We study the data reliability problem for devices forming a dynamic distributed storage system. Such systems are commonplace in traditional cloud storage applications where storage node failures and updates are frequent. We consider the application of regenerating codes for file maintenance. Such codes require lower bandwidth to regenerate lost data fragments compared to file replication or reconstruction. We investigate threshold-based repair strategies where data repair is initiated after a threshold number of data fragments have been lost. We show that at a low departure-to-repair rate regime, in which repairs are initiated after several nodes have left the system outperforms if repairs are initiated after a single node departure. This optimality is reversed when the node turnover is high. We further compare distributed and centralized repair strategies and derive the optimal repair threshold for minimizing the average repair cost per unit of time. In addition, we examine cooperative repair strategies and show performance improvements. We investigate several models for the time needed for node repair including a simple fixed time model and a more realistic model that takes into account the number of repaired nodes. Finally, an extended model where additional failures are allowed during the repair process is investigated.

Distributed implementations of gradient-based methods, wherein a server distributes gradient computations across worker machines, need to overcome two limitations: delays caused by slow running machines called stragglers, and communication overheads. Recently, Ye and Abbe [ICML 2018] proposed a coding-theoretic paradigm to characterize a fundamental trade-off between computation load per worker, communication overhead per worker, and straggler tolerance. However, their proposed coding schemes suffer from heavy decoding complexity and poor numerical stability. In this paper, we develop a communication-efficient gradient coding framework to overcome these drawbacks. Our proposed framework enables using any linear code to design the encoding and decoding functions. When a particular code is used in this framework, its block-length determines the computation load, dimension determines the communication overhead, and minimum distance determines the straggler tolerance. The flexibility of choosing a code allows us to gracefully trade-off the straggler threshold and communication overhead for smaller decoding complexity and higher numerical stability. Further, we show that using a maximum distance separable (MDS) code generated by a random Gaussian matrix in our framework yields a gradient code that is optimal with respect to the trade-off and, in addition, satisfies stronger guarantees on numerical stability as compared to the previously proposed schemes. Finally, we evaluate our proposed framework on Amazon EC2 and demonstrate that it reduces the average iteration time by 16% as compared to prior gradient coding schemes.

Distributed implementations of gradient-based methods, wherein a server distributes gradient computations across worker machines, suffer from slow running machines, called stragglers. Gradient coding is a coding-theoretic framework to mitigate stragglers by enabling the server to recover the gradient sum in the presence of stragglers. Approximate gradient codes are variants of gradient codes that reduce computation and storage overhead per worker by allowing the server to approximately reconstruct the gradient sum.In this work, our goal is to construct approximate gradient codes that are resilient to stragglers selected by a computationally unbounded adversary. Our motivation for constructing codes to mitigate adversarial stragglers stems from the challenge of tackling stragglers in massive-scale elastic and serverless systems, wherein it is difficult to statistically model stragglers. Towards this end, we propose a class of approximate gradient codes based on balanced incomplete block designs (BIBDs). We show that the approximation error for these codes depends only on the number of stragglers, and thus, adversarial straggler selection has no advantage over random selection. In addition, the proposed codes admit computationally efficient decoding at the server. Next, to characterize fundamental limits of adversarial straggling, we consider the notion of adversarial threshold - the smallest number of workers that an adversary must straggle to inflict certain approximation error. We compute a lower bound on the adversarial threshold, and show that codes based on symmetric BIBDs maximize this lower bound among a wide class of codes, making them excellent candidates for mitigating adversarial stragglers.

Private Information Retrieval (PIR) problem has recently attracted a significant interest in the information-theory community. In this problem, a user wants to privately download one or more messages belonging to a database with copies stored on a single or multiple remote servers. In the single server scenario, the user must have prior side information, i.e., a subset of messages unknown to the server, to be able to privately retrieve the required messages in an efficient way.In the last decade, there has also been a significant interest in Locally Recoverable Codes (LRCs), a class of storage codes in which each symbol can be recovered from a limited number of other symbols. More recently, there is an interest in cooperative locally recoverable codes, i.e., codes in which multiple symbols can be recovered from a small set of other code symbols.In this paper, we establish a relationship between coding schemes for the single-server PIR problem and LRCs. In particular, we show the following results: (i) PIR schemes designed for retrieving a single message are equivalent to classical LRCs; and (ii) PIR schemes for retrieving multiple messages are equivalent to cooperative LRCs. These equivalence results allow us to recover upper bounds on the download rate for PIR-SI schemes, and to obtain a novel rate upper bound on cooperative LRCs. We show results for both linear and non-linear codes.

Place cells in the hippocampus (HC) are active when an animal visits a certain location (referred to as a place field) within an environment. Grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) respond at multiple locations, with firing fields that form a periodic and hexagonal tiling of the environment. The joint activity of grid and place cell populations, as a function of location, forms a neural code for space. In this article, we develop an understanding of the relationships between coding theoretically relevant properties of the combined activity of these populations and how these properties limit the robustness of this representation to noise-induced interference. These relationships are revisited by measuring the performances of biologically realizable algorithms implemented by networks of place and grid cell populations, as well as constraint neurons, which perform denoising operations. Contributions of this work include the investigation of coding theoretic limitations of the mammalian neural code for location and how communication between grid and place cell networks may improve the accuracy of each population's representation. Simulations demonstrate that denoising mechanisms analyzed here can significantly improve the fidelity of this neural representation of space. Furthermore, patterns observed in connectivity of each population of simulated cells predict that anti-Hebbian learning drives decreases in inter-HC-MEC connectivity along the dorsoventral axis.

We consider a single-cell massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system in which a base station (BS) with a large number of antennas transmits simultaneously to several single-antenna users. The BS acquires the channel state information (CSI) for various receivers using uplink pilot transmissions. We demonstrate the vulnerability of the CSI estimation process to pilot-contamination (PC) attacks. In our attack model, the attacker aims at minimizing the sum rate of downlink transmissions by contaminating the uplink pilots. We first study these attacks for two downlink power allocation strategies under the assumption that the attacker knows the locations of the BS and its users. Later on, we relax this assumption and consider the case when such knowledge is probabilistic. The formulated problems are solved using stochastic optimization, Lagrangian minimization, and game-theoretic methods. A closed-form solution for a special case of the problem is obtained. Furthermore, we analyze the achievable individual secrecy rates under PC attacks and provide an upper bound on these rates. We also study this scenario without a priori knowledge of user locations at the attacker by introducing chance constraints. Our results indicate that such attacks can degrade the throughput of a massive MIMO system by more than 50%.

This paper studies the problem of secure communication over a $K$ -transmitter multiple access channel (MAC) in the presence of an external eavesdropper, subject to a collective secrecy constraint (i.e., information leakage rate to an eavesdropper on a collection of messages that are from a pre-specified subset of the $K$ transmitters, say $\mathcal {S}\subseteq \mathcal {K}=\{1,2,\ldots, K\}$ , is made vanishing). Since secrecy is of concern only to transmitters $\{i|i\in \mathcal {S}\}$ but not to transmitters $\{i|i\in \mathcal {S}^{c}\}$ , where $\mathcal {S}^{c}=\mathcal {K}\backslash \mathcal {S}$ , different transmission strategies could be employed at transmitters $\{i|i\in \mathcal {S}^{c}\}$ . Consider the following two scenarios: 1) transmitters $\{i|i\in \mathcal {S}^{c}\}$ use deterministic encoders (which are conventionally used for MAC without secrecy), competing for the channel resource (i.e., being competitive) and 2) transmitters $\{i|i\in \mathcal {S}^{c}\}$ use stochastic encoders, helping to hide other transmitters’ messages from the eavesdropper (i.e., being cooperative). As a result, we establish the respective $\mathcal {S}$ -collective secrecy achievable rate regions and demonstrate the advantage of being cooperative theoretically and numerically. To this end, in addition to the standard techniques, our results build upon two techniques. The first is a generalization of Chia-El Gamal’s lemma on entropy bound for a set of codewords given partial information. The second is to utilize a compact representation of a list of sets that, together with submodular properties of mutual information functions involved, leads to an efficient Fourier-Motzkin elimination. These two approaches allow us to derive achievable regions in this work, and could also be of independent interest in other context.

This paper considers a distributed storage system, where multiple storage nodes can be reconstructed simultaneously at a centralized location. This centralized multi-node repair (CMR) model is a generalization of regenerating codes that allow for bandwidth efficient repair of a single-failed node. This paper focuses on the tradeoff between the amount of data stored and repair bandwidth in the CMR model. In particular, repair bandwidth bounds are derived for the minimum storage multi-node repair (MSMR) and the minimum bandwidth multi-node repair (MBMR) operating points. The tightness of these bounds is analyzed via code constructions. The MSMR point is characterized by codes achieving this point under functional repair for the general set of CMR parameters, as well as with codes enabling exact repair for certain CMR parameters. The MBMR point, on the other hand, is characterized with exact repair codes for all CMR parameters for systems that satisfy a certain entropy accumulation property. Finally, the model proposed here is utilized for the secret sharing problem, where the codes for the multi-node repair problem are used to construct communication efficient secret sharing schemes with the property of bandwidth efficient share repair.

We study the scenario of hybrid cloud storage where the client utilizes both an off-site and a local storage. The former is a distributed storage system (DSS) with the presence of an eavesdropper that has access to the content stored in and downloaded to some subset of nodes. The latter (local) storage is utilized to store a secret key to secure the stored file against the eavesdropper. We introduce two possibilities to utilize local storage (secret key) in enhancing the DSS. First, the key can be used to increase the maximum file size stored in the DSS. We propose an upper bound for this scenario and show constructions achieving it. Second, the key can be used to decrease the number of contacted nodes required to reconstruct the file at the client. We extend the product matrix (PM) framework and construct codes that enables efficient data access. Our analysis includes both minimum repair bandwidth regenerating (MBR) and minimum storage regenerating (MSR) codes.

This paper studies the problem of secure communication over a K-transmitter multiple access channel in the presence of an external eavesdropper, subject to a joint secrecy constraint (i.e., information leakage rate from the collection of K messages to an eavesdropper is made vanishing). As a result, we establish the joint secrecy achievable rate region. To this end, our results build upon two techniques in addition to the standard information-theoretic methods. The first is a generalization of Chia-El Gamal's lemma on entropy bound for a set of codewords given partial information. The second is to utilize a compact representation of a list of sets that, together with properties of mutual information, leads to an efficient Fourier-Motzkin elimination. These two approaches could also be of independent interests in other contexts.

We consider a broadcast channel in which a multi-antenna transmitter (Alice) sends K confidential information signals to K legitimate users (Bobs) in the presence of L eavesdroppers (Eves). Alice uses multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) precoding to generate the information signals along with her own (Tx-based) friendly jamming (FJ). Interference at each Bob is removed by MIMO zero-forcing. This, however, leaves a “vulnerability region” around each Bob, which can be exploited by a nearby Eve. We address this problem by augmenting Tx-based FJ (TxFJ) with Rx-based FJ (RxFJ), generated by each Bob. Specifically, each Bob uses self-interference suppression to transmit a friendly jamming signal, while simultaneously receiving an information signal over the same channel. We minimize the powers allocated to the information, TxFJ, and RxFJ signals under given guarantees on the individual secrecy rate for each Bob. The problem is solved for the cases when the eavesdropper's channel state information is known/unknown. Simulations show the effectiveness of the proposed solution. Furthermore, we discuss how to schedule transmissions when the rate requirements need to be satisfied on average rather than instantaneously. Under special cases, a scheduling algorithm that serves only the strongest receivers is shown to outperform the one that schedules all receivers.

This paper studies the problem of secure communication over the broadcast channel with receiver-side information under the lens of individual secrecy constraints, that is, the transmitter wants to send two independent messages to two receivers, which have, respectively, the desired message of the other receiver as side information, while keeping the eavesdropper ignorant of each message (i.e., the information leakage rate from each message to the eavesdropper is made vanishing). Building upon one-time pad, secrecy coding, and broadcasting schemes, achievable rate regions are investigated, and the capacity region for special cases of either a weak or strong eavesdropper (compared to both legitimate receivers) is characterized. Interestingly, the capacity region for the former corresponds to a line and the latter corresponds to a rectangle with missing corners; a phenomenon occurring due to the coupling between user's rates. Moreover, the individual secrecy capacity region is also fully characterized for the case where the eavesdropper's channel is deterministic. In addition to discrete memoryless setup, Gaussian scenarios are studied. For the Gaussian model, in addition to the strong and weak eavesdropper cases, the capacity region is characterized for the low and high SNR regimes when the eavesdropper's channel is stronger than one receiver but weaker than the other. Remarkably, positive secure transmission rates are always guaranteed under the individual secrecy constraint, unlike the case of the joint secrecy constraint (i.e., the information leakage rate from both messages to the eavesdropper is made vanishing). Thus, this notion of secrecy serves as an appropriate candidate for trading off secrecy level and transmission rate, making secrecy more affordable but still acceptable to the end user.

This paper studies the problem of secure communications over broadcast channels under theindividualsecrecy constraints. That is, the transmitter wants to send two independent messages to two legitimate receivers in the presence of an eavesdropper, while keeping the eavesdropper ignorant ofeachmessage (i.e., the information leakage rate fromeachmessage to the eavesdropper is made vanishing). Building upon Carleial–Hellman’s secrecy coding, Wyner’s secrecy coding, and the framework of Marton’s coding together with techniques, such as rate splitting and indirect decoding, an achievable individual secrecy rate region is established with the characterization of capacity regions for some special cases. In particular, the individual secrecy capacity region for the linear deterministic model is fully characterized, and for the Gaussian model, a constant gap (i.e., 0.5 b within the individual secrecy capacity region) result is obtained. To illustrate the impact of different secrecy constraints on the corresponding capacity regions, comparisons are made with those satisfying joint secrecy and without secrecy constraints. Overall, when compared with the joint secrecy constraint, the results allow for trading off secrecy level and throughput in the system.

We study the data reliability problem for a community of devices forming a mobile cloud storage system. We consider the application of regenerating codes for maintaining a file within a geographically-limited area. Such codes require lower bandwidth to regenerate lost data fragments compared to file replication or reconstruction. We investigate threshold-based repair strategies where data repair is initiated after a threshold number of data fragments have been lost due to node mobility. We show that at a low departure-to-repair rate regime, a lazy repair strategy in which repairs are initiated after several nodes have left the system outperforms eager repair in which repairs are initiated after a single departure. This optimality is reversed when nodes are highly mobile. We further compare distributed and centralized repair strategies and derive the optimal repair threshold for minimizing the average repair cost per unit of time, as a function of underlying code parameters.

This paper considers a distributed storage system, where multiple storage nodes can be reconstructed simultaneously at a centralized location. This centralized multi-node repair (CMR) model is a generalization of regenerating codes that allow for bandwidth-efficient repair of a single failed node. This work focuses on the trade-off between the amount of data stored and repair bandwidth in this CMR model. In particular, repair bandwidth bounds are derived for the minimum storage multi-node repair (MSMR) and the minimum bandwidth multi-node repair (MBMR) operating points. The tightness of these bounds are analyzed via code constructions. The MSMR point is characterized through codes achieving this point under functional repair for general set of CMR parameters, as well as with codes enabling exact repair for certain CMR parameters. The MBMR point, on the other hand, is characterized with exact repair codes for all CMR parameters for systems that satisfy a certain entropy accumulation property.

This paper presents a polar coding scheme to achieve secrecy in block fading binary symmetric wiretap channels without the knowledge of instantaneous channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter. For this model, a coding scheme that hierarchically utilizes polar codes is presented. In particular, on the polarization of different binary symmetric channels over different fading blocks, each channel use is modeled as an appropriate binary erasure channel over fading blocks. Polar codes are constructed for both coding over channel uses for each fading block and coding over fading blocks for certain channel uses. In order to guarantee security, random bits are introduced at appropriate places to exhaust the observations of the eavesdropper. It is shown that this coding scheme, without instantaneous CSI at the transmitter, is secrecy capacity achieving for the simultaneous fading scenario. For the independent fading case, the capacity is achieved when the fading realizations for the eavesdropper channel are always degraded with respect to the receiver. For the remaining cases, the gap between lower and upper bounds is analyzed. Remarkably, for the scenarios where the secrecy capacity is achieved, the results imply that the instantaneous CSI does not increase the secrecy capacity.

This paper considers a state dependent broadcast channel with one transmitter, Alice, and two receivers, Bob and Eve. The problem is to effectively convey (“amplify”) the channel state sequence to Bob while “masking” it from Eve. The extent to which the state sequence cannot be masked from Eve is referred to as leakage. This can be viewed as a secrecy problem, where we desire that the channel state itself be minimally leaked to Eve while being communicated to Bob. This paper is aimed at characterizing the tradeoff region between amplification and leakage rates for such a system. An achievable coding scheme is presented, wherein the transmitter transmits a partial state information over the channel to facilitate the amplification process. For the case when Bob observes a stronger signal than Eve, the achievable coding scheme is enhanced with secure refinement. Outer bounds on the tradeoff region are also derived, and used in characterizing some special case results. In particular, the optimal amplification-leakage rate difference, called as differential amplification capacity, is characterized for the reversely degraded discrete memoryless channel, the degraded binary, and the degraded Gaussian channels. In addition, for the degraded Gaussian model, the extremal corner points of the tradeoff region are characterized, and the gap between the outer bound and achievable rate-regions is shown to be less than half a bit for a wide set of channel parameters.

This paper considers a broadcast channel with a multi-antenna transmitter (Alice) sending two independent confidential data streams to two legitimate users (Bob and Charlie) in the presence of a passive eavesdropper (Eve). To enhance their secrecy rates, Bob and Charlie are assumed to be capable of self-interference suppression (SIS). Alice, on the other hand, uses MIMO precoding to generate the two confidential information signals along with its own (Tx-based) friendly jamming. The interfering signals at Bob and Charlie are removed by employing the zero-forcing technique. This, however, leaves ``vulnerability regions'' around Bob and Charlie, which can be exploited by a nearby eavesdropper. We address this problem by augmenting Tx-based friendly jamming with Rx-based friendly jamming, generated by Bob and Charlie. For the resulting broadcast channel, a secrecy encoding scheme is developed to construct the signals intended to Bob and Charlie. The corresponding achievable secrecy sum-rate is characterized, and an optimization problem is formulated. A special case of this problem is investigated. Simulation results show the effectiveness of utilizing (Tx- and/or Rx-based) jamming, and the impact of the degree of SIS on physical-layer security.

This paper studies the problem of secure communication over broadcast channels under the lens of individual secrecy constraints (i.e., information leakage from each message to an eavesdropper is made vanishing). It is known that, for the communication over the degraded broadcast channels, the stronger receiver is able to decode the message of the weaker receiver. In the individual secrecy setting, the message for the weaker receiver can be further utilized to secure the partial message that is intended to the stronger receiver. With such a coding spirit, it is shown that more secret bits can be conveyed to the stronger receiver. In particular, for the corresponding Gaussian model, a constant gap (i.e., 0.5 bits within the individual secrecy capacity region) result is obtained. Overall, when compared with the joint secrecy constraint, the results allow for trading-off secrecy level and throughput in the system.

This paper presents a polar coding scheme for fading wiretap channels that achieves reliability as well as security without the knowledge of instantaneous channel state information at the transmitter. Specifically, a block fading model is considered for the wiretap channel that consists of a transmitter, a receiver, and an eavesdropper; and only the information regarding the statistics (i.e., distribution) of the channel state information is assumed at the transmitter. For this model, a coding scheme that hierarchically utilizes polar codes is presented in order to address channel state variation. In particular, on polarization of different binary symmetric channels over different fading blocks, each channel use (corresponding to a possibly different polarization) is modeled as an appropriate binary erasure channel over fading blocks. Polar codes are constructed for both coding over channel uses for each fading block and coding over fading blocks for certain channel uses. In order to guarantee security, message bits are transmitted such that they can be reliably decoded at the receiver, and random bits are introduced to exhaust the observations of the eavesdropper. It is shown that this coding scheme, without instantaneous channel state information at the transmitter, is secrecy capacity achieving for the corresponding fading binary symmetric wiretap channel.

In large scale distributed storage systems (DSS) deployed in cloud computing, correlated failures resulting in simultaneous failure (or, unavailability) of blocks of nodes are common. In such scenarios, the stored data or a content of a failed node can only be reconstructed from the available live nodes belonging to available blocks. To analyze the resilience of the system against such block failures, this work introduces the framework of Block Failure Resilient (BFR) codes, wherein the data (e.g., file in DSS) can be decoded by reading out from a same number of codeword symbols (nodes) from each available blocks of the underlying codeword. Further, repairable BFR codes are introduced, wherein any codeword symbol in a failed block can be repaired by contacting to remaining blocks in the system. Motivated from regenerating codes, file size bounds for repairable BFR codes are derived, trade-off between per node storage and repair bandwidth is analyzed, and BFR-MSR and BFR-MBR points are derived. Explicit codes achieving these two operating points for a wide set of parameters are constructed by utilizing combinatorial designs, wherein the codewords of the underlying outer codes are distributed to BFR codeword symbols according to projective planes.

In this paper, we study the problem of secure communication over the broadcast channel with receiver side information, under the lens of individual secrecy constraints (i.e., information leakage from each message to an eavesdropper is made vanishing). Several coding schemes are proposed by extending known results in broadcast channels to this secrecy setting. In particular, individual secrecy provided via one-time pad signal is utilized in the coding schemes. As a result, we obtain an achievable rate region together with a characterization of the capacity region for special cases of either a weak or strong eavesdropper (compared to both legitimate receivers). Interestingly, the capacity region for the former corresponds to a line and the latter corresponds to a square with missing corners; a phenomenon occurring due to the coupling between user's rates. At the expense of having a weaker notion of security, positive secure transmission rates are always guaranteed, unlike the case of the joint secrecy constraint.

A general method of source coding is proposed in this paper, which enables one to reduce the problem of compressing an analog (continuous-valued) source to a set of much simpler problems, compressing discrete sources. Specifically, the focus is on lossy compression of exponential and Laplace sources, which are represented as set of discrete variables through a finite alphabet expansion. Due to the decomposability property of such sources, the resulting random variables post expansion are independent and discrete. Thus, these variables can be considered as independent discrete source coding problems, and the original problem is reduced to coding over these sources with a total distortion constraint. Any feasible solution to this resulting optimization problem corresponds to an achievable rate distortion pair of the original continuous-valued source compression problem. Although finding the optimal solution for a given distortion is not a tractable task, we show that, via a heuristic choice, our expansion coding scheme still presents a good performance in the low distortion regime. Further, by adopting low-complexity codes designed for discrete source coding, the total coding complexity can be reduced for practical implementations.

This work presents a polar coding scheme for fading channels, focusing primarily on fading binary symmetric and additive exponential noise channels. For fading binary symmetric channels, a hierarchical coding scheme is presented, utilizing polar coding both over channel uses and over fading blocks. The receiver uses its channel state information (CSI) to distinguish states, thus constructing an overlay erasure channel over the underlying fading channels. By using this scheme, the capacity of a fading binary symmetric channel is achieved without CSI at the transmitter. Noting that a fading AWGN channel with BPSK modulation and demodulation corresponds to a fading binary symmetric channel, this result covers a fairly large set of practically relevant channel settings. For fading additive exponential noise channels, expansion coding is used in conjunction to polar codes. Expansion coding transforms the continuous-valued channel to multiple (independent) discrete-valued ones. For each level after expansion, the approach described previously for fading binary symmetric channels is used. Both theoretical analysis and numerical results are presented, showing that the proposed coding scheme approaches the capacity in the high SNR regime. Overall, utilizing polar codes in this (hierarchical) fashion enables coding without CSI at the transmitter, while approaching the capacity with low complexity.

Regenerating codes enable trading off repair bandwidth for storage in distributed storage systems (DSS). Due to their distributed nature, these systems are intrinsically susceptible to attacks, and they may also be subject to multiple simultaneous node failures. Cooperative regenerating codes allow bandwidth efficient repair of multiple simultaneous node failures. This paper analyzes storage systems that employ cooperative regenerating codes that are robust to (passive) eavesdroppers. The analysis is divided into two parts, studying both minimum bandwidth and minimum storage cooperative regenerating scenarios. First, the secrecy capacity for minimum bandwidth cooperative regenerating codes is characterized. Second, for minimum storage cooperative regenerating codes, a secure file size upper bound and achievability results are provided. These results establish the secrecy capacity for the minimum storage scenario for certain special cases. In all scenarios, the achievability results correspond to exact repair, and secure file size upper bounds are obtained using min-cut analyses over a suitable secrecy graph representation of DSS. The main achievability argument is based on an appropriate precoding of the data to eliminate the information leakage to the eavesdropper.

Node failures are inevitable in distributed storage systems (DSS). To enable efficient repair when faced with such failures, two main techniques are known: Regenerating codes, i.e., codes that minimize the total repair bandwidth; and codes with locality, which minimize the number of nodes participating in the repair process. This paper focuses on regenerating codes with locality, using pre-coding based on Gabidulin codes, and presents constructions that utilize minimum bandwidth regenerating (MBR) local codes. The constructions achieve maximum resilience (i.e., optimal minimum distance) and have maximum capacity (i.e., maximum rate). Finally, the same pre-coding mechanism can be combined with a subclass of fractional-repetition codes to enable maximum resilience and repair-by-transfer simultaneously.

Regenerating codes enable trading off repair bandwidth for storage in distributed storage systems (DSS). Due to their distributed nature, these systems are intrinsically susceptible to attacks, and they may be susceptible to multiple node failures. This paper analyzes storage systems that employ cooperative regenerating codes that are robust to passive eavesdroppers, and proposes codes achieving the secrecy capacity for the minimum bandwidth cooperative regenerating point. The achievability results correspond to exact repair, and secure file size upper bounds are obtained using mincut analyses over a suitable secrecy graph representation of DSS. The main achievability argument is based on appropriate precoding of the data using MRD (Gabidulin) codes to eliminate any information leakage to the eavesdropper.

This paper presents coding schemes for distributed storage systems (DSS) that are secure against eavesdroppers, while simultaneously enabling efficient node repair (regeneration). Towards this, novel upper bounds on secrecy capacity for minimum storage regenerating (MSR) codes and locally repairable codes (LRCs) are derived. The eavesdropper model considered in this paper incorporates the ability to listen in on data downloaded during ℓ2node repairs in addition to content stored on ℓ1nodes. Finally, this paper presents coding schemes, based on precoding using Gabidulin codes, that achieve the upper bounds on secrecy capacity and characterize the secrecy capacity of DSS for various settings of system parameters.

This paper presents a new explicit construction for locally repairable codes (LRCs) for distributed storage systems which possess all-symbol locality and the largest possible minimum distance, or equivalently, can tolerate the maximum number of node failures. This construction, based on maximum rank distance (MRD) Gabidulin codes, provides new optimal vector and scalar LRCs. In addition, the paper also discusses mechanisms by which codes obtained using this construction can be used to construct LRCs with efficient local repair of failed nodes by combination of LRCs with regenerating codes.

A polar coding scheme for fading channels is proposed in this paper. More specifically, the focus is on the Gaussian fading channel with a BPSK modulation, where the equivalent channel is modeled as a binary symmetric channel with varying cross-over probabilities. To deal with variable channel states, a coding scheme of hierarchically utilizing polar codes is proposed. In particular, by observing the polarization of different binary symmetric channels over different fading blocks, each channel use corresponding to a different polarization is modeled as a binary erasure channel such that polar codes could be adopted to encode over blocks. It is shown that the proposed coding scheme, without instantaneous channel state information at the transmitter, achieves the capacity of the corresponding fading binary symmetric channel.

We investigate the delay limited secrecy capacity of the flat fading channel under two different assumptions on the available transmitter channel state information (CSI). The first scenario assumes perfect prior knowledge of both the main and eavesdropper channel gains. Here, upper and lower bounds on the delay limited secrecy capacity are derived, and shown to be tight in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. In the second scenario, only the main channel CSI is assumed to be available at the transmitter where, remarkably, we establish the achievability of a non-zero delay-limited secure rate, for a wide class of channel distributions, with a high probability. In the two cases, our achievability arguments are based on a novel two-stage key-sharing approach that overcomes the secrecy outage phenomenon observed in earlier works.

The two-way wiretap channel is considered in this paper. Two legitimate users, Alice and Bob, wish to exchange messages securely in the presence of a passive eavesdropper Eve. In the full-duplex scenario, where each node can transmit and receive simultaneously, new achievable secrecy rate regions are obtained based on the idea of allowing the two users to jointly optimize their channel prefixing distributions and binning codebooks in addition to key sharing. The new regions are shown to be strictly larger than the known ones for a wide class of discrete memoryless and Gaussian channels. In the half-duplex case, where a user can only transmit or receive on any given degree of freedom, the idea of randomized scheduling is introduced and shown to offer a significant gain in terms of the achievable secrecy sum-rate. A practical setup is further developed based on a near field wireless communication scenario, and it is shown that one can exploit the two-way nature of the communication, via appropriately randomizing the transmit power levels and transmission schedule, to introduce significant ambiguity at a noiseless Eve.

A general method of coding over expansions is proposed, which allows one to reduce the highly non-trivial problem of coding over continuous channels to a much simpler discrete ones. More specifically, the focus is on the additive exponential noise (AEN) channel, for which the (binary) expansion of the (exponential) noise random variable is considered. It is shown that each of the random variables in the expansion corresponds to independent Bernoulli random variables. Thus, each of the expansion levels (of the underlying channel) corresponds to a binary symmetric channel (BSC), and the coding problem is reduced to coding over these parallel channels while satisfying the channel input constraint. This optimization formulation is stated as the achievable rate result, for which a specific choice of input distribution is shown to achieve a rate which is arbitrarily close to the channel capacity in the high SNR regime. Remarkably, the scheme allows for low-complexity capacity-achieving codes for AEN channels, using the codes that are originally designed for BSCs. Extensions to different channel models and applications to other coding problems are discussed.

Achieving information theoretic security with practical coding complexity is of definite interest. This work first focuses on the key agreement problem. For this problem, a new cross-layer secure coding protocol over block fading channels is proposed. The proposed scheme requires only the statistical knowledge about the eavesdropper channel state information (CSI), and, utilizing a privacy amplification technique, reduces the problem of key agreement to a provably secure coding problem per block. Focusing on this secure coding problem, it is shown that polar codes, introduced by Arikan, achieve nonzero perfect secrecy rates for the binary-input degraded wiretap channel while enjoying a remarkably low encoding-decoding complexity. We further show that, in the special case of symmetric main and eavesdropper channels, this coding technique achieves the secrecy capacity. This approach is also extended to the multiple-access channel with a degraded eavesdropper where a nontrivial achievable secrecy region is established. This polar coding method is then utilized in the proposed key agreement protocol, where the secure coding per block is used to create an advantage for the legitimate nodes over the eavesdropper, which is then turned into a private key via the privacy amplification module.

This paper studies the achievable secure rate per source-destination pair in wireless networks. First, a path loss model is considered, where the legitimate and eavesdropper nodes are assumed to be placed according to Poisson point processes with intensities λ and λe, respectively. It is shown that, as long as λe/λ =o((logn)-2), almost all of the nodes achieve a perfectly secure rate of Ω(1/√n) for the extended and dense network models. Therefore, under these assumptions, securing the network does not entail a loss in the per-node throughput. The achievability argument is based on a novel multihop forwarding scheme where randomization is added in every hop to ensure maximal ambiguity at the eavesdropper(s). Second, an ergodic fading model withnsource-destination pairs and neeavesdroppers is considered. Employing the ergodic interference alignment scheme with an appropriate secrecy precoding, each user is shown to achieve a constant positive secret rate for sufficiently largen. Remarkably, the scheme does not require eavesdropper CSI (only the statistical knowledge is assumed) and the secure throughput per node increases as we add more legitimate users to the network in this setting. Finally, the effect of eavesdropper collusion on the performance of the proposed schemes is characterized.

A coding problem, over a slotted system, is introduced where the sender has to transmit one out of several packets to the receiver, but learns the request only at the beginning of each slot with prior statistical information about which packet is needed at the receiver. There is an associated cost of sending bits at each slot, and the goal is to minimize the expected cost of the communication. A proactive coding scheme is proposed, where the source proactively communicates with the receiver before the receiver requests the message. This way, by designing a cost optimal side information at the receiver, the scheme is able to minimize the expected cost of the communication. Numerical results are provided demonstrating the gains obtained by proactive coding over the conventional coding technique.

Cognitive broadcast channel, where two multiantenna transmitters communicate with their respective receivers, is considered. One of the transmitters is said to be cognitive (secondary) as it is assumed to know the messages of the other (primary) transmitter non-causally. The goal is to design cooperative schemes between the two transmitters, which impose only minimal changes to the primary broadcast channel (compared to the non-cognitive scenario). Towards this end, an achievable scheme is provided under which both intra cell and inter cell interferences at the primary receivers are aligned. The interference at the secondary receivers, on the other hand, is canceled by dirty paper coding. The corresponding achievable region and an outer bound region are provided in terms of the degrees of freedom (DoF) metric. Special cases shows the optimality of the proposed scheme in the high SNR regime for those cases. We also illustrate the advantage of the cognitive cooperation over the non-cognitive system by proving that the achieved sum DoF is strictly larger than the non-cognitive case.

Downlink communication in a cellular network with a cognitive (secondary) cell is considered. In our model, the base station of the cognitive cell knows the messages of the other cell non-causally. We propose a new interference cancellation technique that zero forces the intra-cell interference in the primary cell by the help of the cognitive base station. In addition, as the primary messages are known at the cognitive base station, the interference caused by the primary base station on the secondary users are canceled using dirty paper coding (DPC). Moreover, we provide an outer bound on the achievable degrees of freedom (DoF) region and show that for some special cases the proposed signaling scheme is sum DoF optimal for the considered system when the cognitive cell operates at its maximum sum DoF. The benefit of the cognitive paradigm is also established using the derived outer-bound and showing that the achieved sum DoF is strictly larger than the case when cognitive message sharing is unavailable.

This paper investigates the fundamental performance limits of the two-user interference channel in the presence of an external eavesdropper. In this setting, we construct an inner bound, to the secrecy capacity region, based on the idea of cooperative encoding in which the two users cooperatively design their randomized codebooks and jointly optimize their channel prefixing distributions. Our achievability scheme also utilizes message-splitting in order to allow for partial decoding of the interference at the nonintended receiver. Outer bounds are then derived and used to establish the optimality of the proposed scheme in certain cases. In the Gaussian case, the previously proposed cooperative jamming and noise-forwarding techniques are shown to be special cases of our proposed approach. Overall, our results provide structural insights on how the interference can be exploited to increase the secrecy capacity of wireless networks.

This paper studies the frequency/time selectiveK-user Gaussian interference channel with secrecy constraints. Two distinct models, namely the interference channel with confidential messages and the interference channel with an external eavesdropper, are analyzed. The key difference between the two models is the lack of channel state information (CSI) of the external eavesdropper. Using interference alignment along with secrecy precoding, it is shown that each user can achieve non-zero secure degrees of freedom (DoF) for both cases. More precisely, the proposed coding scheme achieves [(K-2)/(2K-2)] secure DoF with probability one per user in the confidential messages model. For the external eavesdropper scenario, on the other hand, it is shown that each user can achieve [(K-2)/(2K)] secure DoF in the ergodic setting. Remarkably, these results establish the positive impact of interference on the secrecy capacity region of wireless networks.

A secure communication game is considered for the cognitive channel with a confidential primary message, where the primary user is interested in maximizing its secure rate with lowest possible power consumption and the utility of the cognitive user is a weighted sum of the primary secrecy rate and the cognitive rate (corresponds to a spectrum law in favor of the legacy owners of the spectrum). An achievable rate region is derived for the channel with message splitting at the cognitive radio and noise forwarding. The game considers the case with no common message, but shows that even this limited scenario can still be beneficial. The established Nash Equilibrium (NE) shows that the cognitive user trades noise for bits. The results are also interesting in the sense that both users can benefit (by playing the distributed game) compared to their throughput resulting from the non-cooperative scenario.

Wyner's work on wiretap channels and the recent works on information theoretic security are based on random codes. Achieving information theoretical security with practical coding schemes is of definite interest. In this note, the attempt is to overcome this elusive task by employing the polar coding technique of Arikan. It is shown that polar codes achieve nontrivial perfect secrecy rates for binary-input degraded wiretap channels while enjoying their low encoding-decoding complexity. In the special case of symmetric main and eavesdropper channels, this coding technique achieves the secrecy capacity. Next, fading erasure wiretap channels are considered and a secret key agreement scheme is proposed, which requires only the statistical knowledge of the eavesdropper channel state information (CSI). The enabling factor is the creation of advantage over Eve, by blindly using the proposed scheme over each fading block, which is then exploited with privacy amplification techniques to generate secret keys.

In this paper, the delay limited secrecy capacity of the flat fading channel is investigated under two different assumptions on the available transmitter channel state information (CSI). The first scenario assumes perfect prior knowledge of both the main and eavesdropper channel gains. Here, upper and lower bounds on the secure delay limited capacity are derived and shown to be tight in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime (for a wide class of channel distributions). In the second scenario, only the main channel CSI is assumed to be available at the transmitter. Remarkably, under this assumption, we establish the achievability of non-zero secure rate (for a wide class of channel distributions) under a strict delay constraint. In the two cases, our achievability arguments are based on a novel two-stage approach that overcomes the secrecy outage phenomenon observed in earlier works.

We consider the discrete memoryless X channel, a communication model with two transmitters and two receivers in which every transmitter has a message for every receiver. We propose an achievable scheme, based on the message splitting and binning techniques, which results in the best inner bound on the capacity region of the X channel to date.

This paper considers the generalized cognitive radio channel where the secondary user is allowed to reuse the frequency during both the idle and active periods of the primary user, as long as the primary rate remains the same. In this setting, the optimal power allocation policy with single-input single-output (SISO) primary and secondary channels is explored. Interestingly, the offered gain resulting from the frequency reuse during the active periods of the spectrum is shown to disappear in both the low and high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regimes. We then argue that this drawback in the high SNR region can be avoided by equipping both the primary and secondary transmitters with multiple antennas. Finally, the scenario consisting of SISO primary and multi-input multi-output (MIMO) secondary channels is investigated. Here, a simple zero-forcing approach is shown to significantly outperform the celebrated decoding- forwarding-dirty paper coding strategy (especially in the high SNR regime).

This paper studies the K-user Gaussian interference channel with secrecy constraints. Two distinct network models, namely the interference channel with confidential messages and the one with an external eavesdropper, are analyzed. Using interference alignment along with secrecy pre-coding at each transmitter, it is shown that each user in the network can achieve non-zero secure Degrees of Freedoms (DoFs) in both scenarios. In particular, the proposed coding scheme achieves K−2/2K−2 secure DoFs for each user in the interference channel with confidential messages model, and K−2/2K secure DoFs in the case of an external eavesdropper. The fundamental difference between the two scenarios stems from the lack of channel state information (CSI) about the external eavesdropper. Remarkably, the results establish the positive impact of interference on the secrecy capacity of wireless networks.

This paper studies interference channels with security constraints. The existence of an external eavesdropper in a two-user interference channel is assumed, where the network users would like to secure their messages from the external eavesdropper. The cooperative binning and channel prefixing scheme is proposed for this system model which allows users to cooperatively add randomness to the channel in order to degrade the observations of the external eavesdropper. This scheme allows users to add randomness to the channel in two ways: 1) Users cooperate in their design of the binning codebooks, and 2) Users cooperatively exploit the channel prefixing technique. As an example, the channel prefixing technique is exploited in the Gaussian case to transmit a superposition signal consisting of binning codewords and independently generated noise samples. Gains obtained form the cooperative binning and channel prefixing scheme compared to the single user scenario reveals the positive effect of interference in increasing the network security. Remarkably, interference can be exploited to cooperatively add randomness into the network in order to enhance the security.

We consider the generalized cognitive radio channel where the secondary user is allowed to reuse the frequency during the active periods of the primary user, as long as the primary rate remains the same. In this setting, the optimal power allocation policy with a single antenna secondary transmitter (and receiver) is explored. Interestingly, we show that the offered gain resulting from the frequency reuse during the active periods of the spectrum disappears in both the low and high signal-to- noise ratio (SNR) regimes. This drawback, however, is shown to disappear with multi-antenna nodes by using simple zero-forcing strategies at both ends of the secondary channel.