Besides providing support for the increasing demands of mobile broadband traffic, 5G technology is envisioned to support machine-to-machine (M2M) communication with minimal or without human intervention. The M2M plays a significant role in many mission-critical applications such as autonomous vehicles, smart factories, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). It is required to support highly reliable and low latency communication over unreliable wireless channels for mission-critical applications. According to Shannon's channel coding theorem, the transmission rate should be less than the channel capacity to drive the error probability to zero. To achieve this result, it is required to use a long codeword. However, using a long codeword (or packet of large size) can increase the latency in communication. To reduce the latency, one can use a short packet, but it can reduce the reliability. Hence, many of the existing communication techniques used in LTE or Wi-Fi cannot be used for such scenarios as they are designed for large packet sizes. Hence, the short packet communication brings new research challenges in channel encoder/decoder design, resource allocation, and network-level protocol development.

The two fundamental characteristics of the wireless medium, namely broadcast and superposition, present different challenges in ensuring reliable and secure communication in the presence of adversarial users. In recent years, physical layer secrecy has gained significant interest as an alternative to traditional key-based enciphering for the wireless networks. The philosophy behind physical layer secrecy is to exploit the inherent randomness present in noise and communication channel (such as fading) to keep the message confidential from the eavesdropper.

The primary objective of research in this direction is to obtain fundamental limits of secure communication over noisy/interference limited scenarios. Such results help to determine the effect of noise or interference on the performance of the system. For each communication model, there exists a maximum rate, above which secure communication is impossible (secrecy capacity). Hence, it is very important to characterize the secrecy capacity or to obtain approximate characterization of capacity (secure degrees of freedom, generalized degress of freedom) of communication systems.

Topics of current interest

• Cooperative communication for secrecy

• Integration of physical layer secrecy into wireless systems

• Security for Internet of Things (IoT)

As the commercial deployment of the fifth generation of cellular networks (5G) is well underway in many countries of the world, academia as well as industrial research organizations turn their attention to what comes next. The next 6G wireless communication networks are expected to connect everything, provide full dimensional wireless coverage and integrate all functions to support full-vertical applications. Recent research reveals that intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) with wireless environment control capability is a promising technology for 6G networks. Specifically, IRS can intelligently control the wavefront, e.g., the phase, amplitude, frequency, and even polarization by massive tunable elements.

Topics of current interest but not limited to

• Role of IRS in multiuser scenarios

• IRS aided secure communication system

Physical layer technique has given effective way to model various uncertainty present in the communication system such as noise, fading and interference. On the other hand network layer has provided effective way to model bursty arrival of data and delay involved in the network. Develping a unified framework which can capture best of both the worlds can give new insights on the performance of the system and design of the communication system.

Topics of current interest but not limited to

• Stability region of multuser networks

• Random access system