Wireless transmission requires access to a shared medium. Hence, communications may be susceptible to adversarial eavesdropping. It is well known that "secrecy" means "cryptography". However, since the current and future technologies require devices with very high performance at low costs, contribution from the physical layer is essential. It could allow devices to save the processing power and reduce power consumption and battery life. The information theoretic approach may help since the effort needed to assure a good degree of confidentiality could be shared between power allocation and cryptography. We consider the framework a MIMO ad-hoc network, which may be extended to a centralized system. In this context, space division multiple access (SDMA) techniques could be the key against eavesdropping at a very low cost. The well known waterfilling solution, which is conventionally used to maximize information rate without considering secrecy levels, is adopted to account for the possible presence of eavesdroppers.

Biography

Mauro Biagi received the laurea degree in communication engineering in 2001 and the Ph.D. in information and communication theory in 2005 from the INFO-COM Department of the University of Rome "La Sapienza", where since 2006 he holds position of Assistant Professor.

His research focuses on several topics of communications engineering. In the area of wireless communications, his main research areas deal with multi-antenna systems both from a physical (PHY) layer point of view (coding, signal processing, and information theory) and multiple Access (resource management, power allocation, and Space Division Multiple Access). In the area of ultra wide band systems, is is involved research activities dealing with timing recovery and pulse shaping algorithms both for single antenna and multiple antenna schemes. In wireline communications, he is involved in several research projects dealing with PHY-MAC problems.

He serves on the Power Line Communication (PLC) ComSoc Group where he proposes solutions for power line communication standards. He is associate editor of the International Journal of Ultra Wideband Communications and Systems (IJUWBCS). He is currently visiting Assistant Professor at University of British Columbia.