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In this paper, we present a detailed framework to analyze the evolution of the random topology of a time-varying wireless network via the information theoretic notion of entropy rate. We consider a propagation channel varying over time with random node positions in a closed space and Rayleigh fading affecting the connections between nodes. The existence of an edge between two nodes at given locations is modeled by a Markov chain, enabling memory effects in network dynamics. We then derive a lower and an upper bound on the entropy rate of the spatiotemporal network. The entropy rate measures the shortest per-step description of the stationary stochastic process defining the state of the wireless system and depends both on the maximum Doppler shift and the path loss exponent. It characterizes the topological uncertainty of the wireless network and quantifies how quickly the underlying topology is varying with time., Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), in press, 2018

In a wide range of complex networks, the links between the nodes are temporal and may sporadically appear and disappear. This temporality is fundamental to analyze the formation of paths within such networks. Moreover, the presence of the links between the nodes is a random process induced by nature in many real-world networks. In this paper, we study random temporal networks at a microscopic level and formulate the \emph{probability of accessibility} from a node \emph{i} to a node \emph{j} after a certain number of discrete time units $T$. While solving the original problem is computationally intractable, we provide an upper and two lower bounds on this probability for a very general case with arbitrary time-varying probabilities of links' existence. Moreover, for a special case where the links have identical probabilities across the network at each time slot, we obtain the exact probability of accessibility between any two nodes. Finally, we discuss scenarios where the information regarding the presence and absence of links is initially available in the form of time duration (of presence or absence intervals) continuous probability distributions rather than discrete probabilities over time slots. We provide a method for transforming such distributions to discrete probabilities which enables us to apply the given bounds in this paper to a broader range of problem settings.

We propose an iterative decoding method, which we call turbo-CS, for the reception of concatenated source-channel encoded sparse signals transmitted over an AWGN channel. The turbo-CS encoder applies 1-bit compressed sensing as a source encoder concatenated serially with a convolutional channel encoder. At the turbo-CS decoder, an iterative joint source-channel decoding method is proposed for signal reconstruction. We analyze, for the first time, the convergence of turbo-CS decoder by determining an EXIT chart of the constituent decoders. We modify the soft-outputs of the decoder to improve the signal reconstruction performance of turbo-CS decoder. For a fixed signal reconstruction performance RSNR of 10 dB, we achieve more than 5 dB of improvement in the channel SNR after 6 iterations of the turbo-CS. Alternatively, for a fixed SNR of -1 dB, we achieve a 10 dB improvement in RSNR.

We introduce a method for securely delivering a set of messages to a group of clients over a broadcast erasure channel where each client is interested in a distinct message. Each client is able to obtain its own message but not the others'. In the proposed method the messages are combined together using a special variant of random linear network coding. Each client is provided with a private set of decoding coefficients to decode its own message. Our method provides security for the transmission sessions against computational brute-force attacks and also weakly security in information theoretic sense. As the broadcast channel is assumed to be erroneous, the missing coded packets should be recovered in some way. We consider two different scenarios. In the first scenario the missing packets are retransmitted by the base station (centralized). In the second scenario the clients cooperate with each other by exchanging packets (decentralized). In both scenarios, network coding techniques are exploited to increase the total throughput. For the case of centralized retransmissions we provide an analytical approximation for the throughput performance of instantly decodable network coded (IDNC) retransmissions as well as numerical experiments. For the decentralized scenario, we propose a new IDNC based retransmission method where its performance is evaluated via simulations and analytical approximation. Application of this method is not limited to our special problem and can be generalized to a new class of problems introduced in this paper as the cooperative index coding problem.

We consider a set of $n$ messages and a group of $k$ clients. Each client is privileged for receiving an arbitrary subset of the messages over a broadcast erasure channel, which generalizes scenario of a previous work. We propose a method for secretly delivering each message to its privileged recipients in a way that each receiver can decode its own messages but not the others'. Our method is based on combining the messages using linear network coding and hiding the decoding coefficients from the unprivileged clients. We provide an information theoretic proof for the secrecy of the proposed method. In particular we show that an unprivileged client cannot obtain any meaningful information even if it holds the entire set of coded data packets transmitted over the channel. Moreover, in our method, the decoding complexity is desirably low at the receiver side.