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Abstract Cyber‐physical systems (CPS) integrate control, sensing, and processing into interconnected physical components to support applications within transportation, energy, healthcare, environment, and various other areas. Secure and reliable wireless communication between devices is necessary to enable the widespread adoption of these emerging technologies. Cyber‐physical systems devices must be protected against active threats, such as Radio Frequency (RF) Jammers, which intentionally disrupt communication links. Jamming detection and mitigation techniques must be evaluated extensively to validate algorithms prior to full implementation. Challenges related to obtaining zoning permits, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) pilot certification for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) licencing lead to evaluation limited to simulation‐based or simplistic, non‐representative hardware experimentation. A site‐specific ray‐tracing emulation framework is presented to provide a realistic evaluation of communication devices under RF jamming attacks in complex scenarios involving mobility, vehicular, and UAV systems. System architecture and capabilities are provided for the devices under test, real‐world jamming adversaries, channel modelling, and channel emulation. Case studies are provided to demonstrate the use of the framework for different applications and jamming threats. The experimental results illustrate the benefit of the ray‐tracing emulation system for conducting complex wireless communication studies under the presence of RF jamming.
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Creating RF Scenarios for Large-scale, Real-time Wireless Channel Emulators
Recent years have seen the introduction of large- scale platforms for experimental wireless research. These platforms, which include testbeds like those of the PAWR program and emulators like Colosseum, allow researchers to prototype and test their solutions in a sound yet realistic wireless environment before actual deployment. Emulators, in particular, enable wire- less experiments that are not site-specific as those on real testbeds. Researchers can choose among different radio frequency (RF) scenarios for real-time emulation of a vast variety of different situations, with different numbers of users, RF bandwidth, antenna counts, hardware requirements, etc. Although very powerful, in that they can emulate virtually any real-world deployment, emulated scenarios are only as useful as how accurately they can capture the targeted wireless channel and environment. Achieving emulation accuracy is particularly challenging, especially for experiments at scale for which emulators require considerable amounts of computational resources. In this paper we propose a framework to create RF scenarios for emulators like Colosseum from rich forms of inputs, like those obtained by measurements through radio equipment or via software (e.g., ray-tracers and electromagnetic field solvers). Our framework optimally scales down the large set of RF data in input to the fewer parameters allowed by the emulator by using efficient clustering techniques and channel impulse response re-sampling. We showcase our method by generating wireless scenarios for Colosseum by using Remcom’s Wireless InSite, a commercial-grade ray-tracer that produces key characteristics of the wireless channel. Examples are provided for line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight scenarios on portions of the Northeastern University main campus.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1925601
- PAR ID:
- 10298726
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE MedComNet 2021
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1-8
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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