Movable antennas have recently emerged as a promising paradigm to overcome the inherent inflexibility of conventional fixed antenna arrays. By enabling the physical movement of antenna elements, movable antennas introduce additional spatial degrees of freedom to wireless systems. Although the importance of the movement delay has been recognized, a critical yet unexplored problem is that the movement schemes used to transition from the initial to the target positions are overlooked. This paper presents a systematic investigation of two fundamental movement schemes: concurrent movement and cumulative movement, and addresses a key design question: Should we prioritize minimizing the total configuration time or maximizing the communication performance under a limited movement budget? Specifically, two different optimization problems are formulated to maximize the sum rate under different movement constraints, thereby introducing tighter coupling between antenna positions and beamforming design, increasing computational complexity in joint optimization, and necessitating efficient allocation of delay budgets across multiple antennas. To this end, we develop an alternating-optimization-based algorithm to obtain the corresponding suboptimal solutions. A theoretical degeneration analysis is further conducted to provide fundamental insights. The optimal strategy for a single antenna can surprisingly be to not move. While in multi-antenna systems, the performance gap scales with antenna displacement, movement budgets, and transmit power. Simulation results show that movable antennas substantially improve achievable rates over fixed antennas, with concurrent movement benefiting low-latency scenarios, while cumulative movement favoring high-rate or delay-tolerant scenarios.

This paper exploits the integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) technology in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks, where multiple UAVs collaboratively form a virtual antenna array (VAA) within a pre-determined area, to effectively operate as a multi-antenna system for communication and sensing (C&S) services. Since the VAA is an extremely-large antenna array, the near-field characteristics must be considered in C&S channels. By optimizing UAV positions, we construct an enhanced VAA configuration and subsequently design the corresponding beamforming, thereby improving sensing performance while guaranteeing communication requirements. A penalty-based iterative algorithm is exploited to address the resulting optimization problem. Simulation results demonstrate that the optimized VAA with beamforming significantly enhances target localization accuracy compared to conventional schemes, validating the effectiveness of the ISAC implementation in UAV networks.

The phase shift information (PSI) overhead poses a critical challenge to enabling real-time intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted wireless systems, particularly under dynamic and resource-constrained conditions. In this paper, we propose a lightweight PSI compression framework, termed meta-learning-driven compression and reconstruction network (MCRNet). By leveraging a few-shot adaptation strategy via model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML), MCRNet enables rapid generalization across diverse IRS configurations with minimal retraining overhead. Furthermore, a novel depthwise convolutional gating (DWCG) module is incorporated into the decoder to achieve adaptive local feature modulation with low computational cost, significantly improving decoding efficiency. Extensive simulations demonstrate that MCRNet achieves competitive normalized mean square error performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines across various compression ratios, while substantially reducing model size and inference latency. These results validate the effectiveness of the proposed asymmetric architecture and highlight the practical scalability and real-time applicability of MCRNet for dynamic IRS-assisted wireless deployments.

Sparse vector coding (SVC) is a promising short-packet transmission method for ultra reliable low latency communication (URLLC) in next generation communication systems. In this paper, a dual-mapping SVC (DM-SVC) based short packet transmission scheme is proposed to further enhance the transmission performance of SVC. The core idea behind the proposed scheme lies in mapping the transmitted information bits onto sparse vectors via block and single-element sparse mappings. The block sparse mapping pattern is able to concentrate the transmit power in a small number of non-zero blocks thus improving the decoding accuracy, while the single-element sparse mapping pattern ensures that the code length does not increase dramatically with the number of transmitted information bits. At the receiver, a two-stage decoding algorithm is proposed to sequentially identify non-zero block indexes and single-element non-zero indexes. Extensive simulation results verify that proposed DM-SVC scheme outperforms the existing SVC schemes in terms of block error rate and spectral efficiency.

Semantic communication has emerged as a promising solution to meet the growing demand for efficient data transmission in the information age. Unlike traditional communication methods that focus on transmitting raw data, semantic communication prioritizes preserving the meaning of transmitted information, which significantly reduces the data volume. However, implementing semantic communication systems in resource-constrained environments, such as Internet of Things (IoT) devices, remains challenging due to limited computational resources. In this letter, we propose a novel lightweight deep learning (DL) model, termed the lightweight image compression and reconstruction network (LICRnet). LICRnet leverages depthwise separable convolution (DSC) and a local and nonlocal mixture (LNLM) block to significantly reduce computational costs. Additionally, the LNLM incorporates a variable window size-based multiscale attention mechanism (VW-MSA), enabling it to effectively learn from both local detailed features and global high-level meaningful features. Extensive simulations demonstrate that LICRnet significantly reduces computational complexity while maintaining satisfactory image compression and reconstruction performance, making it highly suitable for deployment in resource-constrained environments.

A potential 6G technology known as intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has recently gained much attention from academia and industry. However, acquiring the optimized quantized phase shift (QPS) presents challenges for the IRS due to the phenomenon of signaling storms. In this paper, we attempt to solve the above problem by proposing two deep learning models, the global attention phase shift compression network (GAPSCN) and the simplified GAPSCN (S-GAPSCN). In GAPSCN, we propose a novel attention mechanism that emphasizes a greater number of meaningful features than traditional attention mechanisms. Additionally, S-GAPSCN is built with an asymmetric architecture to meet the practical constraints on the computation resources of the IRS controller. Moreover, in S-GAPSCN, to compensate for the performance degradation caused by simplifying the model, we design a low-computation complexity joint attention-assisted multi-scale network (JAAMSN) module in the decoder of S-GAPSCN. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed global attention mechanism achieves prominent performance compared to the existing attention mechanisms and the proposed GAPSCN can achieve reliable reconstruction performance compared to existing state-of-the-art models. Furthermore, the proposed S-GAPSCN can approach the performance of the GAPSCN at a much lower computational cost.