SpecEES: Collaborative Research: A Spectrum-Efficient and Secure Communication Architecture for Smart Cities

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Internet-of-things (IoT)-based smart cities can have a profound impact on transportation, healthcare, energy, education, social life, public safety, and many other sectors. The future of smart cities depends on spectrum efficient and secure communication techniques to interact with ubiquitous IoT devices. The proposed research, if successful, can be a catalyst for developing and deploying smart city applications, thus having potentially enormous impact on the U.S. economy by fostering job growth related to IoT-based smart cities. The proposed research will also enrich the scientific knowledge related to network and distributed system security, wireless networking, and mobile computing. A substantial portion of project deliverables will be made available publicly online in the form of talks, publications, datasets, and open-source code. The broader impact of this research will be further amplified by (i) improving curriculum development with enhanced course projects; (ii) disseminating research results through high-profile tutorials and open-source sites; and (iii) raising interest in technology among K-12 students and under-represented minority groups through open houses. In addition, the investigators aim to enhance undergraduate research experience through senior design projects and Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) supplements.In this project, two closely related research thrusts will be pursued: (i) spectrum-efficient communications; and (ii) secure and privacy-preserving communications. In the first research thrust, the project will leverage the unique physical-layer features among heterogeneous wireless communication technologies for concurrent communication to significantly improve spectrum efficiency in the unlicensed ISM band. In the second research thrust, the project will develop physical-layer authentication techniques, in which each IoT device superimposes some cryptographic, unforgeable information onto physical-layer signals for the IoT gateway to detect and verify before demodulating and decoding the signals. Working for both uplink and downlink transmissions, the proposed techniques can dramatically improve the resilience of the IoT system to illegitimate traffic.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.