ICCSPA 15

Final Program

To download the final program, click here.

Keynote Speakers

Security
Beyond Encryption: How to Hide Wireless Fingerprints

Professor Marwan Krunz
University of Arizona, USA

As we continue to depend on the rapidly expanding
wireless ecosystem, we are challenged with threats related to user privacy,
data confidentiality, and critical system availability. A significant portion
of these threats is attributed to the broadcast nature of wireless
transmissions. Using commodity radio hardware, unauthorized parties can easily
eavesdrop on over-the-air transmissions and breach the privacy of communicating
users by tracking their whereabouts and movements, and inferring their
associations, health state and preferences. Common (application-level)
cryptographic mechanisms fail to provide adequate security and privacy, as they
leave low-level transmission identifiers open to traffic analysis. In this
talk, I will present various examples of leaked transmission signatures and
discuss how they have been used to breach user privacy and launch sophisticated
jamming attacks. I will then present various mitigation techniques for
obfuscating wireless fingerprints and countering malicious eavesdropping over
the wireless medium.

Marwan Krunz is a professor of ECE and CS at the University of Arizona. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Michigan State University in 1995. He has published more than 215 journal articles and peer-reviewed conference papers, and is a co-inventor on five US patents. Dr. Krunz is an IEEE Fellow, an Arizona Engineering Faculty Fellow (2011-2014), and an IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer (2013 and 2014). He was the recipient of the 2012 IEEE TCCC Outstanding Service Award. He received the NSF CAREER award in 1998. He currently serves on the editorial board for the IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management. Please click here for the full profile.

Cascade Perfect Reconstruction Non-Maximally Decimated Filter Banks
A Green Technique to Implement Variable Bandwidth Digital Filters

Professor Fred Harris
San Diego State University, USA

We describe a novel application of perfect reconstruction (PR) non-maximally decimated filter banks (NMDFBs). PR non-maximally decimated analysis/synthesis chains are used for performing resampling, channelization and filtering in very wideband software defined radios. Digital wideband filtering is limited by the hardware clock speed, which constrains the maximum signal bandwidth that can be processed digitally. Cascade analysis and synthesis filter banks partition the high sample rate input signal into multiple low sample rate parallel processing paths that reduce the workload and cost to implement the prototype filter. We show how cascade multiple-tier PR analysis/synthesis channelizer chains efficiently implement, variable bandwidth digital filters and multi-resolution systems operating on very wideband signals. When an inner tier analysis channelizer is applied to band edge output channels of an outer tier analysis channelizer it decomposes this channel into multiple narrower sub-channels that enable finer resolution increments of the composite filter's bandwidth. This process, initially designed to enable DSP processing of wide-bandwidth signals offers an unexpected pleasant benefit: a ten-to-one saving in computational workload.

Fred Harris Professor Fred Harris
holds the Signal Processing Chair of the Communication Systems and Signal
Processing Institute at San Diego State University. He holds 24 patents and
lectures throughout the world on DSP applications. He consults for
organizations requiring high performance, cost effective DSP solutions.

He has written over
240 journal and conference papers. He is the author of the textbook Multirate Signal Processing for Communication
Systems and has contributed
to a number of other DSP and communication textbooks.

Dr. Harris became a
Fellow of the IEEE in 2003, cited for contributions of DSP to communications systems.
In 2006, he received the Software Defined Radio Forum's Industry Achievement
Award.

Registration 

Registration fees covers access to all
conference activities (excluding tutorials), coffee breaks and the banquet
dinner.

Author Registration Fees

1. At least one author must register with the conference by the deadlines shown below.
2. To register for the conference, please go to EDAS, click on the "My Papers" button. Click on the link labeled "Register" and follow the instructors. Note that to get the IEEE membership discount you need to updated your profile on EDAS and provide your IEEE membership number.
3. You may register for tutorials on EDAS. Please check the conference webpage for more info about tutorials.
4. Payments are accepted using credit cards, PayPal, or wire transfer (through EDAS). Note that wire transfer charges need to be covered by the author.

Authors are encouraged to take advantage of
the early registration rates and complete their paper registrations by December
20, 2014. However, registration will be open for authors until December 30,
2014. At least one author must register at the regular rate even if the paper
is presented by a student.

Registration fees cover up two papers; authors
with three or more accepted papers will be required to pay $200 for registering
each additional paper.

Registered papers must be presented at the
conference to be published in IEEE Xplore®.

Non-Author Registration Fees

Non-author registration will be open until and
throughout the conference duration.

Tutorials

Tutorial 1:

Multi-way Communication and Cooperation

Presenters:      Anas Chaaban and Aydin Sezgin, Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum, Germany
Date:               Monday,
February 16, 2015, 9:00 -12:00

Abstract: Predictions show that the number of devices with communication
capability will rise to 50 billion by 2020, leading to a new paradigm referred
to as the Internet-of-Things (IoT). This new paradigm will rather naturally
lead to new and more sophisticated network topologies. For instance, in the IoT
age, two or more nodes are interested in exchanging packets among themselves,
i.e., some nodes may act both as a source and a destination simultaneously. In
addition to this, some nodes may act as relays that support the transmission
from the sources to the destinations. Thus, cooperation between sources and
relays is a key feature that can be exploited in such scenarios. As a
consequence there is an increasing need for the understanding of the
fundamental characteristics of multi-way networks and of cooperation.

This tutorial will span both theoretical foundations and practical
issues of the main aspects and functionalities of such future IoT networks.

About the Presenters

Aydin Sezgin received the Dipl.-Ing. (MS) degree in communications engineering
and the Dr.-Ing. (PhD) degree in electrical engineering from the TFH Berlin in
2000 and the TU Berlin, in 2005, respectively. He is currently a professor at
the Department of EEIT at Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum, Germany. He is interested
in signal processing, communication and information theory with focus on
wireless networks.

Anas Chaaban received his Maitrise-es-Sciences degree in electronics and his MS
degree in communications technology from the Lebanese University in 2006 and
from the University of Ulm (Germany) in 2009, respectively. He received his PhD
in electrical engineering and information technology from the Ruhr-University
of Bochum, Germany, in 2013. He is currently a post-doc at the institute of
digital communication systems in the Ruhr-University of Bochum. His research
interests are in the area of network information theory with main focus on
relaying and interference management.

Tutorial 2

Digital
Signal Processing for Next Generation Software Defined Radio Receivers and
Transmitters

Presenters: Fred Harris, Cubic Signal Processing Chair, San Diego State
University, USA
Date:               Monday,
February 16, 2015, 13:00-16:00

Abstract: There is an old maxim: "If we keep on doing things the same way,
we will keep on getting the same results." This is very true in the design and
implementation of the next generation of DSP-based radios. Radios today are
very different from the radios of yesteryear. Today we do things in a receiver
or transmitter we wouldn't or couldn't dream of in a previous generation. What
is so different about them? One obvious difference is the pervasive use of DSP
to perform many of the waveform processing tasks formerly accomplished with
analog components. These tasks include the traditional chores of modulation, of
spectral shaping, of noise bandwidth control, of spectral translation, and of
equalization. We are also using DSP to perform non-traditional tasks such as
DSP-based timing and carrier recovery, I-Q balancing, DC-canceling, bit
re-quantization, variable bandwidth filtering, arbitrary resampling,
pre-distortion and pre-equalization.

This tutorial will review the basic functions required of
modulators and demodulators in transmitters and receivers. We will explore the
evolution of processing techniques as these functions migrated from early
architectures implemented by standard DSP techniques requiring synchronous
sampling of the signal wave shape and external (analog) spectral translation
through fourth generation architectures that operate asynchronously performing
timing recovery, spectral translation and bandwidth reduction by applications
of multirate filters and algorithms.

About the Presenter

Professor Fred Harris holds the Signal Processing Chair of the
Communication Systems and Signal Processing Institute at San Diego State
University. He holds 24 patents and lectures throughout the world on DSP
applications. He consults for organizations requiring high- performance, cost-effective
DSP solutions.

He has written over 240 journal
and conference papers. He is the author of the textbook Multirate Signal
Processing for Communication Systems and has contributed to a number of
other DSP and communication textbooks.

Dr. Harris became a Fellow of the
IEEE in 2003, cited for contributions of DSP to communications systems. In
2006, he received the Software Defined Radio Forum's Industry Achievement
Award. 

Venue
ICCSPA15 will be held on the campus of American University of Sharjah,
United Arab Emirates.

American University of Sharjah
(AUS) was founded in 1997 by His Highness Sheikh Dr. Sultan Bin Mohammad Al
Qassimi, Member of the Supreme Council of the UAE and Ruler of Sharjah, who
envisioned the university as a leading educational institution in the Gulf
region. AUS is an independent, non-profit coeducational institution. AUS is a
leading comprehensive coeducational university in the Gulf, serving students
from the region and around the world.

Sharjah is a city of learning and
the arts, as confirmed by it being named the 2014 Capital of Islamic Culture
for the Arab Region and the 1998 UNESCO Cultural Capital of the Arab World.
This context facilitates the university's intention to be an academic center at
the intersection of ancient cultural traditions and contemporary intellectual
currents. The city of Sharjah is home to more than 20 museums with splendid
collections of artifacts and art as well as exhibits on science and natural
history. Sharjah also host many cultural festivals, educational conferences,
fairs and economic expositions. These resources permit the university to
broaden students' formal education in a way not possible elsewhere in the region.

American University of Sharjah
located about 20 minutes' drive from downtown Sharjah and Dubai. For the AUS
map and directions, please click here.

Contact Us

Conference Chairs

Khaled Assaleh
Tel +971 6 515 2917
kassaleh@aus.edu

Mohamed El-Tarhuni
Tel +971 6 515 2944
mtarhuni@aus.edu 

Department of Electrical Engineering
College of Engineering
American University of Sharjah
PO Box 26666
Sharjah, UAE