The security of wireless networks and systems is becoming increasingly important as wireless devices are more and more ubiquitous nowadays. The wireless channel exhibits the spatial uncorrelation property, which is that the characteristics of a wireless channel become uncorrelated every half carrier wavelength over distance. This property has prompted an emerging research area that utilizes wireless channel characteristics to achieve location distinction, to detect location changes or facilitate authentication of wireless users, and to establish shared secret key between legitimate communicators. This dissertation includes two work toward the security improvement of existing wireless networks and systems. With the discovered channel camouflage and manipulation techniques in wireless networks, traditional wireless channel based authentication or secure communication systems are broke or renovated. The first work proposes a new attack against all existing location distinction approaches that are built on this spatial uncorrelation property. With the discovered attack, an attacker can easily bypass authentication or camouflage location changes by creating an artificial wireless channel similar to a legitimate one. This dissertation also presents a detection technique that utilizes an auxiliary receiver or antenna to identify these fake channels. On the other hand, the second work shows that the legitimate users can also benefit from constructing these artificial wireless channels and apply them in a novel wireless key establishment. The proposed technique enables the transmitter to specify any content as the secret key and securely deliver it to the target receiver, and meanwhile removes the reconciliation process which is necessary for conventional wireless key establishment schemes.

Over the years, the Internet has become increasingly popular and people's dependence on it has increased dramatically. Whether it be to communicate to someone across the world, find blueprints, or check sports scores, the Internet has become a necessary resource for everyone. In emergency situations, this need increases further. After the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon, it took several days to restore communications. This is not an acceptable time frame when people's lives are at stake. Virginia Tech's Center for Wireless Telecommunication has developed a prototype of a rapidly deployable high bandwidth wireless communication system at 28 GHz (Local Multipoint Distribution Service frequency). This system provides a large bandwidth radio link to a disaster zone up to 5 km away and puts Ethernet speeds and 802.11 accesses to users within hours. Because of the possible variability in locations that the system can be deployed, it is necessary to find the most useable channel at the site as quickly as possible. In addition to 28GHz radio links, the system also has a built-in channel sounder that measures and captures the channel impulse response of the current channel. Until now, there has been limited research on the relationship between the channel impulse response and the usability of the channel quantified using bit error rate. This thesis examines several different channels captured by CWT's channel sounder and simulates the BER using Cadence's SPW with time-domain models of the channels. This thesis goes on further to show that BER greatly depends on the channel impulse response and the symbol rate. / Master of Science

In this thesis, we proposed a precoding scheme for semi-blind channel estimation in amplify-and-forward (AF) multipath two-way relay networks (TWRN), where two terminals exchange their information through multi-relays. The precoding scheme, which diminishes computational complexity of semi-blind channel estimator, is used to distinguish received signal at both terminals from multi-relays. By applying a non-redundant linear precoding scheme at multi-relays, we proposed a semi-blind channel estimation to estimate the channel impulse response (CIR) of direct link and the cascaded source-relay-terminal links. Firstly, semi-blind channel estimation adopts least-square (LS) estimation to find the CIR of direct link between both terminals using a smaller number of training symbols. Secondly, the CIR of the cascaded source-relay-terminal links are obtained through second-order statistics (SOS) of received signals at both terminals. Consequently, the proposed scheme can effectively reduce the computational complexity and enhance the spectral efficiency in overall system. Simulation results corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

In this thesis study, joint frequency offset and channel estimation methods for single-input single-output (SISO) systems are examined. The performance of maximum likelihood estimate of the parameters are studied for different training sequences. Conventionally training sequences are designed solely for the channel estimation purpose. We present a numerical comparison of different training sequences for the joint estimation problem. The performance comparisons are made in terms of mean square estimation error (MSE) versus SNR and MSE versus the total training energy metrics. A novel estimation scheme using complementary sequences have been proposed and compared with existing schemes. The proposed scheme presents a lower estimation error than the others in almost all numerical simulations. The thesis also includes an extension for the joint channel-frequency offset estimation problem to the multi-input multi-output systems and a brief discussion for multiple frequency offset case is also given.