Kuan Zhang

University of Nebraska at Lincoln | NU · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Internet of things, supported by machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, is one of the most important applications for future 6th generation (6G) systems. A major challenge facing by 6G is enabling a massive number of M2M devices to access networks in a timely manner. Therefore, this paper exploits the spatial selectivity of massive multi-input mu...

To ensure the security of Internet of Things (IoT) communications, one can use deep packet inspection (DPI) on network middleboxes to detect and mitigate anomalies and suspicious activities in network traffic of IoT, although doing so over encrypted traffic is challenging. Therefore, in this article, an efficient and privacy-preserving encrypted tr...

In this article, we investigate audio-based security techniques to secure Device-to-Device (D2D) communications. First, the key distribution techniques for secure D2D communication are discussed, which generate the key by using the estimated response of the audio channels between two legitimate devices. Then, keyless D2D secure communication over a...

Autonomous driving vehicles can reduce congestion and improve safety while increasing traffic efficiency. To reflect the quality of driving more comprehensively, the driving safety, efficiency and occupant comfort should be jointly optimized for autonomous vehicles. Furthermore, in order to cope with complicated traffic environments and achieve sat...

Autonomous vehicles in a platoon determine the control inputs based on the system state information collected and shared by the Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is regarded as a potential method for car-following control and has been mostly studied to support a single following vehicle. However, it is more challen...

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) combined with artificial intelligence (AI) have recently gathered significant interest to enable intelligent and on-demand crowdsensing applications. In conventional AI approaches, a wealth of UAVs’ sensory data (which may be privacy-sensitive) needs to be mitigated to the central storage for model training, which po...

Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) connects massive tactical devices to collect battlefield situations and share perceived information. The IoBT can enhance the intelligent battlefield command, collaborative attack, and other applications, such as landmine trigger and post-war clearance. Existing routing path selection methods designed for wirel...

With the proliferation of electric vehicles (EVs), private charging pile (PCP) sharing networks are likely to be an integral part of future smart cities, especially in places with limited public charging infrastructure. However, there are a number of operational challenges associated with the deployment of PCPs in such a shared and untrusted enviro...

Emerging AI-empowered services and techniques, such as connected vehicle, intelligent industry, and smart city, are forthcoming with the sixth generation (6G) cellular network to benefit daily life, industry, and society. However, the increasing integration of the 6G network with the physical world leads to a plethora of new scenarios that bring ne...

Infectious disease presents great hazards to public health, due to their high infectivities and potential lethalities. One of the effective methods to hinder the spread of infectious disease is vaccination. However, due to the limitation of resource and the medical budget, vaccinating all people is not feasible in practice. Besides, the vaccinating...

As cloud storage services have become popular nowadays, the integrity of outsourced data stored at untrusted servers received increased attention. Provable data possession (PDP) provides an effective and efficient solution for cloud data integrity by asking the cloud server to prove that the stored data are not tampered with or maliciously discarde...

The sixth generation (6G) networks are expected to provide a fully connected world with terrestrial wireless and satellite communications integration. The design concept of 6G networks is to leverage artificial intelligence (Ai) to promote the intelligent and agile development of network services. intelligent services inevitably involve the process...

WiFi Fingerprint-based positioning technology emerges as a potential application to offer fundamental location information for indoor mobile users. However, the crowd traffic evaluation based on RSS fingerprints is vulnerable to the malicious check-in attacks. Attackers who are not at the target POI submit the self-modification RSS fingerprints. In...

WiFi-based fingerprint positioning system emerges to provide fundamental location-related service for in heterogeneous communications networks. It relies on crowdsourcing technology in the collection of received signal strength (RSS) to dynamically update fingerprint database. However, this crowdsourced indoor positioning system is vulnerable to th...

Anomaly detection for non-linear dynamical system plays an important role in ensuring the system stability. However, it is usually complex and has to be solved by large-scale simulation which requires extensive computing resources. In this paper, we propose a novel anomaly detection scheme in non-linear dynamical system based on Long Short-Term Mem...

Anomaly detection for non-linear dynamical system plays an important role in ensuring the system stability. However, it is usually complex and has to be solved by large-scale simulation which requires extensive computing resources. In this paper, we propose a novel anomaly detection scheme in non-linear dynamical system based on Long Short-Term Mem...

With the rapid development of communications and computing, the concept of connected vehicles emerges to improve driving safety, traffic efficiency and the infotainment experience. Due to the limited capabilities of sensors and information processing on a single vehicle, vehicular networks (VNETs) play a vital role for the realization of connected...

To efficiently support real-time control applications, networked control systems operating with ultra-reliable and low-latency communications (URLLCs) become a fundamental technology for future Internet of things (IoT). However, the design of control, sensing and communications is generally isolated at present. In this paper, we investigate the joi...

The Internet of Things (IoT) extends the Internet connectivity into billions of IoT devices around the world, where the IoT devices collect and share information to reflect status of the physical world. The Autonomous Control System (ACS), on the other hand, performs control functions on the physical systems without external intervention over an ex...

The rapid development of the fifth generation mobile communication systems accelerates the implementation of vehicle-to-everything communications. Compared with the other types of vehicular communications, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications mainly focus on the exchange of driving safety information with neighboring vehicles, which requires ult...

To efficiently support the real-time control applications, networked control systems operating with ultra-reliable and low-latency communications (URLLCs) become fundamental technology for future Internet of things (IoT). However, the design of control, sensing and communications is generally isolated at present. In this paper, we propose the joint...

The rapid development of the fifth generation mobile communication systems accelerates the implementation of vehicle-to-everything communications. Compared with the other types of vehicular communications, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications mainly focus on the exchange of driving safety information with neighboring vehicles, which requires ult...

As a highly scalable permissioned blockchain platform, Hyperledger Fabric supports a wide range of industry use cases ranging from governance to finance. In this paper, we propose a model to analyze the performance of a Hyperledgerbased system by using Generalised Stochastic Petri Nets (GSPN). This model decomposes a transaction flow into multiple...

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have been developed rapidly with the increasing popularity of wireless network and wearable technologies. The inherent characteristics of convenience and efficiency for health monitoring facilitate the depth and width of WBAN applications. However, the inter-WBAN interference problem affects the network performan...

With the rapid advances of wireless technologies and popularization of smart mobile devices, edge-enabled mobile social networks (MSNs) have emerged as a promising network paradigm for mobile users to deliver, share, and exchange contents with each other. By leveraging edge caching technology, various content services can be provided to mobile user...

Pervasive data collected from e-healthcare devices possess significant medical value through data sharing with professional healthcare service providers. However, health data sharing poses several security issues, such as access control and privacy leakage, as well as faces critical challenges to obtain efficient data analysis and services. In this...

The rise of smart health promotes ubiquitous healthcare services with the adoption of information and communication technologies. However, increasing demands of medical services require more computing and storage resources in proximity of medical users for intelligent sensing, processing, and analysis. Fog computing emerges to enable in situ data p...

Mobile crowdsensing engages a crowd of individuals to use their mobile devices to cooperatively collect data about social events and phenomena for special interest customers. It can reduce the cost on sensor deployment and improve data quality with human intelligence. To enhance data trustworthiness, it is critical for service provider to recruit r...

Smart homes expects to improve the convenience, comfort, and energy efficiency of the residents by connecting and controlling various appliances. As the personal information and computing hub for smart homes, smartphones allow people to monitor and control their homes anytime and anywhere. Therefore, the security and privacy of smartphones and the...

Mobile crowdsourcing enables mobile requesters to publish tasks, which can be accomplished by workers with awards. However, existing task allocation schemes face tradeoff between effectiveness and privacy preservation, and most of them lack consideration of win-win incentives for both requesters and workers participation. In this paper, we propose...

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) technology jumps into popularity owing to its real-time ability and high reliability in health monitoring. The accompanying interference problem must be highly concerned in coexisting densely deployed WBANs since the inter-WBAN interference results in high delay and low reliability data transmissions, especially wi...

Caching contents in edge computing-enabled small cell base stations (ECSBSs) has become a promising technology for mitigating burdens of macro cell base stations and offloading data from mobile users. However, as ECSBSs may be malicious, providing a secure caching scheme becomes a challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel secure caching scheme i...

Intelligent Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have entered into an incredible explosive popularization stage. WBAN technologies facilitate real-time and reliable health monitoring in e-healthcare and creative applications in other fields. However, due to the limited space and medical resources, deeply deployed WBANs are suffering severe interfere...

With Body Area Networks (BANs), bio-sensors can collect personal health information and cooperate with each other to provide intelligent health care services for medical users. Since personal health information is highly privacy-sensitive, BANs raise new security challenges, especially secure communication between bio-sensors. In this paper, we pro...

In this paper, we investigate physical (PHY) layer message authentication to combat adversaries with infinite computational capacity. Specifically, a PHY-layer authentication framework over a wiretap channel ( $W_1,\;W_2$ ) is proposed to achieve information-theoretic security with the same key. We develop a theorem to reveal the requirements/cond...

Mobile crowdsensing engages a crowd of individuals to use their mobile devices to cooperatively collect data about social events and phenomena for special interest customers. It can reduce the cost on sensor deployment and improve data quality with human intelligence. To enhance data trustworthiness, it is critical for service provider to recruit m...

Due to the broadcast characteristic of the wireless medium, message impersonation and substitution attacks can possibly be launched by an adversary with low cost in wireless communication networks. As an ingenious solution, physical layer based message authentication can achieve perfect security by leveraging channel precoding techniques to meet hi...

In this paper, we study physical layer message authentication with perfect security for wireless networks, regardless of the computational power of adversaries. Specifically, we propose an efficient and feasible authentication scheme based on low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes and ϵ-AU <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xl...

It is frustrating and time-consuming for drivers to find an available parking spot in a congested area, such as downtown and shopping malls, especially in peak hours. Thus, it is very helpful for drivers to have real-time parking information to assist them in finding vacant parking spots timely. Unfortunately, to acquire needed parking information,...

Mobile crowdsensing enables a crowd of individuals to cooperatively collect data for special interest customers using their mobile devices. The success of mobile crowdsensing largely depends on the participating mobile users. The broader participation, the more sensing data are collected; nevertheless, the more replicate data may be generated, ther...

In recent years, wireless networks are undergoing the paradigm transformation from high-speed data rate to connecting everything, raising the development of Internet of things (IoT). As a typical scenario of IoT, vehicular networks have attracted extensive attentions from automotive and telecommunication industry, especially for ultra-reliable and...

Internet of Things (IoT) allows billions of physical objects to be connected to collect and exchange data for offering various applications, such as environmental monitoring, infrastructure management and home automation. On the other hand, IoT has unsupported features (e.g., low latency, location awareness and geographic distribution) that are cri...

Smart grid enables two-way communications between smart meters and operation centers to collect real-time power consumption of customers to improve flexibility, reliability and efficiency of the power system. It brings serious privacy issues to customers, since the meter readings possibly expose customers’ activities in the house. Data encryption c...

In this paper, we investigate multi-message authentication to combat adversaries with infinite computational capacity. An authentication framework over a wiretap channel $(W_1,W_2)$ is proposed to achieve information-theoretic security with the same key. The proposed framework bridges the two research areas in physical (PHY) layer security: secure...

Finding a vacant parking space in a congested area, such as shopping mall, airport, etc., is always time-consuming and frustrating for drivers. Real-time parking information can avoid vehicles being cruising on the roads. However, when the drivers are acquiring parking information, their privacy is inevitable to be disclosed. In this paper, to mini...

Smart grid enables two-way communications between operation centers and smart meters to collect power consumption and achieve demand response to improve flexibility, reliability and efficiency of electricity system. However, power consumption data may contain users’ privacy, e.g., activities, references and habits. Many smart metering schemes have...

With the flourishing and advancement of the IoT, the smart city has become an emerging paradigm, consisting of ubiquitous sensing, heterogeneous network infrastructure, and intelligent information processing and control systems. A smart city can monitor the physical world in real time, and provide intelligent services to both local residents and tr...

In this chapter, the optimization of relay service for MSNs is studied. In MSNs, each user has his own virtual currency and can earn currency as a relay for other users. A bundle carrier selects relay users based on his current resource usage. A bargain game is employed to model the transaction pricing between the bundle carrier and the relay user,...

In this chapter, we discuss the modeling and optimization for heterogeneous MSN architecture to deliver social contents. With the small cells and macro cells, we present a heterogeneous architecture where the content can be managed in a content-centric mode. Based on the availability of cached replicas in the content store of content centric nodes,...

In this chapter, we study the optimization for cloud resource allocation in MSNs to provide mobile social services with high capacity and low latency. Here, the media cloud means the cloud which can provide users with resources such as media processing or storage to process media tasks. For example, some complicated computation or large-sized conte...

In this chapter, we discuss the modeling of selfishness and propose an incentive mechanism in MSNs. We consider two types of selfish behavior: weak selfishness and extreme selfishness. The information dissemination is studied through the ordinary differential equations (ODEs) with weak and extreme selfishness, respectivelys. Then, an incentive mode...

In this chapter, we summarize the monograph and provide future research directions.

In this chapter, the modeling of epidemic information dissemination in MSNs is discussed. We introduce two new elements, i.e., preimmunity and immunity. Then, we study the features of information dissemination for users. Based on the process of the epidemic information dissemination, a novel dissemination mechanism is proposed with four disseminati...

Human-to-human infection, as a type of fatal public health threats, can rapidly spread in a human population, resulting in a large amount of labor and health cost for treatment, control and prevention. To slow down the spread of infection, social network is envisioned to provide detailed contact statistics to isolate susceptive people who has frequ...

In this paper, we propose a secure incentive scheme to achieve fair and reliable cooperative (SIRC) downloading in highway vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). SIRC can stimulate vehicle users to help download-and-forward packets for each other and consists of cooperative downloading and forwarding phase. During the cooperative downloading phase, SI...

Cognitive radio sensor network (CRSN) has emer-ged as a promising solution to address the spectrum scarcity problem in traditional sensor networks, by enabling sensor nodes to opportunistically access licensed spectrum. To protect the transmission of primary users and enhance spectrum utilization, collaborative spectrum sensing is generally adopted...

Data publish-subscribe service is an effective approach to selectively share and selectively receive data. Towards the huge amount of data generated in our daily life, cloud systems, with economical but powerful storage and computing resources, are inevitably becoming the most appropriate platform for data publication and subscription. However, clo...

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are vulnerable to selective forwarding attacks that can maliciously drop a subset of forwarding packets to degrade network performance and jeopardize the information integrity. Meanwhile, due to the unstable wireless channel in WSNs, the packet loss rate during the communication of sensor nodes may be high and vary f...

Big data offers a plethora of opportunities to mobile network operators for improving quality of service. This article explores various means of integrating big data analytics with network optimization toward the objective of improving the user quality of experience. We first propose a framework of Big Data-Driven (BDD) mobile network optimization....