Toward intrinsically secure and physical layer aware mmWave and THz networks

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) to terahertz (THz) bands spanning from 100 GHz to 1 THz are a key spectrum frontier for next-generation wireless networks. Compared to the sub-6 GHz bands, these higher bands feature fundamentally different physical layer properties, including a higher pathloss and a sparser channel. In this talk, I will share how these fundamental differences in the physical layer impact the design and performance of mmWave and THz networks. First, I will show how the co-design of physical layer radiation and linear network coding can achieve information-theoretic security for general wideband high-frequency links. Our approach creates a large spatial region in which an eavesdropper Eve is “blind” and obtains no information regarding the message Alice sends to Bob. Next, I will show how we can obtain critical information for network operation from the physical layer. We show that by using a lightweight machine learning model, we can predict blockage events with high accuracy, which is essential for preemptive network management strategies.