Prof. Andrea Tonello (now with the University of Klagenfurt) and his former PhD student Alberto Pittolo have received the prestigious IET 2016 Premium Award for the Best Paper published in IET Communications over the past two years.
The paper “Physical Layer Security in PLC Networks: An Emerging Scenario, Other Than Wireless” is a landmark paper that sheds new light on information theoretic limits for secure communications in Power Line Communication (PLC) channels.
“While physical layer security (PLS) is a well understood topic in wireless communications, this work for the first time addresses PLS in PLC. The PLC channel has very peculiar characteristics that render it much different from the well understood radio channel”, Prof. Tonello says. “Signal propagation in PLC networks is affected by some level of determinism that significantly affects the channel statistics and introduces correlation between the channel of the intended user and that of the eavesdropper. All of this influences the secrecy rate which is a measure of the speed of communication with total confidentiality that can be achieved”.
This award attests the outstanding work that is carried out by prof. Tonello’s group on Power Line Communications. This is the third award received by prof. Tonello and his group in 2016 including the two best paper awards received at IEEE ISPLC 2016. “We are devoting great endeavors in the field of PLC where we carry out research at experimental level, theoretical level and we look at applications that can have a direct impact in boosting the PLC market ranging from home networking, to smart grids and in-vehicle communications. This award is such a great encouragement to keep our focus and contribute more” prof. Tonello says.
Full paper details: Physical Layer Security in PLC Networks: An Emerging Scenario, Other Than Wireless, IET Communications, 2014, 8, (8), pp. 1239–1247
