Pablo Piantanida

Secrecy Degrees of Freedom of MIMO Broadcast Channels With Delayed CSIT

The degrees of freedom (DoF) of the two-user Gaussian multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) broadcast channel with confidential messages is studied under the assumption that delayed channel state information (CSI) is available at the transmitter. We characterize the optimal secrecy DoF (SDoF) region and show that it can be achieved by a simple artificial noise alignment scheme. The proposed scheme sends the confidential messages superposed with the artificial noise over several time slots. Exploiting delayed CSI, the transmitter aligns the transmit signal in such a way that the useful message can be extracted at the intended receiver but is completely drowned by the artificial noise at the unintended receiver. The proposed scheme can be regarded as a nontrivial extension of Maddah-Ali Tse scheme and enables us to quantify the resource overhead, or equivalently the DoF loss, to be paid for the secure communications.

Secure Multiterminal Source Coding With Side Information at the Eavesdropper

The problem of secure multiterminal source coding with side information at the eavesdropper is investigated. This scenario consists of a main encoder (referred to as Alice) that wishes to compress a single source but simultaneously satisfying the desired requirements on the distortion level at a legitimate receiver (referred to as Bob) and the equivocation rate-average uncertainty-at an eavesdropper (referred to as Eve). It is further assumed the presence of a (public) rate-limited link between Alice and Bob. In this setting, Eve perfectly observes the information bits sent by Alice to Bob and has also access to a correlated source which can be used as side information. A second encoder (referred to as Charlie) helps Bob in estimating Alices source by sending a compressed version of its own correlated observation via a (private) rate-limited link, which is only observed by Bob. For instance, the problem at hands can be seen as the unification between the Berger-Tung and the secure source coding setups. Inner and outer bounds on the so-called rate-distortion-equivocation region are derived. The inner region turns to be tight for two cases: 1) uncoded side information at Bob and 2) lossless reconstruction of both sources at Bob-secure distributed lossless compression. Application examples to secure lossy source coding of Gaussian and binary sources in the presence of Gaussian and binary/ternary (respectively) side informations are also considered. Optimal coding schemes are characterized for some cases of interest where the statistical differences between the side information at the decoders and the presence of a nonzero distortion at Bob can be fully exploited to guarantee secrecy.

On the optimality of uncoded cache placement

Caching is an effective way to reduce peak-hour network traffic congestion by storing some contents at users local cache. Maddah-Ali and Niesen (MAN) initiated a fundamental study of caching systems by proposing a scheme (with uncoded cache placement and linear network coding delivery) that is provably optimal to within a factor 4.7. In this paper, when the cache contents and the user demands are fixed, we connect the caching problem to an index coding problem and show the optimality of the MAN scheme under the conditions that (i) the cache placement phase is restricted to be uncoded (i.e, pieces of the files can only copied into the users cache), and (ii) the number of users is no more than the number of files. As a consequence, further improvements to the MAN scheme are only possible through the use of coded cache placement.

Bounds on the Capacity of the Relay Channel With Noncausal State at the Source

We consider a three-terminal state-dependent relay channel with the channel state available noncausally at only the source. Such a model may be of interest for node cooperation in the framework of cognition, i.e., collaborative signal transmission involving cognitive and noncognitive radios. We study the capacity of this communication model. One principal problem is caused by the relays not knowing the channel state. For the discrete memoryless (DM) model, we establish two lower bounds and an upper bound on channel capacity. The first lower bound is obtained by a coding scheme in which the source describes the state of the channel to the relay and destination, which then exploit the gained description for a better communication of the sources information message. The coding scheme for the second lower bound remedies the relays not knowing the states of the channel by first computing, at the source, the appropriate input that the relay would send had the relay known the states of the channel, and then transmitting this appropriate input to the relay. The relay simply guesses the sent input and sends it in the next block. The upper bound accounts for not knowing the state at the relay and destination. For the general Gaussian model, we derive lower bounds on the channel capacity by exploiting ideas in the spirit of those we use for the DM model; and we show that these bounds are optimal for small and large noise at the relay irrespective to the strength of the interference. Furthermore, we also consider a relay model with orthogonal channels from the source to the relay and from the source and relay to the destination in which the source input component that is heard by the relay does not depend on the channel states. We establish a better upper bound for both DM and Gaussian cases and we also characterize the capacity in a number of special cases.

On Fundamental Trade-offs of Device-to-Device Communications in Large Wireless Networks

This paper studies the gains, in terms of served requests, attainable through out-of-band device-to-device (D2D) video exchanges in large cellular networks. A stochastic framework, in which users are clustered to exchange videos, is introduced, considering several aspects of this problem, i.e., the video caching policy, user matching for exchanges, and aspects regarding scheduling and transmissions. A family of admissible protocols is introduced: in each protocol the users are clustered by means of a hard-core point process and, within the clusters, video exchanges take place. Two metrics, quantifying the “local” and “global” fractions of video requests served through D2D are defined, and relevant trade-off regions involving these metrics, as well as quality-of-service constraints, are identified. A simple communication strategy is proposed and analyzed to obtain inner bounds to the trade-off regions and to draw conclusions on the performance attainable through D2D. To this end, the analysis of the time-varying interference that the nodes experience and the tight approximations of its Laplace transform are derived.

Secure lossy source coding with side information at the decoders

This paper investigates the problem of secure lossy source coding in the presence of an eavesdropper with arbitrary correlated side informations at the legitimate decoder (referred to as Bob) and the eavesdropper (referred to as Eve). This scenario consists of an encoder that wishes to compress a source to satisfy the desired requirements on: (i) the distortion level at Bob and (ii) the equivocation rate at Eve. It is assumed that the decoders have access to correlated sources as side information. For instance, this problem can be seen as a generalization of the well-known Wyner-Ziv problem taking into account the security requirements. A complete characterization of the rate-distortion-equivocation region for the case of arbitrary correlated side informations at the decoders is derived. Several special cases of interest and an application example to secure lossy source coding of binary sources in the presence of binary and ternary side informations are also considered. It is shown that the statistical differences between the side information at the decoders and the presence of non-zero distortion at the legitimate decoder can be useful in terms of secrecy. Applications of these results arise in a variety of distributed sensor network scenarios.

On caching with more users than files

Caching is an efficient way to reduce peak hour network traffic congestion by storing some content at the users cache without knowledge of later demands. Recently, Maddah-Ali and Niesen proposed a two-phase, placement and delivery phase, coded caching strategy for centralized systems (where coordination among users is possible in the placement phase), and for decentralized systems. This paper investigates the same setup under the assumption that the number of users is larger than the number of files. By using the same uncoded placement strategy of Maddah-Ali and Niesen, a novel coded delivery strategy is proposed to profit from the multicasting opportunities that arise because a file may be demanded by multiple users. The proposed delivery method is proved to be optimal under the constraint of uncoded cache placement for centralized systems with two files. Moreover it is shown to outperform known caching strategies for both centralized and decentralized systems.

Multiple access channel with states known noncausally at one encoder and only strictly causally at the other encoder

We consider a two-user state-dependent multiaccess channel in which the states of the channel are known non-causally to one of the encoders and only strictly causally to the other encoder. Both encoders transmit a common message and, in addition, the encoder that knows the states non-causally transmits an individual message. We study the capacity region of this communication model. In the discrete memoryless case, we establish inner and outer bounds on the capacity region. Although the encoder that sends both messages knows the states fully, we show that the strictly causal knowledge of these states at the other encoder can be beneficial for this encoder, and in general enlarges the capacity region. Furthermore, we find an explicit characterization of the capacity in the case in which the two encoders transmit only the common message. In the Gaussian case, we characterize the capacity region for the model with individual message as well. Our converse proof in this case shows that, for this model, strictly causal knowledge of the state at one of the encoders does not increase capacity if the other is informed non-causally, a result which sheds more light on the utility of conveying a compressed version of the state to the decoder in recent results by Lapidoth and Steinberg on a multiacess model with only strictly causal state at both encoders and independent messages.

Bounds on the capacity of the relay channel with noncausal state information at source

We consider a three-terminal state-dependent relay channel with the channel state available non-causally at only the source. Such a model may be of interest for node cooperation in the framework of cognition, i.e., collaborative signal transmission involving cognitive and non-cognitive radios. We study the capacity of this communication model. One principal problem in this setup is caused by the relays not knowing the channel state. In the discrete memoryless (DM) case, we establish lower bounds on channel capacity. For the Gaussian case, we derive lower and upper bounds on the channel capacity. The upper bound is strictly better than the cut-set upper bound. We show that one of the developed lower bounds comes close to the upper bound, asymptotically, for certain ranges of rates.

On the Secrecy Degrees of Freedom of the Multiantenna Block Fading Wiretap Channels

We consider a practical scenario of the Gaussian multiantenna wiretap channel where a transmitter with no channel state information wishes to send a confidential message to its legitimate receiver in the presence of an eavesdropper. It has been known that the secrecy capacity of such a channel does not scale with signal-to-noise ratio under general conditions. Taking into account the different temporal fading structures at the legitimate receiver and the eavesdropper, we characterize lower and upper bounds on the secrecy degrees of freedom (s.d.o.f.) of the channel at hand. Our results show that a positive s.d.o.f. can be ensured whenever two receivers experience the asynchronous variation. Remarkably, simple linear precoding schemes provide the optimal s.d.o.f. in most cases of interest by aligning either the confidential signal at the eavesdropper or the artificial noise at the legitimate receiver.