Wireless technology has changed the way we communicate today and has enormous potential to change the way we will live over the next several decades. Future applications will require significant increase in data rates and lower latency, with better coverage and spectral efficiency, often in a new communication channel, like Terahertz (THz) spectrum. Furthermore, it is expected that the spectrum access will be congested, competitive, and vulnerable to malicious intents of strong adversaries. This motivates us to innovate in novel deep learning models to tackle the challenges posed in new channels as well as to secure wireless communication. This talk will have two parts. The first part of the talk will discuss development of neural network (NN) models for OFDM receiver, where expert knowledge of wireless communication is infused in different stages of the model to create a practical receiver. The parameters of the NN are derived from underlying theory and can be adapted to different wireless environments. The models are trained with over-the-air captured OFDM signals, transmitted in THz band with 10GHz bandwidth. The second part of the talk will discuss a cross-layer solution for addressing wireless security in presence of a strong adversary. A novel NN model pair is created for encryption and decryption that generates an encrypted waveform, which remains undeciphered by the adversary while the intended receiver can recover the secret message. The NN model can encode any modulation order and improves both reliability and secrecy capacity compared to prior work.
Dola Saha is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at University at Albany, SUNY. She co-directs the Mobile Emerging Systems and Applications (MESA) Lab at UAlbany. She was a faculty fellow at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech, NASA in summer of 2022. She was a visiting faculty at the Air Force Research Laboratory in summers of 2020 and 2021. She is the Vice Chair of the IEEE ComSoc TCCN SIG for AI and Machine Learning in Security and has been appointed a member of the SUNY Innovations Policy Board. Prior to that, she was a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Rutgers University. Before that, she was a Researcher in the Mobile Communications and Networking group at NEC Laboratories America. She received her Masters and Doctorate degrees from the Department of Computer Science in the University of Colorado Boulder. She is the recipient of Google Anita Borg Scholarship for her academic credentials. Her research interests lie in the crossroads of Machine Learning for Wireless Communication, Wireless Security, Digital Communication, Wireless Networks, Wireless Signal Processing, and Architecture of Software Defined Radios with focus on systems design and practical evaluation.