optimal allocation for maximization of the secrecy rate (with partial knowledge of the wireless channel). Our experiments show that BeamSec outperforms the benchmark schemes against single and colluding eavesdroppers and enhances the secrecy rate by 79.8% over a random paths selection benchmark.