Robust classification of the operational environment of wireless devices is becoming increasingly important for wireless network optimization, particularly in a shared spectrum environment. Distinguishing between indoor and outdoor devices can enhance reliability and improve coexistence with existing, outdoor, incumbents. For instance, the unlicensed but shared 6 GHz band (5.925 - 7.125 GHz) enables sharing by imposing lower transmit power for indoor unlicensed devices and a spectrum coordination requirement for outdoor devices. Further, indoor devices are prohibited from using battery power, external antennas, and weatherization to prevent outdoor operations. As these rules may be circumvented, we propose a robust indoor/outdoor classification method by leveraging the fact that the radio-frequency environment faced by a device are quite different indoors and outdoors. We first collect signal strength data from all cellular and Wi-Fi bands that can be received by a smartphone in various environments (indoor interior, indoor near windows, and outdoors), along with GPS accuracy, and then evaluate three machine learning (ML) methods: deep neural network (DNN), decision tree, and random forest to perform classification into these three categories. Our results indicate that the DNN model performs the best, particularly in minimizing the most important classification error, that of classifying outdoor devices as indoor interior devices.

The rapid growth of Internet of Things (IoT) networks brings new security challenges for service providers. Due to the resource constrained nature of IoT networks, conventional security methods are not always suitable. Therefore, physical layer security (PLS) has come to the forefront, providing a high level of security while respecting the limited resources of IoTs. A Sybil attack is an insider attack in which a malicious node illegitimately fakes multiple identities, to impersonate legitimate nodes in the IoT network. This study introduces a novel Sybil attack detection scheme for mobile IoT networks that corresponds to time-varying channel. doppler-shift caused by mobile IoT nodes is considered as a novel detection metric to identify available Sybil attacks. The proposed scheme is analyzed by both the true positive rate and the false positive rate, which are mathematically formulated to verify the simulation results. Results demonstrate that as the randomness in the mobility pattern of IoT nodes increases, the proposed detection mechanism based on doppler-shift offers improved identification of the Sybil nodes. Moreover, this work provides receiver operating characteristics (RoCs) for mobile IoT networks to evaluate the effect of different system parameters, including carrier frequency, velocity, subcarrier spacing (SCS), and the size of cyclic prefix (CP). The performance of the proposed scheme improves with an increase in both the carrier frequency and velocity, as the doppler-shift becomes more pronounced.

IoT (Internet of Things) networks are becoming an integral part of everyday life. The exponential growth in these networks poses various privacy and security threats for the users and the vendors. Among these threats are Sybil attacks, which occurs due to poor authentication capabilities and thus a malicious node gets access to any information on the host. The malicious node uses its' fake identities to impersonate legitimate nodes and transmit misleading data to the central entity. However, conventional cryptographical approaches are not always suitable for IoT nodes due to the their limited resources. Therefore, physical layer security (PLS) solutions become more and more important for IoT networks. In this regard, this study introduces a novel technique for detecting Sybil attacks in mobile networks, which stands in contrast to the current methods developed for stationary environment, i.e., time-invariant channel. Specifically, this work exploits the Doppler shift caused by the mobility in the environment to identify Sybil nodes in the network. If the nodes belong to the same terminal, they experience the same amount of Doppler shift. The detection performance of the proposed scheme has been evaluated under different system configurations. The obtained results show that the performance of the proposed scheme improves as the amount of Doppler shift increases.

Design of simple transceiver architectures is inevitable in order to provide low computational complexity, low power consumption and affordable cost in beyond 5G (B5G) wireless systems, but it results in hardware impairments that significantly degrade the performance reliability of transmission. In this paper, among these hardware impairments, we discuss in-phase and quadrature (IQ) imbalance in orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS), which is a recent waveform considered as a potential candidate for B5G systems to relax the vulnerability against time-variant wireless channels. To mitigate the effect of IQ imbalance for OTFS, we propose an energy and spectral efficient IQ imbalance compensation scheme with the aid of index modulation (IM), which provides an attractive flexibility in the system design. In contrast to conventional solutions used in classical wireless technologies, such as iterative and pilot-based techniques, the proposed scheme avoids additional energy consumption and significant spectral efficient loss during the estimation and compensation of the IQ imbalance effect. The obtained bit error rate (BER) results validate the accuracy of the proposed compensator for different OTFS system configurations considering perfect/imperfect channel state information in practical scenarios.

Orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) technique is a recent two-dimensional (2-D) modulation aiming to exploit both time and frequency selectivity of doubly dispersive wireless channel, which significantly affects the reliability of conventional wireless communication systems. In OTFS transmission, delay-Doppler domain is utilized for conveying the data symbols. Besides channel characteristics, the performance of wireless communications systems is severely limited due to the impairments at the RF front-end. One of these impairments is the in-phase and quadrature (IQ) imbalance that occurs due to inevitable imperfections existing between in-phase and quadrature branches at either transmitter (Tx) or receiver (Rx) architecture. The aim of this paper is to reveal and investigate the physical effect of IQ impairment in delay-Doppler domain, which is unknown in the literature. Hence, we provide theoretical models to explicitly understand the impact of IQ imbalance at different stages of OTFS-based communication systems including Tx, Rx, and jointly Tx-Rx. Importantly, we show that although the performance of OTFS transmission depends on both delay and Doppler axes, IQ imbalance leads to an interference originating only from the mirror Doppler axes, which we name mirror Doppler interference (MDI), along with power degradation. Moreover, we assess the performance of IQ imbalanced OTFS under various communication scenarios considering ideal and practical pulse shapes with maximum likelihood (ML) and minimum mean square error (MMSE) detectors, respectively.

Abstract In 5G and beyond communication systems, distinct numerologies can coexist to serve diverse requirements for users and applications. However, the inter‐numerology interference (INI) is a main challenge that significantly impacts the system performance. Therefore, the performance under INI has become an essential evaluation metric for the suitability of the different transmission schemes in the future communication systems. This paper analyzes the impact of INI on the performance of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing with index modulation (OFDM‐IM) systems. Specifically, an analytical expression of the INI level in OFDM‐IM systems is presented as a function of the subcarrier activation ratio (SAR) and subcarrier activation probability (SAP). Furthermore, aiming at reducing the INI level, an adaptive subcarrier mapping scheme (SMS) is proposed based on the conventional combinatorial mapping scheme. Moreover, analysis and evaluation of SAR and SAP are performed regarding the requirements of 5G and beyond services. It is proved that the INI level in OFDM‐IM systems is highly dependent not only on the number of active subcarriers but also on their position in an OFDM block.

Index modulation (IM) provides a novel way for the transmission of additional data bits via the indices of the available transmit entities compared with classical communication schemes. This study examines the flexible utilization of existing IM techniques in a comprehensive manner to satisfy the challenging and diverse requirements of 5G and beyond services. After spatial modulation (SM), which transmits information bits through antenna indices, application of IM to orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) subcarriers has opened the door for the extension of IM into different dimensions, such as radio frequency (RF) mirrors, time slots, codes, and dispersion matrices. Recent studies have introduced the concept of multidimensional IM by various combinations of 1-D IM techniques to provide higher spectral efficiency (SE) and better bit error rate (BER) performance at the expense of higher transmitter (Tx) and receiver (Rx) complexity. Despite the ongoing research on the design of new IM techniques and their implementation challenges, proper use of the available IM techniques to address different requirements of 5G and beyond networks is an open research area in the literature. For this reason, we first provide the dimensional-based categorization of available IM domains and review the existing IM types regarding this categorization. Then, we develop a framework that investigates the efficient utilization of these techniques and establishes a link between the IM schemes and 5G services, namely, enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), massive machine-type communications (mMTCs), and ultrareliable low-latency communication (URLLC). In addition, this work defines key performance indicators (KPIs) to quantify the advantages and disadvantages of IM techniques in time, frequency, space, and code dimensions. Finally, future recommendations are given regarding the design of flexible IM-based communication systems for 5G and beyond wireless networks.