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1. LTE Spectrum Sharing Research Testbed: Integrated Hardware, Software, Network and Data

   https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1145/3131473.3131484  

   Marojevic, Vuk; Nealy, Randall; Reed, Jeffrey H. (October 2017, ACM WiNTECH 2017)

   This paper presents Virginia Tech’s wireless testbed supporting research on long-term evolution (LTE) signaling and radio frequency (RF) spectrum coexistence. LTE is continuously refined and new features released. As the communications contexts for LTE expand, new research problems arise and include operation in harsh RF signaling environments and coexistence with other radios. Our testbed provides an integrated research tool for investigating these and other research problems; it allows analyzing the severity of the problem, designing and rapidly prototyping solutions, and assessing them with standard-compliant equipment and test procedures. The modular testbed integrates general-purpose software-defined radio hardware, LTE-specific test equipment, RF components, free open-source and commercial LTE software, a configurable RF network and recorded radar waveform samples. It supports RF channel emulated and over-the-air radiated modes. The testbed can be remotely accessed and configured. An RF switching network allows for designing many different experiments that can involve a variety of real and virtual radios with support for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna operation. We present the testbed, the research it has enabled and some valuable lessons that we learned and that may help designing, developing, and operating future wireless testbeds. 

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2. Performance Analysis of a Mission-Critical Portable LTE System in Targeted RF Interference

   Marojevic, Vuk; Rao, Raghunandan (September 2017, IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC) Fall, 2017)

   Mission-critical wireless networks are being upgraded to 4G long-term evolution (LTE). As opposed to capacity, these networks require very high reliability and security as well as easy deployment and operation in the field. Wireless communication systems have been vulnerable to jamming, spoofing and other radio frequency attacks since the early days of analog systems. Although wireless systems have evolved, important security and reliability concerns still exist. This paper presents our methodology and results for testing 4G LTE operating in harsh signaling environments. We use software-defined radio technology and open-source software to develop a fully configurable protocol-aware interference waveform. We define several test cases that target the entire LTE signal or part of it to evaluate the performance of a mission-critical production LTE system. Our experimental results show that synchronization signal interference in LTE causes significant throughput degradation at low interference power. By dynamically evaluating the performance measurement counters, the k-nearest neighbor classification method can detect the specific RF signaling attack to aid in effective mitigation. 

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3. Demo: Spectrum Access System on Cognitive Radio Network Testbed

   Kikamaze, Shem; Marojevic, Vuk; Dietrich, Carl (October 2017, ACM WiNTECH)

   Radio frequency (RF) spectrum is transitioning from exclusive licensed to shared use in many bands. We demonstrate our design and implementation of a spectrum access system (SAS), which allows centrally coordinated access to shared spectrum. It shows how resources are requested by the radios and how the SAS tracks spectrum occupation and grants or denies access to requesting nodes. The open-source software framework is readily installed on Virginia Tech’s cognitive radio network (CORNET) testbed, a remotely-accessible wireless research platform of large scale. 

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4. VET5G: A Virtual End-to-End Testbed for 5G Network Security Experimentation

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3546096.3546111  

   Wen, Zhixin; Pacherkar, Harsh Sanjay; Yan, Guanhua (August 2022, The 15th Workshop on Cyber Security Experimentation and Test)

   As 5G networks are gradually rolled out worldwide, it is important to ensure that their network infrastructures are resilient against malicious attacks. This work presents VET5G, a new virtual end-to-end testbed for 5G network security research experiments or training activities such as Capture-The-Flag competitions. The distinguishing features of VET5G include a home-grown 5G core network emulator written in Rust to ensure memory and thread safety, integration of OpenAirInterface’s Radio Access Network emulator and the official Android emulator to achieve full end-to-end 5G network emulation, inclusion of a reference P4 software switch to assist with prototyping of defense mechanisms for 5G data planes, implementation of Python APIs for easy 5G network experimentation, and adoption of JupyterHub to support multi-user experimentation. In our experiments we demonstrate how to use VET5G for two attack scenarios in 5G networks as well as its performance when it is used in a 5G hacking project for a Mobile Systems Security course. 

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5. Cross-Layer Band Selection and Routing Design for Diverse Band-Aware DSA Networks

   https://doi.org/10.1109/GLOBECOM42002.2020.9322500  

   Upadhyaya, Pratheek S.; Shah, Vijay K.; Reed, Jeffrey H. (December 2020, GLOBECOM 2020 - 2020 IEEE Global Communications Conference, 2020)

   As several new spectrum bands are opening up for shared use, a new paradigm of Diverse Band-aware Dynamic Spectrum Access (d-DSA) has emerged. d-DSA equips a secondary device with software defined radios (SDRs) and utilize whitespaces (or idle channels) in multiple bands, including but not limited to TV, LTE, Citizen Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), unlicensed ISM. In this paper, we propose a decentralized, online multi-agent reinforcement learning based cross-layer BAnd selection and Routing Design (BARD) for such d-DSA networks. BARD not only harnesses whitespaces in multiple spectrum bands, but also accounts for unique electro-magnetic characteristics of those bands to maximize the desired quality of service (QoS) requirements of heterogeneous message packets; while also ensuring no harmful interference to the primary users in the utilized band. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that BARD outperforms the baseline dDSAaR algorithm in terms of message delivery ratio, however, at a relatively higher network latency, for varying number of primary and secondary users. Furthermore, BARD greatly outperforms its single-band DSA variants in terms of both the metrics in all considered scenarios. 

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