Tutorial 1: On the Security of Wireless Systems: A Cyber-Physical System Perspective
Speaker:
Prof. Gunes Karabulut Kurt, Istanbul Technical University, Turkey
Abstract:
The user demand and data transmission rates are ever-increasing in wireless communication networks. However, due to the broadcast nature of wireless links, connections are inherently risky. In recent years, advances in the field of secure wireless communications have been made in the physical layer including beamforming and artificial interference approaches. However, these works are yet to be used for cyber-physical systems (CPS), which will enable us to interconnect all elements of industrial production processes. CPSs contain stringent requirements such as a maximum allowed latency, in addition to the commonly known metrics as security capacity. Existing Physical Layer (PHY) security solutions fail to address these requirements.
This tutorial will address the requirements that are necessary to establish a secure CPS communications framework, along with an overview of the state-of-the-art and open challenges. A generalized problem description will be provided, and the theoretical performance limits will be overviewed. Attack types and current tools for secure wireless system designs will be covered.
Application-based requirements for the CPS systems will be addressed. The promise of machine learning solutions will be highlighted. The tutorial will be concluded with a future outlook and current open issues.
Speaker’s Biography:
Gunes Karabulut Kurt received the B.S. degree with high honors in electronics and electrical engineering from the Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey, in 2000 and the M.A.Sc. and the Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Ottawa, ON, Canada, in 2002 and 2006, respectively. From 2000 to 2005, she was a Research Assistant with the CASP Group, University of Ottawa. Between 2005 and 2006, she was with TenXc Wireless, Canada. From 2006 to 2008, she was with Edgewater Computer Systems Inc., Canada. From 2008 to 2010, she was with Turkcell Research
and Development Applied Research and Technology, Istanbul. Since 2010, she has been with Istanbul Technical University, where she currently works as a Professor. Her research interests include wireless network design, physical layer security, and network coding. She is a Marie Curie Fellow, and her project REALMARS is selected to be a success story by European Commission Research Executive Agency. She is the Director of Wireless Communications Research Laboratory at Istanbul Technical University. Gunes has co-authored 58 peer-reviewed journal papers, 11 granted patents, 9 filed patent applications, 7 book chapters, and more than 170 conference papers. She has supervised 6 PhD theses (1 as a co-supervisor), 16 MSc theses and 37 Senior Design Projects. She pioneered several significant test-bed designs for experimental verification for several topics including network coding, non- orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and various waveform designs, that have been published in reputable IEEE Journals. Since August 2019, she is at Carleton University as a visiting professor and also appointed as an adjunct research professor. Gunes is currently serving an Associate Technical Editor of the IEEE Communications Magazine.
Tutorial 2: Civil drones traffic management: Wireless communication for safe UAV
Speakers:
- Evgenii (Genia) Vinogradov, KU Leuven, Belgium
- Franco Minucci, KU Leuven, Belgium
- Aymen Fakhreddine, Lakeside Labs, Austria
Abstract:
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-enabled solutions are becoming very popular. UAVs (or drones) are attractive owing to their flexibility and potential cost efficiency in comparison with conventional aircraft. While in some countries drones are perceived as “game changers” and “development enablers”, in other areas, the public is rather concerned about safety and security issues aroused by the UAV-use. Moreover, it is not fully understood how the wide-scale drones’ applications will influence conventional Air Traffic Management (ATM). National and supranational authorities (e.g., Federal Aviation Administration – FAA, European Union Aviation Safety Agency – EASA, International Civil Aviation Organization – ICAO) and industrial actors (Amazon, Google, DJI) are now developing systems for UAV Traffic Management. These services and products are vital for establishing trust between the authorities, the public, and industry. As it is anticipated that UTM and ATM systems will, at some point, coincide or overlap, the common terminology and approaches are vital. Given UAVs mobility, high speed and adaptive altitude, the communication with UAVs will have to rely on several technologies to ensure the targeted reliability. Cellular networks and LWAN could potentially be good candidates. This tutorial will shed lights on how connecting UAVs via several popular technologies ranging from WiFi (and others, part 2) to cellular networks (part 3). We will discuss the technical challenges that drone-connected networks research has to deal with. We report and discuss throughput, interference and handover measurements for an aerial drone connected the aforementioned networks.
The tutorial consists of three main parts. The first part (given by E. Vinogradov) is dedicated to describing the traffic management system architecture, requirements, terminology, and services. Moreover, he will give a quick overview of existing technologies that can be useful for aerial deconfliction. In the second part, F. Minucci will focus wireless technologies used for the tactical (while flying) deconfliction: ADS-B, p2p LoRa, WiFi, FLARM. These technologies require only on-board equipment. The use of ground infrastructure will be investigated by A. Fakhreddine in the third part of the tutorial on the example of using LTE-A. The second and third parts are mostly based on the extensive measurement campaigns.
Speakers’ Biography:
Evgenii Vinogradov received the Dipl. Engineer degree in Radio Engineering and Telecommunications from Saint-Petersburg Electro-technical University (Russia), in 2009. After several years of working in the field of mobile communications, he joined UCLouvain (Belgium) in 2013, where he obtained his Ph.D. degree in 2017. His doctoral research interests focused on multidimensional radio propagation channel modeling. In 2017, Evgenii joined the electrical engineering department at KU Leuven (Belgium) where he is working on wireless communications with UAVs and UAV detection. He has also authored several tutorials (during ICC’19, EuCAP’19, and IE’19) dedicated to various aspects of wireless cominications with drones.
Franco Minucci received his BSc and MSc in electronics engineering from the University of Calabria in Italy. After graduation, he worked for three years in Italy mostly as a hardware designer for telecom equipment. In 2011 he moved to Belgium, where he worked for Ansem NV, IMEC vzw and Nokia (former Alcatel Lucent) in Antwerp. Currently, he is a Ph.D. student in KU Leuven, where he is working on a wireless system for automatic air conflict management and collision avoidance.
Aymen Fakhreddine holds a doctoral and master degree in telematic engineering from the University Carlos III of Madrid (Spain) with expertise in wireless communications, networking, and localization. He is a senior researcher at Lakeside Labs (Klagenfurt, Austria) working on cellular- connected drone systems. He previously held a similar position at the University of Klagenfurt, worked as a researcher at IMDEA Networks Institute (Madrid, Spain) and a visiting researcher at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. He also holds a master degree in advanced wireless communication systems from École Supérieure d’Électricité (CentraleSupélec) in Paris (France) and an engineering degree in Telecommunications from INPT Rabat (Morocco).
Tutorial 3: Moving Towards Zero-Touch Automation, A Key Enabler for 6G: Addressing the Training Data Sparsity/Scarcity Challenge
Speaker:
Prof. Ali Imran, Director AI4Networks Research Center, William H. Barkow Presidential (Associate) Professor, ECE, The University of Oklahoma, USA, CTA AISON
Abstract:
Despite the recent success of AI for enabling automation in other domains, in mobile networks attempts towards AI powered zero touch automation are hampered by a fundamental challenge: The sparsity and scarcity of the training data in mobile networks. Unlike many other native applications of AI, real cellular data for training AI is generally both scarce and sparse. This is because operators generally do not test a wide range of parameters on live network, and whatever data they have cannot be extracted and shared easily. This limits the utility of some of the most powerful AI tools such as DNN for solving many practical problems in mobile networks; Without addressing this challenge explicitly and timely, despite the hype and hopes, full potential of AI cannot be
harnessed for mobile networks. Leveraging insights from presenter’s heavy involvement in several cutting-edge projects on the topic, the goal of this tutorial is to share promising approaches for addressing the data sparsity challenge to ultimately enable zero touch automation in 6G. Some of the approaches to be discussed include, domain aware data augmentation methods for cellular network data, use of generative adversarial networks (GANs), leveraging different types of network geometries and novel methods for realistic synthetic data generation to address the sparsity challenge. The tutorial will conclude with introduction of new real problems of mobile industry interest that require AI based solutions and potential solution approaches and opportunities therein to trigger the much-needed focused research effort towards zero touch automation.
Speaker’s Biography:
Dr. Ali Imran is founding director of AI4Networks Research Centre (www.ai4networks.com) at the University of Oklahoma. In addition to being first of its kind centre focused on mobile network
native AI, the centre is also host to TurboRAN (http://bsonlab.com/TurboRAN/ )-a purpose-built cellular testbed for enabling experimental research on zero touch automation–and numerous
multinational R&D projects on AI for wireless networks. Dr. Imran is also co-founder of a start-up AISON (www.aison.co ) that has launched world’s first deep AI enabled RAN automation and
performance optimization solution currently being evaluated by several operators around the world for its game changing gains over current SON paradigm. Dr Imran’s research on network automation has played major role in this area and has been supported by over $4M in nationally and internationally competitive research grants. On this topic, he has published over 100 refereed
journal and conference papers and has several patents granted and pending. His work includes some of the most influential publications in the area of mobile network automation. The impact of his
work on network automation has been recognized by several prestigious awards such as VPR Outstanding International Impact Award at the University of Oklahoma, 2018, IEEE Green ICT YP
International award 2017, and best paper award IEEE CAMAD 2013. Dr. Imran is routinely invited to serves as an advisor to key stakeholder in cellular network eco-system. He has been a tutorial
presenter, a keynote speaker and a panellist on numerous international industry fora and academic conferences on this topic. He is an Associate Fellow of Higher Education Academy (AFHEA), UK;
president of ComSoc Tulsa Chapter; Senior Member IEEE, Member of Advisory Board for Special Technical Community on Big Data at IEEE Computer Society, and board member of ITERA.
Tutorial 4: Satellite Communications: present and future
Speaker:
Prof. Arie Reichman, Ariel University and Ayecka Communication Systems
Abstract:
After more than 60 years of history, the satellite communication continues to grow in all terms of capacity, number of systems and users and applications competing and cooperating with wireless
communications. The latest challenges are high throughput satellite (HTS) systems using GEO satellites and multi beam Ka band technology and ‘newspace’ LEO Constellation systems that would provide low latency global Internet access at high data rates.
The satellite communication has unique features that make it vital and growing mean of communication. This tutorial is meant to provide the audience an overview of present satellite communication methods and systems, how it works and its application. The focus is to present the new goals with GEO and MEO and LEO satellites.
This tutorial will be suitable for all those engineers who wish to learn the present methods of satellite communication based on international standards at different frequency bands and the future systems that are under development. After completing this tutorial, you will be able to understand the types of satellite communication in the present and in the future, its performance and applications.
Speaker’s Biography:
Prof. Arie Reichman is an expert in wireless communication with more than 40 years of experience in industry and academy. Now he is the Chief Scientist at Ayecka Communication Systems, a company with high expertise in satellite communication and a professor at Ariel University. At the university he teaches courses in communication including a course on satellite communication. He received the prestigious Israeli Security Prize, developed core technologies of high-tech companies and was the cofounder of Shiron Satellite Communications. He represents the state of Israel in European programs of Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) in the domain of Information and Communication Technologies.
He was the initiator and held leading positions in several R&D consortia under the auspices of Chief Science of Ministry of Industry and Trade. He wrote more than 50 articles in refereed journals and in conference proceedings and 5 patents. He holds the B.Sc. and M.Sc. from the Technion and PhD from the University of Southern California in 1984.