<p dir="ltr">With the increasing availability of inexpensive computing power in wireless radio network nodes, machine learning based models are being deployed in operations that traditionally relied on rule-based or statistical methods. Contemporary high bandwidth networks enable easy availability of significant amounts of training data in a comparatively short time, aiding in the development of better deep learning models. Specialized deep learning models developed for wireless networks have been shown to consistently outperform traditional methods in a variety of wireless network applications.</p><p><br></p><p dir="ltr">We aim to address some of the unique challenges inherent in the wireless radio communication domain. Firstly, as data is transmitted over the air, data privacy and adversarial attacks pose heightened risks. Secondly, due to the volume of data and the time-sensitive nature of the processing that is required, the speed of the machine learning model becomes a significant factor, often necessitating operation within a latency constraint. Thirdly, the impact of diverse and time-varying wireless environments means that any machine learning model also needs to be generalizable. The increasing computing power present in wireless nodes provides an opportunity to offload some of the deep learning to the edge, which also impacts data privacy.</p><p><br></p><p dir="ltr">Towards this goal, we work on deep learning methods that operate along different aspects of a wireless network—on network packets, error prediction, modulation classification, and channel estimation—and are able to operate within the latency constraint, while simultaneously providing better privacy and security. After proposing solutions that work in a traditional centralized learning environment, we explore edge learning paradigms where the learning happens in distributed nodes.</p>

The rampant growth of the Internet has been coupled with an equivalent growth in cyber crime over the Internet. With our increased reliance on the Internet for commerce, social networking, information acquisition, and information exchange, intruders have found financial, political, and military motives for their actions. Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDSs) intercept the traffic at an organization’s periphery and try to detect intrusion attempts. Signature-based NIDSs compare the packet to a signature database consisting of known attacks and malicious packet fingerprints. The signatures use regular expressions to model these intrusion activities. This thesis presents a memory efficient pattern matching system for the class of regular expressions appearing frequently in the NIDS signatures. Proposed Cascaded Automata Architecture is based on two stage automata. The first stage recognizes the sub-strings and character classes present in the regular expression. The second stage consumes symbol generated by the first stage upon receiving input traffic symbols. The basic idea is to utilize the research done on string matching problem for regular expression pattern matching. We formally model the class of regular expressions mostly found in NIDS signatures. The challenges involved in using string matching algorithms for regular expression matching has been presented. We introduce length-bound transitions, counter-based states, and associated counter arrays in the second stage automata to address these challenges. The system uses length information along with counter arrays to keep track of overlapped sub-strings and character class based transition. We present efficient implementation techniques for counter arrays. The evaluation of the architecture on practical expressions from Snort rule set showed compression in number of states between 50% to 85%. Because of its smaller memory footprint, our solution is suitable for both software based implementations on network chips as well as FPGA based designs.