The beginning of 2020 has seen the emergence of COVID-19 outbreak caused by a novel coronavirus, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). There is an imminent need to better understand this new virus and to develop ways to control its spread. In this study, we sought to gain insights for vaccine design against SARS-CoV-2 by considering the high genetic similarity between SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV, which caused the outbreak in 2003, and leveraging existing immunological studies of SARS-CoV. By screening the experimentally-determined SARS-CoV-derived B cell and T cell epitopes in the immunogenic structural proteins of SARS-CoV, we identified a set of B cell and T cell epitopes derived from the spike (S) and nucleocapsid (N) proteins that map identically to SARS-CoV-2 proteins. As no mutation has been observed in these identified epitopes among the 120 available SARS-CoV-2 sequences (as of 21 February 2020), immune targeting of these epitopes may potentially offer protection against this novel virus. For the T cell epitopes, we performed a population coverage analysis of the associated MHC alleles and proposed a set of epitopes that is estimated to provide broad coverage globally, as well as in China. Our findings provide a screened set of epitopes that can help guide experimental efforts towards the development of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2.

We consider the problem of secure communication with multiantenna transmission in fading channels. The transmitter simultaneously transmits an information-bearing signal to the intended receiver and artificial noise to the eavesdroppers. We obtain an analytical closed-form expression of an achievable secrecy rate and use it as the objective function to optimize the transmit power allocation between the information signal and the artificial noise. Our analytical and numerical results show that equal power allocation is a simple yet near-optimal strategy for the case of noncolluding eavesdroppers. When the number of colluding eavesdroppers increases, more power should be used to generate the artificial noise. We also provide an upper bound on the SNR, above which, the achievable secrecy rate is positive and shows that the bound is tight at low SNR. Furthermore, we consider the impact of imperfect channel state information (CSI) at both the transmitter and the receiver and find that it is wise to create more artificial noise to confuse the eavesdroppers than to increase the signal strength for the intended receiver if the CSI is not accurately obtained.

This letter studies information-theoretic security without knowing the eavesdropper's channel fading state. We present an alternative secrecy outage formulation to measure the probability that message transmissions fail to achieve perfect secrecy. Using this formulation, we design two transmission schemes that satisfy the given security requirement while achieving good throughput performance.

We consider multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmit beamforming systems with maximum ratio combining (MRC) receivers. The operating environment is Rayleigh fading with both transmit and receive spatial correlation. We present exact expressions for the probability density function (pdf) of the output signal-to-noise ratio, as well as the system outage probability. The results are based on explicit closed-form expressions which we derive for the pdf and cumulative distribution function of the maximum eigenvalue of double-correlated complex Wishart matrices. For systems with two antennas at either the transmitter or the receiver, we also derive exact closed-form expressions for the symbol-error rate. The new expressions are used to prove that MIMO-MRC achieves the maximum available spatial diversity order, and to demonstrate the effect of spatial correlation. The analysis is validated through comparison with Monte Carlo simulations

This paper considers the capacity of spatially correlated Rician multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels. We consider the general case with double-sided correlation and arbitrary rank channel means. We derive tight upper and lower bounds on the ergodic capacity. In the particular cases when the numbers of transmit and receive antennas are equal, or when the correlation is single sided, we derive more specific bounds which are computationally efficient. The bounds are shown to reduce to known results in cases of independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) and correlated Rayleigh MIMO channels. We also analyze the outage characteristics of the correlated Rician MIMO channels at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). We derive the mean and variance of the mutual information and show that it is well approximated by a Gaussian distribution. Finally, we present numerical results which show the effect of the antenna configuration, correlation level (angle spreads), Rician K-factor, and the geometry of the dominant Rician paths.

This paper presents an analytical characterization of the ergodic capacity of amplify-and-forward (AF) MIMO dual-hop relay channels, assuming that the channel state information is available at the destination terminal only. In contrast to prior results, our expressions apply for arbitrary numbers of antennas and arbitrary relay configurations. We derive an expression for the exact ergodic capacity, simplified closed-form expressions for the high SNR regime, and tight closed-form upper and lower bounds. These results are made possible by employing recent tools from finite-dimensional random matrix theory, which are used to derive new closed-form expressions for various statistical properties of the equivalent AF MIMO dual-hop relay channel, such as the distribution of an unordered eigenvalue and certain random determinant properties. Based on the analytical capacity expressions, we investigate the impact of the system and channel characteristics, such as the antenna configuration and the relay power gain. We also demonstrate a number of interesting relationships between the dual-hop AF MIMO relay channel and conventional point-to-point MIMO channels in various asymptotic regimes.