This paper proposes a novel towed movable antenna (ToMA) array architecture to enhance the physical layer security of airborne communication systems. Unlike conventional onboard arrays with fixed-position antennas (FPAs), the ToMA array employs multiple subarrays mounted on flexible cables and towed by distributed drones, enabling agile deployment in three-dimensional (3D) space surrounding the central aircraft. This design significantly enlarges the effective array aperture and allows dynamic geometry reconfiguration, offering superior spatial resolution and beamforming flexibility. We consider a secure transmission scenario where an airborne transmitter communicates with multiple legitimate users in the presence of potential eavesdroppers. To ensure security, zero-forcing beamforming is employed to nullify signal leakage toward eavesdroppers. Based on the statistical distributions of locations of users and eavesdroppers, the antenna position vector (APV) of the ToMA array is optimized to maximize the users’ ergodic achievable rate. Analytical results for the case of a single user and a single eavesdropper reveal the optimal APV structure that minimizes their channel correlation. For the general multiuser scenario, we develop a low-complexity alternating optimization algorithm by leveraging Riemannian manifold optimization. Simulation results confirm that the proposed ToMA array achieves significant performance gains over conventional onboard FPA arrays, especially in scenarios where eavesdroppers are closely located to users under line-of-sight (LoS)-dominant channels.

Multispectral filter array (MSFA) camera is increasingly used due to its compact size and fast capturing speed. However, because of its narrow-band property, it often suffers from the light-deficient problem, and images captured are easily overwhelmed by noise. As a type of commonly used denoising method, neural networks have shown their power to achieve satisfactory denoising results. However, their performance highly depends on high-quality noisy-clean image pairs. For the task of MSFA image denoising, there is currently neither a paired real dataset nor an accurate noise model capable of generating realistic noisy images. To this end, we present a physics-based noise model that is capable to match the real noise distribution and synthesize realistic noisy images. In our noise model, those different types of noise can be divided into SimpleDist component and ComplexDist component. The former contains all the types of noise that can be described using a simple probability distribution like Gaussian or Poisson distribution, and the latter contains the complicated color bias noise that cannot be modeled using a simple probability distribution. Besides, we design a noise-decoupled network consisting of a SimpleDist noise removal network (SNRNet) and a ComplexDist noise removal network (CNRNet) to sequentially remove each component. Moreover, according to the non-uniformity of color bias noise in our noise model, we introduce a learnable position embedding in CNRNet to indicate the position information. To verify the effectiveness of our physics-based noise model and noise-decoupled network, we collect a real MSFA denoising dataset with paired long-exposure clean images and short-exposure noisy images. Experiments are conducted to prove that the network trained using synthetic data generated by our noise model performs as well as trained using paired real data, and our noise-decoupled network outperforms other state-of-the-art denoising methods.

Fine-grained visual categorization (FGVC) relies on hierarchical features extracted by deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to recognize closely alike objects. Particularly, shallow layer features containing rich spatial details are vital for specifying subtle differences between objects but are usually inadequately optimized due to gradient vanishing during backpropagation. In this article, hierarchical self-distillation (HSD) is introduced to generate well-optimized CNNs features for accurate fine-grained categorization. HSD inherits from the widely applied deep supervision and implements multiple intermediate losses for reinforced gradients. Besides that, we observe that the hard (one-hot) labels adopted for intermediate supervision hurt the performance of FGVC by enforcing overstrict supervision. As a solution, HSD seeks self-distillation where soft predictions generated by deeper layers of the network are hierarchically exploited to supervise shallow parts. Moreover, self-information entropy loss (SIELoss) is designed in HSD to adaptively soften intermediate predictions and facilitate better convergence. In addition, the gradient detached fusion (GDF) module is incorporated to produce an ensemble result with multiscale features via effective feature fusion. Extensive experiments on four challenging fine-grained datasets show that, with neglectable parameter increase, the proposed HSD framework and the GDF module both bring significant performance gains over different backbones, which also achieves state-of-the-art classification performance.

Fusion-based hyperspectral image (HSI) super-resolution has become increasingly prevalent for its capability to integrate high-frequency spatial information from the paired high-resolution (HR) RGB reference (Ref-RGB) image. However, most of the existing methods either heavily rely on the accurate alignment between low-resolution (LR) HSIs and RGB images or can only deal with simulated unaligned RGB images generated by rigid geometric transformations, which weakens their effectiveness for real scenes. In this article, we explore the fusion-based HSI super-resolution with real Ref-RGB images that have both rigid and nonrigid misalignments. To properly address the limitations of existing methods for unaligned reference images, we propose an HSI fusion network (HSIFN) with heterogeneous feature extractions, multistage feature alignments, and attentive feature fusion. Specifically, our network first transforms the input HSI and RGB images into two sets of multiscale features with an HSI encoder and an RGB encoder, respectively. The features of Ref-RGB images are then processed by a multistage alignment module to explicitly align the features of Ref-RGB with the LR HSI. Finally, the aligned features of Ref-RGB are further adjusted by an adaptive attention module to focus more on discriminative regions before sending them to the fusion decoder to generate the reconstructed HR HSI. Additionally, we collect a real-world HSI fusion dataset, consisting of paired HSI and unaligned Ref-RGB, to support the evaluation of the proposed model for real scenes. Extensive experiments are conducted on both simulated and our real-world datasets, and it shows that our method obtains a clear improvement over existing single-image and fusion-based super-resolution methods on quantitative assessment as well as visual comparison. The code and dataset are publicly available at https://zeqiang-lai.github.io/HSI-RefSR/.

Recently, supervised deep-learning methods have shown their effectiveness on raw video denoising in low-light. However, existing training datasets have specific drawbacks, e.g., inaccurate noise modeling in synthetic datasets, simple motion created by hand or fixed motion, and limited-quality ground truth caused by the beam splitter in real captured datasets. These defects significantly decline the performance of network when tackling real low-light video sequences, where noise distribution and motion patterns are extremely complex. In this paper, we collect a raw video denoising dataset in low-light with complex motion and high-quality ground truth, overcoming the drawbacks of previous datasets. Specifically, we capture 210 paired videos, each containing short/long exposure pairs of real video frames with dynamic objects and diverse scenes displayed on a high-end monitor. Besides, since spatial self-similarity has been extensively utilized in image tasks, harnessing this property for network design is more crucial for video denoising as temporal redundancy. To effectively exploit the intrinsic temporal-spatial self-similarity of complex motion in real videos, we propose a new Transformer-based network, which can effectively combine the locality of convolution with the long-range modeling ability of 3D temporal-spatial self-attention. Extensive experiments verify the value of our dataset and the effectiveness of our method on various metrics.

The brain–computer interface (BCI) technology improves the communication efficiency between people and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. BCI based on the steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP-BCI) is the preferred scheme for controlling devices because of its convenient operation, low training requirement, and high information transmission rate (ITR). Most signal acquisition devices for BCIs are used for medical diagnosis and scientific research and utilize multiple channels and wet electrodes to obtain high-quality signals. However, the practicability, wearability, and cost of the signal acquisition devices for real-life applications need to be considered, resulting in new requirements for the acquisition mode, the number of electrodes, power consumption, and signal processing methods. This article presents a wearable low-power collaborative sensing system based on a time mask window canonical correlation analysis method (TMW-CCA). An 8-array spring dry electrode signal acquisition device based on a flexible circuit board is designed to address the shortcomings of traditional wet electrode acquisition devices, such as high-power consumption, discomfort, and being unsuitable for long-time use. The proposed TMW-CCA method, which uses a dry electrode sensor to evaluate the time domain’s signal quality dynamically, exhibits 12.5% higher steady-state visual evoked potential recognition accuracy and 40% lower average power consumption (only 740 mW) than the benchmark.

In this article, we investigate an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted Internet of Things (IoT) system in a sophisticated 3-D environment, where the UAV’s trajectory is optimized to efficiently collect data from multiple IoT ground nodes. Unlike existing approaches focusing only on a simplified 2-D scenario and the availability of perfect channel state information (CSI), this article considers a practical 3-D urban environment with imperfect CSI, where the UAV’s trajectory is designed to minimize data collection completion time subject to practical throughput and flight movement constraints. Specifically, inspired by the state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning approaches, we leverage the twin-delayed deep deterministic policy gradient (TD3) to design the UAV’s trajectory and we present a TD3-based trajectory design for completion time minimization (TD3-TDCTM) algorithm. In particular, we set an additional information, i.e., the merged pheromone, to represent the state information of the UAV and environment as a reference of reward which facilitates the algorithm design. By taking the service statuses of the IoT nodes, the UAV’s position, and the merged pheromone as input, the proposed algorithm can continuously and adaptively learn how to adjust the UAV’s movement strategy. By interacting with the external environment in the corresponding Markov decision process, the proposed algorithm can achieve a near-optimal navigation strategy. Our simulation results show the superiority of the proposed TD3-TDCTM algorithm over three conventional nonlearning-based baseline methods.

In an aerial hybrid massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system, how to design a spectral-efficient broadband multi-user hybrid beamforming with a limited pilot and feedback overhead is challenging. To this end, by modeling the key transmission modules as an end-to-end (E2E) neural network, this paper proposes a data-driven deep learning (DL)-based unified hybrid beamforming framework for both the time division duplex (TDD) and frequency division duplex (FDD) systems with implicit channel state information (CSI). For TDD systems, the proposed DL-based approach jointly models the uplink pilot combining and downlink hybrid beamforming modules as an E2E neural network. While for FDD systems, we jointly model the downlink pilot transmission, uplink CSI feedback, and downlink hybrid beamforming modules as an E2E neural network. Different from conventional approaches separately processing different modules, the proposed solution simultaneously optimizes all modules with the sum rate as the optimization object. Therefore, by perceiving the inherent property of air-to-ground massive MIMO-OFDM channel samples, the DL-based E2E neural network can establish the mapping function from the channel to the beamformer, so that the explicit channel reconstruction can be avoided with reduced pilot and feedback overhead. Besides, practical low-resolution phase shifters (PSs) introduce the quantization constraint, leading to the intractable gradient backpropagation when training the neural network. To mitigate the performance loss caused by the phase quantization error, we adopt the transfer learning strategy to further fine-tune the E2E neural network based on a pre-trained network that assumes the ideal infinite-resolution PSs. Numerical results show that our DL-based schemes have considerable advantages over state-of-the-art schemes.

International audience

Supported by deep learning techniques, remote sensing scene classification, a fundamental task in remote image analysis, has recently obtained remarkable progress. However, due to the severe uncertainty and perturbation within an image, it is still a challenging task and remains many unsolved problems. In this paper, we note that regular one-hot labels cannot precisely describe remote sensing images, and they fail to provide enough information for supervision and limiting the discriminative feature learning of the network. To solve this problem, we propose a Variational Self-Distillation Network (VSDNet), in which the class entanglement information from the prediction vector acts as the supplement to the category information. Then, the exploited information is hierarchically distilled from the deep layers into the shallow parts via a Variational Knowledge Transfer (VKT) module. Notably, the VKT module performs knowledge distillation in a probabilistic way through variational estimation, which enables end-to-end optimization for mutual information and promotes robustness to uncertainty within the image. Extensive experiments on four challenging remote sensing datasets demonstrate that, with a negligible parameter increase, the proposed VSDNet brings a significant performance improvement over different backbone networks and delivers state-of-the-art results.

Well-designed multi-modal transportation networks are crucial for our connected world. For instance, the excessive construction of railway tracks in China, at speeds up to 350 km/h, makes it necessary to consider the interaction of rail with air transportation for network design. In this study, we propose a model for an air/rail multi-modal, multiple allocation hub location problem with uncertainty on travel demands. Our model is unique in that it integrates features from the existing literature on multi-modal hub location problem (including hub-level capacities, link capacities, direct links, travel cost and time, transit costs and uncertainty), which have not been considered simultaneously, given its high computational complexity. We formulate this model with$O(n^{4})$variables and show that the implementation of a Benders decomposition algorithm is inherently hard, because of the cubic number of variables in the master problem. Furthermore, we derive an iterative network design algorithm and additional improvement strategies: MMHUBBI which resolves a restricted problem by the solver CPLEX and MMHUBBI-DIRECT which re-designs the transportation network by a heuristic. Our evaluation on real-world dataset for Chinese domestic transportation shows that MMHUBBI provides a significant speed-up on all instances, compared to using CPLEX, while obtaining near-optimal solutions. MMHUBBI-DIRECT further reduces the runtime/memory usage but provides solutions with worse quality. We believe that our study contributes towards the design of more realistic multi-modal hub location problems.

Massive machine-type communications (mMTC) are poised to provide ubiquitous connectivity for billions of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. However, the required low-latency massive access necessitates a paradigm shift in the design of random access schemes, which invokes a need of efficient joint activity and data detection (JADD) algorithms. By exploiting the feature of sporadic traffic in massive access, a beacon-aided slotted grant-free massive access solution is proposed. Specifically, we spread the uplink access signals in multiple subcarriers with pre-equalization processing and formulate the JADD as a multiple measurement vectors (MMV) compressive sensing problem. Moreover, to leverage the structured sparsity of uplink massive access signals among multiple time slots, we develop two computationally efficient detection algorithms, which are termed as orthogonal approximate message passing (OAMP)-MMV algorithm with simplified structure learning (SSL) and accurate structure learning (ASL). To achieve accurate detection, the expectation maximization algorithm is exploited for learning the sparsity ratio and the noise variance. To further improve the detection performance, channel coding is applied and successive interference cancellation (SIC)-based OAMP-MMV-SSL and OAMP-MMV-ASL algorithms are developed, where the likelihood ratio obtained in the soft-decision can be exploited for refining the activity identification. Finally, the state evolution of the proposed OAMP-MMV-SSL and OAMP-MMV-ASL algorithms is derived to predict the performance theoretically. Simulation results verify that the proposed solutions outperform various state-of-the-art baseline schemes, enabling low-latency random access and high-reliable massive IoT connectivity with overloading.

The massive machine-type communications (mMTC) paradigm based on media modulation in conjunction with massive multi-input multi-output base stations (BSs) is emerging as a viable solution to support the massive connectivity for the future Internet-of-Things, in which the inherent massive access at the BSs poses significant challenges for device activity and data detection (DADD). This paper considers the DADD problem for both uncoded and coded media modulation based mMTC with a slotted access frame structure, where the device activity remains unchanged within one frame. Specifically, due to the slotted access frame structure and the adopted media modulated symbols, the access signals exhibit adoubly structured sparsityin both the time domain and the modulation domain. Inspired by this, a doubly structured approximate message passing (DS-AMP) algorithm is proposed for reliable DADD in the uncoded case. Also, we derive the state evolution of the DS-AMP algorithm to theoretically characterize its performance. As for the coded case, we develop a bit-interleaved coded media modulation scheme and propose an iterative DS-AMP (IDS-AMP) algorithm based on successive inference cancellation (SIC), where the signal components associated with the detected active devices are successively subtracted to improve the data decoding performance. In addition, the channel estimation problem for media modulation based mMTC is discussed and an efficient data-aided channel state information (CSI) update strategy is developed to reduce the training overhead in block fading channels. Finally, simulation results and computational complexity analysis verify the superiority of the proposed DS-AMP algorithm over state-of-the-art algorithms in the uncoded case. Also, our results confirm that the proposed SIC-based IDS-AMP algorithm can enhance the data decoding performance in the coded case and verify the validity of the proposed data-aided CSI update strategy.

In this paper, we propose to employ multiple unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) base stations to serve ground users in the millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequency bands. To improve the spectrum efficiency, uniform planar arrays are equipped at the UAVs and users for compensation of the high path loss and for mitigation of interference. We formulate a problem to jointly optimize the UAV positioning, user clustering, and hybrid analog-digital beamforming (BF) for the maximization of user achievable sum rate (ASR), subject to a minimum rate constraint for each user. Since the problem is highly non-convex and involves high-dimensional variable matrices and combinatorial programming variables, we develop a suboptimal solution via alternating optimization, successive convex optimization, and combinatorial optimization. First, we design the UAV positioning and user clustering under the assumption of ideal beam patterns, which significantly decouples the UAV positioning and directional BF. Then, the transmit and receive BF variables are successively optimized to approach the ideal beam patterns. Our simulation results verify the convergence and superiority of the proposed algorithm. Significant performance gains can be obtained compared to some benchmark schemes in terms of the ASR, and the proposed hybrid BF solution closely approaches a performance bound given by fully-digital BF.

Subspace methods, e.g., multiple signal classification algorithm (MUSIC), show great promise to high-resolution environment sensing in the 6G-enabled mobile Internet of Things (IoT), e.g., the emerging unmanned systems. Existing schemes, aiming to simplify the computational 1-D search of the MUSIC pseudospectrum, unfortunately have still an unaffordable complexity or the compromised accuracy, especially when the millimeter-wave massive multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) radar is considered. In this work, we address the fast and accurate estimation of the high-resolution pseudospectrum in massive MIMO radars. To enable real-time automotive sensing, we first formulate this computational procedure as one matrix product problem, which is then solved by leveraging randomized matrix sketching techniques. To be specific, we compute the large matrix productapproximatelyby the product of two small matrices abstracted via random sampling. To minimize the approximation error, we further design another sampling, pruning, and recomputing (SaPRe) algorithm, which refines the approximated results and thus attains the exact pseudospectrum. Finally, the theoretical analysis and numerical simulations are provided to validate the proposed methods. Our fast approaches dramatically reduce the time complexity and simultaneously attain the accurate Direction-of-Arrival (DoA) estimation, which have the great potential to real time and high-resolution automotive sensing with massive MIMO radars.

Fine-grained visual categorization aims to recognize objects from different sub-ordinate categories, which is a challenging task due to subtle visual differences between images. It is highly desired to identify discriminative regions while achieving highly non-linear compact representation for fine-grained visual categorization. However, existing methods either rely on manually defined part-based annotations to indicate the distinctive regions or operate on longitudinal vectors to capture the non-linear information, which may lose important spatial layout information. In this paper, we propose the Attentional Kernel Encoding Networks (AKEN) for fine-grained visual categorization. Specifically, the AKEN aggregates feature maps from the last convolutional layer of ConvNets to obtain a holistic feature representation. By Fourier embedding, it encodes features from both the longitudinal and transverse directions, which largely retains the spatial layout information. Moreover, we incorporate a Cascaded Attention (Cas-Attention) module to highlight local regions that distinguish among subordinate categories, enabling the AKEN to extract the most discriminative features. Working in conjunction with the attention mechanism, the proposed AKEN combines the strengths of ConvNets and kernels for non-linear feature learning, which can establish discriminative and descriptive feature representations for fine-grained image categorization. Experiments on three benchmark datasets show that the proposed AKEN delivers highly competitive performance, surpassing most existed methods and achieving state-of-the-art results.

This article investigates the problem of global output feedback stabilization by using aperiodic-sampled-data control, i.e., event-triggered control, for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems under certain assumptions. By employing the technique of output feedback domination, an observer-based event-triggered output feedback control law is explicitly constructed to guarantee the globally asymptotic stabilization. To avoid the Zeno behavior, a combining mechanism with event-triggered and time-triggered is proposed to ensure that the two consecutive updated time for the sampled-data controller is larger than one positive constant. Finally, it is shown that the problem of global output feedback stabilization for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems is solved via the proposed event-triggered control law. Finally, some comparative simulation examples are given to show the efficiency of the introduced method.

In this paper, we investigate millimeter-wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) networks with multiple unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) mounted base stations (BSs). Uniform planar arrays are equipped at the UAV-BSs to perform hybrid analog-digital beamforming (BF) for compensation of the high path loss of mmWave channels and for mitigation of intra-cell and/or inter-cell interference. We jointly optimize the UAV-BS positioning, user assignment, and hybrid BF for maximization of the achievable sum rate (ASR) of the users, subject to a minimum rate constraint for each user. A sub-optimal solution for the resulting high-dimensional and non-convex problem is developed by exploiting alternating optimization, successive convex optimization, and combinatorial optimization. Our simulation results verify the convergence of the proposed algorithm and demonstrate significant performance gains compared to two benchmark schemes in terms of the ASR.

In this paper, a full-duplex unmanned aerial vehicle (FD-UAV) relay is employed to increase the communication capacity of millimeter-wave (mmWave) networks. Large antenna arrays are equipped at the source node (SN), destination node (DN), and FD-UAV relay to overcome the high path loss of mmWave channels and to help mitigate the self-interference at the FD-UAV relay. Specifically, we formulate a problem for maximization of the achievable rate from the SN to the DN, where the UAV position, analog beamforming, and power control are jointly optimized. Since the problem is highly non-convex and involves high-dimensional, highly coupled variable vectors, we first obtain the conditional optimal position of the FD-UAV relay for maximization of an approximate upper bound on the achievable rate in closed form, under the assumption of a line-of-sight (LoS) environment and ideal beamforming. Then, the UAV is deployed to the position which is closest to the conditional optimal position and yields LoS paths for both air-to-ground links. Subsequently, we propose an alternating interference suppression (AIS) algorithm for the joint design of the beamforming vectors and the power control variables. In each iteration, the beamforming vectors are optimized for maximization of the beamforming gains of the target signals and the successive reduction of the interference, where the optimal power control variables are obtained in closed form. Our simulation results confirm the superiority of the proposed positioning, beamforming, and power control method compared to three benchmark schemes. Furthermore, our results show that the proposed solution closely approaches a performance upper bound for mmWave FD-UAV systems.

In this paper, we are concerned with exploring the theoretically and technically research outcomes for the conflict resolution (CR) of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) by using the Internet of Things technologies. We propose a satisficing algorithm to mitigate the CR problem of multiple UAVs. Specifically, we first formulate the CR problem as a game model and design strategies of the game model based on flight characteristics of UAVs. Next, a satisficing game theory is used to mitigate the formulated problem. Furthermore, required time of arrival, which is a new judgment parameter of the strategy utility, is developed to ensure that the whole system can reach a socially acceptable compromise. Simulation results verify the effectiveness and adaptability of the proposed algorithm under complex environments.

In this paper, we investigate the combination of non-orthogonal multiple access and millimeter-wave communications (mmWave-NOMA). A downlink cellular system is considered, where an analog phased array is equipped at both the base station and users. A joint Tx-Rx beamforming and power allocation problem is formulated to maximize the achievable sum rate (ASR) subject to a minimum rate constraint for each user. As the problem is non-convex, we propose a sub-optimal solution with three stages. In the first stage, the optimal power allocation with a closed form is obtained for an arbitrary fixed Tx-Rx beamforming. In the second stage, the optimal Rx beamforming with a closed form is designed for an arbitrary fixed Tx beamforming. In the third stage, the original joint Tx-Rx beamforming and power allocation problem is reduced to a Tx beamforming problem by using the previous results, and a boundary-compressed particle swarm optimization (BC-PSO) algorithm is proposed to obtain a sub-optimal solution. Extensive performance evaluations are conducted to verify the rational of the proposed solution, and the results show that the proposed sub-optimal solution can achieve a significantly better performance in terms of ASR compared with those of the state-of-the-art schemes and the conventional mmWave orthogonal multiple access (mmWave-OMA) system.

This paper investigates the application of non-orthogonal multiple access in millimeter-Wave communications (mmWave-NOMA). Particularly, we consider downlink transmission with a hybrid beamforming structure. A user grouping algorithm is first proposed according to the channel correlations of the users. Whereafter, a joint hybrid beamforming and power allocation problem is formulated to maximize the achievable sum rate, subject to a minimum rate constraint for each user. To solve this non-convex problem with high-dimensional variables, we first obtain the solution of power allocation under arbitrary fixed hybrid beamforming, which is divided into intra-group power allocation and inter-group power allocation. Then, given arbitrary fixed analog beamforming, we utilize the approximate zero-forcing method to design the digital beamforming to minimize the inter-group interference. Finally, the analog beamforming problem with the constant-modulus constraint is solved with a proposed boundary-compressed particle swarm optimization algorithm. The simulation results show that the proposed joint approach, including user grouping, hybrid beamforming and power allocation, outperforms the state-of-the-art schemes and the conventional mmWave orthogonal multiple access system in terms of achievable sum rate, and energy efficiency.

This paper mainly investigates the attitude control problem for a aircraft with quadrotor model. By combining with the physical feature of quadrotor, the attitude trajectory is first planned and divided into different priorities. Then, based on the technique of finite-time control, the finite-time attitude tracking controller is designed such that the attitude decoupled control can be achieved in a finite time. A simulation example is given to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method.

In this paper, we investigate the combination of two key enabling technologies for the fifth generation wireless mobile communication, namely millimeter-wave (mm-wave) communications and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA). In particular, we consider a typical two-user uplink mm-wave-NOMA system, where the base station equips an analog beamforming structure with a single radio-frequency chain and serves two NOMA users. An optimization problem is formulated to maximize the achievable sum rate of the two users while ensuring a minimal rate constraint for each user. The problem turns to be a joint power control and beamforming problem, i.e., we need to find the beamforming vectors to steer to the two users simultaneously subject to an analog beamforming structure, and meanwhile control appropriate power on them. As direct search for the optimal solution of the non-convex problem is too complicated, we propose decomposing the original problem into two sub-problems that are relatively easy to solve: one is a power control and beam gain allocation problem, and the other is an analog beamforming problem under a constant-modulus constraint. The rationale of the proposed solution is verified by extensive simulations, and the performance evaluation results show that the proposed sub-optimal solution achieves a close-to-bound uplink sum-rate performance.

Air traffic flow management (ATFM) aims to facilitate the utilization of airspace and airport resources and is critical in air transportation systems. During the past decades, several challenging problems have arisen from this domain and attracted intensive studies. This paper addresses the problem of alleviating the airspace congestion and reducing the flight delays in ATFM simultaneously. We formulate this problem as a multi-objective air traffic network flow optimization (MATNFO) problem. In this MATNFO model, comprehensive ATFM actions, for instance, ground-holding, airborne-holding, rerouting, and speed control, are considered. Meanwhile, a systematic approach, namely route and time-slot assignment (RTA) algorithm, is developed to solve the MATNFO problem. The idea of divide-and-conquer is embedded in the algorithm by sequentially applying both route searching module and time refinement module. Furthermore, for the sake of efficiency, a pre-selection operator is proposed as one heuristic strategy to identify promising solutions and reduce the search space by defining a sector equilibrium metric. Experiments on real data of the Chinese airspace show that the RTA algorithm outperforms an existing competitor and three related multi-objective evolutionary algorithms. In addition, RTA is competent for high-quality real-time air traffic network flow assignment.

Plenoptic cameras capture the light field in a scene with a single shot and produce lenselet images. From a lenselet image, light field can be reconstructed, with which we can render images with different viewpoints and focal length. Because of large volume data, high efficient image compression scheme for storage and transmission is urgent. Containing 4D light field information, lenselet images have much more redundant information than traditional 2D images. In this paper, we propose a subaperture images streaming scheme to compress lenselet images, in which rotation scan mapping is adopted to further improve compression efficiency. The experiment results show our approach can efficient compress the redundancy in lenselet images and outperform traditional image compression method.

The detection of sparse signals against background noise is difficult since the information in the signal is only carried by a small portion of it. Prior information is usually assumed to ease detection. This study considers the general unknown and arbitrary sparse signal detection problem when no prior information is available. Under a Neyman–Pearson hypothesis‐testing problem model, a new detection scheme referred to as the likelihood ratio test with sparse estimation (LRT‐SE) is proposed. The SE technique from the compressive sensing theory is incorporated into the LRT‐SE to achieve the detection of sparse signals with unknown support sets and arbitrary non‐zero entries. An analysis of the effectiveness of LRT‐SE is first given in terms of the characterisation of the conditions for the Chernoff‐consistent detection. A large deviation analysis is then given to characterise the error exponent of LRT‐SE with respect to the signal‐to‐noise ratio and the angle between the sparse signal and its estimate. Numerical results demonstrate superior detection performance of the proposed scheme over existing asymptotically optimal sparse detectors for finite signal dimensions. In addition, the simulation shows that the error probability of the proposed scheme decays exponentially with the number of observations.

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) provides superior coding efficiency than previous video coding standards at the cost of increasing encoding complexity. The complexity increase of motion estimation (ME) procedure is rather significant, especially when considering the complicated partitioning structure of HEVC. To fully exploit the coding efficiency brought by HEVC requires a huge amount of computations. In this paper, we analyze the ME structure in HEVC and propose a parallel framework to decouple ME for different partitions on many-core processors. Based on local parallel method (LPM), we first use the directed acyclic graph (DAG)-based order to parallelize coding tree units (CTUs) and adopt improved LPM (ILPM) within each CTU (DAGILPM), which exploits the CTU-level and prediction unit (PU)-level parallelism. Then, we find that there exist completely independent PUs (CIPUs) and partially independent PUs (PIPUs). When the degree of parallelism (DP) is smaller than the maximum DP of DAGILPM, we process the CIPUs and PIPUs, which further increases the DP. The data dependencies and coding efficiency stay the same as LPM. Experiments show that on a 64-core system, compared with serial execution, our proposed scheme achieves more than 30 and 40 times speedup for 1920 × 1080 and 2560 × 1600 video sequences, respectively.

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard achieves double compression efficiency compared to H.264/AVC with the adoption of more flexible coding structure and advanced coding tools. On the other hand, the coding mode space is too large and it's very time consuming for an HEVC encoder to search for the best coding mode. With the development of multi-core or many-core computing architecture, parallelizing HEVC encoding on such platforms is an efficient approach to fulfill the high computational requirement. In this paper, we exploit the potential parallelism in HEVC mode decision (MD) process and propose a highly parallel MD method which works in a motion estimation region (MER). Specifically, we analyze and remove data dependencies that hinder parallel MD, including motion estimation (ME) dependencies and entropy coding dependencies, and then the MD computation for different blocks within the same MER can be computed concurrently. Experimental results show that our proposed parallel MD method gets an overall speed up of more than 14x with negligible quality loss (1.79% bit rate increasing), compared with the non-parallel baseline.

Relay selection has been considered as an effective method to improve the performance of cooperative communication. However, the channel state information (CSI) used in relay selection can be outdated, yielding severe performance degradation of cooperative communication systems. In this study, the authors investigate how to select relays under outdated CSI in an amplify‐and‐forward cooperative communication system to improve its outage performance. The authors adopt maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation to predict the actual signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR) of each relay during data transmission and propose a single‐relay selection (SRS) strategy based on the MAP estimation (SRS‐MAP). To reduce the computational complexity, we approximate the a posteriori probability density of SNR and obtain a closed form of the predicted SNR. Simulation shows that SRS‐MAP outperforms the relay selection strategies given in the literature. In order to further improve the outage performance, a new multiple‐relay selection (MRS) method for outdated CSI is proposed, and by applying it to existing SRS strategies the corresponding MRS strategies are obtained. The authors find that the MRS strategies perform much better than their corresponding SRS ones and the MRS method improves the outage performance of cooperative communication system more effectively under outdated CSI than under non‐outdated CSI.

Camera shake during long exposure is ineluctable in light-limited situations, and results in a blurry observation. Recovering the blur kernel and the latent image from the blurred image is an inherently ill-posed problem. In this paper, we analyze the image acquisition model to capture two blurred images simultaneously with different blur kernels. The image pair is well-aligned and the kernels have a certain relationship. Such strategy overcomes the challenge of blurry image alignment and reduces the ambiguity of blind deblurring. Thanks to the aided hardware, the algorithm based on such image pair can give high-quality kernel estimation and image restoration. The experiments on both synthetic and real images demonstrate the effectiveness of our image capture strategy, and show that the kernel estimation is accurate enough to restore superior latent image, which contains more details and fewer ringing artifacts.

The large-scale Crossing Waypoints Location Problem (CWLP) is a crucial problem in the design of Air Route Network (ARN). CWLP is fully non-separable and non-differentiable, and thus traditional algorithms can hardly deal with it. This paper proposes an algorithm named Cooperative Co-evolution with Weighted Random Grouping (CCWR) to tackle it. CCWR employs the weighted random (WR) grouping strategy, which is specifically designed for CWLP, to divide the large-scale Crossing Waypoints (CWs) into small sub-groups and an Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) to solve the smaller scale CWs location problem in each sub-group. Experiments on the database of the ARN in China have been carried out to evaluate the performance of CCWR. The results showed that CCWR is superior to a number of state-of-the-art algorithms, and the advanced performance of CCWR is mainly due to the WR grouping strategy.

In this paper, we investigate the hop distance optimization problem in ad hoc networks where cooperative multi-input-single-output (MISO) is adopted to improve the energy efficiency of the network. We first establish the energy model of multihop cooperative MISO transmission. Based on the model, the energy consumption per bit of the network with high node density is minimized numerically by finding an optimal hop distance, and, to get the global minimum energy consumption, both hop distance and the number of cooperating nodes around each relay node for multihop transmission are jointly optimized. We also compare the performance between multihop cooperative MISO transmission and single-input-single-output (SISO) transmission, under the same network condition (high node density). We show that cooperative MISO transmission could be energy-inefficient compared with SISO transmission when the path-loss exponent becomes high. We then extend our investigation to the networks with varied node densities and show the effectiveness of the joint optimization method in this scenario using simulation results. It is shown that the optimal results depend on network conditions such as node density and path-loss exponent, and the simulation results are closely matched to those obtained using the numerical models for high node density cases.

The multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technique can be used to improve the performance of ad hoc networks. Various medium access control (MAC) protocols with multiple contention slots have been proposed to exploit spatial multiplexing for increasing the transport throughput of MIMO ad hoc networks. However, the existence of multiple request-to-send/clear-to-send (RTS/CTS) contention slots represents a severe overhead that limits the improvement on transport throughput achieved by spatial multiplexing. In addition, when the number of contention slots is fixed, the efficiency of RTS/CTS contention is affected by the transmitting power of network nodes. In this study, a joint optimisation scheme on both transmitting power and contention slots number for maximising the transport throughput is presented. This includes the establishment of an analytical model of a simplified MAC protocol with multiple contention slots, the derivation of transport throughput as a function of both transmitting power and the number of contention slots, and the optimisation process based on the transport throughput formula derived. The analytical results obtained, verified by simulation, show that much higher transport throughput can be achieved using the joint optimisation scheme proposed, compared with the non-optimised cases and the results previously reported.

This paper proposes an efficient image fusion scheme for compressed sensing (CS) imaging, in which fusion is performed on the random projections before reconstruction. Specifically, the measurements of multiple input images are fused into composite measurements via weighted average, in which the weights are calculated based on entropy metrics of the original measurements. Then the fused image with transformation coefficients in a selected basis is reconstructed from the composite measurements by the gradient projection for sparse reconstruction (GPSR) algorithm. The proposed scheme is implemented in a block-based CS framework. Simulation results show that our scheme provides promising fusion performance with a low computational complexity.

Aircraft landing scheduling is a multiobjective optimization problem with lots of constraints, which is difficult to be dealt with by traditional multiobjective evolutionary algorithms with general constraint handling strategies such as constraint-dominate definition. In this paper we pertinently designed an effective constraint handling method, and then presented a multiobjective evolutionary algorithm using the constraint handing method to solve the aircraft landing scheduling problem. Experiments show that our method is able to locate the feasible region in the search space, obtain the jagged Pareto front, and thereby provide efficient schedule for aircraft landing.

Scheduling aircraft landings has been a complex and challenging problem in air traffic control for long time. In this paper, we propose to solve the aircraft landing scheduling problem (ALSP) using multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs). Specifically, we consider simultaneously minimizing the total scheduled time of arrival and the total cost, and formulate the ALSP as a 2-objective optimization problem. A MOEA named Multi-Objective Neighborhood Search Differential Evolution (MONSDE) is applied to solve the 2-objective ALSP. Besides, a ranking scheme named non-dominated average ranking is also proposed to determine the optimal landing sequence. Advantages of our approaches are demonstrated on two example scenarios.