PSO-Based Antenna Pattern Synthesis: A Paradigm for Secured Data Communications

Introduction

Wireless technologies usually provide numerous potential benefits like enormous bandwidth, less space, light weight, ease of installation and maintenance etc. Obviously, these are also essential requirements for the design of state-of-the-art communication systems. However, a continuous research growth during the last decade makes it possible simply to develop low power and low cost wireless devices and circuits on both of MMIC (monolithic microwave integrated circuits) as well as VLSI (very large scale of integration) architecture. Thus, wireless systems utilizing radio frequency (RF) signals or microwaves and millimeter waves are now extensively used in various sectors of communication services (Schafer et al, 2014; Schafer, 2003). For implementation of long-haul communication systems, multi-hop networks are generally constituted with several wireless transceivers (transmitter-receiver) to relay the broadcast messages at the receiving end in a cooperative manner. During transmission and reception of RF signals, the transceivers (also termed as nodes) inevitably share a common channel in free space. Consequently, data communications among the nodes become vulnerable to the attackers mostly at the physical and other outer layers (Zhou et al, 2014; Zhou et al, 2016). At most of the cases, attackers appear in pretention of the benevolent nodes within the networks and normally get access to the control systems of few nodes using malicious codes to compromise them. They mislead the entire system operation by transferring erroneous information through the multi-hop data links (Khan et al, 2014; Mahmoud et al, 2014). Therefore, preserving privacy and security of data along its route from source to destination has turned into a prime issue in modern wireless communication systems. Several popular cryptographic methods were proposed so far and these work well for protecting data at the application and other inner layers. Nonetheless, only few approaches were adopted to defend the physical layer attacks (Wong et al, 2007; Wong et al, 2011). Besides, the task of implementing a secured data communication network with simple structure that must ensure data privacy over its radio links still puts a great challenge to the system designers. Hence, much more research attention is required to enrich both of its algorithmic and architectural attributes.