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.
Chia-Yi Yeh is currently a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT and the School of Engineering at Brown University, under Prof. Muriel Médard and Prof. Daniel M. Mittleman. She received her Ph.D. and M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rice University in 2021 and 2017 under the supervision of Prof. Edward W. Knightly, and her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University in 2014. Her research interests are design, implementation, and experimental demonstration of next-generation wireless systems for communication, security, and sensing based on theoretical foundations, for systems including massive MIMO, millimeter wave and terahertz networks.