Cette thèse de doctorat traite du « modèle de perceptron sphérique », un modèle simple et exactement soluble qui présente un comportement visqueux et d'encombrement qui a été généralisé aux valeurs négatives du paramètre de produit scalaire κ. Le problème classique d'apprentissage par machine qui consiste en la classification des motifs aléatoires par le perceptron fait partie des problèmes de satisfaction des contraintes (PSC) convexes. Même quand le « paramètre de stabilité » du modèle κ devient négatif, le problème reste toujours correctement posé et peut être interprété comme le problème de placement des particules sur une sphère N-dimensionnelle en évitant les obstacles placés au hasard. Dans ce cas, le PSC correspondant n'est pas convexe. Cette thèse étudie le problème en détail dans le domaine non convexe. Une étude systématique est rendue possible en faisant correspondre à un problème de satisfaction de contraintes un problème d'optimisation sur le même support, mais doté d'un Hamiltonien (fonction de coût) qui mesure les violations des contraintes en fonction de la configuration du système. Le lien entre le PSC aléatoire et la phénoménologie vitreuse en physique est bien connue et a été explorée en détail pour les modèles à variables discrètes. La présence de variables continues dans le modèle de perceptron (sphérique) nous permet de dévoiler, en PSC aléatoire, la transition caractéristique SAT/UNSAT où le système subit une transition du régime satisfaisable (dans lequel l'état fondamental possède une énergie nulle) à celui insatisfaisable (dans lequel l'état fondamental possède une énergie positive). Cette transition de phase peut également être interprétée comme une transition d'encombrement similaire à celles démontrées par les modèles des sphères sans friction. La simplicité du modèle étudié permet de trouver exactement son diagramme de phase à température zéro en fonction des deux paramètres de contrôle: la densité des obstacles et leur taille. Ainsi identifiée, la transition d'encombrement est complètement caractérisée dans le présent document. Sont également étudiées en détail de diverses phases vitreuses de caractère stable et marginal. / This thesis treats the «spherical perceptron model», a simple exactly solvable model for glassy behavior and jamming suitably generalized to negative values of scalar product parameter κ. The classical machine-learning problem of random pattern classification by the perceptron is a convex constraint satisfaction problem (CSP). Even when the «stability parameter» κ of the model becomes negative, the problem still make sense and can be interpreted as the problem of particles on an N-dimensional sphere trying to avoid randomly placed obstacles. In this case, the corresponding CSP is non-convex. This thesis studies the problem in detail in the non-convex domain. Systematic study is made possible by assigning to a constraint satisfaction problem its corresponding optimization version endowed with a Hamiltonian function (cost function) quantifying the violations of the constraints, as a function of the system's configuration. The connection between random CSP and glassy phenomenology in physics is well known and has been explored in detail for models with discrete variables. The presence of continuous variables in the (spherical) perceptron model enables us to unveil, in random CSP, the characteristic SAT/UNSAT transition where the system transits from the satisfiable regime (where the ground state has zero energy) to the unsatisfiable one (where the ground state energy is positive). This phase transition can also be interpreted as a jamming transition similar to the one that exhibit models with frictionless spheres. The simplicity of the considered model allows the exact determination of the zero temperature phase diagram as a function of the control parameters: the density of obstacles and their size. In the present thesis, the jamming transition thus identified is completely characterized and several glass phases of stable and marginal character are studied in detail.

Jamming' ist ein faszinierender, nicht vollständig verstandener Prozess in der Physik der weichen Materie. Zelluläres Jamming' tritt auch in biologischem Gewebe auf und muss sich im Fall von Krebszellen im Tumorgewebe aufgrund der dichten Packung der Zellen über der dichtesten Kugelpackung anders verhalten als die bekannten 'Jamming' Systeme. In meiner Dissertation skizziere ich wesentliche Ergebnisse zum Verständnis dieses neuen physikalischen Phänomens. Meine Erkenntnisse tragen dazu bei die Dichotomie zwischen den Theorien der dichteinduzierten und der forminduzierten 'Zelljamming' aufzulösen. Die gewonnenen Erkenntnisse weisen auf die Möglichkeit hin Krebszellformen und deren Zellkernformen als Tumormarker für die Metastasierung zu verwenden. Ich fand ein kritisches Skalierungsverhalten für die Dynamik der Neuanordnung von Zellen in der Nähe des Jamming-Übergangs, abhängig von der Zellform der Nachbarschaft. Dies ist der bisher stärkste Beweis dafür, dass die Zellformen als Kontrollparameter für das 'Zelljamming' fungieren können. Die Zellanzahldichte beeinflusst ebenfalls das 'Jamming', ihr Einfluss kann jedoch als eine Verlangsamung der Eigengeschwindigkeit der Zellen beschrieben werden. Eine hohe Zellanzahldichte allein würde also nur die Viskosität des Gewebes erhöhen und es nicht verfestigen. Darüber hinaus habe ich gezeigt, dass es in dicht gepackten dreidimensionalen Zellsphäroiden sowie in Primärtumorstücken einen mit der Zellform verbundenen 'Jamming'-Übergang gibt. Ich verbinde das 'Unjamming' von Zellen mit dem Fortschreiten des Krebses, indem ich zeigte, dass die Herunterregulierung des Adhäsionsmoleküls E-Cadherin, die ein typischer Schritt während der Krebentwicklung ist, einen 'Unjamming'-Übergang verursacht. Bei diesem 'Unjamming'-Übergang kommt es zu einem ausgeprägten Verlust der Kohäsion und einem reduzierten Volumenanteil der Zellen, was zeigt, dass das 'Zelljamming' einen hohen Volumenanteil erfordert.

This paper discusses culture jamming as the countercultural tool of our current mass media society and argues for a more holistic understanding of the concept in order to open up its subversive potential. Part of this holisitic approach involves emphasizing the role of remediation inherent in the concept. Thus, the aim of this paper is twofold: to elaborate the diverse techniques involved in culture jamming (as opposed to the common reductionist approaches to the concept) and, more importantly, to highlight the remediation elements imbedded in culture jamming practices. To accomplish this, the works of street artist Banksy are taken as a case study and analyzed to answer the following questions: In what ways do the works of street artist Banksy subvert or “jam” culture? And how does remediation come into play in these jamming practices?

The traditional picture of tissues, where they are treated as liquids defined by properties such as surface tension or viscosity has been redefined during the last few decades by the more fundamental question: under which conditions do tissues display liquid-like or solid-like behaviour? As a result, basic concepts arising from the treatment of tissues as solid matter, such as cellular jamming and glassy tissues, have shifted into the current focus of biophysical research. Here, we review recent works examining the phase states of tissue with an emphasis on jamming transitions in cancer. When metastasis occurs, cells gain the ability to leave the primary tumour and infiltrate other parts of the body. Recent studies have shown that a linkage between an unjamming transition and tumour progression indeed exists, which could be of importance when designing surgery and treatment approaches for cancer patients

A collision study is performed to compare the interference rejection characteristics of two spread spectrum receivers, one employing a sliding correlator and the other using a more sophisticated matched filter design. The testing involves using two similar transmitters, one acting a the jammer, to test the collision dynamics of each receiver. Packet data from both transmitters contain identical spreading codes. Data from the testing is analyzed and the receivers' jamming margin, capture, and process gain qualities are compared as to which system best optimizes a one-way channel. Motivation for the collision study stems from researching a one-way communication link for the Interactive Video Data Service ( IVDS ) project currently being developed by the Center for Wireless Telecommunications ( CWT ) at Virginia Tech. A novel retransmission technique has previously been developed which discusses the probability of packet collisions on the channel and uses a computer program to simulate the channel model. This thesis will provide more information as to what happens in packet collisions as well as determine which receiver type offers the greatest interference rejection. / Master of Science

Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) are vital tools for accurate navigation and timing for both civil and military use. Due to the low power of the GNSS signals, these systems are sensitive to interference attacks. For wideband GNSS jamming, adaptive antenna arrays are commonly used to suppress interference.  This thesis focuses on how distortions induced by adaptive antenna arrays can affect the performance of a GNSS receiver and how prone different beamforming algorithms are to suffer from such distortions. To investigate this, simulations in software have been performed for static scenarios with two different beamforming algorithms and four different antenna arrays. The results show that the method for interference suppression that uses constraints in direction and frequency achieves a higher signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio, more stable acquisition over the hemisphere, and less fluctuating code delay error than the method that only minimizes the power of the output signal.

No description available.

Jamming is an ongoing threat that plagues wireless communications in contested areas. Unfortunately, jamming complexity and sophistication will continue to increase over time. The traditional approach to addressing the jamming threat is to harden radios, such that they sacrifice communications performance for more advanced jamming protection. To provide an escape from this trend, we investigate the previously unexplored area of jammer exploitation. This dissertation develops the concept of antifragile communications, defined as the capability for a communications system to improve in performance due to a system stressor or harsh condition. Antifragility refers to systems that increase in capability, resilience, or robustness as a result of disorder (e.g., chaos, uncertainty, stress). An antifragile system is fundamentally different from one that is resilient (i.e., able to recover from failure) and robust (i.e., able to resist failure). We apply the concept of antifragility to wireless communications through several novel strategies that all involve exploiting a communications jammer. These strategies can provide an increase in throughput, efficiency, connectivity, or covertness, as a result of the jamming attack itself. Through analysis and simulation, we show that an antifragile gain is possible under a wide array of electronic warfare scenarios. Throughout this dissertation we provide guidelines for realizing these antifragile waveforms. Other major contributions of this dissertation include the development of a communications jamming taxonomy, feasibility study of reactive jamming in a SATCOM-type scenario, and a reinforcement learning-based reactive jamming mitigation strategy, for times when an antifragile approach is not practical. Most of the jammer exploitation strategies described in this dissertation fall under the category of jammer piggybacking, meaning the communications system turns the jammer into an unwitting relay. We study this jammer piggybacking approach under a variety of reactive jamming behaviors, with emphasis on the sense-and-transmit type. One piggybacking approach involves transmitting using a specialized FSK waveform, tailored to exploit a jammer that channelizes a block of spectrum and selectively jams active subchannels. To aid in analysis, we introduce a generalized model for reactive jamming, applicable to both repeater-based and sensing-based jamming behaviors. Despite being limited to electronic warfare scenarios, we hope that this work can pave the way for further research into antifragile communications. / Ph. D.

With the advent of ubiquitous computing and Internet of Things (IoT), potentially billions of devices will create a broad range of data services and applications, which will require the communication networks to efficiently manage the increasing complexity. Cognitive network has been envisioned as a new paradigm to address this challenge, which has the capability of reasoning, planning and learning by incorporating cutting edge technologies including knowledge representation, context awareness, network optimization and machine learning. Cognitive network spans over the entire communication system including the core network and wireless links across the entire protocol stack. Cognitive Radio Network (CRN) is a part of cognitive network over wireless links, which endeavors to better utilize the spectrum resources. Core network provides a reliable backend infrastructure to the entire communication system. However, the CR communication and core network infrastructure have attracted various security threats, which become increasingly severe in pace with the growing complexity and adversity of the modern Internet. The focus of this dissertation is to exploit the security vulnerabilities of the state-of-the-art cognitive communication systems, and to provide detection, mitigation and protection mechanisms to allow security enhanced cognitive communications including wireless communications in CRNs and wired communications in core networks. In order to provide secure and reliable communications in CRNs: emph{first}, we incorporate security mechanisms into fundamental CRN functions, such as secure spectrum sensing techniques that will ensure trustworthy reporting of spectrum reading. emph{Second}, as no security mechanism can completely prevent all potential threats from entering CRNs, we design a systematic passive monitoring framework, emph{SpecMonitor}, based on unsupervised machine learning methods to strategically monitor the network traffic and operations in order to detect abnormal and malicious behaviors. emph{Third}, highly capable cognitive radios allow more sophisticated reactive jamming attack, which imposes a serious threat to CR communications. By exploiting MIMO interference cancellation techniques, we propose jamming resilient CR communication mechanisms to survive in the presence of reactive jammers. Finally, we focus on protecting the core network from botnet threats by applying cognitive technologies to detect network-wide Peer-to-Peer (P2P) botnets, which leads to the design of a data-driven botnet detection system, called emph{PeerClean}. In all the four research thrusts, we present thorough security analysis, extensive simulations and testbed evaluations based on real-world implementations. Our results demonstrate that the proposed defense mechanisms can effectively and efficiently counteract sophisticated yet powerful attacks. / Ph. D.

This dissertation addresses physical layer security concerns, resiliency of the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and the Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) systems; the `de-facto' air-interface of most wireless broadband standards including LTE and WiMAX. The major contributions of this dissertation are: 1) developing jamming taxonomy, 2) proposing OFDM and MIMO equalization jamming attacks and countermeasures, 3) developing antijam (AJ) MIMO systems, and 4) designing null space projected overlapped-MIMO radar waveform for spectrum sharing between radar and communications system. First, we consider OFDM systems under various jamming attacks. Previous research is focused on jamming OFDM data transmissions. We focus on energy efficient attacks that can disrupt communication severely by exploiting the knowledge of target waveform. Specifically, these attacks seek to manipulate information used by the equalization algorithm to cause errors to a significant number of symbols, i.e., pilot tones jamming and nulling. Potential countermeasures are presented in an attempt to make OFDM waveform robust and resilient. The threats were mitigated by randomizing the location and value of pilot tones, causing the optimal attack to devolve into barrage jamming. We also address the security aspects of MIMO systems in this dissertation. All MIMO systems need a method to estimate and equalize channel, whether through channel reciprocity or sounding. Most OFDM-based MIMO systems use sounding via pilot tones. Like OFDM attacks, this research introduces MIMO channel sounding attack, which attempts to manipulate pilot tones to skew the channel state information (CSI) at the receiver. We describe methods of designing AJ MIMO system. The key insight is that many of the theoretical concepts learned from transmit beamforming and interference alignment (IA) in MIMO systems can be applied to the field of AJ and robust communications in the presence of jammers. We consider a realistic jamming scenario and provide a `receiver-only' and a transmitter `precoding' technique that allow a pair of two-antenna transceivers to communicate while being jammed by a malicious non-cooperative single-antenna adversary. Finally, we consider designing a collocated MIMO radar waveform, which employs a new MIMO architecture where antenna arrays are allowed to overlap. This overlapped-MIMO radar poses many advantages including superior beampattern and improvement in SNR gain. We combine this radar architecture with a projection-based algorithm that allows the radar waveform to project onto the null space of the interference channel of MIMO communications system, thus enabling the coexistence of radar and communications system. / Ph. D.