arXiv subjects

Burhan Wafai

Publications and source records attributed to Burhan Wafai.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Beamforming and RIS-Aided Ambient Backscatter Communications with Residual-Feature SVM Detection

Ambient backscatter communication (AmBC) enables battery-free connectivity by modulating data onto existing radio-frequency (RF) signals, eliminating the need for dedicated power sources. However, its reliability degrades when direct wireless channels are obstructed or severely faded. Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) offer a solution by creating a favorable propagation environment through the control of the phases of incident signals, thereby strengthening wireless links. This paper investigates an RIS-aided AmBC system that jointly exploits physical-layer reconfiguration and statistical learning to restore detection reliability under such conditions. The RIS phase profile is aligned for the source-RIS-tag link, while a multi-antenna reader applies receive beamforming to steer toward the RF source and the tag separately. At the reader, a hypothesis-based minimum mean square error (MMSE) equalizer reconstructs the ambient symbol under each candidate tag state and produces a pair of residual features, which are classified by a support vector machine (SVM) with a Gaussian kernel. We make the physical-layer-to-learning coupling explicit, i.e., RIS phase alignment and beamforming improve the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), thereby rendering the residual features more separable and reducing classification error. Simulation results show that the proposed RIS-beamforming-SVM detector achieves substantial bit-error-rate (BER) gains over RIS-energy, SVM, and SVM-beamforming baselines across a wide SINR range, that the spectral-efficiency gains are governed more strongly by the number of RIS elements than by the number of reader antennas, and that performance saturates with a moderate RIS size, allowing near-optimal operation at reduced hardware cost.

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arXiv2025

Opportunistic User Scheduling for Secure RIS-aided Wireless Communications

In this paper, we provide expressions for the secrecy outage probability (SOP) for suboptimal and optimal opportunistic scheduling schemes in a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) aided {single antenna} system with multiple eavesdroppers in approximate closed form. A suboptimal scheduling (SS) scheme is analyzed, which is used when the channel state information (CSI) of the eavesdropping links is unavailable, and the optimal scheduling (OS) scheme is also analyzed, which is used when the global CSI is available. For each scheme, we provide a simplified expression for the SOP in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime to demonstrate its behavior as a function of the key system parameters. At high SNR, the SOP saturates to a constant level which decreases exponentially with the number of RIS elements in the SS scheme and with the product of the number of RIS elements and the number of users in the OS scheme. We also show that the derived SOP of the SS scheme can directly provide the SOP for the best antenna-user pair scheduling scheme in a multiple antenna system. We compare the performance of the opportunistic user scheduling schemes with that of a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) based scheduling scheme which chooses a pair of users in each time slot for scheduling and we show that the opportunistic schemes outperform the NOMA-based scheme. We also derive a closed-form expression for the SOP of a decode-and-forward (DF) relay-aided scheduling scheme in order to compare it with that of the RIS-aided system. It is found that the RIS-aided system outperforms the relay-aided systems when the number of RIS elements is sufficiently large. An increased number of RIS elements is required to outperform the relay-aided system at higher operating frequencies.

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arXiv2024

Secrecy Analysis of CSI Ratio-Based Transmitter Selection with Unreliable Backhaul

This paper explores the secrecy performance of a multi-transmitter system with unreliable backhaul links. To improve secrecy, we propose a novel transmitter selection (TS) scheme that selects a transmitter with the maximum ratio of the destination channel power gain to the eavesdropping channel power gain. The backhaul reliability factor is incorporated with the distribution of the channel power gain through the utilization of a mixture distribution. We evaluate the non-zero secrecy rate (NZR) and the secrecy outage probability (SOP) as well as their asymptotes in two scenarios of backhaul activity knowledge, where it is available and where it is unavailable. The results illustrate that because of the unreliable backhaul, the proposed destination-to-eavesdropper channel power gain ratio-based TS scheme is constrained in terms of secrecy performance. However, performance enhancements are observed when the backhaul knowledge activity is utilized. Furthermore, the proposed scheme outperforms all the sub-optimal TS schemes and achieves nearly optimal performance without requiring noise power or the evaluation of the exact secrecy rate measurement.

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arXiv2023

Secrecy of Opportunistic User Scheduling in RIS-Aided Systems: A Comparison with NOMA Scheduling

In this paper, we propose an opportunistic user scheduling scheme in a multi-user reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) aided wireless system to improve secrecy. We derive the secrecy outage probability (SOP) and its asymptotic expression in approximate closed form. The asymptotic analysis shows that the SOP does not depend on the transmitter-to-RIS distance and saturates to a fixed value depending on the ratio of the path loss of the RIS-to-destination and RIS-to-eavesdropper links and the number of users at high signal-to-noise ratio. It is shown that increasing the number of RIS elements leads to an exponential decrease in the SOP. We also compare our scheme with that of a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheduling scheme, which chooses a pair of users to schedule in each time slot. The comparison shows that the SOP of all of the NOMA users is compromised, and that our proposed scheduling scheme has better performance.

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arXiv2023

Transmitter Selection for Secrecy Against Colluding Eavesdroppers with Backhaul Uncertainty

Due to the exponential growth of interconnected devices and reduced cell coverage, beyond fifth-generation networks will be dense. Thus, instead of wired backhaul, wireless backhaul will be cost-effective and flexible. For security in multi-transmitter systems, sub-optimal and optimal transmitter selection schemes exist. However, including backhaul activity knowledge available (BKA) and backhaul activity knowledge unavailable (BKU) cases and transmitter selection schemes, there is no generalized secrecy analysis method. Moreover, evaluation of the ergodic secrecy rate (ESR) of the optimal selection schemes is impossible using existing solution approaches. To address these, we propose two sub-optimal and optimal transmitter selection schemes for a small-cell multi-transmitter system in BKU or BKA cases in the presence of multiple colluding eavesdroppers. We derive the distribution of the ratio of the destination channel SNR and eavesdropping channel SNR, thereby providing different secrecy performance metrics uniformly irrespective of selection schemes and BKU or BKA cases. Simplified asymptotic expressions are provided to elucidate the influence of the system parameters and of the backhaul reliability. We observe that the secrecy performance improves when the knowledge of backhaul link activity is utilized, and the improvement is most noticeable when the backhaul is highly unreliable. We also observe that while the secrecy performance degrades with an increasing number of eavesdroppers, neither the asymptotic saturation value of the secrecy outage probability nor the rate of improvement of the ESR with signal-to-noise-ratio depends on the number of eavesdroppers.

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arXiv2022

Optimal Friendly Jamming and Transmit Power Allocation in RIS-assisted Secure Communication

This paper analyzes the secrecy performance of a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) assisted wireless communication system with a friendly jammer in the presence of an eavesdropper. The friendly jammer enhances the secrecy by introducing artificial noise towards the eavesdropper without degrading the reception at the destination. Approximate secrecy outage probability (SOP) is derived in closed form. We also provide a simpler approximate closed-form expression for the SOP in order to understand the effect of system parameters on the performance and to find the optimal power allocation for the transmitter and jammer. The optimal transmit and jamming power allocation factor is derived by minimizing the SOP assuming a total power constraint. It is shown that the SOP performance is significantly improved by the introduction of the jammer and a gain of approximately $3$ dB is achieved at an SOP of $10^{-4}$ by optimally allocating power compared to the case of equal power allocation.

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arXiv2021

Transmitter Selection for Secrecy in Cognitive Small-Cell Networks with Backhaul Knowledge

A small-cell network with multiple transmitters and unreliable wireless backhaul is considered for secrecy enhancement. The small-cell network is operating under a spectrum sharing agreement with a primary network in a cognitive radio system. A constraint on the desired outage probability at the primary receiver is assumed as a part of the spectrum sharing agreement. The reliability of the wireless backhaul links are modeled by a set of independent and identically distributed Bernoulli random variables. A sub-optimal and an optimal small-cell transmitter selection (TS) scheme is proposed to improve the performance of the system, depending on the availability of channel state information. Selection schemes are designed for the scenario where knowledge is available regarding which backhaul links are active. The corresponding secrecy outage probabilities along with their asymptotic expressions are derived. It is shown that the secrecy performance is significantly improved compared to the case where knowledge of the active backhaul links is unavailable.

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