Rydberg atomic quantum receivers (RAQRs) have emerged as highly sensitive receivers for future communication and sensing systems. However, conventional RAQRs are primarily effective for single-carrier and narrowband reception, typically with an operational bandwidth of only a few hundred kilohertz. To enable the reception of multi-carrier signals with larger bandwidth, we propose a multi-carrier Rydberg atomic quantum receiver (MC-RAQR) architecture based on a five-level quantum system model. We analyze the amplitude and phase of the output laser in MC-RAQR and extract the baseband electrical signal for signal processing. Furthermore, we quantify the performance of MC-RAQR in multi-carrier communication and sensing by studying the channel capacity and distance estimation, respectively. Numerical results show that the MC-RAQR is capable of achieving a bandwidth of $7.2$ MHz, which is an order of magnitude larger than conventional RAQRs. Besides, compared to conventional receivers, MC-RAQR can improve the capacity and distance estimation by $18$-fold and $10^3$-fold, respectively. This validates the superiority of MC-RAQR in receiving multi-carrier signal, and demonstrates its compatibility in detecting waveforms such as orthogonal frequency‐division multiplexing.

With the advent of 5G, the internet has entered a new video-centric era. From short-video platforms like TikTok to long-video platforms like Bilibili, online video services are reshaping user consumption habits. Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) control is widely recognized as a critical factor influencing Quality of Experience (QoE). Recent learning-based ABR methods have attracted increasing attention. However, most of them rely on limited network trace sets during training and overlook the wide-distribution characteristics of real-world network conditions, resulting in poor generalization in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose SABR, a training framework that combines behavior cloning (BC) pretraining with reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning. We also introduce benchmarks, ABRBench-3G and ABRBench-4G+, which provide wide-coverage training traces and dedicated OOD test sets for assessing robustness to unseen network conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that SABR achieves the best average rank compared with Pensieve, Comyco, and NetLLM across the proposed benchmarks. These results indicate that SABR enables more stable learning across wide distributions and improves generalization to unseen network conditions.

As the sixth-generation (6G) networks evolve towards a deep integration of communication and computation (ICC), they face challenges of inherent interference and resource competition between heterogeneous services. To address this issue, this paper investigates an uplink ICC system enhanced by a stacked intelligent metasurface (SIM), where SIM’s unique multi-layer structure transforms the wireless channel into a controllable, task-oriented medium. The system is designed to support the coexistence of over-the-air computation (AirComp) tasks, which require high-precision results, and traditional tasks that demand high-quality communication. To this end, we formulate a joint optimization framework aiming to minimize the total mean squared error (MSE) of all computation tasks while strictly guaranteeing the communication quality of service (QoS). To solve the highly non-convex problem of synergistically designing the system resources, we propose an efficient alternating optimization (AO) algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm not only converges rapidly but also achieves up to a 95.2% reduction in total computation MSE compared to an ICC system without SIM, while also significantly outperforming other benchmark schemes, validating the great potential of SIM in proactively managing multi-service conflicts and enabling efficient ICC.

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) with cloud radio access networks (C-RAN) unifies two foundational technologies for the Internet of Things (IoT), enabling both high-data-rate transmission and accurate environmental awareness. This paper investigates an uplink C-RAN system where multiple remote radio units (RRUs) jointly serve user equipment devices (UEs) and sense a target. We demonstrate that only a subset of RRUs is typically needed to meet sensing requirements, while energy is potentially conserved by deactivating redundant sensing RRUs. Motivated by this, we aim to improve the system’s energy efficiency (EE) by jointly optimizing RRU activation, user association, and power allocation, while ensuring localization accuracy through the Cram´er-Rao lower bound (CRLB). To address this problem, we propose a model-based iterative algorithm that integrates optimal user association, decision tree-based selection of sensing RRUs, and fixed-point power allocation. This algorithm is further used to train a graph neural network (GNN) framework, ISAC-GNN, to overcome scalability and computational complexity limitations. Our theoretical analysis ensures performance guarantees, while a semi-supervised training strategy enhances stability and generalization. Simulation results demonstrate that ISAC-GNN reduces inference time by 67% relative to the model-based approach, enabling real-time implementation for ISAC system resource management. In addition, ISAC-GNN allows scalable deployment across various system scenarios without retraining the model.

The performance of actuators is essential for ensuring the safe and reliable cruise of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). However, limited data and constrained computational resources pose significant challenges for accurate and timely fault diagnosis of UAV actuators in practice. To this end, this paper proposes a novel lightweight fault diagnosis method termed ensemble domain adaptation with constructive incremental learning (EDA-CIL). First, a cloud feature extraction strategy is developed to adaptively extract fault-sensitive information from vibration signals using cloud entropy theory. Next, the proposed meta domain adaptation (MDA) is gained with node-based constructive incremental learning, which serves as a base classifier leveraging knowledge from the source domain and few-shot target domain data. Specifically, MDA minimizes discrepancies in marginal and conditional distributions across different domain features during this incremental process, benefiting the lightweight and compact structure for domain adaptation. Moreover, the convergence analysis of MDA is given to guarantee the efficacy of cross-domain performance and network compactness theoretically. Finally, to avoid the negative transfer arising from excessive dependence on a single-source domain, the stable diagnosis performance is obtained via the domain energy-based parallel ensemble learning of multiple source actuators. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves good accuracy and the fastest speed on hexacopter UAV actuator diagnosis with limited data. In comparison with the bidirectional LSTM-based multi-source transfer learning method, EDA-CIL improves the diagnostic accuracy by 3.45%, 5.61%, 9.34%, 11.86%, 2.29%, and 12.80% across six actuators, while achieving approximately 18 times faster diagnostic speed.

Smart alignment is a fundamental requirement for charging in the Internet of Things (IoT). The pose or relative pose is crucial for achieving this smart alignment. This paper addresses the deployment problem for anchors on the detector and tags on an object, leveraging range measurements for high accuracy. We designed a Reference Point Transformation (RPT) joint deployment algorithm, including a topology framework of deployment, a joint deployment model, and the RPT module in 6 Degrees of Freedom (6-DoF). First, the topology framework of deployment decreases the search space of the optimization problem. Second, the joint deployment model represents anchors and tags together mathematically, allowing the deployment problem to be treated in a unified framework. The final component of our framework aims to determine an optimal anchor/tag configuration at a designated target point. Specifically, using the translation and rotation between the reference and target points, the optimization criterion shifts from the Geometric Dilution of Precision (GDOP) at the reference point to the square root of the trace of the Cramér-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) for the target point position. Thereafter, simulations and experiments were conducted to demonstrate the rationality of the RPT deployment algorithm compared with three other deployment algorithms. The good performance of the RPT deployment algorithm verifies that it is suitable for 6-DoF Rigid Body Localization (RBL). Finally, the extended performance analysis of the RPT deployment algorithm is conducted to illustrate two relationships related to the lower bound of localization errors. One is the detector dimensions under the topology framework. The other is the number of anchors and tags under the RPT deployment algorithm.

Ensuring the secure communication of unmanned aerial vehicle-assisted reconfigurable intelligent surface (UAV-RIS) is crucial in maintaining seamless connection in next-generation Internet of Things (IoT) networks. For this purpose, intelligent beamforming is essential to ensure secure data transmission from IoT devices to UAV-RIS and optimize communication while preventing adversarial attacks. This paper proposes a novel framework of federated learning for long short-term memory-based deep deterministic policy gradient with an attention mechanism (F-DDPG-AM). The proposed algorithm aims to improve security and mitigate potential threats in UAV-RIS-assisted IoT networks. The F-DDPG-AM combines the federated LSTM’s power to capture long-term dependencies in sequential data with the attention mechanism to focus on key network states and improve decision-making efficiency. The F-DDPG-AM framework improves learning efficiency, accelerates convergence, and enhances resilience against adversarial attacks by selectively prioritizing crucial network information and focusing on insecure scenarios. In addition, federated learning in the proposal ensures secure decision-making through local training for UAV-RIS-enabled IoT networks. The F-DDPG-AM enhances system scalability, trustworthiness, and compliance with secure machine learning principles by decentralizing the training process. The simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed F-DDPG-AM framework in defending against attacks, significantly outperforming traditional security approaches and other existing reinforcement learning models.

This study investigates energy-efficient resource allocation for covert vehicular communications with age constraints, where vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) links leverage spectrum sharing to conceal covert transmissions. Vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) links serve as friendly jammers, simultaneously disrupting detection and maintaining connectivity with the base station. To maximize V2V links’ covert energy efficiency (CEE) and V2I links’ throughput under quality of service (QoS), communication covertness, and freshness constraints, a novel matching-based resource allocation framework is proposed. Specifically, we derive the minimum error detection rate and the optimal detection threshold at warden. The transmit probability and power are jointly optimized using the successive convex approximation method. Jamming selection is then modeled as a stable marriage problem, solved via the Gale-Shapley algorithm for stable matching between V2V and V2I links. Additionally, we explore a coalition falsification strategy to further enhance the CEE of certain V2V links without hurting the performance of the rest. Extensive simulations validate the proposed approach, showing significant improvements over existing baselines.

Conventional visible light positioning (VLP) systems are limited by inadequate positioning accuracy and vulnerability to obstacle occlusion, thereby hindering their deployment in precision-critical applications. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a fusion algorithm that synergistically combines received signal strength (RSS) and angle of arrival (AoA) information. Furthermore, the proposed approach incorporates an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) framework into the system model, thereby improving system robustness and simultaneously enhancing positioning accuracy under sparse light-emitting diode (LED) deployment, blockage, or non-line-of-sight (NLoS) conditions. Specifically, this paper employs a multi-photodetector (PD) array at the receiver to formulate a system of linear equations based on RSS measurements, which facilitates accurate angle estimation. This derived AoA information is subsequently fused with the RSS data to establish a joint positioning objective function, thereby mitigating the limitations associated with single-parameter approaches. Crucially, an optical IRS is integrated to produce robust NLoS propagation paths, significantly enhancing accuracy in scenarios characterized by a scarcity of LEDs or obstructed line-of-sight (LoS) links, which are common challenges in practical deployments. To address the resulting non-convex optimization problem, a dimension learning-based hunting enhanced grey wolf optimizer (GWO-DLH) is developed, ensuring efficient convergence to the global optimum. Comprehensive simulations conducted under realistic channel models demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves a lower root-mean-square error compared to conventional RSS-only or AoA-only methods, while maintaining a computational complexity that is comparable to state-of-the-art techniques. These findings substantiate the algorithm’s effectiveness in balancing accuracy and robustness, thereby providing a foundational framework for the advancement of high-precision indoor optical positioning systems.

Direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation for incoherently distributed (ID) sources is crucial for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications operating in complex multipath environments, yet it remains challenging due to the combined effects of angular spread and gain-phase uncertainties in cost-sensitive antenna arrays. This paper presents a two-stage sparse DOA estimation framework, transitioning from partial calibration to full potential, under the generalized array manifold (GAM) framework. In the first stage, coarse DOA estimates are obtained by exploiting the output from a subset of partly-calibrated arrays (PCAs). In the second stage, these estimates are utilized to determine and compensate for gain-phase uncertainties across all array elements. Then a sparse total least-squares optimization problem is formulated and solved via alternating descent to refine the DOA estimates. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior estimation accuracy compared to existing approaches, while maintaining robustness against both noise and angular spread effects in practical industrial environments.

Deep neural networks have achieved significant progress but face growing security threats, particularly backdoor attacks. Adversaries implant backdoors into pre-trained models and uses specific triggers to activate the backdoor, inducing the model to output incorrect results. To cope with backdoor attacks, we systematically introduces frequency domain perturbations into backdoor defense scenarios. By preserving phase semantics and perturbing amplitude high-frequency features, the repaired model will shift from trigger dependency to semantic dependency, thereby weakening the coupling relationship between backdoor trigger patterns and target categories. We propose Freq-Pret to demonstrate this backdoor defense strategy, which is a novel backdoor defense scheme combining frequency domain perturbations with lightweight retraining. Theoretical analysis and experiments demonstrate that Freq-Pret effectively repairs backdoors without compromising initial accuracy, enabling the repaired model to resist attacks and correctly categorize contaminated samples with high probability. Compared to existing methods, Freq-Pret offers clear advantages.

This paper investigates the reliability and security of a hybrid double-reconfigurable intelligent surface (HDRIS) aided wireless-powered communication (WPC) system in the presence of eavesdroppers, where one active/passive RIS (RIS-1) is deployed between the power station and the information user, and the other passive/active RIS (RIS-2) is deployed between the information user and the access point. We propose two modes of HDRIS aided WPC, i.e., HDRIS-I with passive RIS-1 and active RIS-2, and HDRIS-II with active RIS-1 and passive RIS-2. Based on the two modes, we analyze the outage probability (OP) from the perspective of reliability and intercept probability (IP) from the perspective of security, and derive their accurate and asymptotic expressions, respectively. Moreover, a joint metric is proposed, i.e., reliability and security probability (RSP), to reveal the superiority of HDRIS compared to pure double-RIS (PDRIS). The results show that compared to PDRIS, the proposed HDRIS-I and HDRIS-II have better OPs than PDRIS-I with two passive RISs, but worse OPs than PDRIS-II with two active RISs. Both HDRIS-I and HDRIS-II have worse IPs than PDRIS-I, but better IPs than PDRIS-II. Interestingly, in HDRIS-I and HDRIS-II, the diversity gain for legitimate users is proportional to the number of elements of the RISs, while the diversity gain for eavesdroppers is only 1, indicating that HDRIS provide greater benefits for legitimate communications. In Particular, HDRIS-I achieves the best RSP under high transmission power, while HDRIS-II achieves the best RSP under low transmission power, demonstrating the superiority of HDRIS.

A polarization-aware direction-of-arrival (DoA) detection scheme is conceived that leverages the intrinsic vector sensitivity of a single Rydberg atomic vapor cell to achieve quantum-enhanced angle resolution. Our core idea lies in the fact that the vector nature of an electromagnetic wave is uniquely determined by its orthogonal electric and magnetic field components, both of which can be retrieved by a single Rydberg atomic receiver via electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT)- based spectroscopy. To be specific, in the presence of a static magnetic bias field that defines a stable quantization axis, a pair of sequential EIT measurements is carried out in the same vapor cell. Firstly, the electric-field polarization angle is extracted from the Zeeman-resolved EIT spectrum associated with an electricdipole transition driven by the radio frequency (RF) field. Within the same experimental cycle, the RF field is then retuned to a magnetic-dipole resonance, producing Zeeman-resolved EIT peaks for decoding the RF magnetic-field orientation. This scheme exhibits a dual yet independent sensitivity on both angles, allowing for precise DoA reconstruction without the need for spatial diversity or phase referencing. Building on this foundation, we derive the quantum Fisher-information matrix (QFIM) and obtain a closed-form quantum Cramér-Rao bound (QCRB) for the joint estimation of polarization and orientation angles. Finally, simulation results spanning various quantum parameters validate the proposed approach and identify optimal operating regimes. With appropriately chosen polarization and magnetic-field geometries, a single vapor cell is expected to achieve sub-0.1° angle resolution at moderate RF-field driving strengths.

Fluid antenna systems (FAS) have emerged as a promising technology to achieve high spatial diversity by dynamically reconfiguring multiple closely spacedNantenna ports. However, the inherent spatial correlation among these ports poses significant challenges for accurate performance analysis. Traditional block-correlation modeling algorithms, which partition theN×NToeplitz-structured correlation matrix into independentDblocks with constant correlation coefficients, often yield substantial approximation errors to block-correlation models, especially in scenarios with limited ports. In this paper, we revisit the spatial block-correlation model for FAS and introduce a novel block-correlation modeling algorithm in tuning the model parameters, which realizes the variable block-correlation model in practice. Our proposed approach derives closed-form expressions for the optimal block-specific correlation coefficients and develops a low-complexity heuristic algorithm that reduces the computational complexity from exponentialDN–Dto linear (N–D) ×Dsearches,thereby achieving significantly lower approximation error compared to constant correlation models. To validate the effectiveness of our variable block-correlation modeling algorithm, we first apply it to point-to-point FAS communications with closely spaced ports, deriving analytical expressions for the joint probability density function (PDF) of channel amplitudes and outage probability. Our analysis shows that the proposed algorithm offers tractable performance evaluation and superior accuracy, particularly when the number of ports is small (NThese results underscore the practical value of our approach for the design and optimization of next-generation FAS-based wireless networks.

As intelligent network services continue to diversify, ensuring efficient and adaptive resource allocation in edge networks has become increasingly critical. Yet the wide functional variations across services often give rise to new and unforeseen optimization problems, rendering traditional manual modeling and solver design both time-consuming and inflexible. This limitation reveals a key gap between current methods and human solving — the inability to recognize and understand problem characteristics. It raises the question of whether problem-aware learning can bridge this gap and support effective cross-problem generalization. To answer this question, we propose a problem-aware diffusion (PAD) model, which leverages a problem-aware learning framework to enable cross-problem generalization. By explicitly encoding the mathematical formulations of optimization problems into token-level embeddings, PAD empowers the model to understand and adapt to problem structures. Extensive experiments across ten representative network optimization problems show that PAD generalizes well to unseen problems while avoiding the inefficiency of building new solvers from scratch, yet still delivering competitive solution quality. Meanwhile, an auxiliary constraint-aware module is designed to enforce solution validity further. The experiments indicate that problem-aware learning opens a promising direction toward general-purpose solvers for intelligent network operation and resource management. Our code is open source at https://github.com/qiyu3816/PAD.

Multimodal learning emerges as a promising solution for high-precision localization, a cornerstone of 6G integrated sensing and communications (ISAC), by integrating measurements from different data sources. Yet its real-world deployment remains challenging because(i)the quality and relevance of different modalities fluctuate with frequency, noise, and antenna heterogeneity and(ii)spatial and fingerprint ambiguities under non-line-of-sight (NLOS) propagation obscure the mapping between channel measurements and positions. To overcome these challenges, we propose a spatial-context-aware dynamicfusion architecture built on the mixture-of-experts (SCADF-MoE) backbone. We first construct a million-scale comprehensive ray-tracing dataset measuring synchronized angle, distance, gain, and channel across diverse carrier frequencies, antenna geometries, and noise levels. A three-stage pre-processing pipeline then clusters neighboring points into short trajectories, enriching data samples with spatial context information. The resulting sequences are fed into SCADF-MoE: first, multimodal soft MoE blocks with learnable routing matrices dynamically fuse heterogeneous inputs according to their modality relevance in different environmental contexts; second, a modality-task MoE formulates position estimation as a multi-objective problem, simultaneously predicting coordinates of neighboring points to leverage their shared spatial correlations. Additionally, we introduce a regularization loss that enforces expert diversity and mitigates gradient conflicts during multi-task optimization. Simulations across three environments (dense-urban, suburban, canyon) and three heterogeneity dimensions (frequency, noise, antenna) demonstrate that SCADF-MoE achieves consistent sub-meter accuracy in all conditions, reducing overall MSE by 63%, and cuts unseen-NLOS error by 55% compared to state-of-the-art methods. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that leverages large-scale multimodal MoEs for high-precision ISAC localization.

In vehicle-to-everything (V2X) scenarios, the high dynamic characteristics of V2X environments impose significant challenges on communication channel estimation, where the emerging integrated sensing and communication technology could serve as a vital tool for achieving accurate channel estimation. This paper leverages radar-sensed angle information to assist in communication channel estimation and proposes a deep unfolding-based radar-assisted channel estimation network (Radar-CEnet). Specifically, for the radar module, to address the challenges posed by insufficient data in imperfect arrays, we employ a model-agnostic meta-learning with a convolutional neural network (MAML-CNN) approach to achieve high-precision direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation. Then, the angle information obtained by the radar module, as prior knowledge, is used for channel estimation. Building on this, we design a novel soft-thresholding shrinkage function and propose the Radar-CEnet algorithm to efficiently estimate the sparse channel. Finally, we rigorously prove the convergence of the Radar-CEnet algorithm and demonstrate that it achieves a lower estimation error. Experimental results show that the proposed Radar-CEnet outperforms existing traditional methods and deep learning-based approaches in channel estimation performance. At an SNR of 20dB, the proposed Radar-CEnet method reduces the NMSE from –23.75dB to –27.15dB compared to the learning-based iterative soft-thresholding method, achieving an estimation accuracy improvement of approximately 54%.

In this paper, the covert performance of the simultaneous transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) aided Terahertz (THz) communication systems with rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) over the generalized α-μ fading channel is studied, where the discrete phase error and noise power uncertainty are considered. By means of the Gaussian approximation and Gamma distribution, the closed-form outage probability (OP) of the legitimate users is firstly derived. Then, the covert performance of the system is analyzed, and average detection error probability (ADEP) is deduced for the warden, and resultant closed-form ADEP is obtained. By minimizing the ADEP, the optimal detection threshold is derived with closed-form expression. With these results, subject to the constraints of covertness and reliability, the power allocation (PA) coefficients are optimized to minimize the OP of the covert user. Two adaptive PA schemes based on two-dimensional (2D) and one-dimensional (1D) search methods are respectively proposed to achieve the solutions, and resulting lower OP is attained. Simulation results indicate that the theoretical OP and ADEP can agree the corresponding simulations well, and randomizing the noise power of warden can improve the covert performance. Moreover, the warden with the optimized threshold can obtain lower ADEP than that with a fixed threshold, and the system with two PA schemes has a lower OP than that with a fixed PA, especially the scheme based on 1D search has lower complexity while maintaining the superior performance.

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) requires effective coordination among multiple decision-making agents to achieve joint goals. Approaches based on a global value function face the curse of dimensionality, while fully decomposed centralized training with decentralized execution (CTDE) methods often suffer from relative overgeneralization. Coordination graphs mitigate this issue but typically fail to capture dynamic collaboration patterns that evolve over time and across tasks. We propose Dynamic Deep Factor Graphs (DDFG), a value decomposition algorithm that represents the global value via factor graphs and learns graph structures on the fly through a graph-generation policy, adapting to evolving inter-agent relations. We provide a theoretical upper bound on the approximation error of high-order decompositions and reveal how the maximum order $D$D trades off accuracy against computation, offering guidance for balancing performance and cost. Using max-sum for inference, DDFG efficiently derives joint policies. Experiments on higher-order predator-prey and SMAC show consistent gains over strong value-decomposition baselines, demonstrating improved sample efficiency and robustness in complex settings.

Accurate state of health (SOH) estimation of lithium-ion batteries is essential for ensuring the safe and reliable operation of battery-powered systems. Variations in battery types and operating conditions give rise to distribution discrepancies, for which various domain adaptation strategies have been proposed. However, current domain adaptation approaches typically require access to source domain information, including model parameters, model structure, and even the source data. Considering the increasing awareness of data protection and security restrictions, this work proposes a novel source-free foundation model-enabled SOH estimation framework designed for black-box scenarios, where only the access permission to a pre-trained source model and limited labeled target samples are required. First, degradation-sensitive features based on crucial voltage ranges are extracted from source batteries to construct a foundation SOH estimation model, reducing reliance on full-cycle measurements. Second, a novel intelligent adapter model is proposed to bridge the distribution gap between the source and target domains by leveraging an intermediate reference battery, enabling latent feature alignment without access to the source data or internal details of the source model. Finally, a fine-tuning strategy under limited target labels is employed for model adaptation to the target domain. Extensive experiments are conducted on multiple cells and compared with several representative domain adaptation approaches. The results demonstrate that, compared with the most competitive source-free adaptation baseline, the proposed framework achieves approximately 41% lower average RMSE and a consistently higher average R 2 of 0.9657, validating its effectiveness under label scarcity and privacy constraints.

The extremely large reconfigurable intelligent surface (XL-RIS) is an architecture that shows potential in expanding the transmission region to meet high requirements of sixth-generation communication systems. In XL-RIS-assisted scenarios, users transmit signal through spherical-wavefront near-field channel, where the channel estimation presents great challenges. Additionally, XL-RIS elements are prone to failure due to accidental damages or blockages, which further complicates the channel state. To address these issues, we propose a three-stage signal-assisted sparse representation-based channel estimation (SA-SRCE) scheme to robustly recover near-field channel and diagnose RIS failure state with low pilot overhead. The first stage utilizes a double domain filter (DDF) to eliminate noise based on sparse representation in the angle and polar domains. Then, based on the filtered signal, a failure-aware orthogonal matching pursuit (FA-OMP) algorithm is proposed to iteratively reconstruct the channel, as well as eliminate the perturbation invoked by RIS element failures. Moreover, considering the limited availability of pilot, we further exploit the information of compressed signal and propose the signal-assisted failure-aware double-sparsity OMP (FADS-OMP) algorithm as the third stage to improve the estimation performance in FA-OMP. The effectiveness and robustness of our proposed scheme is validated through theoretical analysis and extensive simulations.

While stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIMs) have demonstrated significant technical and cost advantages in multiuser scenarios, existing literature universally assumes ideal transceiver hardware. Addressing this gap, this paper investigates the design and optimization of a SIM-assisted multiuser downlink multiple-input single-output (MISO) system under practical transceiver hardware impairments (HWIs). To accurately capture distortion effects at both the base station (BS) and user equipment, we adopt an aggregate HWI model based on improper Gaussian statistics. The considered impairments include finite-resolution digital-to-analog converters (DACs), power amplifier (PA) nonlinearities, in-phase/quadrature (I/Q) imbalance, and other radio-frequency (RF) front-end non-idealities. We formulate a sum-rate (SR) maximization problem that jointly optimizes digital beamforming at the BS and multi-layer analog beamforming at the SIM. To tackle this highly non-convex optimization challenge, we propose a closed-form-based iterative algorithm that alternately updates BS and SIM beamforming with guaranteed convergence. Extensive simulations validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, quantify the impact of different HWI sources, and demonstrate that SIM deployment significantly improves system robustness, mitigates HWI-induced performance degradation, and reduces DAC resolution requirements without substantial performance loss.

Stacked intelligent metasurface (SIM) extends the concept of single-layer reconfigurable holographic surfaces (RHS) by incorporating a multi-layered structure, thereby providing enhanced control over electromagnetic wave propagation and improved signal processing capabilities. This study investigates the potential of SIM in enhancing the rate fairness in multiuser downlink systems by addressing two key optimization problems: maximizing the minimum rate (MR) and maximizing the geometric mean of rates (GMR). The former strives to enhance the minimum user rate, thereby ensuring fairness among users, while the latter relaxes fairness requirements to strike a better trade-off between user fairness and system sum-rate (SR). For the MR maximization, we adopt a consensus alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM)-based approach, which decomposes the approximated problem into sub-problems with closed-form solutions. For GMR maximization, we develop an alternating optimization (AO)-based algorithm that also yields closed-form solutions and can be seamlessly adapted for SR maximization. Numerical results validate the effectiveness and convergence of the proposed algorithms. Comparative evaluations show that MR maximization ensures near-perfect fairness, while GMR maximization balances fairness and system SR. Furthermore, the two proposed algorithms respectively outperform existing related works in terms of MR and SR performance. Lastly, SIM with lower power consumption achieves performance comparable to that of multi-antenna digital beamforming.

The significant progress of quantum sensing technologies offer numerous radical solutions for measuring a multitude of physical quantities at an unprecedented precision. Among them, Rydberg atomic quantum receivers (RAQRs) emerge as an eminent solution for detecting the electric field of radio frequency (RF) signals, exhibiting great potential in assisting classical wireless communications and sensing. So far, most experimental studies have aimed for the proof of physical concepts to reveal its promise, while the practical signal model of RAQR-aided wireless communications and sensing remained under-explored. Furthermore, the performance of RAQR-based wireless receivers and their advantages over classical RF receivers have not been fully characterized. To fill these gaps, we introduce the RAQR to the wireless community by presenting an end-to-end reception scheme. We then develop a corresponding equivalent baseband signal model relying on a realistic reception flow. Our scheme and model provide explicit design guidance to RAQR-aided wireless systems. We next study the performance of RAQR-aided wireless systems based on our model, and compare them to classical RF receivers. The results show that Doppler broadening-free RAQRs are capable of achieving a substantial received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gain of over 27 decibel (dB) and 40 dB in the photon shot limit and standard quantum limit regimes, respectively.

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) emerges as a transformative paradigm for enabling future wireless networks by jointly supporting high-rate communication and precise environmental perception. In this paper, we investigate a robust beamforming framework tailored for monostatic ISAC systems in near-field channels, where the impact of spherical wavefront effects is significant and cannot be neglected. In particular, we formulate a minimum mean squared error (MMSE)-driven beamforming optimization problem that strikes an effective balance between sensing accuracy and communication quality, while considering both power and outage constraints and explicitly accounting for channel estimation errors. To address the inherent non-convexity arising from coupled sensing-communication constraints and uncertainties due to channel errors, a semidefinite relaxation (SDR)-based algorithm leveraging sphere bounding techniques is developed to acquire a favorable suboptimal solution, with polynomial-time complexity. Furthermore, extensive simulations are conducted to rigorously validate the proposed methodology under a variety of practical conditions. Our results demonstrate that the proposed design reduces sensing mean squared error (MSE) by up to 3.8 dB and improves achievable communication rate by 33.4% over non-robust baselines under imperfect channel state information (CSI). Furthermore, compared to conventional far-field schemes, our design achieves up to 1.6 dB lower MSE and 28.0% higher rate in millimeter-wave (mmWave) scenarios, and 2.5 dB lower MSE and 31.7% rate gain in terahertz (THz) scenarios at 10 dB communication signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR). To further underscore the practical significance of our approach, the experimental results reveal critical insights into the delicate balance between communication and sensing performance in ISAC systems under real-world conditions. Specifically, our findings emphasize the importance of robust beamforming techniques that optimize resource allocation to mitigate the adverse effects of channel estimation errors, particularly in high-frequency regimes such as mmWave and THz. These insights are vital for the design of adaptive ISAC systems, where trade-offs between sensing precision and communication reliability must be dynamically managed to meet stringent performance requirements in next-generation wireless networks.

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) has been a key technology for wireless systems for decades. For typical MIMO communication systems, antenna array elements are usually separated by half of the carrier wavelength, thus termed as co-located MIMO. In this paper, we investigate the performance of multi-user sparse MIMO communication, with sparse arrays at both the transmitter and receiver side, i.e., the array elements are separated by more than half wavelength. Given the same number of array elements, the performance of sparse MIMO is compared with co-located MIMO. On one hand, sparse MIMO has a larger aperture, which can achieve narrower main lobe beams that make it easier to resolve densely located users. Besides, increased array aperture also enlarges the near-field communication region, which can enhance the spatial multiplexing gain, thanks to the spherical wavefront property in the near-field region. On the other hand, element spacing larger than half wavelength leads to undesired grating lobes, which, if left unattended, may cause severe multi-user interference (MUI). Specifically, we first study the spatial multiplexing gain of the basic single-user sparse MIMO communication system, where a closed-form expression of the near-field effective degree of freedom (EDoF) is derived. The result shows that EDoF increases with the array sparsity for sparse MIMO before reaching its upper bound, which equals to the minimum value between the transmit and receive antenna numbers. Furthermore, the scaling law for the achievable data rate with varying array sparsity is analyzed and an array sparsity-selection strategy is proposed.We then consider the more general multi-user sparse MIMO communication system. It is shown that sparse MIMO is less likely to experience severe MUI than co-located MIMO, especially when users are densely located, thanks to the non-uniform distribution of spatial angle difference among users. Finally, numerical results are provided to validate our theoretical analysis.

This paper proposes a robust received signal strength (RSS)-based localization framework for non-cooperative unmanned aerial vehicles. Conventional RSS methods face three fundamental obstacles: susceptibility to heavy-tailed measurement noise, intractable non-convexity, and severe accuracy degradation when target transmission power is unknown. These vulnerabilities present critical security risks to emerging low-altitude economy networks. To overcome these limitations, we propose an integrated joint-estimation architecture. First, a cascaded preprocessing pipeline, combining Gaussian outlier suppression and statistical median weighting, is developed to mitigate multipath-induced biases and minimize variance. Second, an information-theoretic base station (BS) selection mechanism is designed to identify geometrically optimal BSs, thereby exponentially reducing computational overhead in both uniform and random deployment scenarios. Third, the power-unknown problem is reformulated via semidefinite programming, absorbing the unknown parameter into a higher-dimensional convex cone to guarantee global convergence without relying on initial guesses. Extensive Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate that under uniform BS deployment, our strategy achieves sub-10-meter accuracy (approximately 5 m root mean square error) using only 5 selected BSs in typical urban conditions with a path loss exponent of 3. Consequently, this approach delivers a highly accurate and computationally efficient solution for real-time target tracking in complex environments.

FAS-enabled cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (FAS-CoNOMA) systems capture the potential of fluid antenna systems in enhancing network performance. In this system, a base station (BS) transmits a superposition signal to a central user (CU) and a cell-edge user (EU), both equipped with FAS. Specifically, the CU decodes the signal intended for the EU and cooperatively relays it to improve the EU’s communication performance. The EU employs selective combining (SC) or maximum ratio combining (MRC) to receive signals from both the BS and CU. By leveraging the dynamic properties of FAS to improve user differentiation, the CoNOMA system effectively enhances network performance compared to traditional NOMA, OMA, and fixed position antenna (FPA) systems. To address the challenging spatial correlation properties in FAS, we utilize the block-diagonal matrix approximation (BDMA) model to calculate the outage probabilities for both the CU and EU. We then derive upper bound, lower bound, and asymptotic approximation of the outage probabilities to gain deeper insights. Furthermore, we optimize the EU’s outage probability under the CU’s outage constraint and total transmit power limits by adjusting the power allocation coefficient for the CU and the transmit powers for both the BS and CU. To simplify the optimization process, we reduce the number of variables and apply the alternating optimization (AO) algorithm to break down the problem into two sub-problems. Each sub-problem is solved using the bisection search method and gradient descent algorithm (GDA). Simulation results demonstrate that FAS significantly improves outage performance, especially for the EU, and that CoNOMA notably captures the potential of FAS beyond NOMA and OMA, offering a promising solution for future wireless networks.

Over-the-air computation (AirComp) enables swift wireless data aggregation by leveraging the superposition property of multiple-access channels (MAC), making it essential for the seamless integration of communication and computing in future networks. Meanwhile, fluid antenna systems (FAS) offer dynamic spatial degrees of freedom (DoF) by reconfiguring antenna positions, thus enhancing adaptability under varying channel conditions. This paper investigates the integration of FAS into a communication and AirComp coexistence framework. We aim to jointly optimize the transceiver beamforming vectors and the antenna positioning vector (APV) to minimize the computation distortion while ensuring reliable cellular communication performance. To tackle this highly non-convex problem, we develop an efficient joint learning-optimization framework. Specifically, we propose a neural network (NN) framework with a dedicated surrogate loss function design to infer optimal APV based on multi-path channel conditions, while an alternating optimization (AO) method is developed to find a locally optimal solution of transceivers by iteratively optimizing each variables with the others being fixed. Besides, to provide analytical tractability and benchmark insight, the APV design problem is relaxed and transformed into a tractable quadratically constrained quadratic program (QCQP) by successive convex approximation (SCA) as a special case under line-of-sight (LoS) channels, which reveals the performance bounds and convergence properties of the system. Numerical results show that proposed method significantly improves the system performance compared with traditional fixed-position antenna (FPA) as well as various benchmark schemes with remarkable generalization capabilities across diverse channel conditions.

In this paper, we contribute to the beamforming design problem with imperfect channel state information in a monostatic integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system. We propose a robust waveform design framework tailored for monostatic ISAC systems, incorporating a channel random error vector to account for imperfections in the communication channels, and addressing clutter interference in radar sensing received waveforms. Next, we derive expressions for target estimation performance via utilizing the minimum mean squared error criterion and the Cramer-Rao bound, which serve as objective functions for our beamforming design. Additionally, we introduce signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio outage probability constraints and power constraints, formulating two different beamforming optimization problems. Utilizing semi-definite programming techniques, we reformulate these optimization problems into convex optimization problems and resolve them via a convex toolbox. Finally, our simulation results achieves 45% sensing gain and 37% communication gain at an SINR threshold of 20 dB compared with the baseline.

This study considers covert and secure communications in which a transmitter, Alice, sends information to a legitimate receiver, Bob, using a differential space-time line code (Diff-STLC) scheme. A warden, Willie, attempts to detect Alice’s transmission based on signal strength. Upon successful detection, Willie becomes an eavesdropper (Eve) and starts to eavesdrop on the information. Willie and Eve are adversaries against covert and secure communications, respectively. To enhance the limited secrecy of a conventional Diff-STLC system, we propose a code-hopping strategy by randomly switching between two Diff-STLC structures. As a result, only Bob, aware of the hopping pattern, can decode the signals. To quantify both covertness and secrecy, we define a covert secrecy rate (CSR) as the difference between the achievable rates at Bob and Eve. Using the detection probability of Willie and the bit error rates of Eve and Bob, we derive an analytical lower bound for CSR. Both analytical and Monte Carlo results confirm that the proposed Diff-STLC hopping method significantly enhances the performance of CSR, thus improving the overall covertness and secrecy in communications.

Accurate battery capacity estimation is key to alleviating consumer concerns about battery performance and reliability of electric vehicles (EVs). However, practical data limitations imposed by stringent privacy regulations and labeled data shortages hamper the development of generalizable capacity estimation models that remain robust to real-world data distribution shifts. While self-supervised learning can leverage unlabeled data, existing techniques are not particularly designed to learn effectively from challenging field data—let alone from privacy-friendly data, which are often less feature-rich and noisier. In this work, we propose a first-of-its-kind capacity estimation model based on self-supervised pretraining, developed on a large-scale dataset of privacy-friendly charging data snippets from real-world EV operations. Our pre-training framework,snippet similarity-weighted masked input reconstruction, is designed to learn rich, generalizable representations even from less feature-rich and fragmented privacy-friendly data. Our key innovation lies in harnessing contrastive learning to first capture high-level similarities among fragmented snippets that otherwise lack meaningful context. With our snippet-wise contrastive learning and subsequent similarity-weighted masked reconstruction, we are able to learn rich representations of both granular charging patterns within individual snippets and high-level associative relationships across different snippets. Bolstered by this rich representation learning, our model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving 31.9% lower test error than the best-performing benchmark, even under challenging domain-shifted settings affected by both manufacturer and age-induced distribution shifts.

Accurate and rapid state-of-health (SOH) monitoring plays an important role in indicating energy information for lithium-ion battery-powered portable mobile devices. To confront their variable working conditions, transfer learning (TL) emerges as a promising technique for leveraging knowledge from data-rich source working conditions, significantly reducing the training data required for SOH monitoring from target working conditions. However, traditional TL-based SOH monitoring is infeasible when applied in portable mobile devices since substantial computational resources are consumed during the TL stage and unexpectedly reduce the working endurance. To address these challenges, this article proposes a lightweight TL-based SOH monitoring approach with constructive incremental transfer learning (CITL). First, taking advantage of the unlabeled data in the target domain, a semisupervised TL mechanism is proposed to minimize the monitoring residual in a constructive way, through iteratively adding network nodes in the CITL. Second, the cross-domain learning ability of node parameters for CITL is comprehensively guaranteed through structural risk minimization, transfer mismatching minimization, and manifold consistency maximization. Moreover, the convergence analysis of the CITL is given, theoretically guaranteeing the efficacy of TL performance and network compactness. Finally, the proposed approach is verified through extensive experiments with a realistic autonomous air vehicles (AAVs) battery dataset collected from dozens of flight missions. Specifically, the CITL outperforms SS-TCA, MMD-LSTM-DA, DDAN, BO-CNN-TL, and AS$^{3}$LSTM, in SOH estimation by 83.73%, 61.15%, 28.24%, 87.70%, and 57.34%, respectively, as evaluated using the index root-mean-square error.

Environment sensing and fusion via onboard sensors are envisioned to be widely applied in future autonomous driving networks. This paper considers a vehicular system with multiple self-driving vehicles that is assisted by multi-access edge computing (MEC), where image data collected by the sensors is offloaded from cellular vehicles to the MEC server using vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) links. Sensory data can also be shared among surrounding vehicles via vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication links. To improve spectrum utilization, the V2V links may reuse the same frequency spectrum as the V2I links, which may cause severe interference. To tackle this issue, we leverage reconfigurable intelligent computational surfaces (RICSs) to jointly enable V2I reflective links and mitigate interference appearing at the V2V links. Considering the limitations of traditional algorithms in addressing this problem, such as the assumption of quasi-static channel state information, which restricts their ability to adapt to dynamic environmental changes and leads to poor performance under frequently varying channel conditions, in this paper, we formulate the problem at hand as a Markov game. Our novel formulation is applied to time-varying channels subject to multi-user interference and introduces a collaborative learning mechanism among users. The considered optimization problem is solved via a driving safety-enabled multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (DS-MADRL) approach that capitalizes on the RICS presence. Our extensive numerical investigations showcase that the proposed reinforcement learning approach achieves faster convergence and significant enhancements in both data rate and driving safety, as compared to various state-of-the-art benchmarks.

In this paper, we propose a dynamically segmented Intelligent Reflecting Surface (IRS)-assisted Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Computing Power Networks (CPNs) with tightly integrated communication and computing power resources. The IRS can be dynamically segmented and allocated to users, with computing resources allocated accordingly to satisfy their delay constraints. Considering the energy limitations of UAVs, we formulate a multi-objective optimization problem to minimize user delay and UAV energy consumption. To solve the problem, we propose a new scheme jointly considering UAVtrajectory,computing power allocation, reflecting element allocation,phase shift, and UAV-userassociation (TCPA) scheme. The phase alignment theory is utilized to determine the IRS phase shift control and decompose the problem into three subproblems based on the coupling of variables. Specifically, we use channel optimal matching to solve the first subproblem to obtain user association decisions. Then, we formulate a computing power communication matching subproblem, and propose a successive convex approximation scheme to solve it. The trajectory subproblem is optimized by a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning-based method. The evaluation results demonstrate that our proposed TCPA achieves high performance in terms of reward and system delay. Additionally, it demonstrates that integrating IRS and CPNs can effectively reduce the total system delay with only a marginal increase in energy consumption.

With the emergence of fluid antenna (FA) in wireless communications, the capability to dynamically adjust port positions offers substantial benefits in spatial diversity and spectrum efficiency, which are particularly valuable for mobile edge computing (MEC) systems. Therefore, we propose an FA-assisted MEC offloading framework to minimize system delay. This framework faces two severe challenges, which are the complexity of channel estimation due to dynamic port configuration and the inherent non-convexity of the joint optimization problem. Firstly, we propose Information Bottleneck Metric-enhanced Channel Compressed Sensing (IBM-CCS), which advances FA channel estimation by integrating information relevance into the sensing process and capturing key features of FA channels effectively. Secondly, to address the non-convex and high-dimensional optimization problem in FA-assisted MEC systems, which includes FA port selection, beamforming, power control, and resource allocation, we propose a game theory-assisted Hierarchical Twin-Dueling Multi-agent Algorithm (HiTDMA) based offloading scheme, where the hierarchical structure effectively decouples and coordinates the optimization tasks between the user side and the base station side. Crucially, the game theory effectively reduces the dimensionality of power control variables, allowing deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents to achieve improved optimization efficiency. Numerical results confirm that the proposed scheme significantly reduces system delay and enhances offloading performance, outperforming benchmarks. Additionally, the IBM-CCS channel estimation demonstrates superior accuracy and robustness under varying port densities, contributing to efficient communication under imperfect CSI.

Low-Altitude Economy Networks (LAENets) are emerging as a promising paradigm to support various low-altitude services through integrated air-ground infrastructure. To satisfy low-latency and high-computation demands, the integration of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) systems plays a vital role, which offloads computing tasks from terminal devices to nearby UAVs, enabling flexible and resilient service provisions for ground users. To promote the development of LAENets, it is significant to achieve low-carbon multi-UAV-assisted MEC networks. However, several challenges hinder this implementation, including the complexity of multi-dimensional UAV modeling and the difficulty of multi-objective coupled optimization. To this end, this paper proposes a novel Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)-based Large Language Model (LLM) agent framework for model formulation. Specifically, we develop HybridRAG by combining KeywordRAG, VectorRAG, and GraphRAG, empowering LLM agents to efficiently retrieve structural information from expert databases and generate more accurate optimization problems compared with traditional RAG-based LLM agents. After customizing carbon emission optimization problems for multi-UAV-assisted MEC networks, we propose a Double Regularization Diffusion-enhanced Soft Actor-Critic (R2DSAC) algorithm to solve the formulated multi-objective optimization problem. The R2DSAC algorithm incorporates diffusion entropy regularization and action entropy regularization to improve the performance of the diffusion policy. Furthermore, we dynamically mask unimportant neurons in the actor network to reduce the carbon emissions associated with model training. Simulation results demonstrate the reliability of the proposed HybridRAG-based LLM agent framework, which achieves a$6.6\%$improvement in F1 scores over traditional RAG, and validate the effectiveness of the R2DSAC algorithm, which outperforms the SAC algorithm by up to$64.17\%$.

In this paper, we analyze the role of fluid antenna systems (FAS) in multi-user systems with hardware impairments (HIs). Specifically, we investigate a scenario where a base station (BS) equipped with multiple fluid antennas communicates with multiple communication users (CUs), each equipped with a single fluid antenna. Our objective is to maximize the minimum communication rate among all users by jointly optimizing the BS's transmit beamforming, the positions of its transmit fluid antennas, and the positions of the CUs' receive fluid antennas. To address this non-convex problem, we propose a block coordinate descent (BCD) algorithm integrating semidefinite relaxation (SDR), rank-one constraint relaxation (SRCR), successive convex approximation (SCA), and majorization-minimization (MM). Simulation results demonstrate that FAS significantly enhances system performance and robustness, with notable gains when both the BS and CUs are equipped with fluid antennas. Even under low transmit power conditions, deploying FAS at the BS alone yields substantial performance gains. However, the effectiveness of FAS depends on the availability of sufficient movement space, as space constraints may limit its benefits compared to fixed antenna strategies. Our findings highlight the potential of FAS to mitigate HIs and enhance multi-user system performance, while emphasizing the need for practical deployment considerations.

In long-distance and long-duration flight missions of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), optimal scheduling of flight speed and energy replenishment is crucial to ensure flight efficiency and safety. This paper focuses on a UAV-based patrol inspection system, where a UAV is scheduled to visit multiple task nodes that are geographically distributed in the communication coverage of a base station (BS). The UAV hovers at each task node, performing data collection and data processing. The BS is equipped with a mobile edge computing (MEC) server and a battery swapping station, offering computation and energy support to the UAV. A decision-making model customized for the UAV is proposed, jointly optimizing flight speed selection, battery swapping, and task offloading to minimize the UAV's total operational cost in its flight. By introducing virtual nodes in the flight network, we construct a unidirectional extended graph, based on which the original nonconvex cost minimization problem is reformulated to a tractable mixed-integer convex problem. Further, a fast heuristic based on analytical target cascading (ATC) is developed to obtain suboptimal solutions to large-scale problems. Results demonstrate that the proposed model can lower the UAV's total operational cost by providing greater flexibility in terms of speed selection and battery swapping, and the proposed heuristic shows high computational efficiency for large-scale network scenarios.

Vertical federated learning (VFL) has been widely adopted in various domains for collaborative decision-making. However, recent studies have revealed critical privacy vulnerabilities in VFL, particularly label inference attacks, which significantly undermine label confidentiality and limit the applicability of VFL in privacy-sensitive scenarios. To mitigate such threats, several defense methods have been proposed by incorporating diverse privacy-preserving techniques. Nevertheless, existing defenses fail to effectively prevent the recently proposed model completion-based label inference attacks. To address this limitation, we propose a novel defense method, termed Label Compression-Based Defense (LCD), to defend against this class of attacks. The core idea of LCD is to train the VFL model using fake labels, thereby decoupling the ground-truth labels from the outputs of the malicious bottom model, which constitute the critical component exploited in the model completion-based attacks. Specifically, we introduce a multi-stage training strategy that decomposes the training process into different stages to deceive the malicious bottom model without affecting the original task. In addition, we design a deep feature-based label compression mechanism to generate fake labels for misleading the attacker. To further enhance the defense effectiveness, we propose an embedding compaction strategy based on center loss, which substantially increases the difficulty of label inference. Moreover, we theoretically prove the effectiveness of LCD from an information-theoretic perspective. Extensive experiments on both tabular and image datasets demonstrate that LCD can effectively defend against label inference attacks. The source code of LCD is publicly available at GitHub:https://github.com/YuanShunJie1/LCD.

Mobile metaverses are envisioned as a transformative digital ecosystem that delivers immersive, intelligent, and ubiquitous services through mobile devices. Driven by Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs), Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents hold the potential to empower the creation, maintenance, and evolution of mobile metaverses, enabling seamless human-machine interaction and dynamic service adaptation. Currently, AI agents are primarily built upon cloud-based LLMs and VLMs. However, several challenges hinder their efficient deployment, including high service latency and a risk of sensitive data leakage during perception and processing. In this paper, we develop an edge-cloud collaboration-based federated AI agent construction framework in mobile metaverses. Specifically, Edge Servers (ESs), as agent infrastructures, first create agent modules in a distributed manner. The cloud server then integrates these modules into AI agents and deploys them at the edge, thereby enabling low-latency AI agent services for users. Considering that ESs may exhibit dynamic levels of willingness to participate in federated AI agent construction, we design a two-period dynamic contract model to continuously incentivize ESs to participate in agent module creation, effectively addressing the dynamic information asymmetry between the cloud server and ESs. Furthermore, we propose an Enhanced Diffusion Model-based Soft Actor-Critic (EDMSAC) algorithm to effectively generate optimal dynamic contracts. In the algorithm, we apply dynamic structured pruning to DM-based actor networks to enhance denoising efficiency and policy learning performance. Simulation results demonstrate that the EDMSAC algorithm outperforms the DMSAC algorithm by up to 23% in optimal dynamic contract generation.

In this paper, we propose a new concept of self-sustainable active metasurface (SAM), which exploits the dual advantages of energy harvesting in terms of self-sustainability and active metasurface in terms of information transmission, to achieve continuous operation and flexible deployment for reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) and simultaneously mitigate its multiplicative fading. SAM can enhance incident signals via power amplifiers and achieve self-sustainability by harvesting ambient energy. We propose three operation schemes to implement energy harvesting and information transmission for SAM, namely, time-switching based SAM (TS-SAM), power-splitting based SAM (PS-SAM), and element-splitting based SAM (ES-SAM). Then, we propose three new metrics, namely, energy-information outage probability (EIOP), energy-information intercept probability (EIIP), and secure energy efficiency ratio (SEER). The accurate and asymptotic EIOP and EIIP as well as accurate SEER for the three proposed schemes are analyzed, respectively. The results show that compared to self-sustainable passive RIS, TS-SAM and ES-SAM have better EIOPs, and PS-SAM has a better EIIP. Among the three schemes, PS-SAM achieves the best EIOP at low RF energy, while TS-SAM and ES-SAM perform better in high-energy scenarios. For EIIP, PS-SAM outperforms the other two schemes. In particular, compared to self-sustainable passive RIS, TS-SAM and ES-SAM have better SEERs, verifying the superiority of the proposed TS-SAM and ES-SAM. Among all inter-node distances, the distance between user and SAM dominates the performance. When the harvested energy and the number of reflecting elements are sufficiently large, the EIOP and EIIP of TS-SAM and ES-SAM are unrelated to the amplification factor of SAM.

The intrinsic integration of Rydberg atomic receivers into wireless communication systems is proposed, by harnessing the principles of quantum physics in wireless communications. More particularly, we conceive a pair of Rydberg atomic receivers, one incorporates a local oscillator (LO), referred to as an LO-dressed receiver, while the other operates without an LO and is termed an LO-free receiver. The appropriate wireless model is developed for each configuration, elaborating on the receiver's responses to the radio frequency (RF) signal, on the potential noise sources, and on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) performance. The developed wireless model conforms to the classical RF framework, facilitating compatibility with established signal processing methodologies. Next, we investigate the associated distortion effects that might occur, specifically identifying the conditions under which distortion arises and demonstrating the boundaries of linear dynamic ranges. This provides critical insights into its practical implementations in wireless systems. Finally, extensive simulation results are provided for characterizing the performance of wireless systems, harnessing this pair of Rydberg atomic receivers. Our results demonstrate that LO-dressed systems achieve a significant SNR gain of approximately 40~50 dB over conventional RF receivers in the standard quantum limit regime. This SNR head-room translates into reduced symbol error rates, enabling efficient and reliable transmission with higher-order constellations.

Recent studies have shown that the stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIM) can exploit inter-layer electromagnetic (EM) wave transmission for wave-domain signal processing. This enables over-the-air computing with characteristics such as high-speed operation, low energy consumption, and support for multitasking parallel processing. By leveraging these advantages, SIM show great potential in substituting or augmenting customized communication functions in conventional wireless systems. To support various transmitter-customized communication functions, we design a novel multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmitter architecture based on SIM and develop corresponding detection algorithms. Initially, we present a SIM-enabled MIMO transceiver model. Unlike conventional wireless communication, the SIM-enabled transmitter automatically performs customized functions, such as precoding and channel encoding, as the EM waves propagate within the layers. At the receiver side, minimum mean square error (MMSE) and maximum likelihood (ML) detectors are adopted as benchmarks, and their theoretical performance bounds are derived accordingly. Furthermore, we propose a data-enhanced deep unfolding algorithm, namely orthogonal approximate message passing causal dilated convolutional transformer (OAMP-CDT), to demonstrate the performance of customized functions based on SIM. Simulation results verify that the proposed SIM-enabled MIMO transmitter supports customized functions via over-the-air signal processing, and the proposed OAMP-CDT algorithm outperforms the same series of algorithms, such as orthogonal approximate message passing (OAMP) and OAMP-Net2.

Pinching antennas (PAs), a special class of leaky-wave antennas (LWAs), have recently emerged as a promising technology to mitigate blockage and reduce large-scale path loss. However, PAs suffer from performance limitations due to their passive radiation characteristics and mechanical actuation. To overcome these limitations, we introduce reconfigurable LWAs (RLWAs), which enable RLWA beamforming through electronic control of both radiation amplitudes and phases. By integrating RLWAs into the existing PA systems (PASS), we propose a hybrid PASS (H-PASS) architecture, which combines mechanically reconfigurable PA beamforming with electronically reconfigurable RLWA beamforming. Given that PAs in H-PASS can be deployed in discrete-position or continuous-position manners, H-PASS comes in two variants accordingly, and we formulate weighted sum-rate maximization problems for them, respectively. For the discrete-position case, we propose a penalty-based two-loop joint analog and digital beamforming algorithm. For the continuous-position case, we propose an alternating-minimization-based joint position optimization and beamforming algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that H-PASS can increase the sum-rate of the existing PASS by up to 33%, reduce the performance loss caused by phase quantization in discrete-position PAs by up to 69%, and mitigate the performance loss caused by position errors in continuous-position PAs by up to 90%. Overall, H-PASS significantly improves the performance of existing PASS by leveraging the strengths of RLWAs while mitigating the limitations of PAs.

In this paper, we investigate near-field wideband channel estimation with block sparsity. First, we propose an on-grid total variation-regularized block sparse Bayesian learning (TV-BSBL) algorithm. By constructing sparse representations of near-field wideband channels, we show that the sparse coefficient vectors exhibit both common sparsity across subcarriers and block sparsity in the surrogate distance-angle domain. To promote common sparsity, a Gamma prior combined with subcarrier-adaptive factors is utilized. To encourage block sparsity, TV regularization is incorporated into the prior model. The channel estimation is formulated as a maximum a posteriori (MAP) problem and solved via an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. Then, in the M-step, we further propose a primal-dual hybrid gradient-based signal hyperparameter update algorithm, which admits simple primal and dual updates and guarantees convergence to the global optimum. Moreover, we propose an off-grid TV-BSBL algorithm for near-field wideband channel estimation. We introduce additional variables to characterize the deviations between the true channel parameters and their quantized grids. These deviation variables are then integrated into the MAP estimation framework and refined via gradient descent. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed on-grid and off-grid TV-BSBL algorithms achieve superior estimation performance under various conditions.

The integration of multicarrier modulation and multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) is critical for reliable transmission of wireless signals in complex environments, which significantly improve spectrum efficiency. Existing studies have shown that popular orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) and affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM) offer significant advantages over orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) in uncoded doubly selective channels. However, it remains uncertain whether these benefits extend to coded systems. Meanwhile, the information-theoretic limit analysis of coded MIMO multicarrier systems and the corresponding low-complexity receiver design remain unclear. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes a multi-slot cross-domain memory approximate message passing (MS-CD-MAMP) receiver as well as develops its information-theoretic (i.e., achievable rate) limit and optimal coding principle for MIMO-multicarrier modulation (e.g., OFDM, OTFS, and AFDM) systems. The proposed MS-CD-MAMP receiver can exploit not only the time domain channel sparsity for low complexity but also the corresponding symbol domain constellation constraints for performance enhancement. Meanwhile, limited by the high-dimensional complex state evolution (SE), a simplified single-input single-output variational SE is proposed to derive the achievable rate of MS-CD-MAMP and the optimal coding principle with the goal of maximizing the achievable rate. Numerical results show that coded MIMO-OFDM/OTFS/AFDM with MS-CD-MAMP achieve the same maximum achievable rate in doubly selective channels, whose finite-length performance with practical optimized low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes is only$0.5\sim 1.8$dB away from the associated theoretical limit, and has$0.8\sim 4.4$dB gain over the well-designed point-to-point LDPC codes.

In this paper, we develop a tensor-based joint multi-dimensional (polarization, angle, and time delay) channel parameter estimation algorithm for single-input multiple-output (SIMO) communication systems equipped with an electromagnetic vector sensor (EMVS) linear array. By considering the EMVS array structure and multi-path propagation environment, the received signals at the base station (BS) are constructed into a third-order parallel factor (PARAFAC) tensor model. By decomposing the constructed tensor, we design a joint structured tensor decomposition algorithm (STDA) and bilinear alternating least squares (BALS) fitting algorithm using the Vandermonde structure of the array to estimate the factor matrices containing angles, polarization, and time delay. Based on the estimated factor matrices, we employ a closed-form algorithm to extract the two-dimensional direction of arrival (2D-DoA), polarization parameters, and time delay. In addition, to provide a quantitative assessment of the proposed algorithm’s performance, we calculate the Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) as a benchmark for comparison. Simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm achieves superior estimation accuracy and is closer to the CRB compared with the existing tri-polarized algorithms.

In this paper, we focus on beamforming optimization for a multiuser and multi-target integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system with non-ideal hardware at both the base station (BS) and the users. Specifically, by taking into account the impact of hardware impairments encountered in practice, we jointly optimize the transmit and receive beamforming at the ISAC BS to maximize the minimum radar output signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) for the multi-target sensing, subject to the constraints of multiuser communication requirements and transmit power limit. The formulated joint optimization is nonconovex and challenging to solve. To address this intricate optimization task, we start with a single-target scenario, for which we propose an optimal solution. In particular, we prove in theory that, even in the presence of general additive Gaussian distortions caused by transceiver hardware impairments, a matched filter (MF) radar receiver and a transmit beamforming determined through beampattern gain maximization criterion are optimal, which follow the same strategies as an ideal scenario with perfect hardware. Subsequently, for a general multi-target scenario, we derive a series of closed-form optimal radar receive beamforming. By substituting these solutions, we achieve an equivalent problem reformulation with respect to the transmit beamforming and propose an iterative algorithm to solve it. We also extend the optimization method to cases involving more realistic hardware impairments. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms and highlight their notable advantages compared to existing approaches through simulation results.

In this paper, we investigate a two-way backscatter communication system assisted by a dual-sided reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) which consists of active or passive elements. By altering the switch status within each RIS element, different transmission and reflection coefficients can be achieved, thus enabling a binary backscatter modulation. To begin with, we propose a maximum likelihood (ML) detector and a maximal-ratio-combining (MRC)-based detector for the proposed dual-sided RIS-assisted two-way communication system to decode the backscatter signal as well as the end-users’ respective signal. Moreover, we compare the underlying system with and without backscatter modulation at the dual-sided RIS. Subsequently, we analyze the corresponding symbol error rate (SER) and throughput to highlight the performance differences of the various communication modes under perfect channel state information (CSI) and imperfect CSI. Finally, numerical results reveal that: (1) the ML detector significantly outperforms the MRC-based detector in terms of SER and throughput; (2) the throughput performance can be significantly improved by adopting a backscatter modulation, especially in the medium and high signal-to-noise ratio regimes; (3) the phase shift of the dual-sided RIS element should be aligned with the signal to be decoded first, to guarantee an improvement in the SER performance.

The existing works on holographic MIMO are mainly based on the time encoding (TE) scheme. Since the continuous aperture of holographic MIMO is able to capture both the temporal and the spatial variation of electromagnetic waves, we propose a space-time encoding (STE) scheme, which relies on the orthogonal basis function representation of the spatial-temporal EM waves. From the perspective of electromagnetic information theory, we derive the achievable information rate of the STE scheme in the narrowband communication systems and prove that the STE scheme achieves a higher information rate than the TE scheme. Firstly, We build the transmission model of the STE scheme based on electromagnetic information theory and investigate the characteristics of the model, including the blocklength of codewords and the signal-to- noise ratio. Specifically, the blocklength is determined through proving the eigenvalue distribution of the space-time-wavenumber-frequency limited operator and the signal-to-noise ratio is obtained based on proposed noise model. Then we derive the achievable information rate of both the STE scheme and the TE scheme by employing the finite blocklength information theory. Closed-form approximations of the rates are further derived, based on which we prove the conclusion that the STE scheme achieves a higher information rate than the TE scheme while utilizing the same spatial and temporal resources. Numerical results verify the accuracy of the approximations and indicate that the STE scheme improves the information rate by 7.96% over the TE scheme.

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems rely on digital or hybrid digital and analog designs for beamforming against frequency-selective fading, which suffer from high hardware complexity and energy consumption. To address this, this work introduces a fully-analog stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIM) architecture that directly performs wave-domain beamforming, enabling diagonalization of the end-to-end channel matrix and inherently eliminating inter-antenna interference (IAI) for MIMO OFDM transmission. By leveraging cascaded programmable metasurface layers, the proposed system establishes multiple parallel subchannels, significantly improving multi-carrier transmission efficiency while reducing hardware complexity. To optimize the SIM phase shift matrices, a block coordinate descent and penalty convex-concave procedure (BCD-PCCP) algorithm is developed to iteratively minimize the channel fitting error across subcarriers. Simulation results validate the proposed approach, determining the maximum effective bandwidth and demonstrating substantial performance improvements. Moreover, for a MIMO OFDM system operating at 28 GHz with 16 subcarriers, the proposed SIM configuration method achieves over 300% enhancement in channel capacity compared to conventional SIM configuration that only accounts for the center frequency.

Stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIM) enable fine-grained wave-domain signal processing, but their wideband deployment is impeded by two structural factors: (i) a single, quasi-static SIM phase tensor must adapt to all subcarriers, and (ii) multiuser scheduling changes the subcarrier activation pattern frame by frame, requiring rapid reconfiguration. To address these, we propose a SIM-enhanced wideband multiuser transceiver built on orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing with index modulation (OFDM-IM). The sparse activation of OFDM-IM confines high-fidelity equalization to the active tones, effectively widening the usable bandwidth. To make the design reliability-aware, we directly target the worst-link bit-error rate (BER) and adopt a max-min per-tone signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) as a principled surrogate, turning the reliability optimization tractable. For frame-rate inference and interpretability, we propose an unfolding projected-gradient-descent network (UPGD-Net) that unrolls across the SIM's layers and algorithmic iterations with a learnable per-iteration step size. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves fast convergence and significant BER gains over fully-digital baselines. Notably, the design exhibits superior robustness against errors and outperforms large-aperture hybrid precoding benchmarks in both sum rate and energy efficiency. By combining structural sparsity with a BER-driven, deep-unfolded optimization backbone, the proposed framework effectively resolves the key wideband deficiencies of SIM.

The recently proposed affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM) modulation has been considered as a promising technology for narrowband doubly-dispersive channels. However, the time-scaling effects, i.e., pulse widening and pulse shortening phenomena, in extreme wideband doubly-dispersive channels have not been considered in the literatures. In this paper, we investigate such wideband transmission and develop an efficient transmission structure with chirp-periodic prefix (CPP) and chirp-periodic suffix (CPS) for AFDM system. We derive the input-output relationship of AFDM system under time-scaled wideband doubly-dispersive channels and demonstrate the sparsity in discrete affine Fourier (DAF) domain equivalent channels. We further optimize the AFDM chirp parameters to accommodate the time-scaling characteristics in wideband doubly-dispersive channels and verify the superiority of the derived chirp parameters by pairwise error probability (PEP) analysis. We also develop an efficient cross domain distributed orthogonal approximate message passing (CD-D-OAMP) algorithm for AFDM symbol detection and analyze its corresponding state evolution. By analyzing the detection complexity of CD-D-OAMP detector and evaluating the error performance of AFDM systems based on simulations, we demonstrate that the AFDM system with our optimized chirp parameters outperforms the existing competitive modulation schemes in time-scaled wideband doubly-dispersive channels. Moreover, our proposed CD-D-OAMP detector can achieve the desirable trade-off between the complexity and performance, while supporting parallel computing to significantly reduce the computational latency.

Faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) technique promises higher capacity and spectral efficiency for wireless communications. However, existing FTN studies over doubly-selective fading (DSF) channels separate channel-induced inter-symbol interference (channel-ISI) and FTN-induced ISI (FTN-ISI) to simplify cancellation. In practical DSF scenarios, the inherent coupling between FTN-ISI and channel-ISI causes significant performance degradation in conventional detection algorithms. To address this limitation, we first derive a practical FTN transmission model over DSF channels and construct the corresponding coupled interference matrix. Considering that data detection relies on efficient channel estimation, we propose a channel estimation algorithm with joint recovery of resolvable subpath parameters. This algorithm decomposes propagation paths into resolvable subpaths with independent delay-Doppler characteristics, achieving enhanced estimation accuracy through joint gain-phase optimization. Finally, building on the derived transceiver model and coupled interference matrix, we propose a whitening-enhanced orthogonal approximate message passing (WE-OAMP) algorithm that suppresses coupled interference through iterative linear-nonlinear estimation while maintaining spectral compactness. This algorithm constructs a whitening matrix using the FTN-ISI matrix to suppress noise correlation, and then performs detection through iterative linear and nonlinear estimation. Simulation results validate that the WE-OAMP algorithm outperforms benchmark algorithms in terms of bit error rate performance, especially in coded systems. Furthermore, we derive the achievable capacity of FTN signaling with WE-OAMP detection, demonstrating capacity improvement compared to Nyquist systems.

Hybrid beamforming for extremely large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (XL-MIMO) systems is challenging in the near field because the channel depends jointly on angle and distance, and the multiuser interference (MUI) is strong. Existing deep learning methods typically follow either a decoupled design that optimizes analog beamforming without explicitly accounting for MUI, or an end-to-end (E2E) joint analog–digital optimization that can be unstable under nonconvex constant-modulus (CM), pronounced analog–digital coupling, and gradient pattern of sum-rate loss. To address both issues, we develop a complex-valued E2E framework based on a variant minimum mean square error (variant-MMSE) criterion, where the digital precoder is eliminated in closed form via Karush–Kuhn–Tucker (KKT) conditions so that analog learning is trained with a stable objective. The network employs a grouped complex-convolution sensing front-end for uplink (UL) measurements, a shared complex multi-layer perceptron (MLP) for per-user feature extraction, and a merged constant-modulus head to output the analog precoder. In the indirect mode, the network designs hybrid beamformers from estimated channel state information (CSI). In the direct mode where explicit CSI is unavailable, the network learns the sensing operator and the analog mapping from short pilots, after which additional pilots estimate the equivalent channel and enable a KKT closed-form digital precoder. Simulations show that the indirect mode approaches the performance of iterative variant-MMSE optimization with a complexity reduction proportional to the antenna number. In the direct mode, the proposed method improves spectral efficiency over sparse-recovery pipelines and recent deep learning baselines under the same pilot budget.

The active reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) offers a promising solution to overcome the double-fading attenuation inherent in passive RIS-aided systems. However, this capability can be exploited by adversaries to launch potent pilot spoofing attack (PSA). In this paper, we propose a novel active RIS-aided covert PSA scheme for time-division duplex systems, where a passive eavesdropper manipulates the channel state information (CSI) estimation at the legitimate transceiver during the uplink stage and steers downlink data towards itself during the downlink stage. Crucially, without requiring perfect instantaneous CSI, a practical challenge for eavesdroppers, we maximize the average eavesdropping signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by jointly designing the RIS reflection coefficients for both stages. To ensure covertness, we integrate an anti-energy ratio detection (ERD) mechanism that constrains the detection probability below a predefined threshold. The resulting non-convex optimization problem is solved via an efficient alternating optimization algorithm combined with penalty methods, handling the rank-1 constraints and statistical CSI uncertainties. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves up to 26 dB SNR gain over passive RIS-aided PSA and reduces ERD detection probability compared to traditional PSA. This work reveals the dual-edged nature of the active RIS: while enhancing security, it introduces new attack schemes demanding advanced countermeasures.

Sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks have been driving growing demands for the full utilization of spectral efficiency and spatial degrees of freedom (DoFs). This paper investigates a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) empowered integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system assisted by movable antennas (MAs). We consider a dual functional radar and communication (DFRC) base station (BS) equipped with a two-dimensional (2D) MA array, which simultaneously senses multiple targets and serves users divided into multiple clusters. Successive interference cancellation (SIC) is employed within each cluster to suppress intra-cluster interference. To enhance the total illumination power at the sensing targets while guaranteeing the communication signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) requirements at the users, we formulate an optimization problem for joint power allocation, beamforming, and antenna position design. To address this highly coupled and non-convex problem, an alternating optimization-based algorithm is proposed. We first determine the SIC decoding order by the equivalent-channel-to-interference-plus-noise-ratios (ECINRs), and derive the close-form solutions of the optimal intra-and-inter cluster power allocation coefficients. The sub-problems of beamforming and antenna position design are solved by semidefinite relaxation (SDR) and successive convex approximation (SCA) based schemes, respectively. Numerical simulation results are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. The proposed algorithm significantly outperforms baseline schemes, which achieves approximately 2 dB illumination power gain compared to the conventional fixed position antennas (FPA), demonstrating the promising potential of MAs in wireless networks.

With the development of sixth-generation (6G) wire-less communication networks, the security challenges are becoming increasingly prominent, especially for mobile users (MUs). As a promising solution, physical layer security (PLS) technology leverages the inherent characteristics of wireless channels to provide security assurance. Particularly, stacked intelligent metasurface (SIM) directly manipulates electromagnetic waves through their multilayer structures, offering significant potential for enhancing PLS performance in an energy efficient manner. Thus, in this work, we investigate an SIM-assisted secure communication system for MUs under the threat of an eavesdropper, addressing practical challenges such as channel uncertainty in mobile environments, multiple MU interference, and residual hardware impairments. Consequently, we formulate a joint power and phase shift optimization problem (JPPSOP), aiming at maximizing the achievable secrecy rate (ASR) of all MUs. Given the non-convexity and dynamic nature of this optimization problem, we propose an enhanced proximal policy optimization algorithm with a bidirectional long short-term memory mechanism, an offpolicy data utilization mechanism, and a policy feedback mechanism (PPO-BOP). Through these mechanisms, the proposed algorithm can effectively capture short-term channel fading and long-term MU mobility, improve sample utilization efficiency, and enhance exploration capabilities. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that PPO-BOP significantly outperforms benchmark strategies and other deep reinforcement learning algorithms in terms of ASR.

Orbital angular momentum (OAM) can enhance the spectral efficiency by multiplying a set of orthogonal modes on the same frequency channel. To maintain the orthogonal among different OAM modes, perfect alignments between transmitters and receivers are strictly required. However, in multi-user OAM communications, the perfect alignments between the transmitter and all the receivers are impossible. The phase turbulence, caused by misaligned transmitters and receivers, leads to serious inter-mode interference, which greatly degrades the capacity of OAM transmissions. To eliminate the negative effects of phase turbulence and further enhance the transmission capacity, we introduce RIS into the system, and propose a joint precoder and reflector design for reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted multi-user OAM communication systems. Specifically, we propose a three-layer design at the transmitter side, which includes inter-user OAM mode interference cancellation, intermode self-interference elimination and the power allocation among different users. By analyzing the characteristics of the overall channels, we are able to give the specific expressions of the precoder designs, which significantly reduce the optimization complexity. We further leverage RIS to guarantee the line-of-sight (LoS) transmissions between the transmitter and users for better sum rate performance. To verify the superiority of the proposed multi-user OAM transmission system, we compare it with traditional MIMO transmission schemes, numerical results have shown that our proposed design can achieve better sum rate performance due to the well-designed orthogonality among different users and OAM modes.

Movable antennas (MAs) and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have emerged as two promising technologies for enhancing wireless communication performance, owing to their capability to dynamically reshape and manipulate the propagation environment. Motivated by this potential, this paper investigates the joint utilization of the additional degrees of freedom introduced by MAs (through antenna repositioning) and RIS (via optimized reflection) to effectively mitigate computation distortion in over-the-air computation (AirComp) systems. Specifically, we formulate an optimization problem aimed at minimizing the mean square error (MSE) between the target function values and their estimates, through jointly optimizing the receive beamformer at the access point, RIS reflection phase shifts, and transmit coefficients as well as antenna positions of AirComp users. To address the non-convex nature of the formulated problem, we develop a computationally efficient algorithm capitalizing alternating optimization technique, the penalty-dual decomposition method, and the particle swarm optimization enhanced by a dynamic neighborhood pruning mechanism. Next, we further extend the optimization framework to a more practical case with discrete MA positions. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the joint optimization of RIS beamforming and MA positioning substantially reduces the computation MSE, compared to the separate MA-enhanced AirComp and RIS-aided AirComp schemes. Moreover, the proposed algorithm achieves comparable performance to the penalty function-based method, while incurring significantly lower computational complexity.

The joint design of sensing, communication, computing, and control (SC3) is crucial for supporting environment-aware Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications. Considering the uncontrollable wireless propagation environments and limited spectrum resources, wireless communication performance often becomes the primary design bottleneck for such an integrated system. To address this challenge, this paper presents a design framework for reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-enhanced semantic-aware SC3networks, where RIS and semantic communication technologies are employed to improve wireless communication efficiency. To facilitate real-time closed-loop control, we further formulate a weighted sum execution latency minimization problem, while imposing constraints on maximum execution latency and energy consumption of individual IoT device, as well as minimum information entropy to meet specific control requirements measured by linear quadratic regulator cost. In addition, the design framework aims at optimizing bandwidth allocation, RIS phase shift matrix, time scheduling, transmit power, and CPU-cycle frequency for IoT devices and the base station (BS). To handle the coupled multi-dimensional optimization variables, the block coordinate descent method is utilized to decompose the formulated problem into more tractable subproblems, which are then solved using a penalty-function-based approach and geometric programming technique. Simulation results demonstrate the performance advantages achieved by our proposed method compared to several benchmark approaches. Additionally, we explore the impact of various parameters on SC3systems, offering deeper insights and meaningful research observations.

Stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIMs), which integrate multiple programmable metasurface layers, have recently emerged as a promising technology for advanced wave-domain signal processing. SIMs benefit from flexible spatial degree-of-freedom (DoF) while reducing the requirement for costly radio-frequency (RF) chains. However, current state-of-the-art SIM designs face challenges such as complex phase shift optimization and energy attenuation from multiple layers. To address these aspects, we propose incorporating meta-fibers into SIMs, with the aim of reducing the number of layers and enhancing the energy efficiency. First, we introduce a meta-fiber-connected 2-layer SIM that exhibits the same flexible signal processing capabilities as conventional multi-layer structures, and explains the operating principle. Subsequently, we formulate and solve the optimization problem of minimizing the mean square error (MSE) between the SIM channel and the desired channel matrices. Specifically, by designing the phase shifts of the meta-atoms associated with the transmitting-SIM and receiving-SIM, a non-interference system with parallel subchannels is established. In order to reduce the computational complexity, a closed-form expression for each phase shift at each iteration of an alternating optimization (AO) algorithm is proposed. We show that the proposed algorithm is applicable to conventional multi-layer SIMs. The channel capacity bound and computational complexity are analyzed to provide design insights. Finally, numerical results are illustrated, demonstrating that the proposed two-layer SIM with meta-fiber achieves over a 25% improvement in channel capacity while reducing the total number of meta-atoms by 59% as compared with a conventional seven-layer SIM.

Artificial noise (AN) has been recognized as an effective physical-layer security scheme impairing the eavesdropper (Eve). Recently, artificial noise elimination (ANE) has emerged as a promising strategy to mitigate the impact of AN at Eves. However, conventional ANE schemes rely on prior knowledge, such as legitimate channel state information (CSI) or classification information, which may limit their practical applicability. To address these practical challenges, we propose an ANE scheme beyond prior knowledge (BPK) by leveraging machine learning algorithms. Firstly, a coarse projection is applied to partially eliminate the impact of AN using maximum likelihood estimation on the equivalent AN matrix. Secondly, a density clustering algorithm is introduced to obtain classification information based on the coarsely-projected observed vectors. Thirdly, a generalized principal component analysis (PCA)-based ANE algorithm is developed to effectively mitigate the residual AN using the obtained classification information. Furthermore, the artificial-noise-to-signal ratio (ANSR) and computational complexity are analyzed for performance revaluation, and a redefinition of several AN design principles is provided for scenarios involving a powerful Eve equipped with the BPK-ANE scheme by deriving the validity boundary. Finally, numerical results reveal key insights into four principles of AN: 1) Allocating less power to AN; 2) Reducing the randomness of AN; 3) Increasing the number of transmit antennas; and 4) Increasing the modulation order.

We propose a novel doubly-dispersive (DD) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel model incorporating flexible intelligent metasurfaces (FIMs), which is suitable for integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) in high-mobility scenarios. We then discuss how the proposed FIM-parameterized DD (FPDD) channel model can be applied in a logical manner to multicarrier waveforms that are known to perform well in DD environments, namely, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS), and affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM). Leveraging the proposed model, we formulate an achievable rate maximization problem with a strong sensing constraint for all the aforementioned waveforms, which we then solve via a gradient ascent algorithm with closed-form gradients presented as a bonus. Our numerical results indicate that the achievable rate is significantly impacted by the emerging FIM technology with careful parametrization essential in obtaining strong ISAC performance across all waveforms suitable to mitigating the effects of DD channels.

Cell-free (CF) massive multiple-input multiple-output (mMIMO) and reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) are two advanced transceiver technologies for realizing future sixth-generation (6G) networks. In this paper, we investigate the joint precoding and access point (AP) selection for an energy-efficient RIS-aided CF mMIMO system. To address the associated computational complexity and communication power consumption, we advocate for user-centric dynamic networks in which each user is served by a subset of APs rather than by all of them. Based on the user-centric network, we formulate a joint precoding and AP selection problem to maximize the energy efficiency (EE) of the considered system. To solve this complex nonconvex problem, we propose an innovative double-layer multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL)-based scheme. Moreover, we propose an adaptive power threshold-based AP selection scheme to further enhance the EE of the considered system. To reduce the computational complexity of the RIS-aided CF mMIMO system, we introduce a fuzzy logic (FuZ) strategy into the MARL scheme to accelerate convergence. The simulation results show that the proposed FuZ-based MARL cooperative architecture effectively improves EE performance, offering a 85% enhancement over the zero-forcing (ZF) method, and achieves faster convergence speed compared with MARL. It is important to note that increasing the transmission power of the APs or the number of RIS elements can effectively enhance the spectral efficiency (SE) performance, which also leads to an increase in power consumption, resulting in a non-trivial trade-off between the quality of service and EE performance.

This paper introduces an interference-free multi-stream transmission architecture leveraging stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIMs), from a new perspective of interference exploitation. Unlike traditional interference exploitation precoding (IEP) which relies on computational hardware circuitry, we perform the precoding operations within the analog wave domain provided by SIMs. However, the benefits of SIM-enabled IEP are limited by the nonlinear distortion (NLD) caused by power amplifiers. A hardware-efficient interference-free transmitter architecture is developed to exploit SIM’s high and flexible degree of freedom (DoF), where the NLD on modulated symbols can be directly compensated in the wave domain. Moreover, we design a frame-level SIM configuration scheme and formulate a max-min problem on the safety margin function. With respect to the optimization of SIM phase shifts, we propose a recursive oblique manifold (ROM) algorithm to tackle the complex coupling among phase shifts across multiple layers. A flexible DoF-driven antenna selection (AS) scheme is explored in the SIM-enabled IEP system. Using an ROM-based alternating optimization (ROM-AO) framework, our approach jointly optimizes transmit AS, SIM phase shift design, and power allocation (PA), and develops a greedy safety margin-based AS algorithm. Simulations show that the proposed SIM-enabled frame-level IEP scheme significantly outperforms benchmarks. Specifically, the strategy with AS and PA can achieve a 20 dB performance gain compared to the case without any strategy under the 12 dB signal-to-noise ratio, which confirms the superiority of the NLD-aware IEP scheme and the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Orthogonal delay-Doppler division multiplexing (ODDM) modulation has recently been regarded as a promising technology to provide reliable communications in high-mobility situations. Accurate and low-complexity channel estimation is one of the most critical challenges for massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) ODDM systems, mainly due to the extremely large antenna arrays and high-mobility environments. To overcome these challenges, this paper addresses the issue of channel estimation in downlink massive MIMO-ODDM systems and proposes a low-complexity algorithm based on memory approximate message passing (MAMP) to estimate the channel state information (CSI). Specifically, we first establish the effective channel model of the massive MIMO-ODDM systems, where the magnitudes of the elements in the equivalent channel vector follow a Bernoulli-Gaussian distribution. Further, as the number of antennas grows, the elements in the equivalent coefficient matrix tend to become completely random. Leveraging these characteristics, we utilize the MAMP method to determine the gains, delays, and Doppler effects of the multi-path channel, while the channel angles are estimated through the discrete Fourier transform method. Finally, numerical results show that the proposed channel estimation algorithm approaches the Bayesian optimal results when the number of antennas tends to infinity and improves the channel estimation accuracy by about 30% compared with the existing algorithms in terms of the normalized mean square error.

Typical reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) implementations include metasurfaces with almost passive unit elements capable of reflecting their incident waves in controllable ways, enhancing wireless communications in a cost-effective manner. In this paper, we advance the concept of intelligent metasurfaces by introducing a flexible array geometry, termed flexible intelligent metasurface (FIM), which supports both element movement (EM) and passive beamforming (PBF). In particular, based on the single-input single-output (SISO) system setup, we first compare three modes of FIM, namely, EM-only, PBF-only, and EM-PBF, in terms of received signal power under different FIM and channel setups. The PBF-only mode, which only adjusts the reflecting phase, shows less effective than the EM-only mode in enhancing received signal strength. The EM-PBF mode, which optimizes both element positions and phases, further enhances performance. Additionally, we investigate the channel estimation problem for FIM systems by designing a protocol that gathers EM and PBF measurements, enabling the formulation of a compressive sensing problem for joint cascaded and direct channel estimation. We then propose a sparse recovery algorithm called clustering mean-field variational sparse Bayesian learning, which enhances estimation performance while maintaining low complexity.

In this paper, we investigate reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted communication systems which involve a fixed-antenna base station (BS) and a mobile user (MU) that is equipped with fluid antenna system (FAS). Specifically, the RIS is utilized to enable communication for the user whose direct link from the base station is blocked by obstacles. We propose a comprehensive framework that provides transmission design for both static scenarios with the knowledge of channel state information (CSI) and harsh environments where CSI is hard to acquire. It leads to two approaches: a CSI-based scheme where CSI is available, and a CSI-free scheme when CSI is inaccessible. Given the complex spatial correlations in FAS, we employ block-diagonal matrix approximation and independent antenna equivalent models to simplify the derivation of outage probabilities in both cases. Based on the derived outage probabilities, we then optimize the throughput of the FAS-RIS system. For the CSI-based scheme, we first propose a gradient ascent-based algorithm to obtain a near-optimal solution. Then, to address the possible high computational complexity in the gradient algorithm, we approximate the objective function and confirm a unique optimal solution accessible through a bisection search method. For the CSI-free scheme, we apply the partial gradient ascent algorithm, reducing complexity further than full gradient algorithms. We also approximate the objective function and derive a locally optimal closed-form solution to maximize throughput. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework for the transmission design in FAS-RIS systems.

In this paper, we investigate the question of which technology, fluid antenna systems (FAS) or active reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (ARIS), plays a more crucial role in FAS-ARIS wireless communication systems. To address this, we develop a comprehensive system model and explore the problem from an optimization perspective. We introduce an alternating optimization (AO) algorithm incorporating majorization-minimization (MM), successive convex approximation (SCA), and sequential rank-one constraint relaxation (SRCR) to tackle the non-convex challenges inherent in single-user scenario. Specifically, for the transmit beamforming of the BS optimization, we propose a closed-form rank-one solution with low-complexity. For the optimization the positions of fluid antennas (FAs) of the BS, the Taylor expansions and MM algorithm are utilized to construct the effective lower bounds and upper bounds of the objective function and constraints, transforming the non-convex optimization problem into a convex one. Furthermore, we use the SCA and SRCR to optimize the reflection coefficient matrix of the ARIS and effectively solve the rank-one constraint. To be more general, the proposed AO algorithm is then extended to multi-user scenario. Simulation results reveal that the relative importance of FAS and ARIS varies depending on the scenario: FAS proves more critical in simpler models with fewer reflecting elements or limited transmission paths, while ARIS becomes more significant in complex scenarios with a higher number of reflecting elements or transmission paths. Ultimately, the integration of both FAS and ARIS creates a win-win scenario, resulting in a more robust and efficient communication system. This study underscores the importance of combining FAS with ARIS, as their complementary use provides the most substantial benefits across different communication environments.

The energy-efficient transmission schemes are crucial to realize the Energy Harvesting (EH)-based Device-to-Device (D2D) communications. Multicast, one of the D2D modes, can serve as an effective approach to address the unreliable energy supply of EH-D2D communications and can further improve energy efficiency through cooperation among multiple users, but it has been rarely explored. To achieve the robust and energy-efficient performance for EH-D2D Multicast communications (EH-D2MD), we first design two cooperative transmission schemes: multi-cluster head content cooperation and single-cluster head energy cooperation by integrating the features of D2MD mode, efficient energy management method and wireless power transfer technology. To investigate the effectiveness and adaptability of the two cooperative schemes, we formulate a long-term average energy-efficient utility problem, which allocate the cluster heads, cooperative time and transmission power simultaneously and adaptively. We then propose an Online Convex Approximation (OCA) algorithm that combines the Lyapunov and convex approximation methods to address the non-convex Mixed Integer NonLinear Programming (MINLP) property of the modeled problem. With OCA, we can convert the long-term non-convex MINLP problem into a real-time convex MINLP problem, and obtain an optimal solution for this problem. Results reveal that the achieved energy efficiency of two proposed schemes is at least 10 times higher than that of no cooperation method, and improves at least 50% and up to 4 times compared to the single-slot cooperative algorithms.

Extremely large-scale reconfigurable intelligent surface (XL-RIS) can effectively overcome severe fading and provide higher communication performance. However, current research on XL-RIS overlooks the discrete phase-shift characteristics of RIS in practical systems, which will result in significant performance degradation. In this paper, we investigate near-field communication schemes assisted by XL-RIS with discrete phase shifts. Specifically, we propose a hierarchical beam training method to obtain the user channel state information (CSI), and develop the jointly optimized codebook construction (JOCC) method and separately optimized codebook construction (SOCC) method for base station (BS) precoding and XL-RIS phase shifts, respectively. With JOCC, the most superior beam training performance can be obtained. With SOCC, higher performance than the single-antenna BS codebook can be obtained at a similar complexity. Further, we propose a flexible multiuser interference management (IM) method that is simple to solve. The IM method uses adaptive gain matrix approximation to take into account user fairness and can be solved in closed-form iterations. In addition, we extend the proposed method to a hybrid precoding design. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed multi-resolution codebook construction method can obtain more accurate beam patterns and user CSI, and the proposed IM method obtains superior performance over the benchmark methods.

Stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIM) provide a cost-effective and scalable solution for large-scale antenna communications. However, efficient channel state information acquisition and phase shift optimization remain critical challenges. In this paper, we develop a unified framework of low-complexity algorithms for SIM-assisted communication systems to address these issues. Specifically, we propose a generalized two-step codebook construction (TSCC) method that lever-ages two-dimensional angular-domain decoupling to transform planar array beamformer design into two independent one-dimensional linear array beamformer design problems, efficiently solved via the Gerchberg–Saxton algorithm and our proposed majorization–minimization-based proximal-distance (PDMM) algorithm. We further develop a two-stage coded-sliding beam training (TSCSBT) method for low-overhead and high-accuracy beam training, where error-correcting codes are embedded in the first-stage training to enhance robustness against noise, and sliding sampling is subsequently performed around the matched angular samples to improve angular resolution. The proposed framework is further extended to multi-path user channels. Finally, a variable decoupling-based block successive upper bound minimization (VD-BSUM) algorithm is proposed to directly solve the QoS-constrained sum-rate maximization problem through closed-form iterative updates with substantially reduced computational complexity. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods in achieving precise beam pattern realization, improved beam training accuracy and angular resolution, and enhanced sum-rate performance.

This paper investigates a multi-user multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) symbiotic radio (SR) system empowered by multiple reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs). In this system, each RIS adopts a multi-functional reflection modulation scheme to simultaneously transmit data from Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and enhance the primary transmission. However, allocating all reflected power exclusively to IoT data transmission could compromise the capability of RISs to enhance the primary transmission. To address this issue, we propose a flexible power allocation scheme that partitions the power reflected from the RISs into two components: one for enhancing the primary transmission and the other for supporting IoT communication, fully exploiting the multi-functional potential of RISs. Subsequently, we formulate a joint optimization problem aimed at minimizing the transmit power subject to the rate requirements for both primary and RIS transmissions, involving the joint optimization of the beamforming at the base station (BS) and the reflection modulation design at the RISs. Given the non-convex constraints and the coupled variables within the problem, we develop an alternating optimization algorithm combined with difference-of-convex programming to efficiently solve the problem and determine the power allocation scheme. Furthermore, to reduce computational complexity, we consider uniform power allocation across all reflecting elements and introduce weighted parameters to flexibly balance between assisting primary transmission and supporting IoT communication. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed power allocation scheme effectively balances the demands of the primary and RIS transmission, significantly reducing the required transmit power.

Stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIMs) have emerged as a promising technology for realizing wave-domain signal processing, while the fixed SIMs will limit the communication performance of the system compared to the mobile SIMs. In this work, we consider a UAV-mounted SIMs (UAV-SIMs) assisted communication system, where UAVs as base stations (BSs) can cache the data processed by SIMs, and also as mobile vehicles flexibly deploy SIMs to enhance the communication performance. To this end, we formulate a UAV-SIM-based joint optimization problem (USBJOP) to comprehensively consider the association between UAV-SIMs and users, the locations of UAV-SIMs, and the phase shifts of UAV-SIMs, aiming to maximize the network capacity. Due to the non-convexity and NP-hardness of USBJOP, we decompose it into three sub-optimization problems, which are the association between UAV-SIMs and users optimization problem (AUUOP), the UAV location optimization problem (ULOP), and the UAV-SIM phase shifts optimization problem (USPSOP). Then, these three sub-optimization problems are solved by an alternating optimization (AO) strategy. Specifically, AUUOP and ULOP are transformed to a convex form and then solved by the CVX tool, while we employ a layer-by-layer iterative optimization method for USPSOP. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed strategy under different simulation setups.

Satellite-Air-Ground Integrated Networks (SAGINs) provide ubiquitous connectivity, global coverage and flexible deployment convenience for terrestrial users, which are beneficial to optimizing network resources and achieving task scheduling functions. However, the corresponding SAGIN nodes are dynamic and complex, leading to intractable multi-modal features and high network latency when graph model is used for collaborative task completion. Therefore, we establish a directed SAGIN federated graph model to minimize the total transmission latency via computation offloading and quantization methods. Specifically, we utilize the federated graph learning to process the time-varying graph nodes and sizes, and then perform deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to optimize the computation and quantization resources. Moreover, federated learning is convoked to accelerate the convergence speed. Finally, our simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms some advanced benchmarks in terms of convergence performance and transmission latency for multiple data modals.

Conventional digital beamforming for wideband multiuser orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) demands numerous power-hungry components, increasing hardware costs and complexity. By contrast, the stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIM) can perform wave-based precoding at near-light speed, drastically reducing baseband overhead. However, realizing SIM-enhanced fully-analog beamforming for wideband multiuser transmissions remains challenging, as the SIM configuration has to handle interference across all subcarriers. To address this, this paper proposes a flexible subcarrier allocation strategy to fully reap the SIM-assisted fully-analog beamforming capability in an orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) system, where each subcarrier selectively serves one or more users to balance interference mitigation and resource utilization of SIM. We propose an iterative algorithm to jointly optimize the subcarrier assignment matrix and SIM transmission coefficients, approximating an interference-free channel for those selected subcarriers. Results show that the proposed system has low fitting errors yet allows each user to exploit more subcarriers. Further comparisons highlight a fundamental trade-off: our system achieves near-zero interference and robust data reliability without incurring the hardware burdens of digital precoding.

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have demonstrated an unparalleled ability to reconfigure wireless environments by dynamically controlling the phase, amplitude, and polarization of impinging waves. However, as nearly passive reflective metasurfaces, RISs may not distinguish between desired and interference signals, which can lead to severe spectrum pollution and even affect performance negatively. In particular, in large-scale networks, the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) at the receiving node can be degraded due to excessive interference reflected from the RIS. To overcome this fundamental limitation, we propose in this paper a trajectory prediction-based dynamical control algorithm (TPC) for anticipating RIS ON-OFF states sequence, integrating a long- short-term-memory (LSTM) scheme to predict user trajectories. In particular, through a codebook-based algorithm, the RIS controller adaptively coordinates the configuration of the RIS elements to maximize the received SINR. Our simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed TPC method over various system settings.

This paper proposes an amplitude-phase decoupling scheme for reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-enabled backscatter systems, which aims to achieve the standard quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) constellation on the harmonics by considering the amplitude-phase coupling effects in the non-linear modulation procedure. To begin with, we derive closed-form expressions of the symbol error rate (SER) and throughput of the underlying system with and without decoupling. Moreover, we formulate the maximum amplitude expression of the lthorder harmonic for the coupling amplitude-phase curve. Finally, numerical results show that the proposed amplitude-phase decoupling scheme significantly improves the system performance in terms of SER and throughput, very close to the performance of the ideal one with perfect fitting function.

This paper addresses reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted indoor localization and synchronization in the presence of multipaths. Considering the far field condition, direct range estimation becomes infeasible and there exists clock offset in the system, compounding the difficulty for a single RIS to accomplish user equipment (UE) positioning and synchronization. To tackle this challenge, a dual-RISs system is proposed. The extra degrees of freedom it offers can effectively resolve the problem It uses initial RIS phase design to separate components from dual RISs. Then, atomic norm minimization is employed to reconstruct the separated received signals, and 2D-MUSIC with single-snapshot estimates the angles-of-departure (AODs) of the UE and scatterers. After removing angle terms, root-MUSIC estimates the time-of-arrival (TOA). The UE’s position is derived via least squares using AODs from dual RISs. Combining the UE’s position with LOS path TOAs yields the clock offset. Scatterer positions are obtained using geometric relationships with the UE’s position, NLOS path TOAs, and clock offset. Channel parameters are refined via maximum likelihood estimation. Simulation results prove the method’s effectiveness.

Accurate indoor pathloss prediction is crucial for optimizing wireless communication in indoor settings, where diverse materials and complex electromagnetic interactions pose significant modeling challenges. This paper introduces TransPathNet, a novel two-stage deep learning framework that leverages transformer-based feature extraction and multiscale convolutional attention decoding to generate high-precision indoor radio pathloss maps. TransPathNet demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in the ICASSP 2025 Indoor Pathloss Radio Map Prediction Challenge, achieving an overall Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) of 10.397 dB on the challenge full test set and 9.73 dB on the challenge Kaggle test set, showing excellent generalization capabilities across different indoor geometries, frequencies, and antenna patterns. Our project page, including the associated code, is available at https://lixin.ai/TransPathNet/.

Flexible intelligent metasurfaces (FIMs) constitute a promising technology that could significantly boost the wireless network capacity. An FIM is essentially a soft array made up of many low-cost radiating elements that can independently emit electromagnetic signals. What's more, each element can flexibly adjust its position, even perpendicularly to the surface, to morph the overall 3D shape. In this paper, we study the potential of FIMs in point-to-point multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communications, where two FIMs are used as transceivers. In order to characterize the capacity limits of FIM-aided narrowband MIMO transmissions, we formulate an optimization problem for maximizing the MIMO channel capacity by jointly optimizing the 3D surface shapes of the transmitting and receiving FIMs, as well as the transmit covariance matrix, subject to a specific total transmit power constraint and to the maximum morphing range of the FIM. To solve this problem, we develop an efficient block coordinate descent (BCD) algorithm. The BCD algorithm iteratively updates the 3D surface shapes of the FIMs and the transmit covariance matrix, while keeping the other fixed. Numerical results verify that FIMs can achieve higher MIMO capacity than traditional rigid arrays. In some cases, the MIMO channel capacity can be doubled by employing FIMs.

Rydberg atomic quantum receivers exhibit great potential in assisting classical wireless communications due to their outstanding advantages in detecting radio frequency signals. To realize this potential, we integrate a Rydberg atomic quantum receiver into a classical multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) scheme to form a multi-user Rydberg atomic quantum MIMO (RAQ-MIMO) system for the uplink. To study this system, we first construct an equivalent baseband signal model, which facilitates convenient system design, signal processing and optimizations. We then study the ergodic achievable rates under both the maximum ratio combining (MRC) and zero-forcing (ZF) schemes by deriving their tight lower bounds. We next compare the ergodic achievable rates of the RAQ-MIMO and the conventional massive MIMO schemes by offering a closed-form expression for the difference of their ergodic achievable rates, which allows us to directly compare the two systems. Our results show that RAQ-MIMO allows the average transmit power of users to be$>25 \text{d B m}$lower than that of the conventional massive MIMO. Viewed from a different perspective, an extra$\sim 8.8$bits/s/Hz/user rate becomes achievable by ZF RAQ-MIMO.

The site-specific non-line-of-sight (NLoS) conditions and unpredictable transmission signals in urban areas complicate localization efforts. Radio-frequency fingerprinting (RFF) addresses this challenge by building a database of signal characteristics at various locations. However, transition from indoor to outdoor environments is difficult due to the vast physical area and inaccessible sites. In this paper, we propose an RFF-based passive localization approach enhanced by ray-tracing simulation. This simulation utilizes real geographic data, including all buildings and terrains, without making assumptions about NLoS error statistics. To improve localization accuracy, we investigate the optimal placement of a moving sensor by minimizing the average mean squared error (MSE) within a confidence interval. Simulation results indicate that RFF-assisted passive localization is effective in real-world scenarios, and the optimal placement of the moving sensor significantly enhances localization accuracy.

Unreliable communication is a critical bottleneck for the performance of federated learning (FL) in resourceconstrained wireless networks. To address this issue, we propose a priority-aware transmission strategy, where wireless resources are allocated preferentially based on the importance of data. Specifically, recognizing the crucial role of gradient direction in model updating, we transmit the sign and the modulus of local gradients separately, enabling the reuse of sign packets in the event of erroneous modulus transmission. Furthermore, we introduce a hierarchical resource allocation strategy in the proposed framework, prioritizing key gradients via bandwidth allocation across devices and the sign packet via power allocation at each device. Building upon the theoretical one-step convergence analysis, we formulate the resource allocation optimization problem in an explicit form, which facilitates an alternating optimization algorithm respectively applying the Newton method and technique of successive convex approximation (SCA). Numerical results show the superiority of the proposed scheme in both accuracy and convergence rate compared to existing baselines.

This paper considers a multi-reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) empowered symbiotic radio (SR) system, where multiple RISs, operating as Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, are used to transmit their modulated information bits by backscattering the incident primary signal and to assist the primary system simultaneously. Most existing works consider the modulation design for the single RIS scenario while lacking indepth investigation into the multi-RIS scenario. To fill this gap, we are interested in cooperatively optimizing the signal constellation and the associated phase shifts of all IoT devices to enhance the overall symbol error rate performance of both the primary and IoT transmissions. Towards this end, we formulate a problem to maximize the minimum Euclidean distance of the received noise-free signal from a signal detection perspective, subject to the peak amplitude constraints of the signal constellation and the passive reflection constraints of phase shifts. Due to the non-convexity of the formulated problem, an iterative algorithm is proposed to solve it. Besides, the structure of the optimized signal constellations in the absence of the direct link is sketched to draw useful insights. Finally, simulation results are provided to validate the superiority of the proposed cooperative constellation design methodology over the classic constellation design.

To perform target-following tasks in unknown environments, a robot must identify the target’s position and plan an efficient path to reach it. Traditional LiDAR-based localization systems face challenges in distinguishing the target from objects with similar appearances. Meanwhile, existing target-following approaches often neglect target visibility during path planning, leading to target occlusion by obstacles and ultimately resulting in following failure. In this paper, we propose a sequence matching method for target-localization using LiDAR and Ultra-Wideband (UWB) ranging. We determine the position of the target by analyzing the similarities between UWB ranging sequence and LiDAR cluster trajectories. To achieve visibility-aware target-following, we incorporate a visibility objective function into the Dynamic Window Approach (DWA) to generate a following path that minimizes the risk of target loss. This function evaluates the target loss risk based on the positional relationships between the robot, the target, and the nearest obstacle to the target. Extensive experiments were conducted using both human and robot as targets. The results show that our approach achieves higher completion rates when compared to the target-following using traditional DWA.

While beam-oriented digital predistortion (BO-DPD) is an effective technique to deal with power amplifier (PA) nonlinearity in hybrid beamforming (HBF) communication systems, it suffers from a limited linearization angle. Recent research shows such a drawback can be substantially mitigated by a post-weighting (PW) process. However, the linearization performance of traditional PW-DPD still has room for improvement since the PA distortion is therein approximated by a constant term irrelevant to the PW coefficients. In this work, we address the linearization angle widening issue via an iterative approach based on the alternating optimization framework, which leads to better performance in distortion reduction compared to the conventional PW scheme.

With a massive number of antennas densely deployed in a compact area, holographic multiple-input multiple-output (HMIMO) systems are envisioned to be a key enabling technology for improving the data rate and coverage of 6 G networks. Unfortunately, the reduced spacing between radiation elements, which enables HMIMO to better exploit the channel propagation characteristics, also causes increased mutual coupling (MC) and reduced radiation efficiency. It is thus critical to understand the effect of MC on the capacity of HMIMO systems, which is not yet available in the literature. In this paper, we investigate the ergodic mutual information (EMI) and associated capacity-achieving transmit covariance design for HMIMO systems with MC. To this end, we first derive the closed-form expression for the EMI of HMIMO systems with MC, by leveraging random matrix theory (RMT). Then, based on the derived results, we propose an MC-aware algorithm to maximize the EMI by optimizing the transmit covariance matrix. Numerical simulations validate the accuracy of the theoretical analysis and the effectiveness of the proposed MC-aware algorithm. It is observed that the halfwavelength antenna spacing is not optimal especially with low signal-to-noise ratio.

This paper investigates a movable antenna (MA)-aided integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system using non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA). A base station (BS) configured with a two-dimensional MA array simultaneously serves multiple communication users and sensing multiple targets. To enhance system capacity, superimposed symbols are transmitted to communication users, with successive interference cancellation (SIC) employed for signal decoding. Our objective is to maximize the total illumination power at the targets while satisfying the minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) requirements for communication users. To achieve this goal, we propose an alternating optimization (AO)-based algorithm that jointly optimizes the transmit power allocation, beamforming, sensing covariance matrix, and antenna positions. Numerical results show that the MA system achieves significant improvement in illumination power compared to fixed-position antennas (FPAs), with particularly significant gains under high SINR requirements.

This paper introduces an advanced near-field multi-user access system that integrates the programmable metasurface, also known as Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS), with Orbital Angular Momentum (OAM) technology to enhance spectral efficiency and reduce interference. The system employs a multi-mode OAM transmitter to generate signals carrying multiple data streams, which are directed toward a metasurface-based RIS. The RIS is designed to receive incoming OAM beams, demultiplex the data, and dynamically focus the signals on specific spatial regions, ensuring high Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) and minimal interference for efficient multi-user transmission. To achieve adaptive beam control, a 2-bit transmissive RIS is utilized, allowing dynamic adjustments of OAM modes and enabling precise energy focusing at various user locations in the near-field. The orthogonality of OAM modes further contributes to increased spectral efficiency. Furthermore, extensive full-wave simulations and a complete communication test environment are developed, covering the entire transmission process from the OAM transmitter to the RIS-assisted communication link. Experimental results demonstrate that multi-mode OAM beams are effectively converted to spot focusing through RIS and achieve the same-frequency data separation at each focal point. This novel approach offers a high-spectral-efficiency, low-interference communication solution. It provides valuable insights into improving multi-user access and data transmission efficiency in various IoT applications, including smart factories, logistics hubs, and in-vehicle communication networks.

Existing reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-enabled symbiotic systems generally rely on a dynamic adjustment of the amplitude of the RIS’s reflection coefficient to continuously change from 0 to 1 to support the underlying symbiotic trans-missions, which is however infeasible for practical RIS hardware. To address this, we propose a novel on-off digitalized symbiotic backscatter non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system that employs an on-off mechanism of the RIS’s reflecting elements. In particular, the adjustment of the on-off state of reflecting elements in batches is adaptively invoked to control the power gain of the backscatter channel, thereby changing the amplitude of backscatter signals to establish symbiotic transmissions. In order to evaluate the practicability of the proposed on-off symbiotic mechanism, an analytical expression of coexistence outage probability at high SNR has been derived. Moreover, the adjustment of RIS’s elements on-off state is discussed and extended to the scenarios of one-shot and one-by-one activation modes. Finally, representative numerical results show that when a sufficient number of reflecting elements is deployed on the RIS, our proposed on-off mechanism can fully support the symbiotic transmissions of the underlying systems.

The rapid adoption of cloud computing has introduced critical security challenges in the cloud, with evolving cyberattacks exposing vulnerabilities in conventional intrusion detection systems (IDS). Existing approaches often struggle with high false-positive rates, poor handling of imbalanced traffic, and computational overhead in dynamic cloud environments. To address these issues, we propose SLCAE-BiLSTM, a deep learning-based IDS which enhances feature extraction and sequential learning. The Single-Layer Contractive Autoencoder (SLCAE) ensures efficient data representation by minimizing redundancy while preserving critical attack patterns. Meanwhile, the Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) captures temporal dependencies in network traffic, improving the detection of rare attacks. Experimental evaluations on two benchmark datasets demonstrate SLCAE-BiLSTM's superiority, achieving 99.91% and 99.87% accuracy in binary classification and 97.73% and 91.22% in multi-class classification, surpassing state-of-theart models such as SCAE-SVM, SAE-SVM, and SDAE-SVM. These high accuracy rates indicate a significant reduction in misclassification and improved detection of both common and rare cyber threats. Furthermore, its reduced computational overhead and faster inference time makes it an efficient solution for enhancing cloud security against emerging threats.

In the field of multi-access edge computing (MEC), efficient computation offloading is crucial for improving resource utilization and reducing latency in dynamically changing environments. This paper introduces a new approach, termed as MultiTask Domain Adaptation (MTDA), aiming to enhance the ability of computational offloading models to generalize in the presence of domain shifts, i.e., when new data in the target environment significantly differs from the data in the source domain. The proposed MTDA model incorporates a teacher-student architecture that allows continuous adaptation without necessitating access to the source domain data during inference, thereby maintaining privacy and reducing computational overhead. Utilizing a multitask learning framework that simultaneously manages offloading decisions and resource allocation, the proposed MTDA approach outperforms benchmark methods regarding mean squared error and accuracy, particularly in environments with increasing numbers of users. It is observed by means of computer simulation that the proposed MTDA model maintains high performance across various scenarios, demonstrating its potential for practical deployment in emerging MEC applications.

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) technology holds immense potential for increasing the performance of wireless networks. Therefore, RIS is also regarded as one of the solutions to address communication challenges in high-mobility scenarios, such as Doppler shift and fast fading. This paper investigates a high-speed train (HST) multiple-input single-output (MISO) communication system aided by a RIS. We propose a block coordinate descent (BCD) algorithm to jointly optimize the RIS phase shifts and the transmit beamforming vectors to maximize the channel gain. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly enhances the system performance, achieving an average channel gain improvement of 15 dB compared to traditional schemes. Additionally, the introduction of RIS eliminates outage probability and improves key performance metrics such as achievable rate, channel capacity, and bit error rate (BER). These findings highlight the critical role of RIS in enhancing HST communication systems.

Real-time sharing of traffic information is crucial for effectively reducing losses after road traffic accidents and disasters. However, traditional methods for collecting and sharing this information are often inefficient, consume considerable resources, and face persistent challenges regarding cost and real- time performance. These issues hinder the ability to achieve real-time sharing of large-scale traffic information. To tackle this problem, this paper presents a new data storage method called the storage counting tree (SCT). Unlike traditional storage methods, where the amount of data is closely tied to the storage space required, the counting tree reuses tree nodes, making its storage space usage independent of the data scale. In this context, the coordinates information of vehicles can be shared efficiently via SCT and thus the density can be evaluated. Accordingly, we propose to optimize the backoff window of the traditional binary exponential backoff (BEB) algorithm based on the density. The experiments show that a 127-byte SCT can accommodate up to 4.2 billion entries, demonstrating impressive storage efficiency. Moreover, the system significantly reduces latency for critical message transmission and shows improved adaptability across various scenarios.

With the development of autonomous driving technology, Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) is an effective paradigm to support delay-sensitive applications in vehicular networks. However, achieving the real-time offloading strategy and resource allocation in MEC-empowered vehicular networks becomes a challenge. In this paper, we first formulate an offloading optimization problem to minimize system latency and energy consumption. To obtain the optimal policy in real time, the formulated problem is transformed into a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and then solved by the proposed Attention and Feature Fusion Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (AFF-DDPG) algorithm, where a multi-head attention mechanism is combined with feature fusion to improve the accuracy of the decision. In addition, the exploration ability and learning efficiency of the AFF-DDPG algorithm are further enhanced by exploiting Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) noise and the priority experience replay mechanism. The simulation results show that the proposed AFF-DDPG algorithm achieves a 9.44 % improvement over the DDPG algorithm.

As unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) increasingly operate in large-scale clusters, traditional routing protocols struggle to ensure efficient and time-sensitive packet path planning due to the growing network size and inherent mobility of UAVs. Meanwhile, despite deep learning (DL) based routing methods have shown promise in small UAV networks, their computational demands and limited scalability to large numbers of UAV nodes pose significant challenges. To address the challenges of scalability and computational demands in large-scale UAV networks, this paper proposes a novel decentralized global guided routing algorithm based on potential field. First, a potential field is constructed using a harmonic function to represent the current network status. Subsequently, leveraging this potential field, a global route is derived to define the overarching direction for data transmission. Finally, a compact neural network deployed at each node utilizes the global guidance direction and the local potential field information obtained from its surroundings to establish a specific data forwarding path within its maximum perception range. Simulation results illustrate the advantages of our proposed approach for establishing UAV paths in large-scale UAV networks.

This paper proposes a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) enabled symbiotic backscatter non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system based on uniquely factorable constellation pair (UFCP) rule, where the RIS elements are used to passively modulate the backscatter signal over the primary NOMA signal. According to the coding design of UFCP, the backscatter signal modulated at the RIS and the primary NOMA signal emitted by the source, are jointly constructed to form a UFCP for each primary NOMA signal, thereby facilitating the decoding of the primary NOMA signal and backscatter signal at the receiver. To recover the backscatter signal modulated at the RIS as well as the primary NOMA signal, a successive interference cancellation (SIC) based detector is proposed and a closed-form expression of the symbol error rate (SER) is derived. Finally, extensive numerical results show that the proposed system possesses a signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) gain of more than 10 dB at the SER level of 10−2in comparison with its counterpart without the UFCP design.

Large language models (LLMs) face significant challenges in specialized domains like telecommunication (Tele-com) due to technical complexity, specialized terminology, and rapidly evolving knowledge. Traditional methods, such as scaling model parameters or retraining on domain-specific corpora, are computationally expensive and yield diminishing returns, while existing approaches like retrieval-augmented generation, mixture of experts, and fine-tuning struggle with accuracy, efficiency, and coordination. To address this issue, we propose Telecom mixture of models (TeleMoM), a consensus-driven ensemble framework that integrates multiple LLMs for enhanced decision-making in Telecom. TeleMoM employs a two-stage process: proponent models generate justified responses, and an adjudicator finalizes decisions, supported by a quality-checking mechanism. This approach leverages strengths of diverse models to improve accuracy, reduce biases, and handle domain-specific complexities effectively. Evaluation results demonstrate that TeleMoM achieves a 9.7% increase in answer accuracy, highlighting its effectiveness in Telecom applications.

Radio Frequency Fingerprinting (RFF) is a critical technology for enhancing physical-layer security by leveraging the unique RF characteristics of hardware, enabling authentication and anti-counterfeiting for wireless communication devices. In recent years, Deep Learning (DL) has been extensively applied in$R$FF, significantly improving identification accuracy and efficiency. However, DL- based RFF methods still encounter challenges regarding robustness, particularly in cross-channel scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose a channel-robust RFF method based on a Multi-Scale Convolutional Attention Network (MSCAN) with Random Overlay Augmentation (ROA). Specifically, MSCAN extracts and fuses features at different scales, allowing it to capture more comprehensive signal characteristics. Additionally, ROA is a combinatorial data augmentation (DA) strategy designed to simulate diverse characteristics of wireless propagation environments, thereby enhancing the adaptability and robustness of RFF in complex channel conditions. Experiments conducted on the ORACLE dataset demonstrate that our proposed method achieves over 92 % accuracy in cross-channel scenarios, outperforming the previously proposed DA strategy. The codes will be published in GitHub11https://github.com/BeechburgPieStar/SDG-for-Robust-SEI

The rapid increase in wireless devices has raised significant security and privacy concerns, positioning Specific Emitter Identification (SEI) as a crucial physical-layer security technology. While Deep Learning (DL) has been widely applied to SEI, it often requires large amounts of high-quality signal examples, which are laborious and expensive to obtain. Moreover, the DL-enabled SEI models have difficulties in extracting features from the signal examples in the testing process that are consistent with those from the signal examples in the training phase due to the wireless channel variations, further resulting in a significant reduction in identification performance. To address these challenges, we propose a channel-robust Few-Shot SEI (FS-SEI) method based on Meta-Feature Augmentation (MFA). Our approach utilizes datasets from base emitters to construct a meta-feature embedding function that can extract generalizable features from a few signal examples of target emitters. We then calculate and calibrate the statistics of these extracted features to describe the feature distribution of target emitters. A Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) is subsequently trained on both original and augmented features derived from this distribution, achieving a robust FS-SEI model. Experiments conducted on a Wi-Fi dataset comprising 16 emitter categories - 10 as base emitters and 6 as target emitters - demonstrate that our method achieves 93.75% identification accuracy with only 5 examples per target emitter, maintaining 92.56% accuracy even under varying wireless channel conditions. Code is available at https://github.com/lovelymimola/MFA-based-FS-SEI.

In this paper, we propose a two-way backscatter communication system assisted by an active and passive dualsided reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) where the active RIS element contains an amplifier while the passive one does not. By altering the switch status within each RIS element, different transmission and reflection coefficients can be achieved, enabling a binary backscatter modulation. Moreover, a maximal-ratio-combining (MRC)-based detector is proposed to decode the backscatter signal and the end-user's signal, and the corresponding symbol error rate (SER) and throughput are subsequently analyzed. Numerical results show that by avoiding the additive thermal noise within each RIS element, passive dual-sided RISenabled communications outperform the active dual-sided RISenabled communications in terms of SER, and it is also revealed that the throughput can be significantly improved through backscatter modulation.

The excessive proliferation of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites inescapably bring the explosive growth of space data in LEO Satellite Networks (LSNs). Meanwhile, the stochastic arrivals of space data together with the time-varying satellite-ground links in LSNs pose significant challenges for offloading a large volume of space data from LSNs to ground stations. To circumvent these challenges, we systematically study the energy-constrained online data offloading problem to jointly optimize power allocation and task scheduling for LSNs. First, we leverage Lyapunov optimization to decouple our formulated long-term stochastic joint optimization problem into a set of per-time-slot subproblems. Then, each subproblem is decoupled into a task scheduling problem and a power allocation problem. Next, we derive the optimal solution to the power allocation problem and propose a multi-armed bandit based quasi-optimal solution to the task scheduling problem. Finally, extensive simulation results show that our proposed algorithm has superior performance over the state-of-the-art solutions.

Abstract With the growing demand for seamless connectivity and intelligent communication, the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and sixth-generation (6G) communication networks has emerged as a transformative paradigm. By embedding AI capabilities across various network layers, this integration enables optimized resource allocation, improved efficiency, and enhanced system robust performance. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of AI and communication for 6G networks, with a focus on their foundational principles, inherent challenges, and future research opportunities. We first review the integration of AI and communications in the context of 6G, exploring the driving factors behind incorporating AI into wireless communications, as well as the vision for the convergence of AI and 6G. The discourse then transitions to a detailed exposition of the envisioned integration of AI within 6G networks, divided into three progressive stages. The first stage, AI for network, focuses on employing AI to augment network performance, optimize efficiency, and enhance user service experiences. The second stage, network for AI, highlights the role of the network in facilitating and buttressing AI operations and presents key enabling technologies. We compare wireless network large models with conventional large language models (LLMs), and identify key design principles and components for building wireless network architectures. In the final stage, AI as a service, it is anticipated that future 6G networks will innately provide AI functions as services, supporting application scenarios like immersive communication and intelligent industrial robots. Specifically, we define the quality of AI service, which refers to a framework for measuring AI services within the network. We further summarize the standardization process of AI for wireless networks, highlighting key milestones and ongoing efforts. In addition, we analyze the critical challenges faced by the integration of AI and communications in 6G. Finally, we outline promising future research opportunities that are expected to drive the development and refinement of AI and 6G communications.

As a novel distributed learning paradigm, federated learning (FL) allows clients to train global models collaboratively without exchanging private data. However, recent research not only demonstrates the vulnerability of FL against privacy attacks where adversaries try to recover private data by intercepting local gradients/models but also its inadequacy in defending against poisoning attacks launched by malicious adversaries, who modify local datasets to disrupt the global training process. Even though many solutions have been proposed to defend against these attacks, there is still a gap in mitigating the risks in more complex nonindependent and identically distributed (Non-IID) scenarios that are prevalent in Internet of Things (IoT) systems. To fill this gap, this article proposes a data poisoning resistible and privacy protection FL mechanism (DPR-PPFL) for ubiquitous IoT. Based on representational similarity analysis, DPR-PPFL allows clients to construct asymmetric local models in defending against data inversion attacks, and also the server to detect and aggregate benign local models uploaded by the clients to correctly train the global model in the face of data poisoning attacks. By comparing the performance of DPR-PPFL with state-of-the-art baselines, its merits in securing the learning process under IID and Non-IID scenes of IoT are demonstrated.

In this article, we propose a novel integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) algorithm for massive multiple-input-multiple-output orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) systems with spatial-frequency wideband (SFW) effects. To obtain high accuracy of channel state information (CSI), the proposed algorithm initially utilizes a deep neural network (DNN) for channel estimation. Then, the estimated channel is expressed as a third-order low-rank tensor model, on which the canonical polyadic (CP) decomposition is performed to obtain three factor matrices. These factor matrices hold the information pertaining to channel parameters. By fitting the constructed tensor model, channel parameters, such as Angles of Departure (AoDs), Angles of Arrival (AoAs), time delay, and complex gains, can be extracted. Ultimately, the positions of mobile station (MS) and scattering points are determined by utilizing the mapping relationship between the channel parameters and position coordinates. In contrast to existing algorithms, the proposed algorithm delivers greater precision in both channel estimation and positioning. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm maintains outstanding ISAC performance, persisting even with diminished compression rate. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm proves effective in more complex scenarios lacking a line-of-sight (LOS) path.

Blockchain technology presents significant security challenges despite its transformative impact on digital transactions and decentralized data management. Key vulnerabilities include insecure smart contract execution, data privacy risks on transparent ledgers, and susceptibility of certain consensus mechanisms to attacks. Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) offer a robust hardware-based solution to these critical issues. By providing isolated execution spaces, TEEs safeguard code and data confidentiality and integrity, thereby fundamentally strengthening blockchain security. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of TEEs in blockchain technology. First, we analyze the challenges inherent in blockchain systems and demonstrate the advantages of TEEs over current methods. A detailed analysis of TEE properties, variants, and evolution in the blockchain field is provided. Additionally, we explore innovative TEE-based solutions across three key application domains: consensus mechanism optimization, confidential computation and execution, and payment networks and financial applications. Furthermore, we propose a research agenda addressing current challenges such as vulnerabilities to side-channel attacks and dependencies on hardware trust assumptions. Finally, we propose five critical directions for future TEE-blockchain integration: enhancement of security and privacy protection with particular attention to the Trusted Computing Base (TCB) minimization, performance optimization through hardware architecture advancement, trust model refinement to reduce centralization, expansion of application scenarios through interdisciplinary collaboration, and development of cross-chain interoperability standards. Our work contributes to blockchain security knowledge and provides a roadmap for researchers and practitioners in this rapidly evolving field.

Artificial intelligence generated content (AIGC) technologies, with a predominance of large language models (LLMs), have demonstrated remarkable performance improvements in various applications, which have attracted great interests from both academia and industry. Although some noteworthy advancements have been made in this area, a comprehensive exploration of the intricate relationship between AIGC and communication networks remains relatively limited. To address this issue, this article conducts an exhaustive survey from dual standpoints: first, it scrutinizes the integration of LLMs and AIGC technologies within the domain of communication networks and second, it investigates how the communication networks can further bolster the capabilities of LLMs and AIGC. Additionally, this research explores the promising applications along with the challenges encountered during the incorporation of these AI technologies into communication networks. Through these detailed analyses, our work aims to deepen the understanding of how LLMs and AIGC can synergize with and enhance the development of advanced intelligent communication networks, contributing to a more profound comprehension of next-generation intelligent communication networks.

As wireless communication advances toward the 6G era, the demand for ultra-reliable, high-speed, and ubiquitous connectivity is driving the exploration of new degrees-of-freedom (DoFs) in communication systems. Among the key enabling technologies, Movable Antennas (MAs) integrated into Flexible Cylindrical Arrays (FCLA) have shown great potential in optimizing wireless communication by providing spatial flexibility. This paper proposes an innovative optimization framework that leverages the dynamic mobility of FCLAs to improve communication rates and overall system performance. By employing Fractional Programming (FP) for alternating optimization of beamforming and antenna positions, the system enhances throughput and resource utilization. Additionally, a novel Constrained Grid Search-Based Adaptive Moment Estimation Algorithm (CGS-Adam) is introduced to optimize antenna positions while adhering to antenna spacing constraints. Extensive simulations validate that the proposed system, utilizing movable antennas, significantly outperforms traditional fixed antenna optimization, achieving up to a 31% performance gain in general scenarios. The integration of FCLAs in wireless networks represents a promising solution for future 6G systems, offering improved coverage, energy efficiency, and flexibility.

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for secure data sharing in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), enabling collaborative model training without direct exchange of raw data. However, recent studies have shown that FL still suffers from privacy vulnerabilities, where adversaries can reconstruct sensitive information by analyzing shared model parameters. Although several privacy-preserving FL (PPFL) schemes have been proposed to address these challenges, they primarily focus on protecting local model privacy, with limited attention to protecting global model confidentiality during aggregation. Additionally, their reliance on centralized aggregation servers introduces risks of single points of failure. To address these challenges, we propose a novel privacy-preserving blockchain-based FL framework (PBFL) that integrates blockchain, homomorphic encryption (HE), and a single masking. Specifically, PBFL employs HE to enable secure model training within the ciphertext domain, ensuring global model confidentiality. The single masking technique allows clients to apply unique random masks to their encrypted local model updates, enabling secure aggregation while preserving local privacy. Additionally, PBFL leverages blockchain for decentralized aggregation and encrypted model storage, effectively mitigating the risks associated with centralized servers. Experimental results demonstrate that PBFL achieves comparable model accuracy to state-of-the-art solutions while providing enhanced privacy protection. Furthermore, even with a client dropout rate of up to 30%, PBFL outperforms other blockchain-based PPFL methods in terms of computational and communication efficiency.

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for privacy-preserving collaborative model training in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). By leveraging the decentralization, immutability, and transparency of blockchain technology, Blockchain-enabled FL (BFL) has gained significant attention for enhancing FL’s security and reliability. However, BFL still faces challenges in motivating client participation. While several incentive mechanisms have been proposed, most primarily focus on short-term rewards and overlook the long-term influence of individual contributions on global model performance. To address these challenges, we propose a novel BFL framework that integrates model training with blockchain mining on the client side. Specifically, we design a long-term incentive mechanism based on repeated game theory, where the interactions between participants and the task publisher (TP) are modeled as an infinitely repeated game. We formally prove the existence of a Subgame Perfect Nash Equilibrium, providing theoretical guarantees for stable long-term cooperation. Furthermore, we introduce a hybrid reward scheme that jointly considers contributions to both training and mining tasks, encouraging sustained engagement and attracting new participants. Extensive experiments on MNIST and CIFAR-10 validate that the proposed mechanism enhances the robustness of FL and effectively promotes long-term client participation.

This letter rethinks the probabilistic broadcast gossip scheme to achieve fast distributed average consensus in wireless networks. The consensus attainment in this scheme is heavily influenced by the broadcast probability of each node, which directly affects the convergence rate. To reduce communication costs for achieving consensus, we formulate an optimization problem to determine the optimal broadcast probability for each node. This problem involves a challenging nonconvex spectral radius term in the objective function. To address this challenge, we introduce an enhanced majorization-minimization-based approach that leverages a novel surrogate function to effectively upper bound the spectral radius function. Simulation results show that the proposed method provides substantial performance improvements over existing heuristic methods for broadcast probability optimization.

Network optimization is a fundamental challenge in the Internet of Things (IoT) network, often characterized by complex features that make it difficult to solve these problems. Recently, generative diffusion models (GDMs) have emerged as a promising new approach to network optimization, with the potential to directly address these optimization problems. However, the application of GDMs in this field is still in its early stages, and there is a noticeable lack of theoretical research and empirical findings. In this study, we first explore the intrinsic characteristics of generative models. Next, we provide a concise theoretical proof and intuitive demonstration of the advantages of generative models over discriminative models in network optimization. Based on this exploration, we implement GDMs as optimizers aimed at learning high-quality solution distributions for given inputs, sampling from these distributions during inference to approximate or achieve optimal solutions. Specifically, we utilize denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) and employ a classifier-free guidance mechanism to manage conditional guidance based on input parameters. We conduct extensive experiments across three challenging network optimization problems. By investigating various model configurations and the principles of GDMs as optimizers, we demonstrate the ability to overcome prediction errors and validate the convergence of generated solutions to optimal solutions. We provide code and data athttps://github.com/qiyu3816/DiffSG.

In urban and indoor settings, the efficacy of the global navigation satellite system is notably limited, prompting a shift towards utilizing cellular and wireless signals for location services. However, existing methods struggle to discern short-delay multipath signals in intricate indoor environments, often faltering in the presence of non-Gaussian noise. This paper introduces the Recursive Maximum Correntropy Criterion based Short-Delay Multipath Estimation (RMCSME) algorithm as a solution. By leveraging a short-delay multipath signal processing model and the recursive correntropy criterion, RMCSME accurately estimates dynamic multipath signals in the presense of non-Gaussian noise challenges. Through simulations and empirical signal tests, RMCSME demonstrates a marked reduction in ranging errors attributable to multipath effects while maintaining computational efficiency. Comparative analyses with the Improved Multipath Estimation Delay-Locked Loop (IMEDLL) and Multiple Signal Classification (MUSIC) algorithms reveal that the RMCSME algorithm performs better in static experiments. In dynamic tests, RMCSME achieves a positioning accuracy of 0.29 meters, surpassing IMEDLL by 21.7% and MUSIC by 39.6%. Furthermore, this approach presents a novel strategy for mitigating short-delay multipath errors in indoor 5G positioning signals, providing crucial support for achieving precise localization in commercial 5G networks.

The deep integration of IoT and vehicular networks demands ultra-reliable, low-latency computing paradigms to support emerging applications like autonomous driving and smart traffic management. Existing Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) frameworks, however, struggle with dynamic resource heterogeneity, intermittent connectivity, and inefficient coordination among distributed nodes. To address these challenges, this paper proposes Vehicular Computing Power Networks (VCPN), an IoT-driven edge intelligence framework that orchestrates computational resources from mobile user equipments (MUEs), connected vehicles, and edge servers. We formulate a joint optimization problem to minimize end-to-end task latency by finding optimal task offloading decisions and resource allocation (e.g., CPU, bandwidth) policies under time-varying IoT channel conditions and node mobility. To enable decentralized coordination in IoT environment, we model the problem as a multi-agent Markov decision process (MDP) and propose a multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient (MA-DDPG) algorithm in which agents (MUEs, vehicles, servers) collaboratively learn policies to optimize task scheduling and resource sharing. Furthermore, we design a robust MA-DDPG variant with error-resilient experience replay and channel-adaptive reward mechanisms to ensure reliable training under packet loss and unstable connectivity. Numerical results demonstrate that VCPN reduces average task latency and improves energy efficiency compared to federated MEC baselines. The proposed MA-DDPG algorithm achieves convergence stability in high-mobility scenarios, outperforming conventional deep reinforcement learning methods.

The Position information is essential for large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) devices and services. Multipath and non-line of sight (NLOS) effects introduce additional delays in pseudorange measurements in urban areas. It is one of the main unmodeled errors in Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). To mitigate interference, various techniques have been developed, including antenna design and sensor fusion. However, traditional estimation approaches often produce biased estimates under the additional path delays. To improve estimation accuracy and robustness, we present an Observation Space Representation Refinement (OSRR) algorithm. The initial position is estimated by least squares without the additional path error. Then, the multipath projection method is used to get possible compensation in pseudorange measurements. Subsequently, the Moving Horizontal Estimation (MHE) is leveraged to get the position with corrected observation space. Field experiments demonstrate that the proposed OSRR algorithm significantly reduces the impact of interference on positioning accuracy. There is no empirical constraint to easily adapt to real-time static and kinematic GNSS pseudorange positioning with unilateral obstruction scenarios.

The recently proposed multi-chirp waveform, affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM), is considered as a potential candidate for integrated sensing and communication (ISAC). However, acquiring accurate target sensing parameter information becomes challenging due to fractional delay and Doppler shift occurrence, as well as effects introduced by the coexistence of near-field (NF) and far-field (FF) targets associated with large-scale antenna systems. In this paper, we propose a novel angle-delay-Doppler estimation scheme for AFDM-ISAC system in mixed NF and FF scenarios. Specifically, we model the received ISAC signals as a third-order tensor that admits a low-rank CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) format. By employing the Vandermonde nature of the factor matrix and the spatial smoothing technique, we develop a structured CP decomposition method that guarantees the condition for uniqueness. We further propose a low-complexity estimation scheme to acquire target sensing parameters with fractional values, including angle of arrival/departure (AoA/AoD), delay and Doppler shift accurately. We also derive the Cramér-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) as a benchmark and analyze the complexity of our proposed scheme. Finally, simulation results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed scheme.

This article investigates a joint optimization framework for intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-enhanced integrated sensing, communication, and powering systems. In this framework, the base station transmits signals for simultaneous radar sensing, as well as multi-user information and power transmissions. We aim at maximizing the minimum harvested power among all users, while satisfying beampattern gain requirements for multi-target sensing and signal-to-interference-plus-noise constraints of users. To tackle this strictly non-convex problem, we employ the block coordinate descent technique to iteratively optimize the transmit beamformer of the base station, the phase shift matrix of the IRS, and the power splitting ratios of users. The semi-definite relaxation method is utilized to obtain the optimal transmit beamformer of the base station, and the tightness of the rank-one relaxation is demonstrated. Furthermore, we develop a penalty function-based algorithm and use successive convex approximation techniques to determine the optimal phase shift matrix of the IRS. Additionally, closed-form expressions are derived for the optimal power splitting ratios. Moreover, by exploiting the Bernstein-type inequality, we further designed the robust beamforming and power splitting scheme for considered systems under stochastic channel estimation errors. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed IRS-enhanced method outperforms several benchmark methods in terms of the minimum harvested power among all users.

Effective resource management is critical in the dynamic environment of multiuser, multiservice, and multidevice 6G networks. This necessitates careful consideration of service priorities in the context of conflicting demands and limited resources. To address this challenge, this research introduces intelligent priority-driven resource allocation using the penalty function (IPRAPF) approach, which transforms resource allocation into an integer programming problem, balancing user expectations with available resources. IPRAPF significantly improves service accommodation per priority level over conventional optimization methods, such as simple relax and optimum branch and bound in different 6G networks. Notably, IPRAPF demonstrates robust performance with 20 users, five services, and four computing devices, supporting service allocation improvements ranging from 15% to 18% per priority level. In contrast, the simple relax method yields lower allocations, with improvements ranging from 11% to 13%, highlighting the superior effectiveness of the proposed IPRAPF. Moreover, an analysis of services per priority level highlights the capability of IPRAPF to optimize resource utilization and ensure seamless service delivery, especially with increased service diversity. This emphasizes the adaptability and importance of IPRAPF in navigating the constantly changing environment of 6G wireless networks.

With the frequent occurrence of information security incidents within the Internet of Things (IoT) landscape, there has been an increasing emphasis on anomaly detection in IoT traffic. Recently, supervised machine learning techniques have shown significant potential on this topic. However, the intricate nature of IoT network environments has posed a challenge in acquiring sufficient labeled samples of abnormal traffic. In comparison to supervised learning, unsupervised learning has more lenient sample requirements. Researchers have proposed various unsupervised detection methods, yet limitations persist. First, unsupervised learning, lacking guidance from labeled information, necessitates a more diverse range of traffic perspectives for comprehensive information coverage. Second, despite efforts to extract multiview traffic features from various perspectives, existing methods struggle to integrate these features effectively, limiting interpretability and introducing redundancy and noise. Lastly, conventional unsupervised methods often rely heavily on manually crafted features, potentially leading to biased and limited representations. In this article, we propose an unsupervised IoT traffic anomaly detection method based on multiview subspace learning. Specifically, we first construct a multiview traffic representation, including a protocol field view and a payload semantic view. Subsequently, a multiview subspace learning algorithm is designed to project the different views of traffic onto a unified and low-rank subspace, optimized using the augmented lagrangian multiplier with alternating direction minimization (ALM-ADM) strategy. Finally, spectral clustering is employed to accomplish IoT traffic anomaly detection. We benchmark the proposed method on multiple IoT traffic datasets and diverse computational platforms. The experimental results demonstrate that the method outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency.

Accurately identifying malicious traffic in heterogeneous IoT environments is critical for network security. Although deep learning-based methods can effectively extract multi-dimensional features and achieve high accuracy, deploying complex models on resource-constrained IoT devices remains challenging. To balance performance and efficiency, we propose IoT-CVKD, a novel malicious IoT traffic identification framework leveraging cross-view knowledge distillation. IoT-CVKD consists of a multi-view teacher model and a lightweight single-view student model. The teacher model characterizes heterogeneous traffic from different perspectives by capturing flow-level global and packet-level spatio-temporal local burst information, and efficiently fuses these features using a cross-attention mechanism. The student model, composed of lightweight and computationally efficient modules, takes only packet-level features as input. Multi-view knowledge from the teacher is then implicitly distilled into the student through cross-view knowledge distillation during training, thereby significantly enhancing the student’s classification capability. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that IoT-CVKD achieves superior classification performance compared to state-of-the-art methods while substantially reducing computational complexity, making it highly suitable for resource-constrained IoT deployments.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is widely applied for forest monitoring, since the sensor nodes (SNs) in IoT network are low cost and have computing ability to process the monitoring data. To further improve the performance of forest monitoring, uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) are employed as the data processors to enhance computing capability. However, efficient forest monitoring with limited energy budget and computing resource presents a significant challenge. For this purpose, this article formulates a multiobjective optimization framework to simultaneously consider three optimization objectives, which are minimizing the maximum computing delay, minimizing the total motion energy consumption, and minimizing the maximum computing resource, corresponding to efficient forest monitoring, energy consumption reduction, and computing resource control, respectively. Due to the hybrid solution space that consists of continuous and discrete solutions, we propose a diffusion-model-enhanced improved multiobjective grey wolf optimizer (IMOGWO) to solve the formulated framework. The simulation results show that the proposed IMOGWO outperforms other benchmarks for solving the formulated framework. Specifically, for a small-scale network with 6 UAVs and 50 SNs, compared to the suboptimal benchmark, IMOGWO reduces the motion energy consumption and the computing resource by 53.32% and 9.83%, respectively, while maintaining computing delay at the same level. Similarly, for a large-scale network with 8 UAVs and 100 SNs, IMOGWO achieves reductions of 41.81% in motion energy consumption and 7.93% in computing resource, with the computing delay also remaining comparable.

The growing adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) and expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) in-vehicle applications enhance vehicle intelligence and connectivity but also drive higher demand for both charging and computing services. Charging and computing stations (CCSs), integrating bidirectional chargers and edge computing servers and allowing optimal joint energy-computation management, has been taken as an effective solution to address this demand. This article introduces a new concept called charging and computing service vehicle (CCSV) fleets, which are equipped with high-capacity batteries and edge servers, serving as mobile resources to support the stationary CCSs at different locations in a wide area. We propose a two-timescale model integrating temporal-spatial scheduling, charging/discharging management, and computation task offloading of the CCSV fleets. Our goal is to minimize the total system cost by optimizing the energy-computation coordination between the mobile CCSV fleets and the stationary CCSs. We construct an extended time-space network (TSN) with congestion nodes, providing a clearer depiction of the time-varying congestion conditions in the traffic network. For practical implementation, we develop a heuristic based on the convex-concave procedure (CCP) and penalty alternating direction method (PADM) to solve the problem quickly. Simulation results in a traffic network based on Guangzhou city demonstrate that the proposed model effectively leverages the mobility and multidimensional resources of the CCSV fleets to reduce the system cost significantly.

Along with the development of intelligent transportation system (ITS), artificial intelligence (AI)-based machine learning technologies have been widely utilized in Internet of Vehicles (IoV). Neural network (NN)-based knowledge sharing among vehicles and road side units (RSUs) presents considerable benefits for enhancing vehicle intelligence. However, it is challenging to ensure the efficiency of knowledge sharing under unstable connectivity among vehicles with different NN model architectures. In this article, we propose a new deep semantic communication framework for knowledge sharing (SCKS), enabling one-to-many NN model transmission and realizing efficient knowledge sharing in an IoV. Based on this framework, a generative distillation algorithm is designed to extract the semantic features of NN model, which can ensure the efficiency of the transmitter for knowledge sharing across different NN models and reduce communication bandwidth demand. In order to facilitate an effective understanding of semantic information by heterogeneous receivers, we design a generative adversarial networks (GAN)-based semantic decoding algorithm. Numerical results on CIFAR10 and ImageNet datasets show that the proposed SCKS outperforms the baseline, especially in the low-signal-to-noise (SNR) region. In particular, the simulation results demonstrate superiority of proposed SCKS scheme in terms of bandwidth requirements and computational efficiency for knowledge sharing cross different NN architectures than the state-of-art scheme, including DeepJSCC and knowledge distillation (KD).

The rapid advancement of 6G technology has driven extensive research on integrated sensing, communication, and computation (ISCC), enabling applications in smart transportation, digital twins, and edge intelligence. ISCC aims to integrate communication, sensing, and computation functions to enhance system performance (e.g., energy efficiency, spectrum efficiency, and reduced latency) by designing an integrated architecture that comprehensively considers system resources and energy consumption. This paper provides an overview of key ISCC technologies, research contents, challenges, and prospects. It starts by analyzing key technical points, introducing their development history and metrics, and then discusses the reasons for integrating these key technologies to lay the groundwork for ISCC research. Subsequently, this paper categorizes and discusses existing ISCC research, ranging from different computational paradigms to emerging communication paradigms, highlighting the current research trends in ISCC. Additionally, it explores the interaction between ISCC and AI and how they can be mutually beneficial in research. Finally, we propose challenges for future ISCC research based on existing studies and suggest potential directions and ideas for research combining new technologies. The integration of ISCC and AI is expected to offer strong support for intelligent 6G by enabling intelligent resource management, reducing AI task handling latency, and improving AI inference accuracy.

Urban air mobility (UAM) relies on developing aerospace industries, where safe aviation and efficient communication are critical features of aircraft. However, it is challenging for aircraft to sustain efficient air-ground communication in urban circumstances. Without continuous air-ground communication, aircraft may experience course deviation and safety accidents. To address these problems, a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided trajectory optimization scheme is proposed enabling efficient air-ground communication and safe aviation in UAM with a layered airspace structure. This article first devises a dual-plane RIS communication scheme for layered airspace. It fully engages the omnidirectional and directional signal attributes to reduce the transmission delay of the air-ground communication. Based on the dual-plane RIS configuration, we jointly develop the intra- and interlayer trajectory scheme to optimize communication and safe aviation. In the intralayer trajectory optimization, we propose a dual-time-scale flight scheme to improve communication capacity and horizontal flight safety. Meanwhile, we propose a safe layer-switching method to ensure collision avoidance during vertical flight in the interlayer trajectory optimization. The communication load of the proposed scheme can be improved 40% and the time of safe separation restoration can be lessened 66% compared with the benchmarks in the layered airspace.

Cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) enables connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) to drive autonomously on the highway in closely coupled platoons. The use of CACC technologies increases safety and the traffic throughput, and decreases fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. However, CAVs heavily rely on embedded software, hardware, and communication networks that make them vulnerable to a range of cyberattacks. Cyberattacks to a particular CAV compromise the entire platoon as CACC schemes propagate corrupted data to neighboring vehicles potentially leading to traffic delays and collisions. Physics-based monitors can be used to detect the presence of false data injection (FDI) attacks to CAV sensors; however, given enough system knowledge, adversaries are still able to launch a range of attacks that can surpass the detection scheme by hiding within the system disturbances and uncertainty—we refer to this class of attacks as stealthy FDI attacks. Stealthy attacks are hard to deal with as they affect the platoon dynamics without being noticed. In this manuscript, we propose a design methodology (built around a series convex programs) to synthesize distributed attack monitors and$H_{\infty }$CACC controllers that minimize the joint effect of stealthy FDI attacks and system disturbances on the platoon dynamics while guaranteeing a prescribed platooning performance. Computer simulations are provided to illustrate the performance of our tools.

Fluid antenna systems (FAS) enable dynamic antenna positioning, offering new opportunities to enhance integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) performance. However, existing studies primarily focus on communication enhancement or single-target sensing, leaving multi-target scenarios underexplored. Additionally, the joint optimization of beamforming and antenna positions poses a highly non-convex problem, with traditional methods becoming impractical as the number of fluid antennas increases. To address these challenges, this letter proposes a block coordinate descent (BCD) framework integrated with a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based approach for intelligent antenna positioning. By leveraging the deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) algorithm, the proposed framework efficiently balances sensing and communication performance. Simulation results demonstrate the scalability and effectiveness of the proposed approach. Unlike traditional optimization approaches that suffer from exponential complexity growth, our DRL-based method achieves real-time decision-making with superior scalability for complex multi-target scenarios while maintaining computational efficiency.

Cognitive radio (CR) networks face significant challenges in spectrum sensing, especially under spectrum scarcity. Fluid antenna systems (FASs) can offer an unorthodox solution due to their ability to dynamically adjust antenna positions for improved channel gain. In this letter, we study an FAS-driven CR setup where a secondary user (SU) adjusts the positions of fluid antennas to detect signals from the primary user (PU). We aim to maximize the detection probability under the constraints of the false alarm probability and the received beamforming of the SU. To address this problem, we first derive a closed-form expression for the optimal detection threshold and reformulate the problem to find its solution. Then, an alternating optimization (AO) scheme is proposed to decompose the problem into several subproblems, addressing both the received beamforming and the antenna positions at the SU. The beamforming subproblem is addressed using a closed-form solution, while the fluid antenna positions are solved by successive convex approximation (SCA). Simulation results reveal that the proposed algorithm provides significant improvements over traditional fixed-position antenna (FPA) schemes in terms of spectrum sensing performance.

This letter considers a fluid antenna system (FAS)-aided secure and covert communication system, where the transmitter adjusts multiple fluid antennas’ positions to achieve secure and covert transmission under the threat of an eavesdropper and the detection of a warden. This letter aims to maximize the secrecy rate while satisfying the covertness constraint. Unfortunately, the optimization problem is nonconvex due to the coupled variables. To tackle this, we propose an alternating optimization (AO) algorithm to alternatively optimize the optimization variables in an iterative manner. In particular, we use a penalty-based method and the majorization-minimization (MM) algorithm to optimize the transmit beamforming and fluid antennas’ positions, respectively. Simulation results show that FAS can significantly improve the performance of secrecy and covertness compared to the fixed-position antenna (FPA)-based schemes.

Integrated sensing and massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) communication (mMIMO-ISAC) at terahertz (THz) bands can provide vast spatial degrees of freedom and abundant bandwidth resources. However, the employment of a massive number of antennas will pose prominent challenges to both target sensing and channel training in THz-mMIMO-ISAC. In this article, our goal is to integrate the target sensing functionality into the channel estimation stage and develop a channel-training-aided target sensing framework to facilitate the efficient resource sharing of THz-mMIMO-ISAC. Specifically, by exploiting the sparse characteristics of THz mMIMO channels, we build up the intrinsic connection between the channel parameters and the target parameters in angular, delay, and Doppler dimensions. Then, we propose a shared channel training pattern accommodating the hybrid architecture constraints of THz transceiver. Both the channel estimation and the target sensing can be formulated as two structured tensor decomposition problems and then concurrently addressed at the UE and BS sides, respectively. Next, we propose a tensor-based parameter estimation algorithm to acquire the target and channel parameters, where the associated angles of arrival/departure, time delays, Doppler shifts, and coefficients can be extracted from the estimated factor matrices. In addition, we present the detailed derivation of the Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) for the considered parameter estimation problem in THz-mMIMO-ISAC. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve the target parameters estimation performance close to their corresponding CRB, and recover the high-dimensional THz mMIMO channels with substantially reduced training overhead.

Automatic modulation classification (AMC) plays a vital role in advancing future wireless communication networks. Although deep learning (DL)-based AMC frameworks have demonstrated remarkable classification capabilities, they typically require large-scale training datasets and assume consistent class distributions between training and testing data-prerequisites that prove challenging in few-shot and open-set scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose a novel few-shot open-set automatic modulation classification (FSOS-AMC) framework that integrates a multi-sequence multi-scale attention network (MS-MSANet), meta-prototype training, and a modular open-set classifier. The MS-MSANet extracts features from multi-sequence input signals, while meta-prototype training optimizes both the feature extractor and the modular open-set classifier, which can effectively categorize testing data into known modulation types or identify potential unknown modulations. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that our FSOS-AMC framework achieves superior performance in few-shot open-set scenarios compared to state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, the framework exhibits higher classification accuracy for both known and unknown modulations, as validated by improved accuracy and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) metrics. Moreover, the proposed framework demonstrates remarkable robustness under challenging low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions, significantly outperforming existing approaches.

Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) is an emerging technology, which provides a promising paradigm for completing complex sensing tasks. While existing studies for MCS mainly focus on designing incentive mechanisms to attract more participants or optimizing task allocation to maximize profit, the freshness of information, known as Age of Information (AoI), has been largely overlooked. In MCS systems, some Point of Interests (PoIs) need to be monitored through sampling by participants. High-frequency sampling can effectively ensure AoI performance, which also imposes significant costs on participants. Therefore, it is necessary to allocate appropriate sampling tasks and design the corresponding sample cycles and prices for participants. In this article, we address the joint problem of incentive mechanism and task allocation. First, we adopt the contract theory to model the incentive mechanism, where the crowdsensing platform (CP) offers a set of cycle-price combinations to participants. We establish the necessary and sufficient conditions for the feasibility of the contract and subsequently derive the optimal contract structure. Second, subject to the derived contract structure, we determine the optimal task allocation under specific conditions. For more general situations, we propose an iterative algorithm, which is based on pair switching with a proven convergence guarantee. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed contract-based algorithm, which also outperforms other incentive mechanisms.

Presents corrections to the paper, Coverage Rate Analysis for Integrated Sensing and Communication Networks.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with high mobility and flexibility have emerged as key enablers of computer vision (CV) applications. In the field of image recognition, federated learning can be integrated into UAV swarms, enabling distributed computing and efficient data sharing to train and deploy high-performance real-time image recognition models, while preserving the privacy of the UAV local data. However, despite its potential, federated learning in UAV swarms for real-time image recognition faces significant challenges of low convergence speed and insufficient model recognition accuracy posed by volatile environments. On the one hand, unstable UAV communication channels increase model upload latency. On the other hand, dynamic UAV states lead to fluctuations in local update quality. To address these challenges, we propose an accelerated asynchronous federated learning framework for UAV swarms to support real-time image recognition. Our framework introduces a Shapley-based asynchronous update mechanism, which enhances model accuracy by quantifying UAV update contributions and mitigating the effects of model staleness. Furthermore, we propose a fine-grained client selection strategy that accelerates convergence by selecting UAVs with low latency and high contributions to model recognition accuracy. A time-varying multi-armed bandit (MAB) model is employed to capture dynamic UAV states, optimizing client selection and further improving convergence. Numerical results in the simulated volatile environment show that our scheme outperforms benchmark methods in accuracy and convergence speed of the image recognition model.

Iterative decoding algorithms based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) decoding of low density parity check (LDPC) codes has emerged as an alternating decoding method and bringed a boom of research on drawing upon mathematical optimization to LDPC decoding. Improving error-correcting performance is a key issue to enhance the superiority of ADMM decoding. In this letter, we investigate an efficient ADMM-based iterative decoder for binary LDPC codes. First, we build an mathematical programming equivalence of the maximum likelihood (ML) decoding problem by transforming parity-check constraints to multiple equivalent linear constraints and eliminating check-polytope projection (CPP). Then, an iterative algorithm based on ADMM technique is developed to solve this free-of-CPP (FCPP) equivalence and each ADMM update can be computed efficiently. Moreover, the proposed ADMM-FCPP decoding algorithm is analyzed to display a linear complexity to the length of the LDPC code at each iteration. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed decoder in error-correcting performance compared with the state-of-the-art ADMM-based decoders.

Collaborative multiple robots for unknown environment exploration have become mainstream due to their remarkable performance and efficiency. However, most existing methods assume perfect robots’ communication during exploration, which is unattainable in real-world settings. Though there have been recent works aiming to tackle communication-constrained situations, substantial room for advancement remains for both information-sharing and exploration strategy aspects. In this paper, we propose a Communication-Constrained Multi-Robot Entropy-Field-Based Exploration (MEF-Explore). The first module of the proposed method is the two-layer inter-robot communication-aware information-sharing strategy. A dynamic graph is used to represent a multi-robot network and to determine communication based on whether it is low-speed or high-speed. Specifically, low-speed communication, which is always accessible between every robot, can only be used to share their current positions. If robots are within a certain range, high-speed communication will be available for inter-robot map merging. The second module is the entropy-field-based exploration strategy. Particularly, robots explore the unknown area distributedly according to the novel forms constructed to evaluate the entropies of frontiers and robots. These entropies can also trigger implicit robot rendezvous to enhance inter-robot map merging if feasible. In addition, we include the duration-adaptive goal-assigning module to manage robots’ goal assignment. The simulation results demonstrate that our MEF-Explore surpasses the existing ones regarding exploration time and success rate in all scenarios. For real-world experiments, our method leads to a 21.32% faster exploration time and a 16.67% higher success rate compared to the baseline.

Electric vehicles (EVs) are driving green and low-carbon transport in modern cities. It makes charging station occupancy prediction (CSOP) critual for intelligent transportation systems (ITS) to achieve a balance between the supply and demand in resolving the dynamics between EVs and changing stations. Even though several Big Data-based solutions have been discussed, they are still struggling to collaboratively utilize heterogeneous data and distributed computing resources located at both physically and logicially isolated charging stations to better support context-driven CSOP. To addres this challenge, we propose an Asynchronous Federated Meta-learning Mechanism (AFML) for CSOP, which can train a meta-model with strong adaptation ability in an asynchronous and collaborative manner. In general, it incorporates an adaptive reptile algorithm (AR) and an weighted aggregation strategy (WA) to jointly ensure the training efficiency and model adaptivity. Evaluations on real-world CSOP datasets demonstrate that compared to the second best method, AFML can significantly improve forecasting accuracy by 14%, accelerate model convergence by 9% and enhance model generalizability by 10%, illustrating its merits in support CSOP to embrace a smart and sustainable city.

Flexible intelligent metasurfaces (FIMs) show great potential for improving the wireless network capacity in an energy-efficient manner. An FIM is a soft array consisting of several low-cost radiating elements. Each element can independently emit electromagnetic signals, while flexibly adjusting its position even perpendicularly to the overall surface to ‘morph’ its 3D shape. More explicitly, compared to a conventional rigid antenna array, an FIM is capable of finding an optimal 3D surface shape that provides improved signal quality. In this paper, we study point-to-point multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communications between a pair of FIMs. In order to characterize the capacity limits of FIM-aided MIMO transmissions over frequency-flat fading channels, we formulate a transmit optimization problem for maximizing the MIMO channel capacity by jointly optimizing the 3D surface shapes of the transmitting and receiving FIMs as well as the MIMO transmit covariance matrix, subject to the total transmit power constraint and to the maximum perpendicular morphing range of the FIM. To solve this problem, we develop an efficient block coordinate descent (BCD) algorithm. The BCD algorithm iteratively updates the 3D surface shapes of the FIMs and the transmit covariance matrix, while keeping the other fixed, to find a locally optimal solution. Numerical results verify that FIMs can achieve higher MIMO capacity than that of the conventional rigid arrays. In particular, the MIMO channel capacity can be doubled by the proposed BCD algorithm under some setups.

This paper investigates reconfigurable pixel antenna (RPA)-based electronic movable antennas (REMAs) for multiuser communications. First, we model each REMA as an antenna with a set of predefined and discrete selectable radiation positions within the radiating region. Considering the trade-off between performance and cost, we propose partially-connected and fully-connected RPA-based electronic movable-antenna arrays (PC/FC-REMAA). Then, we formulate a multiuser sum-rate maximization problem subject to the power and hardware constraints of the PC/FC-REMAA. To solve this problem, we propose a two-step multiuser beamforming and antenna selection scheme. In addition, we revisit mechanical movable antennas (MMAs) to establish a benchmark for evaluating the performance of REMA-enabled multiuser communications. Finally, we analyze the performance gap between REMAs and MMAs. Based on Fourier analysis, we derive the maximum power loss of REMAs compared to MMAs for any given position interval. Specifically, we show that REMAs lose at most 3.25% power relative to MMAs when the position interval is one-tenth of the wavelength. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

Orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) modulation and massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) are promising technologies for next generation wireless communication systems for their abilities to counteract the issue of high mobility with large Doppler spread and mitigate the channel path attenuation, respectively. The natural integration of massive MIMO with OTFS in millimeter-wave systems can improve communication data rate and enhance the spectral efficiency. However, when transmitting wideband signals with large-scale arrays, the beam squint effect may occur, causing discrepancies in beam directions across subcarriers in multi-carrier systems. Moreover, the high-mobility wideband millimeter wave communications can induce the Doppler squint effect, leading to different Doppler shifts among the subcarriers. Both beam squint effect and Doppler squint effect (denoted as doubly squint effect) can degrade communication performance significantly. In this paper, we present an efficient channel estimation and hybrid precoding scheme to address the doubly squint effect in massive MIMO-OTFS systems. We first characterize the wideband channel model and the input-output relationship for massive MIMO-OTFS transmission considering doubly squint effect. We then mathematically derive the impact of channel parameters on chirp pilots under the doubly squint effect. Additionally, we develop a peak-index-based channel estimation scheme. By leveraging the results from channel estimation, we propose a hybrid precoding method to mitigate the doubly squint effect in downlink transmission scenarios. Finally, simulation results validate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme and show its superiority over the existing schemes.

Mega-satellite constellations have the potential to leverage inter-satellite links to deliver low-latency end-to-end communication services globally, thereby extending connectivity to underserved regions. However, harsh space environments make satellites vulnerable to failures, leading to node removals that disrupt inter-satellite networking. With the high risk of satellite node failures, understanding their impact on end-to-end services is essential. This study investigates the importance of individual nodes on inter-satellite networking and the resilience of mega satellite constellations against node failures. We represent the mega-satellite constellation as discrete temporal graphs and model node failure events accordingly. To quantify node importance for targeted services over time, we propose a service-aware temporal betweenness metric. Leveraging this metric, we develop an analytical framework to identify critical nodes and assess the impact of node failures. The framework takes node failure events as input and efficiently evaluates their impacts across current and subsequent time windows. Simulations on the Starlink constellation setting reveal that satellite networks inherently exhibit resilience to node failures, as their dynamic topology partially restore connectivity and mitigate the long-term impact. Furthermore, we find that the integration of rerouting mechanisms is crucial for unleashing the full resilience potential to ensure rapid recovery of inter-satellite networking.

Equipping satellites with computing resources to ensure efficient mission completion has become a pivotal trend in multi-layer satellite networks (MLSNs). The uneven spatial distribution of missions and computing resources across satellites necessitates advanced scheduling of communication and computing resources through satellite collaboration. However, the intricate interactions between communication and computing resources, the dynamic mission arrivals and computing resources, and the difficulty of collaboration across different layers in MLSNs present significant challenges for effective scheduling. This paper proposes a collaborative scheduling framework for low Earth orbit (LEO) and medium Earth orbit (MEO) satellites to support communication-computing integration in the MLSN. To adapt to network dynamics, we introduce a federated aggregation matrix and propose an intelligent MEO-LEO collaborative scheduling algorithm that optimizes the decision-making process under uncertain mission arrivals. Additionally, we design a distributed LEO-LEO collaborative scheduling algorithm that leverages the synergy between inter-satellite communication and computing resources to enhance scheduling capabilities and create communication-computing resource chains that meet mission requirements. Extensive simulations demonstrate that our proposed collaborative scheduling framework significantly enhances the scheduling capability of the MLSN.

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted cell-free (CF) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) networks can significantly enhance system performance. However, the extensive deployment of RIS elements imposes considerable channel acquisition overhead, with the high density of nodes and antennas in RIS-assisted CF networks amplifying this challenge. To tackle this issue, in this paper, we explore integrating RIS-user equipment (UE) association into downlink RIS-assisted CF transmitter design, which greatly reduces the channel acquisition costs. The key point is that once UEs are associated with specific RISs, there is no need to frequently acquire channels from non-associated RISs. Then, we formulate the problem of joint RIS-UE association and beamforming at APs and RISs to maximize the weighted sum rate (WSR). In particular, we propose a two-stage framework to solve it. In the first stage, we apply a many-to-many matching algorithm to establish the RIS-UE association. In the second stage, we introduce a sequential optimization-based method that decomposes the joint optimization of RIS phase shifts and AP beamforming into two distinct subproblems. To optimize the RIS phase shifts, we employ the majorization-minimization (MM) algorithm to obtain a semi-closed-form solution. For AP beamforming, we develop a joint block diagonalization algorithm, which yields a closed-form solution. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and show that, while RIS-UE association significantly reduces overhead, it incurs a minor performance loss that remains within an acceptable range. Additionally, we investigate the impact of RIS deployment and conclude that RISs exhibit enhanced performance when positioned between APs and UEs.

Intelligent metasurfaces may be harnessed for realizing efficient holographic multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) systems, at a low hardware-cost and high energy-efficiency. As part of this family, we propose a hybrid beamforming design for stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIM) aided wideband wireless systems relying on the near-field channel model. Specifically, the holographic beamformer is designed based on configuring the phase shifts in each layer of the SIM for maximizing the sum of the baseband eigen-channel gains of all users. To optimize the SIM phase shifts, we propose a layer-by-layer iterative algorithm for optimizing the phase shifts in each layer alternately. Then, the minimum mean square error (MMSE) transmit precoding method is employed for the digital beamformer to support multi-user access. Furthermore, the mitigation of the SIM phase tuning error is also taken into account in the digital beamformer by exploiting its statistics. The power sharing ratio of each user is designed based on the iterative waterfilling power allocation algorithm. Additionally, our analytical results indicate that the spectral efficiency attained saturates in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region due to the phase tuning error resulting from the imperfect SIM hardware quality. The simulation results show that the SIM-aided holographic MIMO outperforms the state-of-the-art (SoA) single-layer holographic MIMO in terms of its achievable rate. We further demonstrate that the near-field channel model allows the SIM-based transceiver design to support multiple users, since the spatial resources represented both by the angle domain and the distance domain can be exploited.

In this paper, we consider a generalized space-air-ground integrated Internet-of-remote-things system with multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and low earth orbit satellites. To explore the diverse channel propagation conditions and adapt to the practical transmission environment, we investigate the three-dimensional node association among sensors, UAVs, and satellites, the spectrum partition between two-hop data collection links, and the multi-UAV deployment under the probabilistic ground-to-air channel model. Unlike existing works, we address the issue of user fairness by maximizing the minimum amount of collected data among all sensors. To cope with the formulated mixed-integer non-convex problem, we decompose it into two subproblems: a node association and spectrum partition subproblem, and a UAV deployment subproblem. To enhance optimized performance, the above two subproblems are solved alternately using the Lagrange dual decomposition and sequential quadratic programming. Simulations show that the proposed strategy converges within 15 iterations and yields an efficient solution, incurring an average loss of approximately 0.2 percent compared to the result of a brute-force search-based algorithm. Additionally, it outperforms benchmarks based on variable relaxation, successive convex approximation, and deep reinforcement learning under various parameter settings.

Deploying an extremely large-scale reconfigurable intelligent surface (XL-RIS) can significantly improve the performance of a RIS-assisted communication system. However, the array aperture and deployment of the XL-RIS affects the radiated field region in which the base station (BS) and the user are located, which in turn affects the performance improvement. In this paper, we have jointly optimized a deployment scheme and phase-shift matrix in XL-RIS-aided communication system, aiming to maximize the user’s received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Firstly, we incorporate the far-field and near-field channel into a unified far- or near-field (FoN) model to simplify the SNR analysis and optimization on RIS deployments. Secondly, based on the FoN approach, we derive an expression for the user’s received SNR and formulate an optimization problem to jointly optimize the RIS deployment and phase-shift matrix in order to maximize the user’s received SNR. Thirdly, we summarize the relationship between the RIS array aperture and deployment and the radiated field region in which the BS and the user are located, and propose an optimized closed-form solution for the RIS deployment and phase-shift matrix. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme through simulation results.

Existing channel estimation and data detection methods for faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) transmission over frequency-selective fading channels primarily face three key challenges: high pilot and guard interval overhead, low channel estimation accuracy, and long distances in satellite communication systems. To address the first two issues, we design a low-overhead frame structure based on circular convolution and, accordingly, propose a low-overhead precoding-driven channel estimation (PD-CE) algorithm. The proposed algorithm leverages circular convolution to suppress inter-block interference (IBI) from the channel with minimal guard intervals and eliminate FTN-induced IBI without guard intervals, significantly reducing pilot and guard overhead. Meanwhile, the limited guard interval mitigates noise enhancement, enabling PD-CE to achieve superior channel estimation accuracy over existing estimation methods. The third challenge arises from the imperfect channel state information obtained at the transmitter. To enhance the robustness in satellite communication systems, we design a precoding matrix based on the minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion, introducing a low-overhead precoding-driven channel estimation and data detection (MMSE-PD-CEDD) algorithm for interference suppression. Simulation results indicate that, even under channel estimation error, the proposed MMSE-PD-CEDD algorithm exhibits superior interference resistance compared to existing algorithms, while its bit error rate performance loss remains within an acceptable range relative to the Nyquist criterion.

Irregularly spaced arrays are appearing in diverse ares, such as wearable devices, stealth aircrafts. This paper studies the two-dimensional (2D) direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation issue for an irregularly spaced electromagnetic vector sensor (EMVS) array. An estimation method of signal parameters via rotational invariance technique (ESPRIT) approach is developed. Unlike existing ESPRIT-like algorithms, the proposed approach in this paper not only estimates the rough directional cosine waveform via the rotational invariance of the polarized response matrix, but also finds the refined directional cosine waveform via the rotational invariance of the spatial response matrix. This proposed algorithm is capable of offering closed-form analytics, thus greatly facilitating 2D-DOA estimation. Numerical results shown in this paper verify that the proposed approach outperforms existing ESPRIT-like algorithms at a sightly increased costs of computation. In addition, numerical results presented in this paper for the proposed 2D-DOA estimation approach also corroborate the theoretical derivations.

Given the rapid growth of diverse communication demands, future large-scale satellite-aerial-terrestrial integrated networks (SATINs) need to simultaneously provide services to users while guaranteeing spectral efficiency, secrecy and energy efficiency. This paper addresses the problem of maximising secrecy energy efficiency (SEE) in SATINs, which can accurately describe the effective trade-off between security, spectral efficiency and transmit power. Particularly, we investigate a secure beamforming (BF) scheme in cognitive SATINs that employs rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) and reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) in the presence of multiple eavesdroppers (Eves) in a UAV-aided secondary network (SN). To optimize the SEE for secondary vehicle users while satisfying the constraints of primary users (PUs), we utilize deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to address the coupling between different optimized parameters based on the improved long short-term memory proximal policy optimization (LSTM-PPO) algorithm. The main innovation of this paper is to design a sophisticated reward function, action space, and state space according to each constraint to speed up the convergence. In addition, simulation results show that the proposed DRL-based optimization scheme exhibits significant advantages in terms of SEE compared with benchmark schemes, validating the effectiveness of this work.

To overcome the impact of information leakage, obstacle blocking, channel uncertainties, and hardware impairments (HWIs) in wireless communication systems, we design a robust secure transmission strategy for a multi-reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided communication system with HWIs and channel uncertainties, where a multi-antenna base station (BS) serves multiple wireless users aided by multiple RISs and overcomes information leakage caused by multiple eavesdroppers. Based on bounded channel uncertainties, a total transmit power minimization problem is investigated subject to the secrecy rates of users, the maximum transmit power of the BS, and the phase shifts of RISs. To deal with the formulated non-convex problem with parameter perturbations, it is transformed into a deterministic problem by using the worst-case approach, S-procedure, and successive convex approximation. Then, the problem is decomposed into an active beamforming and artificial noise subproblem and a passive beamforming subproblem. The subproblems are converted into convex ones via the semi-definite relaxation method, singular value decomposition, penalty function, and eigenvalue decomposition approaches. Finally, an iteration-based robust resource allocation algorithm is proposed. Simulation results verify that by deploying more RISs or increasing the number of reflection elements, the impacts of eavesdroppers and HWIs can be effectively decreased even with channel estimation errors.

In order to reduce the impact of obstacles and improve system performance for traditional backscatter communication (BackCom) networks, we propose a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted heterogeneous BackCom network framework, where multiple backscatter clusters share the spectrum resource with macrocell users in an underlay spectrum sharing mode and achieve self-sufficient energy of each low-power-consumption backscatter device (BD) via a radio-frequency energy-harvesting way. Then, a robust resource allocation problem with imperfect channel station information is studied under the constraints of the minimum rate requirement of each BD, the minimum energy requirement of each BD, the maximum interference power of each macrocell user, the reflection coefficient of each BD, and the phase shifts of each RIS. Moreover, based on the bounded channel uncertainty model, a max-min throughput resource allocation problem of multiple backscatter clusters is formulated by jointly optimizing the time allocation factors, the reflection coefficient of each BD, and the phase shifts of each RIS. To deal with the non-convex optimization problem caused by the uncertain constraints and non-convex constraints, the worst-case approach, successive convex approximation as well as semi-definite relaxation are applied. Finally, an iteration-based robust resource allocation algorithm is proposed accordingly. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has good fairness and stronger robustness.

This paper characterizes the physical layer security (PLS) in a network utilizing massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) for over-the-air computation (AirComp). When the direct links between the access point (AP) and the sensors are blocked, an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is employed to establish communication. Furthermore, the AP sends artificial noise (AN) to the eavesdropper to prevent wiretapping. We study the problem of minimizing the mean-square-error (MSE) between the original and intercepted signals subject to the transmit power constraints at the AP and the sensors, as well as how the MSE threshold hinders the eavesdropper under both perfect and imperfect channel state information (CSI). In the case of perfect CSI, obtaining a globally optimal solution for the investigated non-convex problem is challenging due to the optimization variables’ couple nature. Hence, we convert the problem into two sub-problems to obtain locally optimal solutions. One sub-problem can be solved by an exact penalty-based algorithm, while the other has a closed-form solution using the popular majorization-minimization (MM) algorithm. For the imperfect CSI, the robust beamforming optimization problem formulated is still non-convex. To address this, we harness the block coordinate descent (BCD) algorithm for alternately optimizing the variables to solve it. The results of our simulations demonstrate that the superior MSE performance exhibited by the proposed scheme.

Distributed over-the-air computation (AirComp) is a promising technology for fast data aggregation in wireless networks by leveraging multiple access channel to achieve communication and computation simultaneously. However, device-to-device (D2D) links applied are vulnerable to obstacles, and the performance of distributed AirComp is restricted by the device with the worst channel condition. To tackle these issues, we introduce a multi-functional reconfigurable intelligent surface (MF-RIS) to reconstruct the wireless propagation environment, where the MF-RIS can achieve signal reflection, refraction, and amplification simultaneously. Specifically, we propose an MF-RIS-aided distributed AirComp framework, where MF-RIS receives the aggregated data from all devices and then transmits it to each device for post-processing. We formulate a mean-squared error (MSE) minimization problem by jointly optimizing transmit scalar, receive scalar, and MF-RIS coefficients. To address this non-convex problem, we employ an alternating optimization (AO) technique to decompose it into three subproblems, where semi-closed form or closed form solutions are obtained. Then, we extend the single-input single-output (SISO) system into multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) one. Next, we derive the asymptotic MSE performance for SISO and MIMO cases when the number of RIS elements and that of transmit/receive antennas are very large. Numerical results demonstrate the superiority of MF-RIS in improving MSE performance compared to the baseline without RIS. Additionally, the MF-RIS outperforms its passive counterparts, which reveals the advantages of deploying MF-RIS in distributed AirComp systems to reduce data aggregation error.

The robust beamforming design in multi-functional reconfigurable intelligent surface (MF-RIS) assisted wireless networks is investigated in this work, where the MF-RIS supports signal reflection, refraction, and amplification to address the double-fading attenuation and half-space coverage issues faced by traditional RISs. Specifically, we aim to maximize the system energy efficiency by jointly optimizing the transmit beamforming vector and MF-RIS coefficients in the case of imperfect channel state information (CSI). We first leverage the S-procedure and Bernstein-Type Inequality approaches to transform the formulated problem into tractable forms in the bounded and statistical CSI error cases, respectively. Then, we optimize the MF-RIS coefficients and the transmit beamforming vector alternately by adopting an alternating optimization framework, under the quality of service constraint for the bounded CSI error model and the rate outage probability constraint for the statistical CSI error model. Simulation results demonstrate the significant performance improvement of MF-RIS compared to benchmark schemes. In addition, it is revealed that the cumulative CSI error caused by increasing the number of RIS elements is larger than that caused by increasing the number of transmit antennas.

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) empowered symbiotic radio (SR) holds the potential to support ambient Internet-of-Things (IoT) due to its spectrum- and energy-efficient characteristics. In this system, the RIS not only assists the primary system but also transmits IoT device information. While most existing works focus on the modulation design for single RIS scenarios, there is a lack of investigation into multi-RIS scenarios. This paper addresses this gap by considering a multi-RIS-empowered SR system, where multiple RISs backscatter the incident primary signal to transmit IoT information to the receiver. We aim to cooperatively optimize the signal constellation and phase shifts of all RISs to improve the overall symbol error rate performance for both primary and IoT transmissions. To achieve this, we formulate a problem to maximize the minimum Euclidean distance of the received noise-free signal from a signal detection perspective, subject to constraints on the peak amplitude of the IoT signal constellation and the passive reflection capabilities of the RISs. Given the non-convex nature of the problem, we propose an efficient iterative algorithm. Additionally, we sketch the structure of the optimized IoT signal constellations in the absence of a direct link to provide essential insights. We also develop a low-complexity algorithm and signal detection method by leveraging the received signal structure. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the superiority of our cooperative constellation design methodology over the traditional PSK constellation designs.

In this paper, we propose a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided wireless powered anti-jamming communication network (WPAJCN), where the RIS is utilized to participate in downlink wireless power transfer (WPT), as well as uplink anti-jamming wireless information transfer (AJ-WIT). To evaluate the network anti-jamming performance, we maximize a sum anti-jamming throughput, with the constraints of downlink WPT and uplink AJ-WIT time scheduling, and unit-modulus RIS phase shifts. The formulated problem is not convex in terms of these two types of coupled variables, which cannot be directly solved. To address this problem, the Lagrange dual method and Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions are presented to transform its sum-of-logarithmic objective function into the logarithmically fractional counterpart, which reformulate the original problem into that with respect to RIS phase shift vectors and WPT time scheduling. Next, we propose to apply the Dinkelback algorithm to solve a non-linear fractional programming with respect to the downlink WPT and uplink AJ-WIT RIS phase shifts in an alternating fashion, each of which is derived into a semi-closed solution by utilizing theRiemannian Manifold Optimization(RMO). In addition, the optimal WPT time scheduling is obtained by numerical search. Finally, the numerical results are demonstrated to confirm the improved performance of the proposed approach compared to the benchmark counterparts, which highlights the that RIS can effectively enhance the uplink anti-jamming WIT capability as well as the downlink WPT efficiency.

Recently, stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIMs) have aroused widespread discussions as an innovative technology for directly processing electromagnetic (EM) wave signals. By stacking multiple programmable metasurface layers, an SIM has the ability to provide additional spatial degrees of freedom without the introduction of expensive radio-frequency chains, which may outperform reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) with single-layer structures. For the sake of alleviating information leakage risks in wireless communications, artificial noise (AN) has arisen as a physical-layer security technology with severe hardware constraints, which is impracticable in single-input single-output (SISO) systems. Therefore, we deploy an SIM at the transmitter (Alice) to accomplish joint modulation, beamforming, and AN in SISO systems. As such, an artificial neural network structured SIM aims to convert an input carrier signal into a desired output signal. Subsequently, we formulate the fitting problem between the actual output signal and the desired signal. Moreover, we introduce a regularization parameter to improve the energy efficiency. In order to tackle this resultant non-convex problem, we provide an alternating optimization algorithm to iteratively determine each variable. For the sake of reducing the computational complexity, we derive closed-form expressions for each phase shift and transmit power. Furthermore, we theoretically analyze the secrecy rate and computational complexity. By considering the signal deviation introduced by SIM, we derive upper and lower bounds of the secrecy rate to provide fundamental insights. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that the SIM-aided SISO system is capable of realizing secure communications efficiently, while the introduced power regularization parameter saved over 2 dB transmit power for a 5-layer SIM without amplifying the fitting error.

The allocation of secure resources in non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems has gained significant recognition as a vital research focus in the realm of the Internet of Things (IoT). Previous studies have overlooked the security challenges associated with integrating NOMA with finite blocklength (FBL) transmission. Therefore, this paper examines a secure downlink NOMA system utilizing FBL transmission, which includes a base station (BS), a near user, a far user, and an external eavesdropper. We develop an optimization problem with the objective of maximizing the near user’s effective secrecy throughput, considering the secrecy rates, decoding error probabilities (DEPs), and effective secrecy throughput for both users. Notably, by meticulously defining the DEPs of the users as optimization variables, the monotonicity and concavity of these DEPs in relation to the blocklength, transmission power, and transmission rate can be established effectively. The problem is divided into two sub-problems focusing on the essential conditions for the secrecy rate of the near user, especially in scenarios where successive interference cancellation (SIC) is unsuccessful. These sub-problems are addressed using the block coordinate descent (BCD) algorithm and an exact penalty method. For comparison, the BCD algorithm is also applied to solve the optimization problem using the orthogonal multiple access (OMA) scheme. Numerical simulations confirm the effectiveness of our proposed approaches in improving secure resource allocation when NOMA is combined with FBL transmission.

Malware traffic classification (MTC) is a crucial step in network intrusion detection, which is significant for network security and management. With the continuous evolution of malware traffic, traditional MTC methods are difficult to adapt efficiently to new traffic categories, and manually designed neural network structures suffer from performance bottlenecks and low design efficiency. Hence, we propose an enhanced MTC method based on expandable class incremental learning (CIL) with architecture search. The architecture search can automatically design the optimal neural network structure tailored to different network traffic characteristics, avoiding the limitations of manually designing network structures and improving classification performance. Meanwhile, expandable CIL allows the MTC model to gradually learn new traffic categories without forgetting previous knowledge, avoiding the computational overhead and efficiency loss caused by frequent retraining of the model. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CIL-MTC approach surpasses advanced incremental learning methods on both the Edge-IIoTset and ISCX VPN-nonVPN datasets, achieving superior classification performance while maintaining lower average trainable parameters and training costs. Especially, it achieves an average incremental accuracy of 98.55% and 99.09% on the Edge-IIoTset dataset with incremental tasks of 5 and 2, respectively.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly being integrated into next-generation networks to enhance communication coverage and network capacity. However, the dynamic and mobile nature of UAVs poses significant security challenges, including jamming, eavesdropping, and cyber-attacks. To address these security challenges, this paper proposes a federated learning-based lightweight network with zero trust for enhancing the security of UAV networks. A novel lightweight spectrogram network is proposed for UAV authentication and rejection, which can effectively authenticate and reject UAVs based on spectrograms. Experiments highlight LSNet’s superior performance in identifying both known and unknown UAV classes, demonstrating significant improvements over existing benchmarks in terms of accuracy, model compactness, and storage requirements. Notably, LSNet achieves an accuracy of over 80% for known UAV types and an Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic (AUROC) of 0.7 for unknown types when trained with all five clients. Further analyses explore the impact of varying the number of clients and the presence of unknown UAVs, reinforcing the practical applicability and effectiveness of our proposed framework in real-world FL scenarios.

Autonomous aerial vehicles (AAVs) with cache are considered as an efficient technique to enhance serving capabilities of traditional wireless networks in terms of network coverage and capacity. However, with the introduction of AAVs, new challenges such as trajectory design and AAV-user association occur. In this paper, we consider a caching AAV-assisted wireless network and formulate a user fairness problem by jointly optimizing AAV-user association, trajectory design, and bandwidth allocation of the AAVs, which is mixed-integer and non-convex. In order to find solutions, we decompose the original problem into three subproblems and propose an iterative algorithm based on block alternating descent and successive convex approximation methods. In addition, computational complexity is analyzed. Finally, simulation results validate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm, compared to benchmark algorithms.

Mobile edge computing (MEC)-assisted vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication has been proposed as it can reduce the computation overhead of vehicles by offloading partial tasks. However, the performance improvement of such systems is still challenging due to the limited spectrum resources and computation capabilities. To this end, we study a mode selection and resource allocation (RA) problem in MEC-assisted V2X networks with limited energy and bandwidth constraints. Our goal is to minimize the delay of vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) links under the constraints of the maximum transmission bandwidth, the minimum data rate, the maximum transmit power, and the mode selection factors. To solve the mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem, an alternative optimization method is employed to decompose it into two subproblems: a radio RA subproblem and a task offloading subproblem. Then, the former subproblem is converted into a convex problem via the variable substitution approach, while the latter one is converted into a convex problem via variable relaxation and successive convex approximation. Finally, an iteration-based RA algorithm is proposed. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm reduces latency by 77.9% compared to the RA algorithm without MEC and by 68.9% compared to the RA algorithm without mode selection.

Urban Air Mobility (UAM), powered by flying cars, is poised to revolutionize urban transportation by expanding vehicle travel from the ground to the air. This advancement promises to alleviate congestion and enable faster commutes. However, the fast travel speeds mean vehicles will encounter vastly different environments during a single journey. As a result, onboard learning systems need access to extensive environmental data, leading to high costs in data collection and training. These demands conflict with the limited in-vehicle computing and battery resources. Fortunately, learning model sharing offers a solution. Well-trained local Deep Learning (DL) models can be shared with other vehicles, reducing the need for redundant data collection and training. However, this sharing process relies heavily on efficient vehicular communications in UAM. To address these challenges, this paper leverages the multi-hop Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) technology to improve DL model sharing between distant flying cars. We also employ knowledge distillation to reduce the size of the shared DL models and enable efficient integration of non-identical models at the receiver. Our approach enhances model sharing and onboard learning performance for cars entering new environments. Simulation results show that our scheme improves the total reward by 85% compared to benchmark methods.

In this paper, a localization algorithm based on Bayesian tensor decomposition is proposed for frequency diverse array multiple-input multiple-output (FDA-MIMO) radar, which successfully achieves vehicle localization in intelligent transportation systems (ITSs). Considering that the FDA-MIMO radar array may suffer from unknown mutual coupling (UMC), the proposed algorithm first constructs selection matrices for elimination, and then models the received signals as a third-order complex-valued tensor. To reduce the computational complexity of tensor decomposition, real-valued processing and compression techniques are employed to transform the complex-valued tensor into a real-valued compressed one. Subsequently, the factor matrices are obtained by Bayesian tensor decomposition, from which the direction of arrival (DOA) and range of the vehicle are extracted. Finally, the vehicle location is determined through geometric relationships. Besides, the Cramér-Rao bounds (CRBs) for DOA and range are derived as a performance benchmark. The proposed algorithm is applicable to the manifolds of uniform linear arrays (ULAs) and uniform planar arrays (UPAs) with UMC. Unlike existing algorithms requiring prior knowledge of target numbers, the proposed algorithm realizes accurate vehicle localization under both known and unknown target numbers. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed algorithm.

This paper focuses on improving autonomous driving safety via task offloading from cellular vehicles (CVs), using vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) links, to a multi-access edge computing (MEC) server. Considering that the V2I links sometimes can be reused by vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications to improve spectrum utilization, the receiver of the V2I link may suffer from severe interference, causing outages during the task offloading. To tackle this issue, we propose the deployment of a reconfigurable intelligent computational surface (RICS) to enable, not only V2I reflective links but also interference cancellation at the V2V links exploiting the computational capability of its metamaterials. We devise a joint optimization formulation for the task offloading ratio between the CVs and the MEC server, the spectrum sharing strategy between V2V and V2I communications, as well as the RICS reflection and refraction matrices, to maximize a safety-based autonomous driving task. Due to the non-convexity of the problem and the coupling among its free variables, we transform it into a more tractable equivalent form, which is then decomposed into three sub-problems and solved via an alternate approximation method. Simulation results show that the proposed RICS-assisted offloading framework significantly improves the safety of the autonomous driving network, in which the safety coefficient of the CVs is improved by nearly 34%. The V2V data rate is improved by around 60%, which indicates that the RICS’s adjustment of the signals can effectively mitigate the interference of the V2V link.

In this paper, the event-triggered robust hierarchical synchronization (ETRHS) control of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) is investigated via reinforcement learning. In the ETRHS control problem, there exists one dominant USV and many following USVs. The dominant USV chooses a motion control policy based on the responses of all following USVs, and then each following USV takes corresponding optimal responses to the dominant USV’s policy. This paper converts the ETRHS control problem to an event-triggered optimal synchronization control problem by designing novel value functions for the dominant and following USVs. Subsequently, critic-only structures are established and the ETRHS control laws of all USVs are obtained to form the Stackelberg equilibrium. In order to reduce the computing and communication burden, a novel event-triggering condition is designed for each USV, and the corresponding control law is updated when the condition is triggered. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that the developed reinforcement learning-based ETRHS controllers guarantee all following USVs synchronize with the dominant USV even when dynamic uncertainties exist. Finally, simulation results verify the effectiveness of the developed reinforcement learning-based ETRHS control scheme.

Vehicle-road collaboration is an effective means of improving perception capacities and enhancing safety of intelligent connected vehicles (ICVs). A larger volume of perception data increases the accuracy and robustness of environmental understanding, but it also introduces heavier computation loads. Aiming to reduce data size while meeting perception requirements, this paper studies joint data preprocessing and offloading in vehicle-road collaboration. In the preprocessing stage, we assign different priorities to the detected objects based on their types and distances from the perceiving vehicles. We allow discarding some low-priority objects that may not need immediate attention to reduce computation loads in subsequent data processing. After object selection and downsampling on video frames, the downsized perception data is offloaded and processed collectively by ICVs and roadside units (RSUs). A nonconvex mixed-integer problem is formulated, maximizing the sum of priorities of the selected objects while satisfying constraints of time delay, bandwidth, and computing resources. A fast heuristic based on the penalty alternating direction method (PADM) and modified annealed feasibility pump (MAFP) is developed to solve the problem. Results show that the proposed method is more computationally efficient than the commercial solver in solving the priority maximization problem. Also, it can significantly reduce perception data size, enabling efficient use of the limited communication and computing resources to timely complete more high-priority tasks.

Satellite-ground twin networks (SGTNs) are regarded as a promising service paradigm, which can provide mega access services and powerful computation offloading capabilities via cloud-fog automation functions. Specifically, cloud-fog automation technologies are collaboratively leveraged to enable dense connectivity, pervasive computing, and intelligent control in terrestrial industrial cyber-physical systems, whose system-level privacy security can be strengthened via blockchain based consensus protocol. Moreover, digital twin (DT) can shorten the gap between physical unities and digital space to enable instant data mapping in SGTNs environments. However, complex multi-modal network environments, such as stochastic task size, dynamic low earth orbit location, and time-varying channel gains, hinder better performance metrics in terms of energy consumption, throughput and privacy overhead. Hence, we establish a SGTN integrated cloud-fog automation model to transfer task data to low earth orbit satellites, and then execute broad communication access, powerful computation offloading, and efficient twin control. Next, we propose a Lyapunov stability theory based multi-modal federated learning (LST-MMFL) method to optimize the battery energy, the size of block, computation frequency, and the number of twin control for minimizing the total energy consumption and privacy overhead. Furthermore, we design a novel blockchain based transaction verification protocol to strengthen privacy security, derive performance upper bounds of SGTN model, and fulfill the long-term average task as well as energy queue constraints. Finally, massive simulation results show that the proposed LST-MMFL algorithm outperforms existing state-of-the-art benchmarks in line with energy consumption, available battery level, networked control and privacy protection overhead.

Optimization is crucial for the efficiency and reliability of multi-access edge computing (MEC) networks. Many optimization problems in this field are NP-hard and do not have effective approximation algorithms. Consequently, there is often a lack of optimal (ground-truth) data, which limits the effectiveness of traditional deep learning approaches. Most existing learning-based methods require a large amount of optimal data and do not leverage the potential advantages of using suboptimal data, which can be obtained more efficiently. To illustrate this point, we focus on the multi-server multi-user computation offloading (MSCO) problem, a common issue in MEC networks that lacks efficient optimal solution methods. In this paper, we introduce the graph diffusion-based solution generator (GDSG), designed to work with suboptimal datasets while still achieving convergence to the optimal solution with high probability. We reformulate the network optimization challenge as a distribution-learning problem and provide a clear explanation of how to learn from suboptimal training datasets. We develop GDSG, a multi-task diffusion generative model that employs a graph neural network (GNN) to capture the distribution of high-quality solutions. Our approach includes a straightforward and efficient heuristic method to generate a sufficient amount of training data composed entirely of suboptimal solutions. In our implementation, we enhance the GNN architecture to achieve better generalization. Moreover, the proposed GDSG can achieve nearly 100% task orthogonality, which helps prevent negative interference between the discrete and continuous solution generation training objectives. We demonstrate that this orthogonality arises from the diffusion-related training loss in GDSG, rather than from the GNN architecture itself. Finally, our experiments show that the proposed GDSG outperforms other benchmark methods on both optimal and suboptimal training datasets. Regarding the minimization of computation offloading costs, GDSG achieves savings of up to 56.62% on the ground-truth training set and 41.06% on the suboptimal training set compared to existing discriminative methods.

Cooperative reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) are promising technologies for 6 G networks to support a great number of users. Compared with the fixed RISs, the properly deployed RISs may improve the communication performance with less communication energy consumption, thereby improving the energy efficiency. In this paper, we consider a cooperative unmanned aerial vehicle-mounted RISs (UAV-RISs)-assisted cellular network, where multiple RISs are carried and enhanced by UAVs to serve multiple ground users (GUs) simultaneously such that achieving the three-dimensional (3D) mobility and opportunistic deployment. Specifically, we formulate an energy-efficient communication problem based on multi-objective optimization framework (EEComm-MOF) to jointly consider the beamforming vector of base station (BS), the location deployment and the discrete phase shifts of UAV-RIS system so as to simultaneously maximize the minimum available rate over all GUs, maximize the total available rate of all GUs, and minimize the total energy consumption of the system, while the transmit power constraint of BS is considered. To comprehensively solve EEComm-MOF which is an NP-hard and non-convex problem with constraints, a non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-II with a continuous solution processing mechanism, a discrete solution processing mechanism, and a complex solution processing mechanism (INSGA-II-CDC) is proposed. Simulations results demonstrate that the proposed INSGA-II-CDC can solve EEComm-MOF effectively and outperforms other benchmarks under different parameter settings. Moreover, the stability of INSGA-II-CDC and the effectiveness of the improved mechanisms are verified. Finally, the implementability analysis of the algorithm is given.

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted mobile edge computing (MEC) is emerging as a promising paradigm to provide aerial-terrestrial computing services in close proximity to mobile devices (MDs). However, meeting the demands of computation-intensive and delay-sensitive tasks for MDs poses several challenges, including the demand-supply contradiction between MDs and MEC servers, the demand-supply discrepancy between MDs and MEC servers, the trajectory control requirements on energy efficiency and timeliness, and the different time-scale dynamics of the network. To address these issues, we first present a hierarchical architecture by incorporating terrestrial-aerial computing capabilities and leveraging UAV flexibility. Furthermore, we formulate a joint computing resource allocation, computation offloading, and trajectory control problem to maximize the system utility. Since the problem is a non-convex and NP-hard mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP), we propose a two-timescale joint computing resource allocation, computation offloading, and trajectory control (TJCCT) approach for solving the problem. In the short timescale, we propose a price-incentive model for on-demand computing resource allocation and a matching mechanism-based method for computation offloading. In the long timescale, we propose a convex optimization-based method for UAV trajectory control. Besides, we theoretically prove the stability and polynomial complexity of TJCCT. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed TJCCT is able to achieve superior performances in terms of the system utility, average processing rate, average completion delay, average completion ratio, and average cost, while meeting the energy constraints despite the trade-off of the increased energy consumption.

In Non-Geostationary Orbit Satellite Networks (NGOSNs) with a large number of battery-carrying satellites, proper power allocation and task scheduling are crucial to improving data offloading efficiency. In this work, we jointly optimize power allocation and task scheduling to achieve energy-efficient data offloading in NGOSNs. Our goal is to properly balance the minimization of the total energy consumption and the maximization of the sum weights of tasks. Due to the tight coupling between power allocation and task scheduling, we first derive the optimal power allocation solution to the joint optimization problem with any given task scheduling policy. We then leverage the conflict graph model to transform the joint optimization problem into an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) problem with any given power allocation strategy. We explore the unique structure of the ILP problem to derive an efficient semidefinite relaxation-based solution. Finally, we utilize the genetic framework to combine the above special solutions as a two-layer solution for the original joint optimization problem. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed solution can properly balance the reduction of total energy consumption and the improvement of the sum weights of tasks, thus achieving superior system performance over the current literature.

To utilize the limited acoustic spectrum while combating the harsh underwater propagation, we incorporate partial spectrum sharing into an underwater acoustic sensor network and aim to maximize the minimum data collection rate among all underwater sensor nodes through joint power allocation and spectrum assignment. To cope with the non-convex optimization problem, we propose a Hybrid Model-based and Data-based Resource Allocation (HMDRA) scheme: 1) Under any given spectrum assignment strategy, we analyze the impact of the partial spectrum sharing and imperfect successive interference cancellation on baseband signal processing, and formulate a power allocation problem that is solved by the bisection method and Lagrange dual theory. 2) Based on the optimal power allocation strategy, the gradient-free genetic algorithm (GA) is first adopted to approach the optimal solution of the model-less spectrum assignment problem by nearly enumerating the solution space. To reduce complexity, we further propose a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based algorithm and obtain an efficient solution by traversing a deep neural network-based policy learned from the training stage. Simulation results show that compared with the GA-based algorithm, the average execution time of the DRL-based algorithm is substantially reduced by 5 orders of magnitude to 0.7076 seconds at the cost of approximately 6 percent performance loss.

Vehicular edge computing (VEC) is critical for the safe and efficient driving of intelligent vehicles, by which they can offload computation-intensive tasks (such as driving environment perception) to edge servers to overcome the limitations of onboard computational resources and cooperate with others. One of the major challenges faced by VEC is that the offloaded intelligent driving tasks generally generate large amounts of data, which can easily stretch and congest the vehicle communication channels. To address the above challenges, we first propose a novel semantic VEC (SVEC) architecture, which can extract the semantic information of tasks and offload them to edge servers, thereby achieving reliable and efficient offloaded task communication and computation adaptively. Considering the scarce channel resources of vehicles and the intelligent tasks with different priorities and modalities, we define a novel user utility model for SVEC and transform the problem of maximizing user utility into a joint optimization problem of semantic feature extraction, task offloading and resource allocation. Furthermore, to cope with the complexity of the solution space of the optimization problem, we propose a diffusion-based multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm, which improves the ability of agents to explore the solution space through the diffusion process, thereby achieving optimal decisions for semantic feature extraction, task offloading and resource allocation. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme improves the overall performance of SVEC while reducing offload latency and average system cost.

Evolving monitoring requirements may necessitate the addition of new sensors or the exclusion of old ones. Unfortunately, traditional data-driven fault diagnosis methods usually hold the assumption that the number of sensors remains constant throughout the monitoring process, so they need to be retrained with intractable computation to account for the varying sensor behaviors. This article designs a fault diagnosis method that deals with varying sensor behaviors in an online fashion. First, we list potential sensor varying behaviors by providing definitions of sensor states and sensor state transitions. Then, this article proposes the incremental varying sensory data-driven fault diagnosis model (IVSM). IVSM is able to update in an incremental manner under varying sensory data, with a theoretical performance guarantee. The primary objective of IVSM is to continuously map the heterogeneous sensory data within different time into a unified subspace, thereby enabling the direct measurement of heterogeneous and varying sensory data. Subsequently, it constructs a fault identification classifier within this unified subspace to determine the presence of faulty conditions in the systems. Its effectiveness and efficiency are verified by experimental results obtained from two public industrial systems and one practical industrial plant.

Intelligent metasurfaces have recently emerged as a promising technology that enables the customization of wireless environments by harnessing large numbers of low-cost reconfigurable scattering elements. However, prior studies have predominantly focused on single-layer metasurfaces, which have limitations in terms of wave-domain processing capabilities due to practical hardware limitations. In contrast, this paper introduces a novel stacked intelligent metasurface (SIM) design. Specifically, we investigate the integration of SIM into the downlink of a multiuser multiple-input single-output (MISO) communication system, where an SIM, consisting of a multilayer metasurface structure, is deployed at the base station (BS) to facilitate transmit beamforming in the electromagnetic wave domain. This eliminates the need for conventional digital beamforming and high-resolution digital-to-analog converters at the BS. To this end, an optimization problem is formulated to maximize the sum rate of all user equipments by jointly optimizing the transmit power allocation at the BS and the wave-based beamforming at the SIM, subject to constraints on the transmit power budget and discrete phase shifts. Furthermore, we propose a computationally efficient algorithm for solving the formulated joint optimization problem and elaborate on the potential benefits of employing SIM in wireless networks. Numerical results are illustrated to corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed SIM-enabled wave-based beamforming design and to evaluate the performance improvement achieved by the proposed algorithm compared to various benchmark schemes. It is demonstrated that considering the same number of transmit antennas, the proposed SIM-based system achieves about 200% improvement in terms of sum rate compared to conventional MISO systems. The code for this paper is available athttps://github.com/JianchengAn.

Flexible intelligent metasurface (FIM) technology shows promise in terms of enhancing both the spectral and energy efficiency of wireless networks. An FIM is composed of an array of low-cost radiating elements, each of which can independently radiate electromagnetic signals, while flexibly adjusting its position along the direction perpendicular to the surface by a process termed as “morphing”. This is of particular interest for wireless communication systems operating at millimeter-wave and terahertz frequencies, where deep fading generally occurs within a few millimeters. Hence, in contrast to conventional rigid 2D antenna arrays, the FIM surface shape may be reconfigured to improve the channel quality by beneficial 3D morphing. In this paper, we investigate the multiuser downlink, where an FIM deployed at a base station (BS) communicates with multiple single-antenna users. We formulate an optimization problem for minimizing the total downlink transmit power at the BS, by jointly optimizing the transmit beamforming and FIM surface shape, subject to an individual signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) constraint of each user as well as a constraint on the maximum FIM morphing range. To solve this problem, we first consider a simple single-user scenario and show that the optimal 3D surface shape is achieved by independently adjusting each FIM element to the position having the strongest channel gain. However, in realistic multiuser scenarios, FIM surface-shape morphing involves complex tradeoffs. To address this issue, an efficient alternating optimization method is proposed to iteratively update the FIM surface shape and the transmit beamformer to gradually reduce the transmit power. Additionally, we analyze the performance gain of the FIM, showcasing a logarithmic received power scaling law versus its maximum morphing range. Finally, simulation results show that the FIM reduces the transmit power by about 3 dB compared to conventional rigid 2D arrays at a given data rate. The code for this paper is available athttps://github.com/JianchengAn.

Non-coherent chaotic communication has gained increasing attention as it provides an efficient solution for reliable communications without requiring channel state information. In this paper, we propose a non-coherent reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-empowered differential chaos shift keying scheme with two-level nested index modulation (RIS-DCSK-TLNIM). In the proposed RIS-DCSK-TLNIM scheme, the reference index and information index are nested to form two-level nested index modulation. This design enhances both the spectral efficiency and bit error rate (BER) performance of RIS-DCSK-TLNIM, albeit at the expense of slightly increased complexity. Furthermore, we propose a joint detection algorithm to recover the information bits transmitted via the reference index, information index, and two distinct-mode signals. We then extend RIS-DCSK-TLNIM into an enhanced system to achieve higher spectral efficiency. Subsequently, we analyze the BER performance, spectral efficiency, and system complexity of RIS-DCSK-TLNIM, and compare these metrics with those of benchmark systems. Comparison results demonstrate that the proposed RIS-DCSK-TLNIM, when configured with a small number of time slots, can achieve more than twice the spectral efficiency and at least a 6 dB gain in BER performance compared to benchmark systems.

In the field of constant envelope orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CE-OFDM), the use of phase modulation heralds a paradigm with an extremely reduced peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of zero. However, the non-linear characteristics inherent to phase modulation pose a formidable challenge to the integration of modern channel coding strategies aimed at improved bit error rate (BER) results. To address this issue, we present an efficient low-complexity log-likelihood ratio (LLR) computation strategy based on the traditional phase receiver, anchored in an effective approximation to the phase noise variance. Furthermore, this foundation paves the way for an innovative receiver architecture, namely the near-maximum likelihood (NML) receiver, designed to improve decoding performance without incurring significant computational overhead. Comparative analyses of encoded CE-OFDM across different receiver models not only confirm the accuracy and superiority of the proposed LLR estimation, but also underscore the dual advantages of our proposed NML receiver in optimising BER and detection complexity, positioning CE-OFDM as an optimal candidate for scenarios requiring high-efficiency power amplifiers (PAs).

Most near-field (NF) localization algorithms cannot deal with the underdetermined case, while those which can are computationally expensive due to employment of fourth-order cumulants. In this work, a low-complexity solution is provided for underdetermined three-dimensional (3-D) NF localization, by employing second-order statistics with a tailored array configuration named two parallel centrally symmetric unfold coprime (TPSC) array. Its implementation can be divided into three stages. Firstly, the proposed algorithm constructs two cross-correlation matrices based on the received array data, which eliminates the non-linear range-related information of NF signals. Secondly, covariance and vectorization operations are applied to these two cross-correlation matrices to form a virtual array with extended aperture. Finally, the two-dimensional (2-D) angle parameters are estimated by the sparse and parametric approach (SPA) and a phase retrieval operation, and then the one-dimensional (1-D) range parameter is achieved by the multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm. One specific feature is that the estimated angle and range parameters are matched automatically. An analysis of the properties of the TPSC array is provided, and an optimal parameter configuration is derived, given that the total number of array elements is fixed. Simulation results demonstrate that the designed TPSC array can achieve underdetermined 3-D NF localization, and deliver enhanced estimation capabilities, surpassing those of established algorithms.

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) has emerged as a promising technology to facilitate high-rate communications and super-resolution sensing, particularly operating in the millimeter wave (mmWave) band. However, the vulnerability of mmWave signals to blockages severely impairs ISAC capabilities and coverage. To tackle this, an efficient and low-cost solution is to deploy distributed reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) to construct virtual links between the base stations (BSs) and users in a controllable fashion. In this paper, we model the generalized RIS-assisted mmWave ISAC networks considering the blockage effect, and examine the beneficial impact of RISs on the coverage rate utilizing stochastic geometry. Based on the proposed beam patterns and user association policies, we derive the conditional coverage probability and ergodic rate of communication and sensing dual functions for two association cases, as well as the marginal coverage rate using the distance-dependent thinning method. Taking into account the coupling effect of ISAC dual functions within the same network topology, we further calculate the joint coverage probability of ISAC performance. Simulation results verify the accuracy of derived theoretical formulations, and illustrate the impact of the RIS aperture, blockage, BS and RIS densities on ISAC coverage rates, which provide valuable guidelines for the practical network deployment. Specifically, our results indicate the superiority of the RIS deployment with the density of 40 km${}^{-2}$BSs, and that the joint coverage rate of ISAC performance exhibits potential growth from 62% to 97% with the deployment of RISs.

This paper proposes a fast and robust graph-based wavenumber-domain approach for channel estimation in holo-graphic MIMO (HMIMO) systems. Unlike conventional angulardomain methods—prone tomutual coupling, power leakage, andsampling redundancy—our framework resolves HMIMO’s high-dimensional challenges by introducing a wavenumber-domain basis via orthogonal Fourier harmonics (FHs), eliminating dependencies on antenna density. By reformulating channel estimation as its sparse recovery counterpart, we model clustered sparsity using an elliptic Markov random field (EMRF), upon which a graph-cut swap expansion (GCSE) algorithm is developed, leveraging graph-theoretic optimizations for fast convergence and low complexity. Simulations demonstrate that our method achieves robust performance against mutual coupling, varying SNRs, and antenna density with drastically less computing time.

With the rapid popularity of vision-driven communication applications, object detection has become one of the fundamental techniques for performing practical vision tasks. In traditional communication systems, images are compressed for transmission, reconstructed at the receiver, and then processed by existing object detection algorithms. However, transmitting large amounts of images consumes significant storage and communication resources. To address this challenge, a semantic communication-based image reconstruction scheme has been proposed for object detection, which transmits only the semantic information relevant to image reconstruction. However, this method is prone to losing key information, such as object position and texture details, leading to degraded object detection performance. Additionally, it is sensitive to environmental factors such as weather and lighting, resulting in poor adaptability across multiple scenarios. To address these issues, we propose a multi-scale semantic communication framework for object detection that transmits only multi-scale semantic features relevant to the task and employs decoupling at the receiver to separate positional and classification information of target objects without requiring image reconstruction. To improve adaptability across multiple scenarios, we introduce a cross-domain object detection technique that ensures reliable object detection in new scenarios by optimizing the framework’s multi-scale semantic encoder through domain adversarial learning. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves mean average precision improvements of$15.4\% \sim 38.5\%$over the traditional communication framework within low to medium signal-to-noise ratio regions in additive white Gaussian noise and Rayleigh fading channels.

In this paper, we investigate reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems for robust physical layer security (PLS) schemes. Traditionally, eavesdroppers (Eves) typically avoid interacting with the base station, making it challenging to obtain their relevant information, which limits the implementation of PLS. Fortunately, the sensing information obtained by ISAC can contribute to the design of PLS. Therefore, leveraging imperfect sensing estimation and employing dedicated radar signals as artificial noise, we formulate an RIS-assisted joint active and passive beamforming design problem to maximize the sum secrecy rate while satisfying the user’s quality of service constraints, the transmission power constraints, and the sensing signal strength requirements. To make the problem tractable, we first derive the bound for Eve’s channel state information uncertainty region based on security approximations. Subsequently, we employ the$\mathcal {S}$-procedure and the symbolic-deterministic methods to transform the infinite number of inequalities. We then utilize the first-order Taylor expansion, the second-order cone methods, and the successive convex approximation to address the nonconvexity problem, leading to an efficient suboptimal solution obtained by an iterative algorithm. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate the significant potential of the sensing function in enhancing security and the effectiveness of the proposed robust scheme in flexibly balancing communication and sensing quality.

Movable antennas (MAs) enhance flexibility in beamforming gain and interference suppression by adjusting position within certain areas of the transceivers. In this paper, we propose an MA-assisted integrated sensing and communication framework, wherein MAs are deployed for reconfiguring the channel array responses at both the receiver and transmitter of a base station. Then, we develop an optimization framework aimed at maximizing the sensing signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) by jointly optimizing the receive beamforming vector, the transmit beamforming matrix, and the positions of MAs while meeting the minimum SINR requirement for each user. To address this nonconvex problem involving complex coupled variables, we devise an alternating optimization-based algorithm that incorporates techniques including the Charnes-Cooper transform, second-order Taylor expansion, and successive convex approximation (SCA). Specifically, the closed form of the received vector and the optimal transmit matrix can be first obtained in each iteration. Subsequently, the solutions for the positions of the transmit and receive MAs are obtained using the SCA method based on the second-order Taylor expansion. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme has significant advantages over the other baseline schemes. In particular, the proposed scheme has the ability to match the performance of the fixed position antenna scheme while utilizing fewer resources.

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) and ambient backscatter communication (AmBC) technologies are recognized for their programmability and high energy efficiency respectively, which will be the key parts of the future sixth generation (6G) mobile communication technology. The combination of the two technologies can improve communication security by reducing the probability of detection and decoding through enhanced transmission and backscatter transmission in different communication slots. In this paper, a dual-function RIS that supports cooperative relaying for covert communications is proposed. It operates in different communication slots (enhanced transmission slot and backscatter slot), but the performance is affected by phase errors due to function switching. A source covertly communicates with an intended destination via the help of RIS and cooperative relay. There is an illegal monitor aims to detect and eavesdrop the covert message. For this system, the outage probability (OP), intercept probability (IP), and detection error probability (DEP) in different communication slots are derived to examine the system reliability and security. Moreover, the system security probability (SSP) is proposed, and a block coordinated ascent (BCA)-based iterative algorithm is used to jointly optimize the power allocation coefficients to maximize the SSP. Simulation results show that increasing the number of elements can improve the security performance and mitigate the negative impact of RIS phase errors.

As one of the promising technologies, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) and simultaneous transmitting and reflecting RIS (STAR-RIS) have attracted great interest. However, the existing RISs offer broadband tuning capability without filtering function due to the absence of radio frequency (RF) units, which easily leads to the unexpected tuning of the RIS undesired signals, especially in large-scale deployments. For the target network, it is difficult to obtain the parameter settings of RISs to serve other networks, which causes the unpredictability of the wireless environment. In this paper, we consider the covert communication in a STAR-RIS assisted random wireless network with randomly distributed blockages. We investigate the impact of STAR-RIS large-scale deployment on covert communication and leverage its inherent unpredictability for improving the covertness. We derive the average detection error probability for warden within the random wireless networks. Furthermore, we optimize the passive beamforming of STAR-RIS to maximize the covert communication rate, considering both direct and indirect line-of-sight (LoS) links. To address this, we employ an alternating optimization (AO) algorithm based on the semi-definite programming (SDP) method. Finally, numerical results demonstrate significant enhancements and increase covert capability achieved through the large-scale deployment of STAR-RIS.

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is emerging as a promising technology for next-generation wireless communication networks, offering a variety of merits such as the ability to tailor the communication environment. Moreover, deploying multiple RISs helps mitigate severe signal blocking between the base station (BS) and users, providing a practical and efficient solution to enhance the service coverage. However, fully reaping the potential of a multi-RIS aided communication system requires solving a non-convex optimization problem. This challenge motivates the adoption of learning-based methods for determining the optimal policy. In this paper, we introduce a novel heterogeneous graph neural network (GNN) to effectively leverage the graph topology of a wireless communication environment. Specifically, we design an association scheme that selects a suitable RIS for each user. Then, we maximize the weighted sum rate (WSR) of all the users by iteratively optimizing the RIS association scheme, and beamforming designs until the considered heterogeneous GNN converges. Based on the proposed approach, each user is associated with the best RIS, which is shown to significantly improve the system capacity in multi-RIS multi-user millimeter wave (mmWave) communications. Specifically, simulation results demonstrate that the proposed heterogeneous GNN closely approaches the performance of the high-complexity alternating optimization (AO) algorithm in the considered multi-RIS aided communication system, and it outperforms other benchmark schemes. Moreover, the performance improvement achieved through the RIS association scheme is shown to be of the order of 30%.

In this paper, we investigate a novel integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system aided by movable antennas (MAs). A bistatic radar system, in which the base station (BS) is configured with MAs, is integrated into a multi-user multiple-input-single-output (MU-MISO) system. Flexible beamforming is studied by jointly optimizing the antenna coefficients and the antenna positions. Compared to conventional fixed-position antennas (FPAs), MAs provide a new degree of freedom (DoF) in beamforming to reconfigure the field response, and further improve the received signal quality for both wireless communication and sensing. We propose a communication rate and sensing mutual information (MI) maximization problem by flexible beamforming optimization. The complex fractional objective function with logarithms are first transformed with the fractional programming (FP) framework. Then, we propose an efficient algorithm to address the non-convex problem with coupled variables by alternatively solving four sub-problems. We derive the closed-form expression to update the antenna coefficients by Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions. To improve the direct gradient ascent (DGA) scheme in updating the positions of the antennas, a 3-stage search-based projected GA (SPGA) method is proposed. Simulation results show that MAs significantly enhance the overall performance of the ISAC system, achieving 59.8% performance gain compared to conventional ISAC system enabled by FPAs. Meanwhile, the proposed SPGA-based method has remarkable performance improvement compared the DGA method in antenna position optimization.

As mobile networks progress towards a unified framework for integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), it is foreseeable to introduce new privacy concerns, particularly the potential exposure of position information to unintended receivers. In other words, the scope of physical-layer security (PLS) needs to be expanded to encompass both communication and sensing privacy. Therefore, in contrast to conventional PLS schemes that focus predominantly on preventing eavesdropping, this paper proposes a novel physical-layer privacy (PLP) design within ISAC frameworks, in order to guarantee the secrecy of data transmission while obscuring transmitter’s directional information. Specifically, we introduce a metric termed angular-domain peak-to-average ratio (ADPAR) to assess sensing resistance (SR) performance. Subsequently, three fundamental optimization problems are formulated under such ADPAR constraints to enhance communication secrecy, depending upon the integrity of illegitimate channel state information. These problems are then tackled using advanced strategies such as null-space projection and the cooperation with artificial noise. Additionally, closed-form solutions are further derived in a few specific cases by leveraging singular value decomposition (SVD) and generalized SVD. Finally, simulation results affirm the effectiveness of our design in safeguarding the twofold privacy within ISAC networks.

Cell-free (CF) massive multiple-input multiple-output (mMIMO) systems are emerging as promising alternatives to cellular networks, especially in ultra-dense environments. However, further capacity enhancement requires the deployment of more access points (APs), which will lead to high costs and high energy consumption. To address this issue, in this paper, we explore the integration of low-power, low-cost stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIM) into CF mMIMO systems to enhance AP capabilities. The key point is that SIM performs precoding-related matrix operations in the wave domain. As a consequence, each AP antenna only needs to transmit data streams for a single user equipment (UE), eliminating the need for complex baseband digital precoding. Then, we formulate the problem of joint AP-UE association and precoding at APs and SIMs to maximize the system sum rate. Due to the non-convexity and high complexity of the formulated problem, we propose a two-stage signal processing framework to solve it. In particular, in the first stage, we propose an AP antenna greedy association (AGA) algorithm to minimize UE interference. In the second stage, we introduce an alternating optimization (AO)-based algorithm that separates the joint power and wave-based precoding optimization problem into two distinct sub-problems: the complex quadratic transform method is used for AP antenna power control, and the projection gradient ascent (PGA) algorithm is employed to find suboptimal solutions for the SIM wave-based precoding. Finally, the numerical results validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and assess the performance enhancement achieved by the algorithm in comparison to various benchmark schemes. The results show that, with the same number of SIM meta-atoms, the proposed algorithm improves the sum rate by approximately 275% compared to the benchmark scheme.

In this paper, we explore the integration of low-power, low-cost stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIM) into cell-free (CF) massive multiple-input multiple-output (mMIMO) systems to enhance access point (AP) capabilities and address high power consumption and cost challenges. Specifically, we investigate the uplink performance of a SIM-enhanced CF mMIMO system and propose a novel system framework. First, the closed-form expressions of the spectral efficiency (SE) are obtained using the unique two-layer signal processing framework of CF mMIMO systems. Second, to mitigate inter-user interference, an interference-based greedy algorithm for pilot allocation is introduced. Third, a wave-based beamforming algorithm for SIM is proposed, based only on statistical channel state information, which effectively reduces the fronthaul costs. Finally, two different power control algorithms are proposed to improve the performance of UE with inferior channel conditions. The results indicate that increasing the number of SIM layers and meta-atoms leads to significant performance improvements and allows for a reduction in the number of APs and AP antennas, thus lowering the costs. In particular, the best SE performance is achieved with the deployment of 20 APs plus 1200 SIM meta-atoms. Finally, the proposed wave-based beamforming algorithm can enhance the SE performance of SIM-enhanced CF-mMIMO systems by 57%, significantly outperforming traditional CF mMIMO systems.

This paper introduces a novel smartphone-enabled localization technology for ambient Internet of Things (IoT) devices, leveraging the widespread use of smartphones. By utilizing the passive movement of a smartphone, we create a virtual large array that enables direct localization using only angle-of-arrival (AoA) information. Unlike traditional two-step localization methods, direct localization is unaffected by AoA estimation errors in the initial step, which are often caused by multipath channels and noise. However, direct localization methods typically require prior environmental knowledge to define the search space, with calculation time increasing as the search space expands. To address limitations in current direct localization methods, we propose a machine learning (ML)-based direct localization technique. This technique combines ML with an adaptive matching pursuit procedure, dynamically generating search spaces for precise source localization. The adaptive matching pursuit minimizes location errors despite potential accuracy fluctuations in ML across various training and testing environments. Additionally, by estimating the reflection source’s location, we reduce the effects of multipath channels, enhancing localization accuracy. Extensive three-dimensional ray-tracing simulations demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms current state-of-the-art direct localization techniques in computational efficiency and operates independently of prior environmental knowledge.

In symbiotic radio (SR), the secondary system not only shares the spectrum and power of the primary system but also enhances its performance by providing multipath gains, fostering a cooperative mutualism between the two systems. However, in high-mobility channels, time-frequency selective fading presents significant challenges for reliable SR communications. The recently introduced orthogonal time-frequency space (OTFS) technique, which processes signals in the delay-Doppler (DD) domain, is expected to improve SR communication performance in high-speed mobile scenarios. In this paper, we propose embedding primary information symbols in the DD domain using amplitude-phase modulation, while employing a combinatorial frequency (CF) modulation strategy for secondary information transmission. To obtain channel state information (CSI) and detect secondary symbols, for some special scenarios, we propose an off-grid sparse Bayesian learning (SBL)-based method. This method first estimates the equivalent CSI and then detects the symbols by leveraging the highly structured Doppler shifts. For more general scenarios, we introduce a model-driven equivalent CSI estimation-net (ECSIEst-Net) and a data-driven secondary symbol detection-Net (SSymDet-Net). Numerical results are provided to guide parameter selection and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

Advancements in emerging technologies, e.g., reconfigurable intelligent surfaces and holographic MIMO (HMIMO), facilitate unprecedented manipulation of electromagnetic (EM) waves, significantly enhancing the performance of wireless communication systems. To accurately characterize the achievable performance limits of these systems, it is crucial to develop a universal EM-compliant channel model. This paper addresses this necessity by proposing a comprehensive EM channel model tailored for realistic multi-path environments, accounting for the combined effects of antenna array configurations and propagation conditions in HMIMO communications. Both polarization phenomena and spatial correlation are incorporated into this probabilistic channel model. Additionally, physical constraints of antenna configurations, such as mutual coupling effects and energy consumption, are integrated into the channel modeling framework. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed probabilistic channel model, indicating that traditional Rician and Rayleigh fading models cannot accurately depict the channel characteristics and underestimate the channel capacity. More importantly, the proposed channel model outperforms free-space Green’s functions in accurately depicting both near-field gain and multi-path effects in radiative near-field regions. These gains are much more evident in tri-polarized systems, highlighting the necessity of polarization interference elimination techniques. Moreover, the theoretical analysis accurately verifies that capacity decreases with expanding communication regions of two-user communications.

This paper proposes a fast-decoding scheme based on the successive interference cancellation (SIC) framework for symbiotic backscatter multi-user non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems, which aims to decode the desired primary NOMA signal and the backscatter signal for the end-users in an efficient manner. Under the proposed decoding framework, we derive a closed-form expression of the coexistence outage probability (COP) with perfect SIC for the end-users over Nakagami-m fading channel. More importantly, the diversity order is determined by the bottleneck fading parameter of the two-hop backscatter channels in most general cases, but is dominated by the bottleneck fading parameter of the primary and backscatter channels in a rare special case. Due to the influence of the residual interference, the COP with imperfect SIC would converge to an error floor. Moreover, we formulate the symbiotic constraints to guarantee the minimum decoding times and a shorter decoding time than the conventional solutions, and further derive the corresponding successful fast-decoding probability at high transmit signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The results show that by keeping a weak primary channel statistics or lowering the threshold to decode the backscatter signal, the proposed fast-decoding scheme outperforms conventional schemes in terms of decoding times.

Flexible antenna arrays (FAAs), distinguished by their rotatable, bendable, and foldable properties, are extensively employed in flexible radio systems to achieve customized radiation patterns. This paper aims to illustrate that FAAs, capable of dynamically adjusting surface shapes, can enhance communication performances with both omni-directional and directional antenna patterns, in terms of multi-path channel power and channel angle Cramér-Rao bounds. To this end, we develop a mathematical model that elucidates the impacts of the variations in antenna positions and orientations as the array transitions from a flat to a rotated, bent, and folded state, all contingent on the flexible degree-of-freedom. Moreover, since the array shape adjustment operates across the entire beamspace, especially with directional patterns, we discuss the sum-rate in the multi-sector base station that covers the 360° communication area. Particularly, to thoroughly explore the multi-sector sum-rate, we propose separate flexible precoding (SFP), joint flexible precoding (JFP), and semi-joint flexible precoding (SJFP), respectively. In our numerical analysis comparing the optimized FAA to the fixed uniform planar array, we find that the bendable FAA achieves a remarkable 156% sum-rate improvement compared to the fixed planar array in the case of JFP with the directional pattern. Furthermore, the rotatable FAA exhibits notably superior performance in SFP and SJFP cases with omni-directional patterns, with respective 35% and 281%.

As extremely large-scale (XL) arrays advance, near-field (NF) communications have gained significant attention.With this shift, traditional far-field techniques are being revised for compatibility with new XL NF communication paradigms. This work presents NF hybrid beamforming (NF-HBF) approaches for XL-MIMO, focusing on challenges like near-field effects and spatial non-stationarity. First, it redefines the sparse recovery-based NF-HBF problem, shifting from angular- to polar-domain code-books, leading to direct greedy hybrid beamforming (DG-HBF). However, challenges such as high computational complexity, phase shifter (PS) resolution, and spatial non-stationarities persist. To overcome these, this study proposes stepwise-individual and stepwise-joint greedy HBF methods, namely SIG-HBF and SJG-HBF. These methods simplify the process by approximating spherical-wave beams with planar-wave beams, promising lower PS resolution needs, reduced complexity, and the ability to tackle spatially non-stationary channels. Moreover, by exploring conjugate symmetric sequency-ordered Hadamard transforms, NF-HBF can be efficiently achieved using 2-bit PSs with values in {1,−1,j,−j}, facilitated by the SJG-HBF and SJG-HBF methods. Numerical simulations on the proposed methods demonstrate that DG-HBF can approach NF fully-digital beamforming, while SIG-HBF and SJG-HBF highlight the feasibility of utilizing angular-domain codebooks with low PS cost and low memory storage for NF-HBF.

In this paper, we conduct a theoretical analysis of how to integrate reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) with cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), considering URLLC. We consider a downlink two-user cooperative NOMA system employing short-packet communications, where the two users are denoted by the central user (CU) and the cell-edge user (CEU), respectively, and an RIS is deployed to enhance signal quality. Specifically, compared to CEU, CU lies nearer from BS and enjoys the higher channel gains. Closed-form expressions for the CU’s average block error rate (BLER) are derived. Furthermore, we evaluate the CEU’s BLER performance utilizing selective combining (SC) and derive a tight lower bound under maximum ratio combining (MRC). Simulation results are provided to our analyses and demonstrate that the RIS-assisted system significantly outperforms its counterpart without RIS in terms of BLER. Notably, MRC achieves a squared multiple of the diversity gain of the SC, leading to more reliable performance, especially for the CEU. Furthermore, by dividing the RIS into two zones, each dedicated to a specific user, the average BLER can be further reduced, particularly for the CEU.

A flexible intelligent metasurface (FIM) is composed of an array of low-cost radiating elements, each of which can independently radiate electromagnetic signals and flexibly adjust its position through a 3D surface-morphing process. In our system, an FIM is deployed at a base station (BS) that transmits to multiple single-antenna users. We formulate an optimization problem for minimizing the total downlink transmit power at the BS by jointly optimizing the transmit beamforming and the FIM’s surface shape, subject to an individual signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) constraint for each user as well as to a constraint on the maximum morphing range of the FIM. To address this problem, an efficient alternating optimization method is proposed to iteratively update the FIM’s surface shape and the transmit beamformer to gradually reduce the transmit power. Finally, our simulation results show that at a given data rate the FIM reduces the transmit power by about 3 dB compared to conventional rigid 2D arrays.

In the near-field context, the Fresnel approximation is typically employed to mathematically represent solvable functions of spherical waves. However, these efforts may fail to take into account the significant increase in the lower limit of the Fresnel approximation, known as the Fresnel distance. The lower bound of the Fresnel approximation imposes a constraint that becomes more pronounced as the array size grows. Beyond this constraint, the validity of the Fresnel approximation is broken. As a potential solution, the wavenumber-domain paradigm characterizes the spherical wave using a spectrum composed of a series of linear orthogonal bases. However, this approach falls short of covering the effects of the array geometry, especially when using Gaussian-mixed-model (GMM)-based von Mises-Fisher distributions to approximate all spectra. To fill this gap, this paper introduces a novel wavenumber-domain ellipse fitting (WD-EF) method to tackle these challenges. Particularly, the channel is accurately estimated in the near-field region, by maximizing the closed-form likelihood function of the wavenumber-domain spectrum conditioned on the scatterers’ geometric parameters. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the robustness of the proposed scheme against both the distance and angles of arrival.

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) have emerged as a transformative technology capable of reshaping wireless channels to significantly enhance the efficiency of wireless communication networks in a cost-effective manner. However, the prevailing RIS reflection coefficient optimization scheme presents a significant challenge due to its dependence on channel state information (CSI), which results in excessive pilot overhead and error propagation. To address this issue, this paper proposes a probability update (PU) based dynamic codebook for RIS-aided multiuser multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) communication systems. Specifically, we implement a learning-from-training strategy that dynamically updates the codebook independently of CSI. This process involves assigning a probability vector to the RIS reflecting elements to generate the codebook, with subsequent iterative updates to the probability vector based on codebook training outcomes. Moreover, numerical results illustrate that the proposed scheme can effectively cater to diverse system by flexibly balancing the training overhead and system performance. Finally, despite channel estimation errors, the proposed scheme outperforms passive beamforming and the existing codebook schemes, while significantly reducing training overhead and implementation complexity.

Orthogonal delay-Doppler division multiplexing (ODDM) modulation has recently been considered a promising technology for enhancing communication system performance in high-mobility scenarios. Accurate and low-complexity channel estimation is one of the most significant challenges for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) ODDM systems, mainly due to the massive antenna arrays and high-mobility environments. In this paper, we focus on the downlink massive MIMO-ODDM communication systems, and propose a two-stage low-complexity channel estimation algorithm. Specifically, we first derive the effective channel model of the massive MIMO-ODDM systems, where the elements of the channel matrix do not follow a Bernoulli-Gaussian distribution, but their magnitudes do. Utilizing this characteristic, we employ the memory approximate message passing method to estimate the gains, delay, and Doppler of the multi-path channel, while the angles of the channel are estimated using the discrete Fourier transform method, achieving low-complexity Bayes-optimal results. Finally, numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve improved estimation results, surpassing existing algorithms by approximately 2 dB.

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) technology is increasingly recognized as a pivotal technology of the sixth-generation communication networks due to the large amounts of available spectrum at high frequencies. However, the huge overhead associated with beam training imposes a significant challenge in mmWave communications, particularly in urban environments with high background noise. To reduce this high overhead, we propose a novel solution for robust continuous-time beam tracking with liquid neural network, which dynamically adjust the narrow mmWave beams to ensure real-time beam alignment with mobile users. Through extensive simulations, we validate the effectiveness of our proposed method and demonstrate its superiority over existing state-of-the-art deep-learning-based approaches. Specifically, our scheme achieves at most 46.9% higher normalized spectral efficiency than the baselines when the user is moving at 5 m/s, demonstrating the potential of liquid neural networks to enhance mmWave mobile communication performance.

Staked intelligent metasurface (SIM) based techniques are developed to perform two-dimensional (2D) direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation. In contrast to conventional designs, an advanced SIM in front of a receiver array automatically performs the 2D discrete Fourier transform (DFT) as the incident waves propagate through it. To arrange for the SIM to carry out this task, we design a gradient descent algorithm for iteratively updating the phase shift of each meta-atom in the SIM to minimize the fitting error between the SIM's response and the 2D DFT matrix. To further improve the DOA estimation accuracy, we configure the phase shifts in the input layer of the SIM to generate a set of 2D DFT matrices having orthogonal spatial frequency bins. Extensive numerical simulations verify the capability of a well-trained SIM to perform the 2D DFT. Specifically, it is demonstrated that a SIM having an optical computational speed achieves an MSE of 10–4in 2D DOA estimation.

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have become a promising technology to meet the requirements of energy efficiency and scalability in future six-generation (6G) communications. However, a significant challenge in RISs-aided communications is the joint optimization of active and passive beamforming at base stations (BSs) and RISs respectively. Specif-ically, the main difficulty is attributed to the highly non-convex optimization space of beamforming matrices at both BSs and RISs, as well as the diversity and mobility of communication scenarios. To address this, we present a greenly gradient based meta learning beamforming (GMLB) approach. Unlike traditional deep learning based methods which take channel information directly as input, GMLB feeds the gradient of sum rate into neural networks. Coherently, we design a differential regulator to address the phase shift optimization of RISs. Moreover, we use the meta learning to iteratively optimize the beamforming matrices of BSs and RISs. These techniques make the proposed method to work well without requiring energy-consuming pretraining. Simulations show that GMLB could achieve higher sum rate than that of typical alternating optimization algorithms with the energy consumption by two orders of magnitude less.

This paper proposes a simultaneous transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) segmented symbiotic backscatter non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system. Specifically, the STAR-RIS is divided into an enchancing primary signal (EP) zone and a backscatter device (BD) zone. To characterize the overall transmission effectiveness, the metric of sum ergodic capacity (EC) of the considered symbiotic system is established and the corresponding suboptimal approximation solutions are derived in closed-form for three typical NOMA channel conditions. Our results show that the sum EC obeys the scaling law of $\log \left(P_{s}\right)$ where $P_{s}$ is the total transmit power, and is dominated by the weaker one of the transmission and reflection channels. Moreover, our simulation results show that both the instantaneous sum rate and the sum EC derived by the proposed suboptimal solution are very close to the optimal one obtained through exhaustive search. More importantly, the transmission effectiveness of the proposed system is superior to the STAR-RIS-assisted NOMA system and the STAR-RIS-segmented symbiotic backscatter orthogonal multiple access (OMA) system. Additionally, it is shown that as the quantification order of the imperfect channel state information (ipCSI) increases, the sum EC performance gradually improves.

The imperative to secure stable data transmission for mobile users within the heart of urban zones stands as a pivotal element in the evolution of future communication infrastructures. Utilizing the adaptable beamforming prowess of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs) presents a viable strategy to aid mobile users in sustaining consistent beam tracking amidst the complex urban milieu. This study delves into the dynamic beamforming potential of RIS to facilitate real-time tracking and communication across convoluted wireless landscapes. In pursuit of refined spot beamforming capabilities under near-field scenarios, this work unveils an innovative 2bit RIS unit design approach, engineered to establish stable and adjustable phase shifts whilst minimizing amplitude loss. A tangible RIS experimental framework is devised, drawing from numerical analyses and comprehensive wave simulations. This framework enables each RIS unit to autonomously toggle between states, thereby not only governing cone beams but also materializing sophisticated structured beams, such as 3D spot beams, thus augmenting the versatility of communication designs. To augment the RIS’s beam tracking efficiency, an effective RIS management protocol alongside a spot beam scanning algorithm tailored for mobile users is introduced. Subsequent extensive simulations and empirical investigations, corroborate the prompt and adaptable beamforming proficiency of the proposed RIS prototype within demanding wireless contexts. The outcomes of this research significantly enrich the comprehension and application of RIS technology in the realm of forthcoming communication frameworks.

Accurate people counting in smart buildings and intelligent transportation systems is crucial for energy management, safety protocols, and resource allocation. This is especially critical during emergencies, where precise occupant counts are vital for safe evacuation. Existing methods struggle with large crowds, often losing accuracy with even a few additional people. To address this limitation, this study proposes a novel approach combining a new object tracking algorithm, a novel counting algorithm, and a fine-tuned object detection model. This method achieves 97% accuracy in real-time people counting with a frame rate of 20–27 FPS on a low-power edge computer.

The rapid advancements in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have unlocked numerous applications, including environmental monitoring, disaster response, and agricultural surveying. Enhancing the collective behavior of multiple decentralized UAVs can significantly improve these applications through more efficient and coordinated operations. In this study, we explore a Recurrent PPO model for target localization in perceptually degraded environments like places without GNSS/GPS signals. We first developed a single-drone approach for target identification, followed by a decentralized two-drone model. Our approach can utilize two types of sensors on the UAVs, a detection sensor and a target signal sensor. The single-drone model achieved an accuracy of 93%, while the two-drone model achieved an accuracy of 86%, with the latter requiring fewer average steps to locate the target. This demonstrates the potential of our method in UAV swarms, offering efficient and effective localization of radiant targets in complex environmental conditions.

The rapid increase in video content production has resulted in enormous data volumes, creating significant challenges for efficient analysis and resource management. To address this, robust video analysis tools are essential. This paper presents an innovative proof of concept using Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in the form of Vision Language Models to enhance the downstream video analysis process. Our tool generates customized textual summaries based on user-defined queries, providing focused insights within extensive video datasets. Unlike traditional methods that offer generic summaries or limited action recognition, our approach utilizes Vision Language Models to extract relevant information, improving analysis precision and efficiency. The proposed method produces textual summaries from extensive CCTV footage, which can then be stored for an indefinite time in a very small storage space compared to videos, allowing users to quickly navigate and verify significant events without exhaustive manual review. Qualitative evaluations result in 80% and 70% accuracy in temporal and spatial quality and consistency of the pipeline respectively.

This paper puts forth a proposal for a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) enabled symbiotic backscatter system riding over a multiuser non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) carrier, where the RIS is employed as a substitute for the conventional backscatter device (BD) with the objective of enhancing both primary NOMA transmission and backscatter communications. In particular, a symbiotic mechanism is proposed to control the mutual interference by means of an adaptive adjustment of the reflection coefficient at the RIS. Moreover, a novel and effective multiuser decoding scheme is proposed, based on successive interference cancellation (SIC), with the objective of ensuring the successful transmission of the symbiotic system. To this end, analytical expressions re derived for the closed-form outage lower bounds, asymptotic outage behavior and outage error floors are derived. Furthermore, the upper bounds of the ergodic capacity and its asymptote at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) are developed in order to illustrate the spectral efficiency of the proposed symbiotic system. Theoretical analysis and numerical results demonstrate that a stronger backscatter channel with a greater number of elements deployed on a segmented RIS results in a reduction in transmission outage and an increase in system capacity. Additionally, numerical results illustrate the spectral efficiency advantage of the proposed symbiotic system over the conventional solutions.

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is increasingly recognized as a pivotal technology for next-generation cellular networks, offering mutual benefits in both sensing and communication capabilities. This advancement necessitates a re-examination of the fundamental limits within networks where these two functionalities coexist via shared spectrum and infrastructures. However, traditional stochastic geometry-based performance analyses are confined to either communication or sensing networks separately. This paper bridges this gap by introducing a generalized stochastic geometry framework in ISAC networks. Based on this framework, we define and calculate the coverage rate of sensing and communication performance under resource constraints. Further, we present theoretical results for the coverage rate of unified ISAC performance, taking into account the coupling effects of dual functions in coexistence networks. Extensive numerical results validate the accuracy of all theoretical derivations, and also indicate that denser networks significantly enhance ISAC coverage. Specifically, increasing the base station density from 1 km-2to 10 km-2can boost the ISAC coverage rate from 1.4% to 39.8%.

In Earth Observation Satellite Networks (EOSNs) with a large number of battery-carrying satellites, proper power allocation and task scheduling are crucial to improving the data offloading efficiency. As such, we jointly optimize power allocation and task scheduling to achieve energy-efficient data offloading in EOSNs, aiming to balance the objectives of reducing the total energy consumption and increasing the sum weights of tasks. First, we derive the optimal power allocation solution to the joint optimization problem when the task scheduling policy is given. Second, leveraging the conflict graph model, we transform the original joint optimization problem into a maximum weight independent set problem when the power allocation strategy is given. Finally, we utilize the genetic framework to combine the above special solutions as a two-layer solution for the joint optimization problem. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed solution can properly balance the sum weights of tasks and the total energy consumption, thus achieving superior system performance over the current best alternatives.

It is well known that there is inherent radiation pattern distortion for the commercial base station antenna array, which usually needs three antenna sectors to cover all space. To eliminate pattern distortion and further enhance beamforming performance, we propose an electromagnetic hybrid beamforming (EHB) algorithm based on 3D superdirective holographic antenna arrays. Specifically, EHB consists of antenna excitation current vectors (analog beamforming) and digital precoding matrices, where the implementation of analog beamforming involves real-time adjustments to the radiation pattern to adapt to the wireless environment. Meanwhile, the digital beamforming is optimized based on the channel characteristics of analog beam-forming to further improve the achievable rate of communication systems. An electromagnetic channel model incorporating array radiation pattern and coupling effect is also developed to evaluate the benefits of our proposed scheme. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves a sum rate gain of over 150 % compared to traditional beamforming algorithms.

Intelligent surfaces represent a breakthrough technology capable of customizing the wireless channel cost-effectively. However, the existing works generally focus on planar wavefront, neglecting near-field spherical wavefront characteristics caused by large array aperture and high operation frequencies in the terahertz (THz). Additionally, the single-layer reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) lacks the signal processing ability to mitigate the computational complexity at the base station (BS). To address this issue, we introduce a novel stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIM) comprised of an array of programmable metasurface layers. The SIM aims to substitute conventional digital baseband architecture to execute computing tasks with ultra-low processing delay, albeit with a reduced number of radio-frequency (RF) chains and low-resolution digital-to-analog converters. In this paper, we present a SIM-aided multiuser multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) near-field system, where the SIM is integrated into the BS to perform beamfocusing in the wave domain and customize an end-to-end channel with minimized inter-user interference. Finally, the numerical results demonstrate that near-field communication achieves superior spatial gain over the far-field, and the SIM effectively suppresses inter-user interference as the wireless signals propagate through it.

In this paper, we investigate physical layer security (PLS) for terrestrial RIS-assisted multibeam satellite commu-nications with similar channels. Deploying the reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) in each beam, and we use inter-beam in-terference and the channel variability from the RIS to the satellite user and eavesdroppers to enhance satellite security. Specifically, considering the constraints of the secrecy rate, we formulate a problem to minimize the total power by jointly optimizing the satellite beamforming and the RIS beamforming. To solve the problem, the original problem is decoupled into two non-convex optimization sub-problems, i.e., the active and the passive beamforming optimization problem. Then, semidefinite relax-ation (SDR) is used to solve the active beamforming optimization problem. The maximum ratio transmission-based beamforming and SDR are employed separately to solve passive beamforming optimization problem in each beam. The alternating optimization (AO) is utilized to solve the original problem and the convergence is proven. We have carried out simulations to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed approach, the results show that the proposed algorithms have superior system performance.

We propose a random access and preamble allocation (JRA-PA) protocol for the satellite-based IoT networks that support both high-priority (HP) and low-priority (LP) IoT traffic. The HP traffic requires low delay and high success access probability compared with the LP traffic. The proposed algorithm combines a grant-free random access (GFRA) scheme, which allows the preamble and data packet transmission in a time slot without resource reservation. The satellite estimates the number of active IoT devices by observing the number of successful, collided, and idle preambles in each slot of a frame. The number of preambles is assigned to HP and LP groups in each frame. We compare the JRA-PA protocol with the conventional random access (RA) and access barring class protocol. Based on simulation results, JRA-PA can support mixed-traffic IoT networks and achieve low delay and high success access throughput for the HP devices considering unknown arrival traffic in each frame.

This paper focuses on the wideband frequency invariant (FI) deterministic beamformer design problem for mitigating beam squint and presents a spatial response variation (SRV)-constrained array response control (ARC) synthesis approach. By regarding the SRV matrix as the covariance matrix of an extra virtual colored noise, we extend the ARC-based narrowband beampattern synthesis techniques to wide band FI scenarios. Furthermore, we introduce the FI maximum magnitude response (FI-MMR) based design principle, which maximizes the array magnitude response at the main-beam direction on the reference frequency. Based on this principle, we present an iterative FI beampattern synthesis algorithm under arbitrary array configurations. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in comparison with several popular FI beampattern synthesis techniques.

In this paper, we investigate a multi-user offloading problem in the overlapping domain of a multi-server mobile edge computing system. We divide the original problem into two stages: the offloading decision-making stage and the request scheduling stage. To prevent the terminal from going out of the service area during offloading, we consider the mobility parameter of the terminal according to the human behaviour model when making the offloading decision, and then introduce a server evaluation mechanism based on both the mobility parameter and the server load to select the optimal offloading server. In order to fully utilise the server resources, we design a double deep Q-network (DDQN)-based reward evaluation algorithm that considers the priority of tasks when scheduling offload requests. Finally, numerical simulations are conducted to verify that our proposed method outperforms traditional mathematical computation methods as well as the DQN algorithm.

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) provides a new electromagnetic response control solution, which can reshape the characteristics of wireless channels. In this paper, we propose a novel environment-aware codebook protocol for RIS-assisted multi-user multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) systems. Specifically, we first introduce a channel training protocol which consists of off-line and on-line stages. Secondly, we propose an environment-aware codebook generation scheme, which utilizes the statistical channel state information and alternating optimization method to generate codewords offline. Then, in the on-line stage, we use these pre-designed codewords to configure the RIS, and the optimal codeword resulting in the highest sum rate is adopted for assisting in the downlink data transmission. Thirdly, we analyze the theoretical performance of the proposed protocol considering the channel estimation errors. Finally, numerical simulations are provided to verify our theoretical analysis and the performance of the proposed scheme.

Fueled by the increasing of smart mobile devices, the growth of crowd sensing tasks is explosive, where the Network Service Provider (NSP) relies on the sensing users (mobile devices) to sense and transmit fresh information. Information freshness is captured by the Age of Information (AoI) metric, which is a critical factor for real-time crowd sensing tasks. Considering the individual rationality of sensing users, it is challenged to design an AoI-aware task allocation since freshness means resource consumption. In this paper, an AoI-based dynamic pricing-matching approach is proposed to motivate sensing users to participate in tasks and also complete the task allocation. The problem is modeled as a many-to-many matching with the aim of improving the social welfare. Indeed, the differentiated AoI caused by various service priorities of sensing users should take into consideration. Toward this end, we divide sensing users into sub-users and derive the closed form of their corresponding AoI. Lastly, the proposed matching algorithm is validated to achieves a stable matching with dynamic prices and ensures the individual rationality. Simulation results demonstrate the proposed matching algorithm can achieve a significantly better social welfare than existing algorithms.

Multi-hop packet routing is critical for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks to enable efficient communication between terminals in diverse environments. However, the complexity of routing design exacerbates due to interference from the environment and link instability caused by high-speed mobility. To address this challenge, we propose a harmonic function-based potential field to assess the impact of interference on UAV networks quantitatively. The proposed field maps the communication quality in terms of interference and mobility onto a virtual three-dimensional plane, providing a metric to establish routing paths. Based on this, two routing algorithms are designed to address two distinct routing requirements of UAV networks, timeliness and losslessness. Leveraging the natural adaptation to the potential field, the two proposed routing algorithms can effectively avoid interference while meeting different requirements. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed potential field in representing the influences of interference and mobility. Additionally, the results validate the ability of the two routing algorithms to fulfill data communication requirements in terms of delay and accuracy while effectively mitigating interference.

In this paper, we focus on improving autonomous driving safety via task offloading from cellular vehicles (CVs), using vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) links, to an multi-access edge computing (MEC) server. Considering that the frequencies used for V2I links can be reused for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications to improve spectrum utilization, the receiver of each V2I link may suffer from severe interference, causing outages in the task offloading process. To tackle this issue, we propose the deployment of a reconfigurable intelligent computational surface (RICS) to enable, not only V2I reflective links, but also interference cancellation at the V2V links exploiting the computational capability of its metamaterials. We devise a joint optimization formulation for the task offloading ratio between the CVs and the MEC server, the spectrum sharing strategy between V2V and V2I communications, as well as the RICS reflection and refraction matrices, with the objective to maximize a safety-based autonomous driving task. Due to the non-convexity of the problem and the coupling among its free variables, we transform it into a more tractable equivalent form, which is then decomposed into three sub-problems and solved via an alternate approximation method. Our simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed RICS optimization in improving the safety in autonomous driving networks.

Multihop communication has gained prominence within the realm of the Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT) owing to its exceptional reliability amidst the challenges posed by the underwater acoustic environment. Despite this, the persistence of limitations caused by propagation delay, high collision rate, and limited energy in underwater communication remains, representing the most formidable hurdles in ensuring the successful transmission of data gathered by sensor nodes. To address these challenges, we employ a machine learning (ML)-based optimal cooperating node selection for each hop, considering the Shortest propagation delay, minimal residual Energy, and a low Collision rate (referred to as SEC). For this purpose, we initially assemble the sensor nodes to create a list of cooperative nodes, considering the aspect of SEC. Then, using an assembled list of cooperating sensor nodes, we employ ML-based algorithms, such as reinforcement learning (RL-SEC), deep Q-networks (DQN-SEC), and deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG-SEC), to predict the optimal cooperating node for each hop. The simulation results of the DDPG-SEC demonstrate a significant improvement of approximately 56% when compared with RL-SEC, DQN-SEC, and other state-of-the-art techniques.

Compressive Sensing (CS) technology, which handles large amounts of data in its low-dimensional form, has been shown to enjoy excellent transmission and storage efficiency. To further improve the stability and robustness of CS-based wireless communication system, Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) technology has been introduced to enhance the transmission link connectivity. Current researches generally assume perfect RIS; however, some of its elements may be damaged and fail to work, which degrades the sparse signal recovery. Therefore, this paper establishes a double-sparsity optimization model to jointly recover the sparse signal and diagnose the RIS element failure. For the scenarios with and without Channel State Information (CSI) at the receiver, Double-Sparsity based algorithm (DS), and Atomic norm and Double-Sparsity based algorithm (ADS) exploiting Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) framework are proposed respectively. Additionally, a novel ℓB,B norm is incorporated to further constrain the block and binary characteristics of RIS failures, and the resulting improved versions of DS and ADS are termed as Binary and Block-Sparsity based algorithm (BBS) and Atomic norm, Binary and Block-Sparsity based algorithm (ABBS). Simulations verify the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed algorithms, and show the improved performance of the BBS and ABBS algorithms compared with the DS and ADS algorithms.

In the multiple unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted downlink communication, it is challenging for UAV base stations (UAV BSs) to realize trajectory design and resource assignment in unknown environments. The cooperation and competition between UAV BSs in the communication network leads to a Markov game problem. Multi-agent reinforcement learning is a significant solution for the above decision-making. However, there are still many common issues, such as the instability of the strategy and low utilization of historical data, that limit its application. In this paper, a novel graph-attention multi-agent trust region (GA-MATR) reinforcement learning framework is proposed to solve the multi-UAV assisted communication problem. Graph recurrent network is introduced to process and analyze complex topology of the communication network, so as to extract useful information and patterns from observational information. The attention mechanism provides additional weighting for conveyed information, so that the critic network can accurately evaluate the value of behavior for UAV BSs. This provides more reliable feedback signals and helps the actor network update the strategy more effectively. Ablation simulations indicate that the proposed approach attains improved convergence over the baselines. UAV BSs learn the optimal communication strategies to achieve their maximum cumulative rewards. Additionally, the multi-agent trust region method with monotonic convergence provides an estimated Nash equilibrium for the multi-UAV assisted communication Markov game.

The integration of nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) with integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) heralds a novel and promising paradigm, advancing the frontier of wireless communication technologies. Nevertheless, this synergistic integration may confront security challenges attributable to intrinsic vulnerabilities within the ISAC frameworks, i.e., sensing targets assume the role of potential eavesdroppers. In this article, we exploit the additional degrees of freedom afforded by reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) to enhance secure communication and achieve target detection within the NOMA-assisted ISAC system. Specifically, the coexisting radar and NOMA signals are concurrently propagated through both the direct and reflected links. Subsequently, we formulate a secure optimization problem by collaboratively designing the beamforming vectors of the base station and the phase shifts of RIS under the constraints of total transmit power, communication quality of service, and sensing quality. Due to nonconvexity, the optimization problem is decomposed into two subproblems and addressed separately, employing the successive convex approximation approach based on the first-order Taylor expansion and the second-order cone. Finally, we obtain the solution to the original problem utilizing alternating optimization. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed approach exhibits superior capabilities in secure communication and precise target detection.

As research on integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) progresses, it has been discovered that ISAC can be effectively utilized to enhance the security of wireless communications. Its sensing function can assist in both eavesdropping detection and physical-layer security techniques. In this article, our focus lies on addressing the security challenges associated with high-speed train-to-ground communication using ISAC technology. We explore a novel secure communication scheme. Specifically, we exploit the sensing capabilities of ISAC to detect eavesdropping at the receiving end and subsequently establish a signal blind zone at the location where eavesdropping occurs through beamforming and waveform optimization techniques. This approach ensures the achievement of secure wireless communication. Mathematically modeling the problem as an optimization problem, we derive a lower bound for simplification purposes. Subsequently, we employ an alternating optimization algorithm to iteratively find suboptimal solutions for the optimization variables. Through extensive simulation experiments and comparative analysis, we demonstrate that our proposed algorithm not only guarantees communication security but also outperforms existing algorithms in terms of efficiency.

Multi-hop packet routing is critical for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks to enable efficient communication between terminals in diverse environments. However, the complexity of routing design exacerbates due to interference from the environment and link instability caused by high-speed mobility. To address this challenge, we propose a harmonic function-based potential field to assess the impact of interference on UAV networks quantitatively. The proposed field maps the communication quality in terms of interference and mobility onto a virtual three-dimensional plane, providing a metric to establish routing paths. Based on this, two routing algorithms are designed to address two distinct routing requirements of UAV networks, timeliness and losslessness. Leveraging the natural adaptation to the potential field, the two proposed routing algorithms can effectively avoid interference while meeting different requirements. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed potential field in representing the influences of interference and mobility. Additionally, the results validate the ability of the two routing algorithms to fulfill data communication requirements in terms of delay and accuracy while effectively mitigating interference.

In this paper, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is employed in a millimeter wave (mmWave) integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) system. To alleviate the multi-hop attenuation, the semi-self sensing RIS approach is adopted, wherein sensors are configured at the RIS to receive the radar echo signal. Focusing on the estimation accuracy, the Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) for estimating the direction-of-the-angles is derived as the metric for sensing performance. A joint optimization problem on hybrid beamforming and RIS phase shifts is proposed to minimize the CRB, while maintaining satisfactory communication performance evaluated by the achievable data rate. The CRB minimization problem is first transformed as a more tractable form based on Fisher information matrix (FIM). To solve the complex non-convex problem, a double layer loop algorithm is proposed based on penalty concave-convex procedure (penalty-CCCP) and block coordinate descent (BCD) method with two sub-problems. Successive convex approximation (SCA) algorithm and second order cone (SOC) constraints are employed to tackle the non-convexity in the hybrid beamforming optimization. To optimize the unit modulus constrained analog beamforming and phase shifts, manifold optimization (MO) is adopted. Finally, the numerical results verify the effectiveness of the proposed CRB minimization algorithm, and show the performance improvement compared with other baselines. Additionally, the proposed hybrid beamforming algorithm can achieve approximately 96% of the sensing performance exhibited by the full digital approach within only a limited number of radio frequency (RF) chains.

Digital twin (DT) is a technology that precisely replicates physical entities and seamlessly connects physical entities with virtual counterparts, which facilitates precise understanding, optimization, and decision-making. DT network (DTN) can be regarded as an information-sharing network, comprising a constellation of interconnected DT nodes. This survey provides an in-depth exploration of the concepts and potential of DTN, with a particular focus on the role of machine and deep learning in improving the efficiency of DTN systems, including anomaly monitoring, system state estimation, resource allocation, task offloading, model optimization, and security and privacy protection. Incorporating machine and deep learning into DTN stands to revolutionize industries by enabling the extraction of critical insights, enhancing anomaly detection capabilities, refining the accuracy of predictive models, and optimizing the allocation of resources. Finally, we discuss the challenges and future research directions in the application of machine and deep learning in DTN.

With the advancement in battery technology and the rise of on-board computing capabilities, electric vehicles (EVs) can serve as both energy prosumers and computing nodes. The mobility of EVs allows them to perform wide-area multi-resource exchange in both electricity networks and edge computing networks. We call such a paradigm an Electric Vehicle Charging and Computing Network (EVCCN). It is considered that the EVCCN is composed of multiple charging and computing stations (CCSs) in different locations. Each CCS integrates EV chargers and an edge server, offering the interfaces for EVs to bidirectionally trade both energy and computing resources. We propose a customized model jointly optimizing the path selection, charging/discharging, and task offloading in different CCSs to minimize an EV’s travel cost (i.e., the money spent on the EV’s trip). In the proposed model, the EV consumes energy and generates data on its way to the destination, subject to travel time, energy, and data constraints. The cost minimization problem is formulated as a nonconvex mixed-integer problem from a user-centric perspective. To solve it fast in practice, we construct a new action-expanded network to simply the model and develop a heuristic based on piecewise McCormick to quickly obtain a near-optimal solution. Simulation results show that our heuristic is computationally efficient for large traffic networks compared with global solvers. We also present results in a traffic network based on Guangzhou city, which shows that our model can save 33.99% in the travel cost compared with a baseline model.

In this article, a hybrid radio frequency-visible light communication and positioning (RF-VLCP) system is designed, which can support high-data rate communication and high accuracy positioning with good energy efficiency (EE) performance. The hybrid system uses two links for downlink communication, namely, radio frequency (RF) and visible light communication (VLC) links, and employs visible light positioning (VLP) technology for positioning. Furthermore, an optimization problem is developed to allocate power for VLC and VLP links and to design beamformer for the RF transmitter. By doing so, the EE of the hybrid system is maximized while the Cramer–Rao Lower bound (CRLB) of the positioning error and the minimum data rate of the communication are guaranteed. A two-step algorithm is proposed to tackle the formulated optimization problem, which first determines the power allocation of the VLP signal and then obtains the power allocation of the VLC signal and the beamformer of the RF transmitter. Numerical results demonstrate the advantages of the proposed two-step algorithm over the existing algorithm in terms of computation speed. In addition, the EE performance of the hybrid system is evaluated under different data rate and positioning accuracy requirements. Besides, we also show that the hybrid RF-VLCP system is more energy efficient compared to standalone RF and VLP technologies.

Deploying reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) near source and destination is of practical interest for improving the link quality of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) wireless systems. However, the accurate channel modeling and RIS tile deployment constitute a pair of challenges to evaluate the system performance such as error performance, capacity, etc. In this paper, we investigate the double-RIS channel characteristics and propose a geometry-based triple-cylinder model, where the RIS sub-surface/tile is enabled to assist V2V systems and other elements are turned off. To determine tile locations on RIS surface, we formulate an optimization problem by maximizing the end-to-end channel gain and solve it using gradient ascent (GA) method. Following this, channel correlation function, channel capacity, and outage probability are derived according to the proposed model. Five typical mobile scenarios are discussed to validate the convergence of proposed GA algorithm, where the results show that channel gain can converge to its maximum with optimized tile locations. In addition, channel correlation under different parameters and conditions are explored. Simulation results validate the enhanced channel capacity and outage probability obtained by optimizing the tile locations.

As a promising non-password authentication technology, radio frequency (RF) fingerprinting can greatly improve wireless security. Recent work has shown that RF fingerprinting based on deep learning significantly outperforms conventional approaches. However, this superiority relies largely on using plenty of labeled data for supervised learning, whereas training deep neural networks on a small dataset generally falls into overfitting, resulting in performance degradation. Considering that it is often easier to obtain enough unlabeled data in practice, we leverage deep semisupervised learning for RF fingerprinting, which largely relies on a composite data augmentation scheme specifically designed for wireless communication signals, combined with two popular techniques: 1) consistency-based regularization and 2) pseudo-labeling. Experimental results on both simulated and real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed method for semisupervised RF fingerprinting is far superior to other competing ones, and it achieves remarkable performance almost close to that of fully supervised learning, with a very limited number of examples available.

Urban air mobility (UAM) expands vehicles from the ground to the near-ground space, envisioned as a revolution for transportation systems. Comprehensive scene perception is the foundation for autonomous aerial driving. However, UAM encounters the intelligent perception challenge: high-perception learning requirements conflict with the limited sensors and computing chips of flying cars. To overcome the challenge, federated learning (FL) and other collaborative learning have been proposed. It enables resource-limited devices to conduct onboard deep learning (DL) collaboratively. But traditional FL relies on a central integrator for DL model aggregation, which is difficult to deploy in dynamic UAM environments. The fully decentralized learning schemes may be the intuitive solution while the convergence of decentralized learning cannot be guaranteed. Accordingly, this article explores reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs)-empowered decentralized FL (DFL), taking account of topological attributes to facilitate the DFL performance with convergence guarantee. Several DFL topological criteria are proposed for optimizing the transmission delay and convergence rate. Subsequently, we innovatively leverage the RIS link construction and deconstruction ability to remold the current network based on the proposed topological criteria. This article rethinks the functions of RIS from the perspective of the network layer. Furthermore, a deep deterministic policy gradient-based RIS phase shift control algorithm is developed to reshape the communication network. Simulation experiments are conducted over MobileNet-based multiview learning to verify the efficiency of the DFL framework.

The user-centric cell-free network has emerged as an appealing technology to improve the wireless communication’s capacity of the Internet of Things (IoT) networks thanks to its ability to eliminate intercell interference effectively. However, the cell-free network inevitably brings in higher hardware cost and backhaul overhead as a larger number of base stations (BSs) are deployed. Additionally, severe channel fading in high-frequency bands constitutes another crucial issue that limits the practical application of the cell-free network. In order to address the above challenges, we amalgamate the cell-free system with another emerging technology, namely reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), which can provide high spectrum and energy efficiency with low hardware cost by reshaping the wireless propagation environment intelligently. To this end, we formulate a weighted sum-rate (WSR) maximization problem for RIS-assisted cell-free systems by jointly optimizing the BS precoding matrix and the RIS reflection coefficient vector. Subsequently, we transform the complicated WSR problem to a tractable optimization problem and propose a distributed cooperative alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMMs) to fully utilize parallel computing resources. Inspired by the model-based algorithm unrolling concept, we unroll our solver to a learning-based deep distributed ADMM (D2-ADMM) network framework. To improve the efficiency of the D2-ADMM in distributed BSs, we develop a monodirectional information exchange strategy with a small signaling overhead. In addition to benefiting from domain knowledge, D2-ADMM adaptively learns hyperparameters and nonconvex solvers of the intractable RIS design problem through data-driven end-to-end training. Finally, numerical results demonstrate that the proposed D2-ADMM achieves around 210% improvement in capacity compared with the distributed noncooperative algorithm and almost 96% compared with the centralized algorithm.

Cognitive backscatter communication (BackCom) is a promising technology for improving the spectrum- and energy-efficiency of Internet of Things by enabling spectrum sharing and energy saving. However, the performance of cognitive BackCom networks is adversely affected by the mutual interference between the primary and secondary systems and the blocked links caused by obstacles. Additionally, assuming perfect channel state information (CSI) is unrealistic in practical cognitive BackCom networks due to the limited signal processing capabilities of cognitive backscatter nodes (CBNs) and channel delays. To address these challenges, we investigate a robust radio resource allocation and passive beamforming problem for a downlink reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-enhanced cognitive BackCom network under the nonlinear energy-harvesting (EH) model and imperfect CSI. In particular, a primary base station serves multiple primary users (PUs), while multiple pairs of CBNs share the spectrum of PUs to communicate with each other in a harvest-then-transmit way. Our goal is to maximize the total energy efficiency (EE) of CBNs subject to the constraints of maximum interference power, minimum EH, time allocation, and the phase shift of the RIS. To solve the nonconvex optimization problem, we propose an iteration-based EE optimization algorithm that leverages methods of quadratic transform, variable substitution, and semidefinite relaxation. Simulation results verify that the proposed algorithm has improved its EE by 11.39% and reduced outage probabilities by 15% compared to the existing algorithms.

Along with the vast application of Internet of Things (IoT) and the ever-growing concerns about data protection, a novel type of learning, named incremental federated learning (IFL), is rising to further elevate the intelligence and quality of various IoT systems and services by consistently learning and updating their models, e.g., deep neural networks, in dynamic contexts, where clients and data can increase and accumulate gradually. Since IFL is still in its infancy, to overcome its emerging challenges as represented in 1) periodic learning about how to initialize the model update rationally to avoid catastrophic performance dropping, and 2) iterative learning about how to update the model cost-efficiently to remedy overlearning on duplicated information, this paper proposes a stage-based and layer-wise mechanism for IFL, called SLMFed, in which, the periodic learning is managed by a stage transition and client selection strategy to trigger model update according to the quantitative and qualitative changes on clients, data, and user experience, and the iterative learning is enhanced by an adaptive layer uploading and aggregation strategy to update the global model by measuring representational consistencies and information richness of local model layers. As shown by the evaluation results, SLMFed can not only stabilize the learning across various learning stages but also boost the performance in terms of learning accuracy, communication cost, and stage contribution by about 32.09%, 105.94%, and 22.02%, respectively.

Symbiotic radio (SR) is a promising technology to support ultralow-power or even zero-power Internet of Things (IoT) devices in the sixth-generation mobile networks. In this article, we propose an energy-aware symbiotic transmission in a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) enhanced SR system, in which an IoT network embeds its own data passively over cellular downlink signals by backscattering. The base station (BS) serves multiple cellular users (CUs) through time division multiple access (TDMA) and each IoT device is associated with one CU. We formulate the BS’s energy minimization problem subject to the constraints of the minimum amounts of transmission bits required by IoT devices and CUs. The user association, the active transmit beamforming at the BS, the passive reflecting beamforming at the RIS, and the frame division policy are jointly optimized. The formulated problem is a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem, which is NP-hard and nonconvex. We decouple the problem and solve the subproblems alternatively. First, we design a many-to-one swap-matching-based algorithm to solve the user association subproblem. Then, we develop a joint cooperative beamforming and time allocation optimization algorithm based on the alternative optimization (AO) and semidefinite relaxation (SDR) techniques. Simulation results show that the proposed joint user association and cooperative beamforming algorithm brings significant performance gain in reducing the energy consumption of the BS with fast convergence speed compared with other schemes.

Meta-surfaces, also known as Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS), have emerged as a cost-effective, low power consumption, and flexible solution for enabling multiple applications in Internet of Things (IoT). However, in the context of meta-surface-assisted multi-pair IoT communications, significant interference issues often arise amount multiple channels. This issue is particularly pronounced in scenarios characterized by Line-of-Sight (LoS) conditions, where the channels exhibit low rank due to the significant correlation in propagation paths. These challenges pose a considerable threat to the quality of communication when multiplexing data streams. In this paper, we introduce a meta-surface-aided communication scheme for multi-pair interactions in IoT environments. Inspired by holographic technology, a novel compensation method on the whole meta-surface has been proposed, which allows for independent multi-pair direct data streams transmission with low interference. To further reduce correlation under LoS channel conditions, we propose a vortex beam-based solution that leverages the low correlation property between distinct topological modes. We use different vortex beams to carry distinct data streams, thereby enabling distinct receivers to capture their intended signal with low interference, aided by holographic meta-surfaces. Moreover, a prototype has been performed successfully to demonstrate two-pair multi-node communication scenario operating at 10 GHz with QPSK/16-QAM modulation. The experiment results demonstrate that, even under LoS conditions, the isolation between the two-pair channels exceeds 21 dB. This allows receiving users to undertake simultaneous, same-frequency multiplexed data transmission under extremely low interference conditions, with a real-time demodulation Bit Error Rate (BER) remaining below 3.8×10-3 at achievable Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) conditions. Through the convergence of holographic meta-surfaces and vortex beams, we present a fresh perspective on achieving efficient, low-interference multi-pair IoT communications.

This article introduces a novel Line-of-Sight (LoS) multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) communication architecture leveraging nontraditional orbital angular momentum (OAM) beams. Challenging the conventional paradigm of hollow-emitting OAM beams, this study presents an innovative OAM generator that produces directional OAM beams without central energy voids, aligning their radiation patterns with those of conventional planar wave horn antennas. Within the main lobe of radiation patterns, the phase variation characteristics inherent to OAM beams are ingeniously maintained, linking different OAM modes to the linear wavefront variation gradients, thereby reducing channel correlation in LoS scenarios and significantly augmenting the channel capacity of LoS-MIMO frameworks. Empirical validations conducted through a meticulously designed LoS-MIMO experimental platform reveal significant improvements in channel correlation coefficients, communication stability, and bit error rate (BER) compared to systems utilizing traditional planar wave antennas. The experiment results underscore the potential of the novel OAM-based system to improve current LoS-MIMO communication protocols, and offer both academic and engineering guidance for the construction of practical communication infrastructures. Beyond its immediate contributions, this article underscores a pivotal shift in the field of communications, pointing out that traditional communication algorithms have primarily focused on baseband signal processing while often overlooking the electromagnetic (EM) characteristics of the physical world. This research highlights that, in addition to radiation patterns, the wavefront phase variations of traditional antennas represent a new degree of freedom that can be exploited. Consequently, future communication algorithms designed around reconfigurable EM wavefront properties hold the promise of ushering wireless communications into a new era.

Stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIMs) are capable of emulating reconfigurable physical neural networks by utilizing electromagnetic (EM) waves as carriers. They can also perform various complex computational and signal processing tasks. An SIM is constructed by densely integrating multiple metasurface layers, each consisting of a large number of small meta-atoms that can control the EM waves passing through it. In this paper, we harness an SIM for two-dimensional (2D) direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation. In contrast to conventional designs, an advanced SIM in front of a receiver array can be designed to automatically compute the 2D discrete Fourier transform (DFT) as the incident waves propagate through it. As a result, a receiver array can directly observe the angular spectrum of the incoming signal, and it can estimate the DOA by simply using probes to detect the energy distribution on the receiver array. This avoids the need for power inefficient radio frequency chains. To enable an SIM to perform the 2D DFT in the wave domain, we formulate an optimization problem that minimizes the mean square error (MSE) between the SIM’s EM response and the 2D DFT matrix. Then, a gradient descent algorithm is customized for iteratively updating the phase shift applied by each meta-atom of the SIM. To further improve the DOA estimation accuracy, we configure the phase shifts of the input layer of the SIM to generate a set of 2D DFT matrices associated with orthogonal spatial frequency bins. Additionally, we analytically evaluate the performance of the proposed SIM-based DOA estimator by deriving a tight upper bound for the MSE. Extensive numerical simulations verify the capability of an optimized SIM to perform DOA estimation and corroborate the theoretical analysis. Specifically, we show that an SIM is capable of performing DOA estimation with an MSE of the order of$10^{-4}$.

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is increasingly recognized as a pivotal technology for next-generation cellular networks, offering mutual benefits in both sensing and communication capabilities. This advancement necessitates a re-examination of the fundamental limits within networks where these two functions coexist via shared spectrum and infrastructures. However, traditional stochastic geometry-based performance analyses are confined to either communication or sensing networks separately. This paper bridges this gap by introducing a generalized stochastic geometry framework in ISAC networks. Based on this framework, we define and calculate the coverage and ergodic rate of sensing and communication performance under resource constraints. Then, we shed light on the fundamental limits of ISAC networks by presenting theoretical results for the coverage rate of the unified performance, taking into account the coupling effects of dual functions in coexistence networks. Further, we obtain the analytical formulations for evaluating the ergodic sensing rate constrained by the maximum communication rate, and the ergodic communication rate constrained by the maximum sensing rate. Extensive numerical results validate the accuracy of all theoretical derivations, and also indicate that denser networks significantly enhance ISAC coverage. Specifically, increasing the base station density from$1~\text {km}^{-2}$to$10~\text {km}^{-2}$can boost the ISAC coverage rate from 1.4% to 39.8%. Further, results also reveal that with the increase of the constrained sensing rate, the ergodic communication rate improves significantly, but the reverse is not obvious.

Envisioned as one of the most promising technologies, holographic multiple-input multiple-output (H-MIMO) recently attracts notable research interests for its great potential in expanding wireless possibilities and achieving fundamental wireless limits. Empowered by the nearly continuous, large and energy-efficient surfaces with powerful electromagnetic (EM) wave control capabilities, H-MIMO opens up the opportunity for signal processing in a more fundamental EM-domain, paving the way for realizing holographic imaging level communications in supporting the extremely high spectral efficiency and energy efficiency in future networks. In this article, we propose a generalized EM-domain near-field channel modeling and study its capacity limit of point-to-point H-MIMO systems that equips arbitrarily placed surfaces in a line-of-sight (LoS) environment. Two effective and computational-efficient channel models are established from their integral counterpart, where one is with a sophisticated formula but showcases more accurate, and another is concise with a slight precision sacrifice. Furthermore, we unveil the capacity limit using our channel model, and derive a tight upper bound based upon an elaborately built analytical framework. Our result reveals that the capacity limit grows logarithmically with the product of transmit element area, receive element area, and the combined effects of 1/d2mn, 1/d4mn, and 1/d6mnover all transmit and receive antenna elements, wheredmnindicates the distance between each transmit elementnand receive elementm. Particularly, 1/d6mndominates in the near-field region whereas 1/d2mndominates in the far-field region. Numerical evaluations validate the effectiveness of our channel models, and showcase the slight disparity between the upper bound and the exact capacity, which is beneficial for predicting practical system performance.

In integrated ground-air-space (IGAS) wireless networks, numerous services require sensing knowledge including location, angle, distance information, etc., which usually can be acquired during the beam training stage. On the other hand, IGAS networks employ large-scale antenna arrays to mitigate obstacle occlusion and path loss. However, large-scale arrays generate pencil-shaped beams, which necessitate a higher number of training beams to cover the desired space. These factors motivate our investigation into the IGAS beam training problem to achieve effective sensing services. To address the high complexity and low identification accuracy of existing beam training techniques, we propose an efficient hashing multi-arm beam (HMB) training scheme. Specifically, we first construct an IGAS single-beam training codebook for the uniform planar arrays. Then, the hash functions are chosen independently to construct the multi-arm beam training codebooks for each AP. All APs traverse the predefined multi-arm beam training codeword simultaneously and the multi-AP superimposed signals at the user are recorded. Finally, the soft decision and voting methods are applied to obtain the correctly aligned beams only based on the signal powers. In addition, we logically prove that the traversal complexity is at the logarithmic level. Simulation results show that our proposed IGAS HMB training method can achieve 96.4% identification accuracy of the exhaustive beam training method and greatly reduce the training overhead.

Near-field communications present new opportunities over near-field channels, however, the spherical wavefront propagation makes near-field signal processing challenging. In this context, this paper proposes efficient near-field channel estimation methods for wideband MIMO mmWave systems with the aid of extremely large-scale reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (XL-RIS). For the wideband signals reflected by the analog RIS, we characterize their near-field beam squint effect in both angle and distance domains. Based on the mathematical analysis of the near-field beam patterns over all frequencies, a wideband spherical-domain dictionary is constructed by minimizing the coherence of two arbitrary beams. In light of this, we formulate a two-dimensional compressive sensing problem to recover the channel parameter based on the spherical-domain sparsity of mmWave channels. To this end, we present a correlation coefficient-based atom matching method within our proposed multi-frequency parallelizable subspace recovery framework for efficient solutions. Additionally, we propose a two-dimensional oracle estimator as a benchmark and derive its lower bound across all subcarriers. Our findings emphasize the significance of system hyperparameters and the sensing matrix of each subcarrier in determining the accuracy of the estimation. Finally, numerical results show that our proposed method achieves considerable performance compared with the lower bound and has a time complexity linear to the number of RIS elements.

Abstract Near-field technology is increasingly recognized due to its transformative potential in communication systems, establishing it as a critical enabler for sixth-generation (6G) telecommunication development. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of recent advancements in near-field technology research. First, we explore the near-field propagation fundamentals by detailing definitions, transmission characteristics, and performance analysis. Next, we investigate various near-field channel models—deterministic, stochastic, and electromagnetic information theory based models, and review the latest progress in near-field channel testing, highlighting practical performance and limitations. With evolving channel models, traditional mechanisms such as channel estimation, beamtraining, and codebook design require redesign and optimization to align with near-field propagation characteristics. We then introduce innovative beam designs enabled by near-field technologies, focusing on non-diffractive beams (such as Bessel and Airy) and orbital angular momentum (OAM) beams, addressing both hardware architectures and signal processing frameworks, showcasing their revolutionary potential in near-field communication systems. Additionally, we highlight progress in both engineering and standardization, covering the primary 6G spectrum allocation, enabling technologies for near-field propagation, and network deployment strategies. Finally, we conclude by identifying promising future research directions for near-field technology development that could significantly impact system design. This comprehensive review provides a detailed understanding of the current state and potential of near-field technologies.

With the rapidly increasing number of bandwidth-intensive terminals capable of intelligent computing and communication, such as smart devices equipped with shallow neural network (NN) models, the complexity of multiple access (MA) for these intelligent terminals is increasing due to the dynamic network environment and ubiquitous connectivity in sixth-generation (6G) systems. Traditional MA design and optimization methods are gradually losing ground to artificial intelligence (AI) techniques that have proven their superiority in handling complexity. AI-empowered MA and its optimization strategies aimed at achieving high quality-of-service (QoS) are attracting more attention, especially in the area of latency-sensitive applications in 6G systems. In this work, we aim to: 1) present the development and comparative evaluation of AI-enabled MA; 2) provide a timely survey focusing on spectrum sensing, protocol design, and optimization for AI-empowered MA; and 3) explore the potential use cases of AI-empowered MA in the typical application scenarios within 6G systems. Specifically, we first present a unified framework of AI-empowered MA for 6G systems by incorporating various promising machine learning (ML) techniques in spectrum sensing, resource allocation, MA protocol design, and optimization. We then introduce AI-empowered MA spectrum sensing related to spectrum sharing and spectrum interference management. Next, we discuss the AI-empowered MA protocol designs and implementation methods by reviewing and comparing the state of the art and further explore the optimization algorithms related to dynamic resource management, parameter adjustment, and access scheme switching. Finally, we discuss the current challenges, point out open issues, and outline potential future research directions in this field.

An introduction of intelligent interconnectivity for people and things has posed higher demands and more challenges for sixth-generation (6G) networks, such as high spectral efficiency and energy efficiency (EE), ultralow latency, and ultrahigh reliability. Cell-free (CF) massive multiple-input-multiple-output (mMIMO) and reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), also called intelligent reflecting surface (IRS), are two promising technologies for coping with these unprecedented demands. Given their distinct capabilities, integrating the two technologies to further enhance wireless network performances has received great research and development attention. In this article, we provide a comprehensive survey of research on RIS-aided CF mMIMO wireless communication systems. We first introduce system models focusing on system architecture and application scenarios, channel models, and communication protocols. Subsequently, we summarize the relevant studies on system operation and resource allocation, providing in-depth analyses and discussions. Following this, we present practical challenges faced by RIS-aided CF mMIMO systems, particularly those introduced by RIS, such as hardware impairments (HIs) and electromagnetic interference (EMI). We summarize the corresponding analyses and solutions to further facilitate the implementation of RIS-aided CF mMIMO systems. Furthermore, we explore an interplay between RIS-aided CF mMIMO and other emerging 6G technologies, such as millimeter wave (mmWave) and terahertz (THz), simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT), next-generation multiple access (NGMA), and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Finally, we outline several research directions for future RIS-aided CF mMIMO systems.

Data-driven industrial health prognostics require rich training data to develop accurate and reliable predictive models. However, stringent data privacy laws and the abundance of edge industrial data necessitate decentralized data utilization. Thus, the industrial health prognostics field is well suited to significantly benefit from federated learning (FL), a decentralized and privacy-preserving learning technique. However, FL-based health prognostics tasks have hardly been investigated due to the complexities of meaningfully aggregating model parameters trained from heterogeneous data to form a high performing federated model. Specifically, data heterogeneity among edge devices, stemming from dissimilar degradation mechanisms and unequal dataset sizes, poses a critical statistical challenge for developing accurate federated models. We propose a pioneering FL-based health prognostic model with a feature similarity-matched parameter aggregation algorithm to discriminatingly learn from heterogeneous edge data. The algorithm searches across the heterogeneous locally trained models and matches neurons with probabilistically similar feature extraction functions first, before selectively averaging them to form the federated model parameters. As the algorithm only averages similar neurons, as opposed to conventional naive averaging of coordinate-wise neurons, the distinct feature extractors of local models are carried over with less dilution to the resultant federated model. Using both cyclic degradation data of Li-ion batteries and non-cyclic data of turbofan engines, we demonstrate that the proposed method yields accuracy improvements as high as 44.5% and 39.3% for state-of-health estimation and remaining useful life estimation, respectively.Note to Practitioners—Data-driven machine health monitoring enabled by cyber-physical systems allows humans to make timely predictive maintenance decisions for optimizing the life cycle of critical industrial assets. However, the benefits of intelligent health prognostics may not be fully realized in practice because strict data privacy laws restrict the aggregation of decentralized industrial data that are essential for model training. In proposing a privacy-preserving learning technique, we also focused on tackling a common and practical problem of learning from heterogeneous degradation data at the edge. The competitive performance of the proposed similarity-matching-based federated learning algorithm indicates its suitability for modeling heterogeneous, industrial time series data. Therefore, industry practitioners can utilize this algorithm as a staple component of their machine health modeling toolkit in an increasingly privacy-concerned era.

Odometry is commonly used in localization applications especially with wheeled platforms since encoders are readily available. It is often used by itself or fused with other sensor data to obtain a better estimate. However, its limitation is its exclusivity to wheeled platforms whereas it is often desired to have similar encoder odometry options on other systems. Given that WiFi is ubiquitous in most commercial and industrial areas, in this paper, a method is proposed for obtaining odometry from WiFi scans for position estimation. The method is not constrained to wheel robots such as the case for wheeled odometry and does not rely on the traditional fingerprinting method. The proposed method involves training a neural network model to predict the distance moved based on features extracted from WiFi scans in the environment. These distances moved are then summed up to obtain the trajectory. Experiments are conducted and the methods are evaluated based on Root Mean Square Error (RMSE). Experimental results showed that the proposed method is able to achieve an RMSE of at most 8.39m for the various test cases.Note to Practitioners—This paper was motivated by the limited sensors available for odometry. Existing methods of odometry either require a wheeled platform or exteroceptive sensors to be placed outside of the robot so that it can see the environment. This paper proposes a new and low-cost method of performing odometry using a WiFi receiver and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) with a neural network model. This provides an alternative that exploits existing WiFi infrastructure and thus more flexibility in robot design without wheels and sensor placement constraints. We show how the features are selected as well as propose several similarity methods to choose from. We then show how the neural network model is trained and used during implementation. Preliminary physical experiments suggest that the method was able to obtain the trajectory of a robot in two different environments using the same model and different speeds.

This paper investigates the generalized linear system (GLS), widely employed to evaluate the impact of nonlinear preprocessing on wireless transceivers. Two state-of-the-art signal recovery algorithms, namely generalized approximate message passing (GAMP) and generalized orthogonal/vector AMP (GOAMP/GVAMP), are comparatively studied. They have demonstrated Bayesian optimality for independently and identically distributed (IID) Gaussian matrices and unitary matrices, respectively. However, Bayesian optimality does not inherently guarantee error-free signal recovery. For coded GLS, the information-theoretic (i.e., achievable rate) limit of GAMP remains unknown, and there are still no analytical comparisons between GAMP and GOAMP/GVAMP in terms of the mean-square error and information-theoretic limit. To address these issues, we present the achievable rate analysis and optimal coding principle for GAMP with IID Gaussian matrices, as well as provide comprehensive comparisons with GOAMP/GVAMP with unitary matrices. Specifically, based on the celebrated I-MMSE lemma and the preconditions for state evolution (SE) to hold, the simplified variational SEs of GAMP and GOAMP/GVAMP are derived, leveraging the IID and unitary matrix properties to analyze the achievable rate and optimal coding principle, respectively. On this basis, it is proven that GOAMP/GVAMP outperforms GAMP in terms of asymptotic MSE and maximum achievable rate while requiring less complexity. Furthermore, two common nonlinear functions, clipping and quantization, are used as examples to demonstrate the theoretical comparisons and practical low-density parity-check (LDPC) code design for GAMP and GOAMP/GVAMP. Numerical results show that GAMP and GOAMP/GVAMP with optimized LDPC codes can approach the theoretical limits within 0:3 dB and overcome the decoding deterioration and even divergence of the existing state-of-the-art methods, particularly under low-resolution quantization.

In this paper, we investigate the energy efficiency (EE) problem under reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided secure cell-free networks, where multiple legitimate users and eavesdroppers (Eves) exist. We formulate a max-min security EE optimization problem by jointly designing the distributed active beamforming and artificial noise at base stations as well as the passive beamforming at RISs under practical constraints. To deal with it, we first divide the original optimization problem into two sub-ones, and then propose an iterative optimization algorithm to solve each sub-problem based on the fractional programming, constrained concave-convex procedure (CCCP) and semi-definite programming (SDP) techniques. After that, these two sub-problems are alternatively solved until convergence, and the final solutions are obtained. Next, we extend to the imperfect channel state information of the Eves’ links, and investigate the robust security EE beamforming optimization problem by bringing the outage probability constraints. Based on this, we first transform the uncertain outage probability constraints into the certain ones by the Bernstein-type inequality and sphere boundary techniques, and then propose an alternatively iterative algorithm to obtain the solutions of the original problem based on the S-procedure, successive convex approximation, CCCP, and SDP techniques. Finally, the simulation results are conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed schemes.

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is a promising technique to improve the performance of future wireless communication systems at low energy consumption. To reap the potential benefits of RIS-aided beamforming, it is vital to enhance the accuracy of channel estimation. In this paper, we consider an RIS-aided multiuser system with non-ideal reflecting elements, each of which has a phase-dependent reflecting amplitude, and we aim to minimize the mean-squared error (MSE) of the channel estimation by jointly optimizing the training signals at the user equipments (UEs) and the reflection pattern at the RIS. As examples the least squares (LS) and linear minimum MSE (LMMSE) estimators are considered. The considered problems do not admit simple solution mainly due to the complicated constraints pertaining to the non-ideal RIS reflecting elements. As far as the LS criterion is concerned, we tackle this difficulty by first proving the optimality of orthogonal training symbols and then propose a majorization-minimization (MM)-based iterative method to design the reflection pattern, where a semi-closed form solution is obtained in each iteration. As for the LMMSE criterion, we address the joint training and reflection pattern optimization problem with an MM-based alternating algorithm, where a closed-form solution to the training symbols and a semi-closed form solution to the RIS reflecting coefficients are derived, respectively. Furthermore, an acceleration scheme is proposed to improve the convergence rate of the proposed MM algorithms. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the performance advantages of our proposed joint training and reflection pattern designs.

Large-scale multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) systems are capable of achieving high date rate. However, given the high hardware cost and excessive power consumption of massive MIMO systems, as a remedy, intelligent metasurfaces have been designed for efficient holographic MIMO (HMIMO) systems. In this paper, we propose a HMIMO architecture based on stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIM) for the uplink of cell-free systems, where the SIM is employed at the access points (APs) for improving the spectral- and energy-efficiency. Specifically, we conceive distributed beamforming for SIM-assisted cell-free networks, where both the SIM coefficients and the local receiver combiner vectors of each AP are optimized based on the local channel state information (CSI) for the local detection of each user equipment (UE) information. Afterward, the central processing unit (CPU) fuses the local detections gleaned from all APs to detect the aggregate multi-user signal. Specifically, to design the SIM coefficients and the combining vectors of the APs, a low-complexity layer-by-layer iterative optimization algorithm is proposed for maximizing the equivalent gain of the channel spanning from the UEs to the APs. At the CPU, the weight vector used for combining the local detections from all APs is designed based on the minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion, where the hardware impairments (HWIs) are also taken into consideration based on their statistics. The simulation results show that the SIM-based HMIMO outperforms the conventional single-layer HMIMO in terms of the achievable rate. We demonstrate that both the HWI of the radio frequency (RF) chains at the APs and the UEs limit the achievable rate in the high signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) region.

Wireless communication is vulnerable to malicious jamming attacks due to the inherent broadcasting nature of wireless channels. This paper investigates an anti-jamming communication system that employs a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) to enhance desired signals and suppress jamming signals. To optimize the system performance while guaranteeing fairness, we maximize the minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) at the legitimate user equipments by jointly optimizing the transmit beamforming vectors at the base station (BS) and the reflecting coefficients at the RIS, subject to the BS’s maximum transmit power constraint and the RIS’s reflecting coefficient constraints. To solve the non-convex max-min-fairness optimization problem, we propose an alternating-optimization (AO)-based approach that alternates between optimizing variables using a second-order-cone program and semi-definite relaxation techniques. Considering the piratical limitation of imperfect jammer-related channel state information (CSI), we also adopt the stochastic successive convex approximation technique for tackling imperfect CSI in the AO-based approach. Furthermore, we propose a deep-reinforcement-learning (DRL)-based solving approach that does not require the jammer-related CSI. Numerical results show that both approaches improve the minimum SINR performance significantly. Although the AO-based approach with real-time CSI slightly outperforms the DRL-based approach with historical CSI, the DRL-based approach uses the trained deep neural network to obtain the beamforming decision directly without solving optimization problems.

Collaboration between low Earth orbit (LEO) and geostationary Earth orbit (GEO) satellites in space communication networks has the advantages of wider coverage and higher communication capacity. However, effective resource allocation in the space communication network faces significant challenges due to incomplete information introduced by the highly dynamic communication environment. In this work, we focus onMatchingGame-based resource allocation strategy withIncomplete information in the spaceCommunication network, called MAGIC. Specifically, we formulate the multi-dimensional resource allocation with incomplete information as the revenue maximization problem of access satellite, which is the sum priorities of the successfully accessed users. The revenue maximization problem is a mixed integer nonlinear programming problem, and a three-sided matching game is employed to solve it. Meanwhile, we apply a model-free reinforcement learning framework to pre-train the historical network data to compensate for the shortcomings caused by incomplete information. Furthermore, user-optimal and access satellite-optimal resource allocation algorithms are designed to achieve optimal resource scheduling. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and convergence of proposed algorithms from the single time slot and multiple time slot perspectives of different network parameters.

This paper proposes a simultaneous transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) segmented symbiotic backscatter non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system, where the STAR-RIS is composed of an enhancing primary signal (EP) zone and a backscatter device (BD) zone. To evaluate the overall system transmission reliability, we derive a tight lower bound of the coexistence outage probability (COP), where an imperfect/realistic successive interference cancellation (SIC) is considered. It is shown analytically that the error floor of the COP in both the near field and far field coverages would appear as long as the residual interference due to SIC is non-negligible, resulting in a diversity order of zero. Such an error floor is mainly dominated by the residual interference parameters, the decoding thresholds, and the power allocation ratios. More importantly, unlike the Gamma approximation approach, the adopted Laplace approach can capture the true diversity order with perfect SIC in the near-field/far-field coverage, which is dominated by the bottleneck number of the STAR-RIS elements belonging to the EP and BD zones, regardless of the dual-hop channel statistics. In addition, it is shown that the COP performance improves with either the quantification order or the concentration parameter of the imperfect channel state information.

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) provides a new electromagnetic response control solution, which can proactively reshape the characteristics of wireless channel environments. In RIS-assisted communication systems, the acquisition of channel state information (CSI) and the optimization of reflecting coefficients constitute major design challenges. To address these issues, codebook-based solutions have been developed recently, which, however, are mostly environment-agnostic. In this paper, a novel environment-aware codebook protocol is proposed, which can significantly reduce both pilot overhead and computational complexity, while maintaining expected communication performance. Specifically, first of all, a channel training framework is introduced to divide the training phase into several blocks. In each block, we directly estimate the composite end-to-end channel and focus only on the transmit beamforming. Second, we propose an environment-aware codebook generation scheme, which first generates a group of channels based on statistical CSI, and then obtains their corresponding RIS configuration by utilizing the alternating optimization (AO) method offline. In each online training block, the RIS is configured based on the corresponding codeword in the environment-aware codebook, and the optimal codeword resulting in the highest sum rate is adopted for assisting in the downlink data transmission. Third, we analyze the theoretical performance of the environment-aware codebook-based protocol taking into account the channel estimation errors. Finally, numerical simulations are provided to verify our theoretical analysis and the performance of the proposed scheme. In particular, the simulation results demonstrate that our protocol is more competitive than conventional environment-agnostic codebooks.

Network slicing is now widely used to provide advanced services in terms of sliced resources. It is urgent for Video Streaming Service Providers (VSSPs) to guarantee the Quality of Experience (QoE) via the sliced resources from Network Service Providers (NSPs). In this paper, we propose a bandwidth-cache pricing-based network slicing approach for video streaming delivery. Specifically, the NSP slices the bandwidth and caching space jointly, and then reorganizes these resources flexibly to various VSSPs to maximize the QoE of all users. We design a bandwidth-cache pricing policy to solve the slicing problem, in which there is a trade-off between the bandwidth-cache resources in terms of QoE. We first quantitatively analyze the QoE for various resource bundles by adopting the diffusion approximation. Based on the derived QoE, we propose the heterogeneous auction, a framework for bandwidth-cache slicing with dynamic ascending prices. Specifically, the auction increases the prices of the demanded resource bundles submitted by active bidders. Later, we prove that optimal social surplus and incentive compatible can be realized. Finally, simulation results show that the proposed auction achieves better performance than conventional homogeneous auctions.

This study explores the security of the existing space-time line code (STLC) scheme. A novel STLC-hopping scheme is proposed to ensure physical-layer secure communication of the STLC transceiver, overcoming the limitations of the conventional STLC systems posed by correlated legitimate and eavesdropping channels. The transmitter randomly selects an STLC encoding matrix for every two symbols, and the legitimate receiver decodes them based on the transmitter’s chosen matrix under the assumption that the transceiver shares a pseudorandom sequence generator for the STLC-hopping pattern. The proposed STLC-hopping system is scalable for the number of transmit antennas and compatible with a conventional STLC scheme. Even with highly correlated eavesdropping channels, the proposed STLC-hopping method prevents an eavesdropper from decoding STLC signals. Numerical results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed STLC-hopping method by showing it can almost sustain the secrecy rate lower bound, regardless of the eavesdropping channel correlations, and offer enhanced physical-layer security for STLC systems. Further, bit-error-rate performance results verify that hopping between merely two STLCs can provide sufficient secure communications.

Recently, the reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), capable of adjusting the phase shifts (PSs) of the reflecting signals through its low-cost elements, has emerged as a promising technology for next-generation wireless communications. However, the RIS may be manipulated by an illegal passive attacker (Wyn) due to the shared nature of wireless channels. In this paper, a Wyn-controlled RIS is considered to attack multiple-input single-output (MISO) communications via passive beamforming based on existing localization and Rician factor estimation techniques. Specifically, we propose an alignment cancellation (AC) scheme to minimize the achievable rate (AR), where the closed-form expressions for location, reflecting element number, and PSs are derived. Furthermore, the computational complexity is quantified to evaluate the low-cost characteristics of this algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed AC scheme outperforms other benchmark schemes in degrading the AR with efficient and low-complexity designs.

Driver Distraction Detection (3D) is of great significance in helping intelligent vehicles decide whether to remind drivers or take over the driving task and avoid traffic accidents. However, the current centralized learning paradigm of 3D has become unpractical because of rising limitations on data sharing and increasing concerns about user privacy. In this context, 3D is further facing three emerging challenges, namely data islands, data heterogeneity, and the straggler issue. To jointly address these three issues and make the 3D model training and deployment more practical and efficient, this paper proposes an Asynchronous Federated Meta-learning framework called AFM3D. Specifically, AFM3D bridges data islands through Federated Learning (FL), a novel distributed learning paradigm that enables multiple clients (i.e., private vehicles with individual data of drivers) to learn a global model collaboratively without data exchange. Moreover, AFM3D further utilizes meta-learning to tackle data heterogeneity by training a meta-model that can adapt to new driver data quickly with satisfactory performance. Finally, AFM3D is designed to operate in an asynchronous mode to reduce delays caused by stragglers and achieve efficient learning. A temporally weighted aggregation strategy is also designed to handle stale models commonly encountered in the asynchronous mode and in turn, optimize the aggregation direction. Extensive experiment results show that AFM3D can boost performance in terms of model accuracy, recall, F1 score, test loss, and learning speed by 7.61%, 7.44%, 7.95%, 9.95%, and 50.91%, respectively, against five state-of-the-art methods.

With the growing concerns on data security and user privacy, a decentralized mechanism is implemented for federated data mining (FDM), which can bridge data silos and collaborate diverse devices in ubiquitous IoT (Internet of Things) systems and services to extract global and shareable knowledge, i.e., encoded in deep neural networks (DDNs). Moreover, compared with FDM in synchronous mode, asynchronous FDM (AFDM) is more suitable to accommodate devices with diversified computing resources and distinguishable working statuses. However, as AFDM is still in its infancy, how to harness heterogeneous resources and biased knowledge of learning participants within the asynchronous context remains to be addressed. Such that, this paper proposes an adaptive and integrated mechanism, named AiFed, in which, a layer-wise optimization of AFDM is implemented based on the integration of two dedicated strategies, i.e., an adaptive local model uploading strategy (ALMU), and an adaptive global model aggregation strategy (AGMA). As shown by the evaluation results, AiFed can outperform five state-of-the-art methods to reduce communication costs by about 61.76% and 56.88%, improve learning accuracy by about 1.66% and 3.05%, and accelerate learning speed by about 22.16% and 37.81% under IID (independent and identically distributed) and Non-IID settings of four standard datasets, respectively.

This paper considers optimal traffic signal control in smart cities, which has been taken as a complex networked system control problem. Given the interacting dynamics among traffic lights and road networks, attaining controller adaptivity and scalability stands out as a primary challenge. Capturing the spatial-temporal correlation among traffic lights under the framework of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) is a promising solution. Nevertheless, existing MARL algorithms ignore effective information aggregation which is fundamental for improving the learning capacity of decentralized agents. In this paper, we design a new decentralized control architecture with improved environmental observability to capture the spatial-temporal correlation. Specifically, we first develop atopology-aware information aggregationstrategy to extract correlation-related information from unstructured data gathered in the road network. Particularly, we transfer the road network topology into a graph shift operator by forming a diffusion process on the topology, which subsequently facilitates the construction of graph signals. A diffusion convolution module is developed, forming a new MARL algorithm, which endows agents with the capabilities of graph learning. Extensive experiments based on both synthetic and real-world datasets verify that our proposal outperforms existing decentralized algorithms.

In this work, we investigate the performance of reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) assisted near-field wideband system. By considering the large-scale effect of a high-dimensional RIS and frequency-selective channels, we derive an accurate array manifold of the RIS in the near-field from the scattering point of view. Subsequently, we conceive a near-optimal RIS phase design for a single-user scenario to alleviate the beam-squint effect of the wideband system. As for the multi-user case, we provide a virtual-subarray-based phase shift design, which mitigates the beam-squint effect as well as the mitigates deleterious effects of beam concentration. Numerical results show that the achievable data rate can be significantly improved by the proposed schemes compared to the benchmarks both in the single-user and multi-user cases. Explicitly, in the multi-user system, by leveraging the virtual-subarray-based phase design, the achievable sum-rate can be doubled compared to the conventional benchmarks.

Satellite-Ground integrated networks (SGINs) are regarded as promising network architecture, which can provide global coverage, large broadband and mega access services for massive terrestrial users. Furthermore, it is beneficial to reducing network congestion, releasing network resources and achieving computation offloading functions. However, the SGIN graph structure is time-varying and highly complex, lack of fixed node orders or reference nodes, which result in dynamic multi-modal features. Hence, we consider a SGIN directed graph model to minimize the total latency while improving the model prediction accuracy, and then perform the computation offloading and quantization schemes. Specifically, we envision a spatial graph convolutional neural network framework to adapt to the dynamic SGIN graph nodes and size, and then propose a centrally deep reinforcement learning aided multi-node federated learning (CDRFL) framework to optimize the CPU cycle frequency, transmission bandwidth and the number of quantization bits to accelerate the convergence round. Extensive theoretical analyses verify the graph permutation property between SGIN graph structure and optimization problems, and demonstrate the upper bound of quantization error via massive mathematical derivation. Finally, the experimental results indicate that the proposed CDRFL framework outperforms some existing benchmarks with reference to FL convergence analysis, average latency and transmission energy consumption for all independent identically distribution (IID) and non-IID data.

Driven by the widespread applications of Space-Air-Ground Integrated Networks (SAGINs) in a number of practical fields, the volume of space data grows rapidly. However, the large volume of space data in SAGINs is typically intractable to be offloaded from space to the ground under the high dynamic network topology and the stochastic data arrivals. Furthermore, most nodes in SAGINs are battery-powered and energy-constrained, thereby implying that energy consumption becomes one major bottleneck for data offloading. Towards this end, this paper studies online joint data offloading and power control in SAGINs to maximize long-term time-averaged data offloaded amount under the constraints of average energy consumption. First, we propose a novelty Two-timescale Time-Expanded Graph (TTEG) to characterize the rapid change of the network topology in large-timescale slots and capture the stochastic data arrivals in small-timescale slots. Based the TTEG model, we formulate a stochastic optimization problem and transform it into a series of per-time-slot subproblems to obtain an efficient online solution. Through theoretical analyses, we show that the performance gap with optimal solution is bounded. Finally, extensive simulations demonstrate that the maximum performance gap of our proposed online solution to the optimal solution is less than 2% in a low computation cost.

With the emerging environment-aware applications, ubiquitous sensing is expected to play a key role in future networks. In this paper, we study a 3-dimensional (3D) multi-target localization system where multiple intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) are applied to create virtual line-of-sight (LoS) links that bypass the base station (BS) and targets. To fully unveil the fundamental limit of IRS for sensing, we first study a single-target-single-IRS case and propose a novel two-stage localization protocol by controlling the on/off state of IRS. To be specific, in the IRS-off stage, we derive the Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) of the azimuth/elevation direction-of-arrival (DoA) of the BS-target link and design a DoA estimator based on the MUSIC algorithm. In the IRS-on stage, the CRB of the azimuth/elevation DoA of the IRS-target link is derived and a simple DoA estimator based on the on-grid IRS beam scanning method is proposed. Particularly, the impact of echo signals reflected by IRS from different paths on sensing performance is analyzed and we show that only the signal passing through the BS-IRS-target link is required while that of the BS-target link can be neglected provided that the number of BS antennas is sufficiently large and the dedicated sensing beam at the BS is aligned with the departure transmit array response from the BS to the IRS. Moreover, we prove that the single-beam of the IRS is not capable of sensing, but it can be achieved with multi-beam. Based on the two obtained DoAs, the 3D single-target location is constructed. We then extend to the multi-target-multi-IRS case and propose an IRS-adaptive sensing protocol by controlling the on/off state of multiple IRSs, and a multi-target localization algorithm is developed. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our scheme and show that sub-meter-level positioning accuracy can be achieved.

It is well known that there is inherent radiation pattern distortion for the commercial base station antenna array, which usually needs three antenna sectors to cover the whole space. To eliminate pattern distortion and further enhance beamforming performance, we propose an electromagnetic hybrid beamforming (EHB) scheme based on a three-dimensional (3D) superdirective holographic antenna array. Specifically, EHB consists of antenna excitation current vectors (analog beamforming) and digital precoding matrices, where the implementation of analog beamforming involves the real-time adjustment of the radiation pattern to adapt it to the dynamic wireless environment. Meanwhile, the digital beamforming is optimized based on the channel characteristics of analog beamforming to further improve the achievable rate of communication systems. An electromagnetic channel model incorporating array radiation patterns and the mutual coupling effect is also developed to evaluate the benefits of our proposed scheme. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed EHB scheme with a 3D holographic array achieves a relatively flat superdirective beamforming gain and allows for programmable focusing directions throughout the entire spatial domain. Furthermore, they also verify that the proposed scheme achieves a sum rate gain of over 150% compared to traditional beamforming algorithms.

The continuous aperture of Holographic MIMO enables us to encode and transmit information spatially. This paper investigates the achievable rate of linear Holographic MIMO with arbitrary aperture-length using the finite blocklength information theory. Specifically, we first employ the prolate spheroidal wave functions to expand the received wavenumber band-limited electromagnetic field. This orthogonal representation enables two schemes to convey information related to the normal additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel and the non-normal AWGN channel, namely the NA and NNA schemes, respectively. Then we derive the accurate achievable rates and the converse bounds of the two schemes by extending the$\kappa \beta $bound in finite blocklength information theory. Moreover, we derive an approximate closed-form expression of the achievable rate in the large aperture-length regime based on normal approximation. The approximation indicates that for a given space efficiency, the error probability decreases rapidly as the aperture length L increases, with the rate of decline determined by$Q\left ({{O\left ({{\sqrt {L}}}\right)}}\right)$. Finally, we obtain the asymptotic results when the aperture-length tends to infinity. Numerical results demonstrate that the NA scheme outperforms the NNA scheme when the blocklength is small, while the NNA scheme excels in the large blocklength regime. The accuracy of the approximation and the validity of the asymptotic results are verified.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications are expected to alleviate the load of ground base stations in a cost-effective way. Existing studies mainly focus on the deployment and resource allocation of a single IRS instead of multiple IRSs, whereas it is extremely challenging for joint multi-IRS multi-user association in UAV communications with constrained reflecting resources and dynamic scenarios. To address the aforementioned challenges, we propose a new optimization algorithm for joint IRS-user association, trajectory optimization of UAVs, successive interference cancellation (SIC) decoding order scheduling and power allocation to maximize system energy efficiency. We first propose an inverse soft-Q learning-based algorithm to optimize multi-IRS multi-user association. Then, successive convex approximation (SCA) and Dinkelbach-based algorithm are leveraged to optimize UAV trajectory followed by the optimization of SIC decoding order scheduling and power allocation. Finally, theoretical analysis and performance results show significant advantages of the designed algorithm in convergence rate and energy efficiency.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)-aided device-to-device (D2D) networks have attracted great interests with the development of 5G/6G communications, while there are several challenges about resource scheduling in UAVs-aided D2D networks. In this work, we formulate a UAVs-aided D2D network resource scheduling optimization problem (NetResSOP) to comprehensively consider the number of deployed UAVs, UAV positions, UAV transmission powers, UAV flight velocities, communication channels, and UAV-device pair assignment so as to maximize the D2D network capacity, minimize the number of deployed UAVs, and minimize the average energy consumption over all UAVs simultaneously. The formulated NetResSOP is a mixed-integer programming problem (MIPP) and an NP-hard problem, which means that it is difficult to be solved in polynomial time. Moreover, there are trade-offs between the optimization objectives, and hence it is also difficult to find an optimal solution that can simultaneously make all objectives be optimal. Thus, we propose a non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-III with a Flexible solution dimension mechanism, a Discrete part generation mechanism, and a UAV number adjustment mechanism (NSGA-III-FDU) for solving the problem comprehensively. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and the stability of the proposed NSGA-III-FDU under different scales and settings of the D2D networks.

In this paper, we investigate the issue of uplink integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) in 6G wireless networks where the sensing echo signal and the communication signal are received simultaneously at the base station (BS). To effectively mitigate the mutual interference between sensing and communication caused by the sharing of spectrum and hardware resources, we provide a joint sensing transmit waveform and communication receive beamforming design with the objective of maximizing the weighted sum of normalized sensing rate and normalized communication rate. It is formulated as a computationally complicated non-convex optimization problem, which is quite difficult to be solved by conventional optimization methods. To this end, we first make a series of equivalent transformation on the optimization problem to reduce the design complexity, and then develop a deep learning (DL)-based scheme to enhance the overall performance of ISAC. Both theoretical analysis and simulation results confirm the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed DL-based scheme for ISAC in 6G wireless networks.

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) technology is emerging as a promising technique for performance enhancement for next-generation wireless networks. This paper investigates the physical layer security of an RIS-assisted multiple-antenna communication system in the presence of random spatially distributed eavesdroppers. The RIS-to-ground channels are assumed to experience Rician fading. Using stochastic geometry, exact distributions of the received signal-to-noise-ratios (SNRs) at the legitimate user and the eavesdroppers located according to a Poisson point process (PPP) are derived, and closed-form expressions for the secrecy outage probability (SOP) and the ergodic secrecy capacity (ESC) are obtained to provide insightful guidelines for system design. First, the secrecy diversity order is obtained as 2/α2, where α2denotes the path loss exponent of the RIS-to-ground links. Then, it is revealed that the secrecy performance is mainly affected by the number of RIS reflecting elements,N, and the impact of the number of transmit antennas and transmit power at the base station is marginal. In addition, when the locations of the randomly located eavesdroppers are unknown, deploying the RIS closer to the legitimate user rather than to the base station is shown to be more efficient. Moreover, it is also found that the density of randomly located eavesdroppers, λe, has an additive effect on the asymptotic ESC performance given by log2(1/λe). Finally, numerical simulations are conducted to verify the accuracy of these theoretical observations.

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) networks offer the potential for high-speed data transfer and precise localization, leveraging large antenna arrays and extensive bandwidths. However, these networks are challenged by significant path loss and susceptibility to blockages. In this study, we delve into the use of situational awareness for beam prediction within the 5G NR beam management framework. We introduce an analytical framework based on the Cramér-Rao Lower Bound, enabling the quantification of 6D position-related information of geometric reflectors. This includes both 3D locations and 3D orientation biases, facilitating accurate determinations of the beamforming gain achievable by each reflector or candidate beam. This framework empowers us to predict beam alignment performance at any given location in the environment, ensuring uninterrupted wireless access. Our analysis offers critical insights for choosing the most effective beam and antenna module strategies, particularly in scenarios where communication stability is threatened by blockages. Simulation results show that our approach closely approximates the performance of an ideal, Oracle-based solution within the existing 5G NR beam management system.

In Cell-Free Massive multi-input multi-output (CF mMIMO), it is challenging to assign regular pilots due to the pre-log pilot overhead on spectral efficiency (SE). This paper explores a superimposed-pilot-(SP)-assisted CF mMIMO system which avoids the separate pilot training duration by superimposing pilot symbols onto data symbols. We consider spatial-correlated Rician fading channels with and without random phase shifts, where linear minimum-mean-square-error (LMMSE) estimators are performed at each access point locally. Then, we derive the closed-form SE expressions with maximal-ratio (MR) combining. To fill the gap, we introduce novel expressions of MMSE combining vectors and compare their SE performance with approximate MMSE combining vectors. Next, a generic model is provided for the optimal large-scale fading decoding (LSFD), and we derive the closed-form suboptimal LSFD solutions with MR combining. A line-of-sight-based combining scheme is proposed based on the approximate analysis, where closed-form SE expressions are derived using MR and MMSE combining and corresponding optimal LSFD coefficients. Numerical results show that the combination of MMSE and optimal LSFD yields almost 200% enhancement over the combination of MR and simple centralized decoding in 95% likely per-user SE without phase shifts, and 111% enhancement when phase shifts exist.

The millimeter wave (mmWave) has received considerable interest due to its expansive bandwidth and high frequency. However, a noteworthy challenge arises from its vulnerability to blockages, leading to reduced coverage and achievable rate. To address these limitations, a potential solution is to deploy distributed reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs), which comprise many low-cost and passively reflected elements, and can facilitate the establishment of extra communication links. In this paper, we leverage stochastic geometry to investigate the ergodic coverage probability and the achievable rate in both distributed RISs-assisted single-cell and multi-cell mmWave wireless communication systems. Specifically, we first establish the system model considering the stochastically distributed blockages, RISs and users by the Poisson point process. Then we give the association criterion and derive the association probabilities, the distance distributions, and the conditional coverage probabilities, for two cases of associations between base stations and users without or with RISs. Finally, we use Campbell’s theorem and the total probability theorem to obtain the closed-form expressions of the ergodic coverage probability and the achievable rate. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of our analysis method, and demonstrate that by deploying distributed RISs, the ergodic coverage probability is significantly improved by approximately 50%, and the achievable rate is increased by more than 1.5 times.

This paper evaluates the geometrically averaged performance of a wireless communication network assisted by a multitude of distributed reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs), where the RIS locations are randomly dropped obeying a homogeneous Poisson point process. By exploiting stochastic geometry and then averaging over the random locations of RISs as well as the serving user, we first derive a closed-form expression for the spatially ergodic rate in the presence of phase errors at the RISs in practice. Armed with this closed-form characterization, we then optimize the RIS deployment under a reasonable and fair constraint of a total number of RIS elements per unit area. The optimal configurations in terms of key network parameters, including the RIS deployment density and the array sizes of RISs, are disclosed for the spatially ergodic rate maximization. Our findings suggest that deploying larger-size RISs with reduced deployment density is theoretically preferred to support extended RIS coverages, under the cases of bounded phase shift errors. However, when dealing with random phase shifts, the reflecting elements are recommended to spread out as much as possible, disregarding the deployment cost.Furthermore, the spatially ergodic rate loss due to the phase shift errors is quantitatively characterized. For bounded phase shift errors, the rate loss is eventually upper bounded by a constant as$N\rightarrow \infty $, where N is the number of reflecting elements at each RIS. While for random phase shifts, this rate loss scales up in the order of$\log N$. These analytical observations are validated through numerical results.

This paper investigates the potential of near-field localization using widely-spaced multi-subarrays (WSMSs) and analyzing the corresponding angle and range Cramér-Rao bounds (CRBs). By employing the Riemann sum, closed-form CRB expressions are derived for the spherical wavefront-based WSMS (SW-WSMS). We find that the CRBs can be characterized by the angular span formed by the line connecting the array’s two ends to the target, and the different WSMSs with same angular spans but different number of subarrays have identical normalized CRBs. We provide a theoretical proof that, in certain scenarios, the CRB of WSMSs is smaller than that of uniform arrays. We further yield the closed-form CRBs for the hybrid spherical and planar wavefront-based WSMS (HSPW-WSMS), and its components can be seen as decompositions of the parameters from the CRBs for the SW-WSMS. Simulations are conducted to validate the accuracy of the derived closed-form CRBs and provide further insights into various system characteristics. Basically, this paper underscores the high resolution of utilizing WSMS for localization, reinforces the validity of adopting the HSPW assumption, and, considering its applications in communications, indicates a promising outlook for integrated sensing and communications based on HSPW-WSMSs.

Millimeter wave (mmWave) full-duplex (FD) is a promising technique for improving capacity by maximizing the utilization of both time and the rich mmWave frequency resources. Still, it has restrictions due to FD self-interference (SI) and mmWave’s limited coverage. Therefore, this study dives into FD mmWave MIMO with the assistance of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) for capacity improvement. First, we demonstrate the angular-domain reciprocity of FD antenna arrays under the far-field planar wavefront assumption. Accordingly, a strategy for joint downlink-uplink (DL-UL) channel estimation is presented. For estimating the SI channel, the direct channel, and the cascaded channel, the Khatri-Rao product-based compressive sensing (KR-CS), distributed CS (D-CS), and two-stage multiple measurement vector-based D-CS (M-D-CS) frameworks are proposed, respectively. Additionally, we propose a passive beamforming optimization solution based on the angular-domain cascaded channel. With hybrid beamforming architectures, a novel hybrid weighted minimum mean squared error method for SI cancellation (H-WMMSE-SIC) is proposed. Simulations have revealed that joint DL-UL processing significantly improves estimation performance in comparison to separate DL/UL channel estimation. Particularly, when the interference-to-noise ratio is less than 35 dB, our proposed H-WMMSE-SIC offers spectral efficiency performance comparable to fully-digital WMMSE-SIC. Finally, the computational complexity is analyzed for our proposed methods.

This paper investigates the integration of a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) into a secure multiuser massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system in the presence of transceiver hardware impairments (HWI), imperfect channel state information (CSI), and spatially correlated channels. We first introduce a linear minimum-mean-square error estimation algorithm for the aggregate channel by considering the impact of transceiver HWI and RIS phase-shift errors. Then, we derive a lower bound for the achievable ergodic secrecy rate in the presence of a multi-antenna eavesdropper when artificial noise (AN) is employed at the base station (BS). In addition, the obtained expressions of the ergodic secrecy rate are further simplified in some noteworthy special cases to obtain valuable insights. To counteract the effects of HWI, we present a power allocation optimization strategy between the confidential signals and AN, which admits a fixed-point equation solution. Our analysis reveals that a non-zero ergodic secrecy rate is preserved if the total transmit power decreases no faster than 1/N, whereNis the number of RIS elements. Moreover, the ergodic secrecy rate grows logarithmically with the number of BS antennasMand approaches a certain limit in the asymptotic regimeN→ ∞. Simulation results are provided to verify the derived analytical results. They reveal the impact of key design parameters on the secrecy rate. It is shown that, with the proposed power allocation strategy, the secrecy rate loss due to HWI can be counteracted by increasing the number of low-cost RIS elements.

The application of distributed reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) to massive access multiple-input single-output (MISO) is significant to extend the communication coverage. In this paper, a novel framework is proposed in distributed RIS-aided massive access MISO systems with supporting non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and orthogonal multiple access (OMA) transmissions simultaneously, where a joint active and passive beamforming scheme is designed to fully eliminate the inter-cluster interference and improve the channel gains of prioritized users, respectively. Based on the proposed framework, firstly, we derive two exact channel statistics to characterize the equivalent channel gains of prioritized and non-prioritized users, respectively. Then, by taking into account the influence of imperfect channel state information (CSI) and successive interference cancellation (SIC), the approximate expressions of outage probability and ergodic rate for all users of one cluster under MISO-NOMA and MISO-OMA transmissions are analyzed to obtain their corresponding system throughput. Moreover, by utilizing the above results, we also determine the diversity order and high slope of these users to attain more viewpoints. Finally, simulation results prove our analyses and reveal that: 1) enhancing the estimated accuracy of CSI and the ability of SIC process can remarkably enhance the system performance; 2) the performance of priority users will be significantly improved with the increase of the number of reflecting elements and Rician factor; 3) heterogeneous quality of service requirements and deployment behaviors of users are beneficial for NOMA, while homogenous settings are competitive for OMA.

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is regarded as an important enabling technology for the sixth-generation (6G) network. Recently, modulating information in reflection patterns of RIS, referred to as reflection modulation (RM), has been proven in theory to have the potential of achieving higher transmission rate than existing passive beamforming (PBF) schemes of RIS. To fully unlock this potential of RM, we propose a novel superimposed RIS-phase modulation (SRPM) scheme for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, where tunable phase offsets are superimposed onto predetermined RIS phases to bear extra information messages. The proposed SRPM establishes a universal framework for RM, which retrieves various existing RM-based schemes as special cases.Moreover, the advantages and applicability of the SRPM in practice is also validated in theory by analytical characterization of its performance in terms of average bit error rate (ABER) and ergodic capacity. To maximize the performance gain, we formulate a general precoding optimization at the base station (BS) for a single-stream case with uncorrelated channels and obtain the optimal SRPM design via the semidefinite relaxation (SDR) technique. Furthermore, to avoid extremely high complexity in maximum likelihood (ML) detection for the SRPM, we propose a sphere decoding (SD)-based layered detection method with near-ML performance and much lower complexity. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of SRPM, precoding optimization, and detection design. It is verified that the proposed SRPM achieves a higher diversity order than that of existing RM-based schemes and outperforms PBF significantly especially when the transmitter is equipped with limited radio-frequency (RF) chains.

In this paper, we investigate an active simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) assisted integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) system, where the dual-functional base station (DFBS) operates in full-duplex (FD) mode to provide communication services and performs targets sensing simultaneously. Meanwhile, we consider multiple targets and multiple users scenario as well as the self-interference at the FD DFBS. Through jointly optimizing the DFBS and active STAR-RIS beamforming under different work modes, our purpose is to achieve the maximum communication sum-rate, while satisfying the minimum radar signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) constraint, the active STAR-RIS hardware constraints and the total power constraint of DFBS and active STAR-RIS. To tackle the complex non-convex optimization problem formulated, an efficient alternating optimization algorithm is proposed. Specifically, the fractional programming method is first leveraged to turn the original problem into a more tractable one, and subsequently the transformed problem is decomposed into several sub-problems. Next, we develop a derivation method to obtain the closed-form expression of the radar receiving beamforming, and then the DFBS transmit beamforming is optimized under the radar SINR requirement and total power constraints. After that, the active STAR-RIS reflection and transmission beamforming are optimized by majorization minimization, complex circle manifold and convex optimization techniques. Finally, the proposed schemes are conducted through numerical simulations to show their benefits and efficiency.

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), a large array of passive scattering elements, is able to control the properties of electromagnetic waves, thereby enhancing the channel capacity, reducing the bit error rate, and enabling novel signal modulation methods. However, the promising gain of RIS depends on the precision of channel estimation. In this paper, we propose a three-step channel reconstruction framework to improve the channel estimation accuracy inspired by the concept of integrated sensing and communication scenario. Firstly, based on the coarse channel state information (CSI), the proposed dual one-dimensional multiple signal classification (D1D-MUSIC) algorithm improves the localization precision with a reduced complexity. Secondly, expectation maximization-based refined estimation (EMRE) algorithms are proposed to refine the CSI and estimate channel statistical properties (CSP), i.e., the shadow fading, the power of line-of-sight paths, and that of non-line-of-sight components. Thirdly, a gradient descent-based pilot optimization (GDPO) algorithm is further derived to improve the channel estimation precision on the basis of estimated CSPs. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that the developed D1D-MUSIC algorithm has lower localization error and complexity compared with conventional two-dimensional MUSIC algorithm. Moreover, the EMRE algorithms achieve the identical normalized mean square error (NMSE) performances as the ideal minimum mean square error estimator, while possessing robust resistance to the channel model mismatch. Furthermore, the developed GDPO technique is capable of providing an over 11 dB signal-to-noise ratio gain for channel estimation performance at NMSE$\bf = 10^{-2}$.

A signal scrambling based joint blind channel estimation, activity detection, and data decoding (SS-JCAD) scheme is proposed for coded massive random access. This signal scrambling technique imposes symbol-wise phase rotation to each user’s modulated data, and the scrambling pattern serves as a user-specific signature which is free from any bandwidth expansion or pilot signaling overhead. Building on this scrambling signature, we further propose a simple yet efficient receiver design, which integrates the blind channel state information (CSI) estimation module with the forward error correction (FEC) decoder. Specifically, according to the scrambling signature, a user-specific posterior probability density function of the CSI is derived, based on which both the CSI and activity of each user can be blindly detected using a low-complexity single-user maximum a posteriori estimation. Given the estimated CSI asa prioriinformation, a joint CSI (including user activity) estimation and data decoding algorithm is proposed, where the soft information is iteratively updated between the FEC decoder and the CSI estimation module to refine the detection reliability. Simulation shows that for massive random access systems with moderate code length and system load factor less than 1.5, the SS-JCAD scheme achieves almost the same bit error rate as the ideal case aided with perfect CSI, implying the SS-JCAD scheme as a near-optimal solution to the massive random access scenario.

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) has become a promising technology to realize the programmable wireless environment via steering the incident signal in fully customizable ways. However, a major challenge in RIS-aided communication systems is the simultaneous design of the precoding matrix at the base station (BS) and the phase shifting matrix of the RIS elements. This is mainly attributed to the highly non-convex optimization space of variables at both the BS and the RIS, and the diversity of communication environments. Generally, traditional optimization methods for this problem suffer from the high complexity, while existing deep learning based methods are lacking in robustness in various scenarios. To address these issues, we introduce a gradient-based manifold meta learning method (GMML), which works without pre-training and has strong robustness for RIS-aided communications. Specifically, the proposed method fuses meta learning and manifold learning to improve the overall spectral efficiency, and reduce the overhead of the high-dimensional signal process. Unlike traditional deep learning based methods which directly take channel state information as input, GMML feeds the gradients of the precoding matrix and phase shifting matrix into neural networks. Coherently, we design a differential regulator to constrain the phase shifting matrix of the RIS. Numerical results show that the proposed GMML can improve the spectral efficiency by up to 7.31%, and speed up the convergence by 23 times faster compared to traditional approaches. Moreover, they also demonstrate remarkable robustness and adaptability in dynamic settings.

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is a promising technology that enables the customization of electromagnetic propagation environments in next-generation wireless networks. In this paper, we investigate the optimal pilot power allocation during the channel estimation stage to improve the ergodic channel gain of RIS-assisted systems under practical imperfect channel state information (CSI). Specifically, we commence by deriving an explicit closed-form expression of the ergodic channel gain of a multi-RIS-aided communication system that takes into account channel estimation errors. Then, we formulate the pilot power allocation problem to maximize the ergodic channel gain under imperfect CSI, subject to the average pilot power constraint. Then, the method of Lagrange multipliers is invoked to obtain the optimal pilot power allocation solution, which indicates that allocating more power to the pilots for estimating the weak reflection channels is capable of effectively improving the ergodic channel gain under imperfect CSI. Finally, extensive simulation results corroborate our theoretical analysis.

Compressive sensing (CS) technology, which handles large amounts of data in its low-dimensional form, enjoys excellent transmission and storage efficiency. To further improve the stability and robustness of CS-based wireless communication system, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) technology has been introduced to enhance the transmission link connectivity. Current researches generally assume perfect RIS; however, some of its elements may fail to work, which degrades the sparse signal recovery. Therefore, this paper establishes a double-sparsity optimization model to jointly recover the sparse signal and diagnose the RIS element state. A double-sparsity based algorithm (DS) exploiting Alternating Direction Method of Multiplier framework is proposed as the solution. Additionally, a novel$\ell_{B,B}$norm is incorporated to further constrain the block and binary characteristics of RIS failures, and the resulting improved version of DS is termed as the binary and block-sparsity based algorithm (BBS). Simulations verify the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed algorithms, and show the improved performance of the BBS algorithm compared with the DS algorithm.

To support the extremely high spectral efficiency and energy efficiency requirements, and emerging applications of future wireless communications, holographic multiple-input multiple-output (H-MIMO) technology is envisioned as one of the most promising enablers. It can potentially bring extra degrees-of-freedom for communications and signal processing, including spatial multiplexing in line-of-sight (LoS) channels and electromagnetic (EM) field processing performed using specialized devices, to attain the fundamental limits of wireless communications. In this context, EM-domain channel modeling is critical to harvest the benefits offered by H-MIMO. Existing EM-domain channel models are built based on the tensor Green function, which require prior knowledge of the global position and/or the relative distances and directions of the transmit/receive antenna elements. Such knowledge may be difficult to acquire in real-world applications due to extensive measurements needed for obtaining this data. To overcome this limitation, we propose a transmit-receive parameter separable channel model method-ology in which the EM-domain (or holographic) channel can be simply acquired from the distance/direction measured between the center-points between the transmit and receive surfaces, and the local positions between the transmit and receive elements, thus avoiding extensive global parameter measurements. Analysis and numerical results showcase the effectiveness of the proposed channel modeling approach in approximating the H-MIMO channel, and achieving the theoretical channel capacity.

Computation offloading has become a popular solution to support computationally intensive and latency-sensitive applications by transferring computing tasks to mobile edge servers (MESs) for execution, which is known as mobile/multi-access edge computing (MEC). To improve the MEC performance, it is required to design an optimal offloading strategy that includes offloading decision (i.e., whether offloading or not) and computational resource allocation of MEC. The design can be formulated as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem, which is generally NP-hard and its effective solution can be obtained by performing online inference through a well-trained deep neural network (DNN) model. However, when the system environments change dynamically, the DNN model may lose efficacy due to the drift of input parameters, thereby decreasing the generalization ability of the DNN model. To address this unique challenge, in this paper, we propose a multi-head ensemble multi-task learning (MEMTL) approach with a shared backbone and multiple prediction heads (PHs). Specifically, the shared backbone will be invariant during the PHs training and the inferred results will be ensembled, thereby significantly reducing the required training overhead and improving the inference performance. As a result, the joint optimization problem for offloading decision and resource allocation can be efficiently solved even in a time-varying wireless environment. Experimental results show that the proposed MEMTL outperforms benchmark methods in both the inference accuracy and mean square error without requiring additional training data.

Reconfigurable intelligent surface has recently emerged as a promising technology for shaping the wireless environment by leveraging massive low-cost reconfigurable elements. Prior works mainly focus on a single-layer metasurface that lacks the capability of suppressing multiuser interference. By contrast, we propose a stacked intelligent metasurface (SIM)-enabled transceiver design for multiuser multiple-input single-output downlink communications. Specifically, the SIM is endowed with a multilayer structure and is deployed at the base station to perform transmit beamforming directly in the electromagnetic wave domain. As a result, an SIM-enabled transceiver overcomes the need for digital beamforming and operates with low-resolution digital-to-analog converters and a moderate number of radio-frequency chains, which significantly reduces the hardware cost and energy consumption, while substantially decreasing the pre-coding delay benefiting from the processing performed in the wave domain. To leverage the benefits of SIM-enabled transceivers, we formulate an optimization problem for maximizing the sum rate of all the users by jointly designing the transmit power allocated to them and the analog beamforming in the wave domain. Numerical results based on a customized alternating optimization algorithm corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed SIM-enabled analog beamforming design as compared with various benchmark schemes. Most notably, the proposed analog beamforming scheme is capable of substantially decreasing the precoding delay compared to its digital counterpart.

In this paper, we investigate the energy efficiency (EE) problem in downlink reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided secure cell-free networks. First, we formulate a max-min secure EE (SEE) optimization problem via jointly optimizing the distributed beamforming at base stations and phase shifts at RISs under the constraint of each base station transmit power. To deal with it, we divide the original optimization problem into two sub-ones and propose an alternative scheme. Specifically, we develop an iterative optimization algorithm to solve each sub-one based on the fractional programming, constrained convex-convex procedure and semi-definite programming techniques. After that, these two sub-ones are alternatively solved until convergence, and then the final solutions are obtained. Finally, the simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is considered as a promising solution for next-generation wireless communication networks due to a variety of merits, e.g., customizing the communication environment. Therefore, deploying multiple RISs helps overcome severe signal blocking between the base station (BS) and users, which is also a practical and effective solution to achieve better service coverage. However, reaping the full benefits of a multi-RISs aided communication system requires solving a non-convex, infinite-dimensional optimization problem, which motivates the use of learning-based methods to configure the optimal policy. This paper adopts a novel heterogeneous graph neural network (GNN) to effectively exploit the graph topology in the wireless communication optimization problem. First, we characterize all communication link features and interference relations in our system with a heterogeneous graph structure. Then, we endeavor to maximize the weighted sum rate (WSR) of all users by jointly optimizing the active beamforming at the BS, the passive beamforming vector of the RIS elements, as well as the RISs association strategy. Unlike most existing work, we consider a more general scenario where the cascaded link for each user is not fixed but dynamically selected by maximizing the WSR. Simulation results show that our proposed heterogeneous GNNs perform about 10 times better than other benchmarks, and a suitable RISs association strategy is also validated to be effective in improving the quality services of users by 30%.

This paper studies the exploitation of triple polarization (TP) for multi-user (MU) holographic multiple-input multiple-output surface (HMIMOS) wireless communication systems, aiming at capacity boosting without enlarging the antenna array size. We specifically consider that both the transmitter and receiver are equipped with an HMIMOS comprising compact sub-wavelength TP patch antennas. To characterize TP MU-HMIMOS systems, a TP near-field channel model is proposed using the dyadic Green's function, whose characteristics are leveraged to design a user-cluster-based precoding scheme for mitigating the cross-polarization and inter-user interference contributions. A theoretical correlation analysis for HMIMOS with infinitely small patch antennas is also presented. According to the proposed scheme, the users are assigned to one of the three polarizations, which is easy to implement, at the cost, however, of reducing the system's diversity. Our numerical results showcase that the cross-polarization channel components have a non-negligible impact on the system performance, which is efficiently eliminated with the proposed MU precoding scheme.

In this paper, we investigate a distributed reconfigurable intelligent surface aided massive access in multipleinput single-output non-orthogonal multiple access system with imperfect channel state information (CSI) and successive interference cancellation (SIC). In particular, a novel active and passive beamforming scheme are designed to fully eliminate the intercluster interference and improve the effective channel gain of the prioritized users, respectively. To study the performance of the proposed scheme, the exact channel statistics are derived to further analyze the outage probability of each user within a cluster. Finally, simulation results are presented to prove our theoretical analyses and reveal that: 1) enhancing the estimated accuracy of CSI and the ability of SIC process can significantly enhance the outage performance; 2) the proposed zero-forcing based scheme can obtain a higher system throughput compared to previous designs.

Abstract Herein , one partial repetition extension method is proposed to construct the rate‐compatible spatially coupled low‐density parity‐check (RC‐SCLDPC) codes. For each position of the base SCLDPC code, a certain proportion of the variable nodes are first selected randomly and then repeated a certain number of times. By adjusting the selection proportions and the repetition times, a family of RC‐SCLDPC codes with arbitrary rates from 0 to the rate of the base SCLDPC code can be obtained and the rate‐compatibility is realized. Threshold analysis results show that all member codes in the proposed RC‐SCLDPC code family display capacity‐approaching thresholds over the binary erasure channel and additive white Gaussian noise channel. Finite length simulation results also confirm their excellent thresholds. Moreover, the decoding complexity can be significantly decreased using this partial repetition extension method.

With the explosive increment of computation requirements, the multiaccess edge computing (MEC) paradigm appears as an effective mechanism. Besides, as for the Internet of Things (IoT) in disasters or remote areas requiring MEC services, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and high altitude platforms (HAPs) are available to provide aerial computing services for these IoT devices. In this article, we develop the hierarchical aerial computing framework composed of HAPs and UAVs, to provide MEC services for various IoT applications. In particular, the problem is formulated to maximize the total IoT data computed by the aerial MEC platforms, restricted by the delay requirement of IoT and multiple resource constraints of UAVs and HAPs, which is an integer programming problem and intractable to solve. Due to the prohibitive complexity of the exhaustive search, we handle the problem by presenting the matching game theory-based algorithm to deal with the offloading decisions from IoT devices to UAVs, as well as a heuristic algorithm for the offloading decisions between UAVs and HAPs. The external effect affected by the interplay of different IoT devices in the matching is tackled by the externality elimination mechanism. Besides, an adjustment algorithm is also proposed to make the best of aerial resources. The complexity of proposed algorithms is analyzed and extensive simulation results verify the efficiency of the proposed algorithms, and the system performances are also analyzed by the numerical results.

In recent years, ubiquitous semantic Metaverse has been studied to revolutionize immersive cyber-virtual experiences for augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) users, which leverages advanced semantic understanding and representation to enable seamless, context-aware interactions within mixed-reality environments. This survey focuses on the intelligence and spatiotemporal characteristics of four fundamental system components in ubiquitous semantic Metaverse, i.e., artificial intelligence (AI), spatiotemporal data representation (STDR), Semantic Internet of Things (SIoT), and semantic-enhanced digital twin (SDT). We thoroughly survey the representative techniques of the four fundamental system components that enable intelligent, personalized, and context-aware interactions with typical use cases of the ubiquitous semantic Metaverse, such as remote education, work and collaboration, entertainment and socialization, healthcare, and e-commerce marketing. Furthermore, we outline the opportunities for constructing the future ubiquitous semantic Metaverse, including scalability and interoperability, privacy and security, performance measurement and standardization, as well as ethical considerations and responsible AI. Addressing those challenges is important for creating a robust, secure, and ethically sound system environment that offers engaging immersive experiences for the users and AR/VR applications.

Determining the location of Wi-Fi access points (APs) is vital for various Wi-Fi-based applications, such as localization, security, and AP deployment. Considerable effort has been exerted in the field of AP localization. In contrast to studies that require additional robots with specialized antenna arrays, we present EasyAPPos, a lightweight, always-on, and user-centered AP positioning solution that utilizes widely available mobile phones. We focus on addressing three challenges in AP positioning. First, the patch antenna on a mobile phone has a limited angular range due to its size, but our approach proposes a method for utilizing human natural rotation to enhance angular diversity. Second, our angle-based algorithm does not require synchronous clocks between the mobile device and the APs, in contrast to existing algorithms that require this synchrony to transform propagation delays into positions. Nevertheless, our algorithm can still utilize asynchronous delay information. Third, the low bandwidth of Wi-Fi beacon frames, which only provide limited capacity to counteract the effects of multipath, is addressed by performing AP positioning under challenging conditions. We validate EasyAPPos through simulations and experiments, which demonstrate its ability to achieve decimeter-level positioning accuracy even under harsh conditions.

Cognitive radio and backscatter communication (BackCom) have been viewed as two promising technologies for the future green Internet of Things (IoT). The combination of these two technologies can not only enhance spectrum efficiency but also improve energy efficiency. However, most of the existing resource allocation (RA) algorithms in cognitive BackCom networks consider ideal channel state information and a time division multiple access protocol, which is unrealistic in practical systems and can not support the massive number of accessing users. To this end, in this article, we study a robust chance-constrained RA problem for nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-based cognitive BackCom networks to overcome the influence of channel estimation errors and support for large-scale IoT nodes. Specifically, cognitive backscatter users (CBUs) can not only share the spectrum resource owned by primary users but also harvest surrounding radio frequency and transmit their own information over the primary signals. Moreover, CBUs can use the harvested energy to actively transmit information via an NOMA protocol. The robust RA problem with outage-probability constraints is formulated to maximize the total throughput of CBUs by jointly optimizing the transmission time, transmit power, and the reflection coefficients of CBUs. To tackle the nonconvex problem, the original problem is converted into an equivalent form by applying the linear objective function, an inequality transformation approach, and an auxiliary variable method. Then, an iteration-based RA algorithm is proposed to solve it. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm by comparing it with the benchmark algorithms.

A reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted downlink nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) Internet of Things (IoT) network is proposed, where a Quality-of-Service (QoS)-based NOMA clustering scheme is conceived to effectively utilize the limited wireless resources among IoT devices. A throughput maximization problem is formulated by jointly optimizing the phase shifts of the RIS and the power allocation of the base station (BS) from the short-term and long-term perspectives. We aim to investigate and compare the performance of deep learning (DL) and deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms for solving the formulated problems. In particular, the DL method utilizes model-agnostic-metalearning (MAML) to enhance the generalization capability of the neural network and to accelerate the convergence rate. For the DRL method, the deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) algorithm is employed to incorporate continuous phase-shift variables. It shows that the DL method only focuses on the maximization of the instantaneous throughput, whereas the DRL method can coordinate the power consumption over different time slots to maximize the long-term throughput. Numerical results demonstrate that: 1) the proposed QoS-based NOMA clustering scheme achieves higher IoT throughput than the conventional channel-based scheme; 2) the implementation of RISs induces approximately 5%–25% throughput gain as the number of RIS elements increases from 8 to 64; 3) DL and DRL achieve a similar throughput performance for the short-term optimization, while DRL is superior for the long-term optimization, especially when the total transmit power is limited.

A revolutionary technology relying on Stacked Intelligent Metasurfaces (SIM) is capable of carrying out advanced signal processing directly in the native electromagnetic (EM) wave regime. An SIM is fabricated by a sophisticated amalgam of multiple stacked metasurface layers, which may outperform its single-layer metasurface counterparts, such as reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) and metasurface lenses. We harness this new SIM for implementing holographic multiple-input multiple-output (HMIMO) communications without requiring excessive radio-frequency (RF) chains, which is a substantial benefit compared to existing implementations. First of all, we propose an HMIMO communication system based on a pair of SIM at the transmitter (TX) and receiver (RX), respectively. In sharp contrast to the conventional MIMO designs, SIM is capable of automatically accomplishing transmit precoding and receiver combining, as the EM waves propagate through them. As such, each spatial stream can be directly radiated and recovered from the corresponding transmit and receive port. Secondly, we formulate the problem of minimizing the error between the actual end-to-end channel matrix and the target diagonal one, representing a flawless interference-free system of parallel subchannels. This is achieved by jointly optimizing the phase shifts associated with all the metasurface layers of both the TX-SIM and RX-SIM. We then design a gradient descent algorithm to solve the resultant non-convex problem. Furthermore, we theoretically analyze the HMIMO channel capacity bound and provide some fundamental insights. Finally, extensive simulation results are provided for characterizing our SIM-aided HMIMO system, which quantifies its substantial performance benefits, e.g., 150% capacity improvement over both conventional MIMO and its RIS-aided counterparts.

Sixth-Generation (6G) technologies will revolutionize the wireless ecosystem by enabling the delivery of futuristic services through satellite-terrestrial integrated networks (STINs). As the number of subscribers connected to STINs increases, it becomes necessary to investigate whether the edge computing paradigm may be applied to low Earth orbit satellite (LEOS) networks for supporting computation-intensive and delay-sensitive services for anyone, anywhere, and at any time. Inspired by this research dilemma, we investigate a LEOS edge-assisted multi-layer multi-access edge computing (MEC) system. In this system, the MEC philosophy will be extended to LEOS, for defining the LEOS edge, in order to enhance the coverage of the multi-layer MEC system and address the users’ computing problems both in congested and isolated areas. We then design its operating offloading framework and explore its feasible implementation methodologies. In this context, we formulate a joint optimization problem for the associated communication and computation resource allocation for minimizing the overall energy dissipation of our LEOS edge-assisted multi-layer MEC system while maintaining a low computing latency. To solve the optimization problem effectively, we adopt the classic alternating optimization (AO) method for decomposing the original problem and then solve each sub-problem using low-complexity iterative algorithms. Finally, our numerical results show that the offloading scheme conceived achieves low computing latency and energy dissipation compared to the state-of-the-art solutions, a single layer MEC supported by LEOS or base stations (BS).

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided terahertz (THz) communications have been regarded as a promising candidate for future 6G networks because of its ultra-wide bandwidth and ultra-low power consumption. However, there exists the beam split problem, especially when the base station (BS) or RIS owns the large-scale antennas, which may lead to serious array gain loss. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate the beam split and beamforming design problems in the THz RIS communications. Specifically, we first analyze the beam split effect caused by different RIS sizes, shapes and deployments. On this basis, we apply the fully connected time delayer phase shifter hybrid beamforming (FC-TD-PS-HB) architecture at the BS and deploy distributed RISs to cooperatively mitigate the beam split effect. We aim to maximize the achievable sum rate by jointly optimizing the hybrid analog/digital beamforming, time delays at the BS and reflection coefficients at the RISs. To solve the formulated problem, we first design the analog beamforming and time delays based on different RISs’ physical directions, and then it is transformed into an optimization problem by jointly optimizing the digital beamforming and reflection coefficients. Next, we propose an alternatively iterative optimization algorithm to deal with it. Specifically, for given the reflection coefficients, we propose an iterative algorithm based on the minimum mean square error technique to obtain the digital beamforming. After, we apply Lagrangian dual reformulation (LDR) and multidimensional complex quadratic transform (MCQT) methods to transform the original problem to a quadratically constrained quadratic program, which can be solved by alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) technique to obtain the reflection coefficients. Finally, the digital beamforming and reflection coefficients are obtained via repeating the above processes until convergence. Simulation results verify that the proposed scheme can effectively alleviate the beam split effect and improve the system capacity.

Chaotic secure communication systems using chaotic waveforms as their spreading carriers can hide the transmitted information bits over a wide frequency range of chaotic waveform, which disguises the transmitted information waveform as noise. In this paper, a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) enabled$M$-ary differential chaos shift keying with block interleaving (RIS-MDCSK-BI) system is proposed for chaotic secure communications, where an RIS is deployed at the transmitter to assist communications and a pair of block interleaving patterns are used to interleave$M$-ary information-bearing signals to enhance security performance. Moreover, we propose a chaotic merging sort algorithm to generate different block interleaving patterns, where these interleaving patterns are encrypted by using the non-periodic and noise-like properties of chaotic signals. To estimate information bits at the legitimate receiver, we propose a sequential detection algorithm and a joint detection algorithm. Then, theoretical bit error rate (BER) performances of the proposed RIS-MDCSK-BI system with the legitimate receiver and the eavesdropping receiver are derived. The security performance metrics, including information leakage and secrecy outage probability, are also analyzed. Monte Carlo simulations are performed to verify the superior BER performance and security performance of the proposed RIS-MDCSK-BI system compared to benchmark systems.

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled wireless powered communication networks (WPCNs) are promising technologies in 5G/6G wireless communications, while there are several challenges about UAV power allocation and scheduling to enhance the energy utilization efficiency, considering the existence of obstacles. In this work, we consider a UAV-enabled WPCN scenario that a UAV needs to cover the ground wireless devices (WDs). During the coverage process, the UAV needs to collect data from the WDs and charge them simultaneously. To this end, we formulate a joint-UAV power and three-dimensional (3D) trajectory optimization problem (JUPTTOP) to simultaneously increase the total number of the covered WDs, increase the time efficiency, and reduce the total flying distance of UAV so as to improve the energy utilization efficiency in the network. Due to the difficulties and complexities, we decompose it into two sub optimization problems, which are the UAV power allocation optimization problem (UPAOP) and UAV 3D trajectory optimization problem (UTTOP), respectively. Then, we propose an improved non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-II with$K$-means initialization operator and Variable dimension mechanism (NSGA-II-KV) for solving the UPAOP. For UTTOP, we first introduce a pretreatment method, and then use an improved particle swarm optimization with Normal distribution initialization, Genetic mechanism, Differential mechanism and Pursuit operator (PSO-NGDP) to deal with this sub optimization problem. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed strategies under different scales and settings of the networks.

The popularization of smart Internet of Things (IoT) devices has facilitated the development of fog/edge computing. However, these infrastructure-based service paradigms may fail to complete tasks successfully due to computation and communication overload, or damage in challenging scenarios such as disasters or traffic jams. Noticing that a crowd of devices with considerable idle resources could be available, we investigate the problems of addressing the computation and communication unavailability with peer assistance in this work. To this end, we propose a dispersed service framework for resource-exhausted scenarios that adaptively offloads users’ data to available network computation points. However, the users may not be able to achieve the offloading due to geographical hindrances. Consequently, the relay is introduced as a bridge for data offloading between the users and the network computation points. Furthermore, a game-based incentive-driven offloading mechanism is designed by analyzing and balancing the cost and gain factors of three main entities (users, relays, and network computation points). Considering the interactions among the entities, a two-level Stackelberg game is established for efficiently allocating potential computation resource, as well as balancing the utility conflicts due to the data offloading. Given the hierarchical interaction structure, the upper level game involves network computation points as followers and the relay as a leader, while the lower level game includes the relay as a follower and users as leaders. Moreover, to facilitate applicability in large-scale scenarios with multiple relays, we decompose multiple relays into multiple single relay problems using a tripartite matching strategy that assigns appropriate relays to users and network computation points. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed game-based incentive-driven mechanism and show that it outperforms the baselines in terms of the overall utilities of the involved entities and the average energy consumption of users.

Double-reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is a promising technique, achieving a substantial gain improvement compared to single-RIS techniques. However, in double-RIS-aided systems, accurate channel estimation is more challenging than in single-RIS-aided systems. This work solves the problem of double-RIS-based channel estimation based on active RIS architectures with only one radio frequency (RF) chain. Since the slow time-varying channels, i.e., the BS-RIS 1, BS-RIS 2, and RIS 1-RIS 2 channels, can be obtained with active RIS architectures, a novel multi-user two-timescale channel estimation protocol is proposed to minimize the pilot overhead. First, we propose an uplink training scheme for slow time-varying channel estimation, which can effectively address the double-reflection channel estimation problem. With channels’ sparisty, a low-complexity Singular Value Decomposition Multiple Measurement Vector-Based Compressive Sensing (SVD-MMV-CS) framework with the line-of-sight (LoS)-aided off-grid MMV expectation maximization-based generalized approximate message passing (M-EM-GAMP) algorithm is proposed for channel parameter recovery. For fast time-varying channel estimation, based on the estimated large-timescale channels, a measurements-augmentation-estimate (MAE) framework is developed to decrease the pilot overhead. Additionally, a comprehensive analysis of pilot overhead and computing complexity is conducted. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed multi-user two-timescale estimation strategy and the low-complexity Bayesian CS framework.

In this paper, we consider the robust beamforming design in a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided cell-free (CF) system considering the channel state information (CSI) uncertainties of both the direct channels and cascaded channels at the transmitter with capacity-limited backhaul. We jointly optimize the precoding at the access points (APs) and the phase shifts at multiple RISs to maximize the worst-case sum rate of the CF system subject to the constraints of maximum transmit power of APs, unit-modulus phase shifts, limited backhaul capacity, and bounded CSI errors. By applying a series of transformations, the non-smoothness and semi-infinite constraints are tackled in a low-complexity manner that facilitates the design of an alternating optimization (AO)-based iterative algorithm. The proposed algorithm divides the considered problem into two subproblems. For the RIS phase shifts optimization subproblem, we exploit the penalty convex-concave procedure (P-CCP) to obtain a stationary solution and achieve effective initialization. For precoding optimization subproblem, successive convex approximation (SCA) is adopted with a convergence guarantee to a Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) solution. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed robust beamforming design, which achieves superior performance with low complexity. Moreover, the importance of RIS phase shift optimization for robustness and the advantages of distributed RISs in the CF system are further highlighted.

Capsule network (CapsNet) acts as a promising alternative to the typical convolutional neural network, which is the dominant network to develop the remaining useful life (RUL) estimation models for mechanical equipment. Although CapsNet comes with an impressive ability to represent entities' hierarchical relationships through a high-dimensional vector embedding, it fails to capture the long-term temporal correlation of run-to-failure time series measured from degraded mechanical equipment. On the other hand, the slow-varying dynamics, which reveals the low-frequency information hidden in mechanical dynamical behavior, is overlooked in the existing RUL estimation models (including CapsNet), limiting the utmost ability of advanced networks. To address the aforementioned concerns, we propose a slow-varying dynamics-assisted temporal CapsNet (SD-TemCapsNet) to simultaneously learn the slow-varying dynamics and temporal dynamics from measurements for accurate RUL estimation. First, in light of the sensitivity of fault evolution, slow-varying features are decomposed from normal raw data to convey the low-frequency components corresponding to the system dynamics. Next, the long short-term memory (LSTM) mechanism is introduced into CapsNet to capture the temporal correlation of time series. To this end, experiments conducted on an aircraft engine and a milling machine verify that the proposed SD-TemCapsNet outperforms the mainstream methods. In comparison with CapsNet, the estimation accuracy of the aircraft engine with four different scenarios has been improved by 10.17%, 24.97%, 3.25%, and 13.03% about the index root mean squared error, respectively. Similarly, the estimation accuracy of the milling machine has been improved by 23.57% compared to LSTM and 19.54% compared to CapsNet.

The rapid growth of electric vehicle (EV) penetration has led to more flexible and reliable vehicle-to-grid-enabled cyber-physical systems (V2G-CPSs). However, the increasing system complexity also makes them more vulnerable to cyber-physical threats. Coordinated cyber attacks (CCAs) have emerged as a major concern, requiring effective detection and mitigation strategies within V2G-CPSs. Digital twin (DT) technologies have shown promise in mitigating system complexity and providing diverse functionalities for complex tasks such as system monitoring, analysis, and optimal control. This paper presents a resilient and secure framework for CCA detection and mitigation in V2G-CPSs, leveraging a smart DT-enabled approach. The framework introduces a smarter DT orchestrator that utilizes long short-term memory (LSTM) based actor-critic deep reinforcement learning (LSTM-DRL) in the DT virtual replica. The LSTM algorithm estimates the system states, which are then used by the DRL network to detect CCAs and take appropriate actions to minimize their impact. To validate the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed smart DT framework, case studies are conducted on an IEEE 30 bus system-based V2G-CPS, considering different CCA types such as malicious V2G node or control command attacks. The results demonstrate that the framework is capable of accurately estimating system states, detecting various CCAs, and mitigating the impact of attacks within 5 seconds.

Reed relay serves as the fundamental component of functional testing, which closely relates to the successful quality inspection of electronics. To provide accurate remaining useful life (RUL) estimation for reed relay, a hybrid deep learning network with degradation pattern clustering is proposed based on the following three considerations. First, multiple degradation behaviors are observed for reed relay, and hence, a dynamic time wrapping-based$K$-means clustering is offered to distinguish degradation patterns from each other. Second, although proper selections of features are of great significance, few studies are available to guide the selection. The proposed method recommends operational rules for easy implementation purposes. Third, a neural network for RUL estimation (RULNet) is proposed to address the weakness of the convolutional neural network (CNN) in capturing temporal information of sequential data, which incorporates temporal correlation ability after high-level feature representation of convolutional operation. In this way, three variants of RULNet are constructed with health indicators, features with self-organizing map, or features with curve fitting. Ultimately, the proposed hybrid model is compared with the typical baseline models, including CNN and long short-term memory network (LSTM), through a practical reed relay dataset with two distinct degradation manners. The results from both degradation cases demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms CNN and LSTM regarding the index root-mean-squared error.

To meet the fairly high safety and reliability requirements in practice, the state of health (SOH) estimation of Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), which has a close relationship with the degradation performance, has been extensively studied with the widespread applications of various electronics. The conventional SOH estimation approaches with digital twin are end-of-cycle estimation that require the completion of a full charge/discharge cycle to observe the maximum available capacity. However, under dynamic operating conditions with partially discharged data, it is impossible to sense accurate real-time SOH estimation for LIBs. To bridge this research gap, we put forward a digital twin framework to gain the capability of sensing the battery's SOH on the fly, updating the physical battery model. The proposed digital twin solution consists of three core components to enable real-time SOH estimation without requiring a complete discharge. First, to handle the variable training cycling data, the energy discrepancy-aware cycling synchronization is proposed to align cycling data with guaranteeing the same data structure. Second, to explore the temporal importance of different training sampling times, a time-attention SOH estimation model is developed with data encoding to capture the degradation behavior over cycles, excluding adverse influences of unimportant samples. Finally, for online implementation, a similarity analysis-based data reconstruction has been put forward to provide real-time SOH estimation without requiring a full discharge cycle. Through a series of results conducted on a widely used benchmark, the proposed method yields the real-time SOH estimation with errors less than 1$\%$for most sampling times in ongoing cycles.

As a significant ingredient regarding health status, data-driven state of health (SOH) estimation has become dominant for lithium-ion batteries. To handle data discrepancy across batteries, current SOH estimation models engage in transfer learning (TL), which reserves a priori knowledge gained through reusing partial structures of the offline trained model. However, multiple degradation patterns of a complete life cycle of a battery make it challenging to pursue TL. The concept of the stage is introduced to describe the collection of continuous cycles that present a similar degradation pattern. A transferable multistage SOH estimation model is proposed to perform TL across batteries in the same stage, consisting of four steps. First, with identified stage information, raw cycling data from the source battery are reconstructed into the phase space with high dimensions, exploring hidden dynamics with limited sensors. Next, domain invariant representation across cycles in each stage is proposed through cycling discrepancy subspace with reconstructed data. Third, considering the unbalanced discharge cycles among different stages, a switching estimation strategy composed of a lightweight model with the long short-term memory network and a powerful model with the proposed temporal capsule network is proposed to boost estimation accuracy. Finally, an updating scheme compensates for estimation errors when the cycling consistency of target batteries drifts. The proposed method outperforms its competitive algorithms in various transfer tasks for a run-to-failure benchmark with three batteries. Especially through transferring the estimation model from batteries B7 to B6, the proposed method improves the estimation accuracy by as high as 42.6% in the third stage in terms of the root mean square error, compared to the other state-of-the-art approaches. In addition, similar conclusions can be drawn from other contributed experiments.

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted communication is a significant technology in 6G communication. In order to cope with the dynamic trajectory optimization problem of the air-ground network, the interaction between entities is modeled as a Markov game firstly. Then, the model-free multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is adopted to optimize individual decision-making. This enables agents to learn the mobile patterns of others, so as to optimize their own mobile strategy. However, there are some common issues when executing the benchmark MARL algorithms, such as biased estimation and local optimum. To solve these problems, an enhanced multi-agent proximal policy optimization algorithm is proposed with policy clipping and average evaluation to guarantee the fast convergence and accurate estimation. Simulations demonstrate that this method produces superior convergence than the benchmark algorithms. It allows the UAV base station, ground users and the aerial jammer to adopt the optimal mobile strategies to achieve their respective maximum cumulative rewards. In addition, the stable strategies of agents constitute the approximate Nash equilibrium for the UAV-assisted communication Markov Game.

Integrating sensing functionalities is envisioned as a distinguishing feature of next-generation mobile networks, which has given rise to the development of a novel enabling technology– Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC). Portraying the theoretical performance bounds of ISAC systems is fundamentally important to understand how sensing and communication functionalities interact (e.g., competitively or cooperatively) in terms of resource utilization, while revealing insights and guidelines for the development of effective physical-layer techniques. In this paper, we characterize the fundamental performance tradeoff between the detection probability for target monitoring and the user’s achievable rate in ISAC systems. To this end, we first discuss the achievable rate of the user under sensing-free and sensing-interfered communication scenarios. Furthermore, we derive closed-form expressions for the probability of false alarm (PFA) and the successful probability of detection (PD) for monitoring the target of interest, where we consider both communication-assisted and communication-interfered sensing scenarios. In addition, the effects of the unknown channel coefficient are also taken into account in our theoretical analysis. Based on our analytical results, we then carry out a comprehensive assessment of the performance tradeoff between sensing and communication functionalities. Specifically, we formulate a power allocation problem to minimize the transmit power at the base station (BS) under the constraints of ensuring a required PD for perception as well as the communication user’s quality of service requirement in terms of achievable rate. It indicates that, on the one hand, there exists an intrinsic tradeoff between sensing and communication performance under the mutual-interfered scenarios; On the other hand, with prior knowledge of the baseband waveform, these two functionalities might mutually assist each other to enhance the performance. Finally, simulation results corroborate the accuracy of our theoretical analysis and the effectiveness of the proposed power allocation solutions showing the advantages of the ISAC system over the conventional radar and communication coexistence counterpart.

In reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided coherent communications, channel state information (CSI) is often assumed to be perfectly estimated at the receiver. However, perfect CSI cannot be available in practice. Furthermore, the complex and ever-changing channel makes the acquisition of accurate CSI often unaffordable because of the large overhead in transmitting pilot signals. Motivated by these considerations, a novel non-coherent RIS-aided joint index keying$M$-ary differential chaos shift keying (RIS-JIK-MDCSK) system is proposed in this paper, where the receiver can retrieve information bits by performing non-coherent correlation demodulation without requiring CSI, thereby reducing the system complexity. In RIS-JIK-MDCSK, the states of the reference signal, RIS elements, and information-bearing subcarriers are jointly optimized to devise a joint index keying mechanism, where additional information bits are implicitly transmitted by these state indices, thus increasing the throughput and spectral efficiency. Furthermore, an effective joint index keying detection algorithm is proposed to recover the information bits. The analytical bit error rate (BER) of RIS-JIK-MDCSK is derived over a Rayleigh fading channel. Other evaluation metrics, including the throughput, spectral efficiency, and system complexity are also analyzed and compared against benchmark systems. Numerical simulations are performed to evaluate the superiority of RIS-JIK-MDCSK compared to existing systems.

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is very promising for wireless networks to achieve high energy efficiency, extended coverage, improved capacity, massive connectivity, etc. To unleash the full potentials of RIS-aided communications, acquiring accurate channel state information is crucial, which however is very challenging. For RIS-aided multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) communications, the existing channel estimation methods have computational complexity growing rapidly with the number of RIS units$N$(e.g., in the order of$N^{2}$or$N^{3}$) and/or have special requirements on the matrices involved (e.g., the matrices need to be sparse for algorithm convergence to achieve satisfactory performance), which hinder their applications. In this work, instead of using the conventional signal model in the literature, we derive a new signal model obtained through proper vectorization and reduction operations. Then, leveraging the unitary approximate message passing (UAMP), we develop a more efficient channel estimator that has complexity linear with$N$and does not have special requirements on the relevant matrices, thanks to the robustness of UAMP. These facilitate the applications of the proposed algorithm to a general RIS-aided MIMO system with a larger$N$. Moreover, extensive numerical results show that the proposed estimator delivers much better performance and/or requires significantly less number of training symbols, thereby leading to notable reductions in both training overhead and latency.

This paper investigates the utilization of triple polarization (TP) for multi-user (MU) wireless communication systems with holographic multiple-input multi-output surfaces (HMIMOSs), targeting capacity boosting and diversity exploitation without enlarging the antenna array sizes of the transceivers. We specifically consider that both the transmitter and receiver are equipped with an HMIMOS consisting of compact sub-wavelength TP patch antennas and operating in the near-field (NF) regime. To characterize TP MU-HMIMOS systems, a TP NF channel model is constructed using the dyadic Green’s function, whose characteristics are leveraged to design two precoding schemes for mitigating the cross-polarization and inter-user interference contributions. Specifically, a user-cluster-based precoding scheme that assigns different users to one of three polarizations, at the expense of system’s diversity, is presented together with a two-layer precoding technique that removes interference using a Gaussian elimination method. A theoretical correlation analysis for HMIMOS-based systems operating in the NF region is also derived, revealing that both the spacing of transmit patch antennas and user distance impact transmit correlation factors. Our numerical results showcase that the users located far from the transmit HMIMOS experience higher correlation than those closer in the NF region, resulting in a lower channel capacity. In terms of channel capacity, it is demonstrated that the proposed TP HMIMOS-based systems almost achieve 1.25 and 3 times larger gain compared to their dual-polarized version and conventional HMIMOS systems, respectively. It is also shown that the the proposed two-layer precoding scheme combined with two-layer power allocation realizes the highest spectral efficiency, among compared schemes, without sacrificing diversity.

Smart grids leverage the data collected from smart meters to make important operational decisions. However, they are vulnerable to False Data Injection (FDI) attacks in which an attacker manipulates meter data to disrupt the grid operations. Existing works on FDI are based on a simple threat model in which a single grid operator has access to all the data, and only some meters can be compromised.

In this paper, we investigate the issue of integrated localization and computing (ILAC) in edge-intelligent networks. By exploiting the dual-function radio frequency (RF) signals, we put forward a unified design framework for ILAC in edge-intelligent networks where the localization task and the computing task are conducted cooperatively by multiple user equipments (UEs) and multiple base stations (BSs). In particular, a joint resource allocation algorithm is proposed for ILAC by optimizing the available radio and computing resources with the goal of minimizing the weighted total energy consumption while ensuring the performance requirements of the localization task and the computing task. Finally, numerical results verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm over baseline ones.

The emergent technology of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs) has the potential to transform wireless environments into controllable systems, through programmable propagation of information-bearing signals. Techniques stemming from the field of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) have recently gained popularity in maximizing the sum-rate performance in multi-user communication systems empowered by RISs. Such approaches are commonly based on Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). In this paper, we instead investigate the sum-rate design problem under the scope of the Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) setting, which is a relaxation of the MDP framework. Nevertheless, in many cases, the MAB formulation is more appropriate to the channel and system models under the assumptions typically made in the RIS literature. To this end, we propose a simpler DRL approach for orchestrating multiple metasurfaces in RIS-empowered multi-user Multiple-Input Single-Output (MISO) systems, which we numerically show to perform equally well with a state-of-the-art MDP-based approach, while being less demanding computationally.

Resource allocation is very important for achieving interference suppression and protecting the quality of service of users in heterogeneous networks (HetNets). However, the existing works with perfect channel state information (CSI) and ideal hardware ignored the impact of channel uncertainties and hardware impairments on system performance. In this paper, we design a robust secure resource allocation algorithm with imperfect CSI to achieve the energy efficiency (EE) maximization of femtocell users for a two-tier downlink HetNet with multiple passive eavesdroppers, where the residual hardware impairments are considered at the transceivers. The formulated EE problem is non-convex with the consideration of the maximum transmit power constraint of each base station, the cross-tier interference power constraint, as well as the secure rate constraint. By using the worst-case approach and successive convex approximation, the resource allocation problem with the infinite-dimensional constraints is converted into a convex one which is efficiently solved by using convex optimization theory. Simulation results verify that the proposed algorithm has a higher EE and causes less interference power to macrocell users by comparing it with the baseline algorithms.

To accomplish task efficiently in a multiple robots system, a problem that has to be addressed is Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) has been used for many SLAM solutions due to its superb accuracy, but its performance degrades in featureless environments, like tunnels or long corridors. Centralized SLAM solves the problem with a cloud server, which requires a huge amount of computational resources and lacks robustness against central node failure. To address these issues, we present a distributed SLAM solution to estimate the trajectory of a group of robots using Ultra-WideBand (UWB) ranging and odometry measurements. The proposed approach distributes the processing among the robot team and significantly mitigates the computation concern emerged from the centralized SLAM. Our solution determines the relative pose (also known as loop closure) between two robots by minimizing the UWB ranging measurements taken at different positions when the robots are in close proximity. UWB provides a good distance measure in line-of-sight conditions, but retrieving a precise pose estimation remains a challenge, due to ranging noise and unpredictable path traveled by the robot. To deal with the suspicious loop closures, we use Pairwise Consistency Maximization (PCM) to examine the quality of loop closures and perform outlier rejections. The filtered loop closures are then fused with odometry in a distributed pose graph optimization (DPGO) module to recover the full trajectory of the robot team. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

With the complication of future communication scenarios, most conventional signal processing technologies of multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) become unreliable, which are designed based on ideal assumptions, such as Gaussian signaling and independent identically distributed (IID) channel matrices. As a result, this paper considers a generalized MU-MIMO (GMU-MIMO) system with more general assumptions, i.e., arbitrarily fixed input distributions, and general unitarily-invariant channel matrices. However, there is still no accurate capacity analysis and capacity optimal transceiver with practical complexity for GMU-MIMO under the constraint of coding. To address these issues, inspired by the replica method, the constrained sum capacity of coded GMU-MIMO with fixed input distribution is calculated by using the celebrated mutual information and minimum mean-square error (MMSE) lemma and the MMSE optimality of orthogonal/vector approximate message passing (OAMP/VAMP). Then, a capacity optimal multi-user OAMP/VAMP receiver is proposed, whose achievable rate is proved to be equal to the constrained sum capacity. Moreover, a design principle of multi-user codes is presented for the multi-user OAMP/VAMP, based on which a kind of practical multi-user low-density parity-check (MU-LDPC) code is designed. Numerical results show that finite-length performances of the proposed MU-LDPC codes with multi-user OAMP/VAMP are about 2 dB away from the constrained sum capacity and outperform those of the existing state-of-art methods.

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) can be mounted on aerial platforms to have a complete 360 degree reflection span. Thereafter, the placement of the RIS can be optimized to maximize the received SNR. The rotation of the RIS is another available degree of freedom (DoF). In this paper, we demonstrate the usefulness of the RIS rotation when mounted on aerial platforms. The results demonstrate that if the RIS is rotated at an optimal angle, the received SNR can be improved by 3–4 dB. Furthermore, if we increase the number of base station antennas, an exciting trade-off between BS antennas and bit-resolution with rotation is observed.

Specific emitter identification (SEI) is a highly potential technology for physical-layer authentication that is one of the most critical supplements for the upper-layer authentication. SEI is based on radio frequency (RF) features from circuit difference, rather than cryptography. These features are inherent characteristics of hardware circuits, which are difficult to counterfeit. Recently, various deep learning (DL)-based conventional SEI methods have been proposed, and achieved advanced performances. However, these methods are proposed for close-set scenarios with massive RF signal samples for training, and they generally have poor performance under the condition of limited training samples. Thus, we focus on few-shot SEI (FS-SEI) for aircraft identification via automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) signals, and a novel FS-SEI method is proposed, based on deep metric ensemble learning (DMEL). Specifically, the proposed method consists of feature embedding and classification. The former is based on metric learning with a complex-valued convolutional neural network (CVCNN) for extracting discriminative features with compact intracategory distance and separable intercategory distance, while the latter is realized by an ensemble classifier. Simulation results show that if the number of samples per category is more than 5, the average accuracy of our proposed method is higher than 98%. Moreover, feature visualization demonstrates the advantages of our proposed method in both discriminability and generalization. The code and the dataset can be downloaded fromhttps://github.com/BeechburgPieStar/FS-SEI.

Federated Learning in asynchronous mode (AFL) is attracting much attention from both industry and academia to build intelligent cores for various Internet of Things (IoT) systems and services by harnessing sensitive data and idle computing resources dispersed at massive IoT devices in a privacy-preserving and interaction-unblocking manner. Since AFL is still in its infancy, it encounters three challenges that need to be resolved jointly, namely: 1) how to rationally utilize AFL clients, whose local data grow gradually, to avoid overlearning issues; 2) how to properly manage the client-server interaction with both communication cost reduced and model performance improved; and finally, 3) how to effectively and efficiently aggregate heterogeneous parameters received at the server to build a global model. To fill the gap, this article proposes a triple-step asynchronous federated learning mechanism (TrisaFed), which can: 1) activate clients with rich information according to an informative client activating strategy (ICA); 2) optimize the client–server interaction by a multiphase layer updating strategy (MLU); and 3) enhance the model aggregation function by a temporal weight fading strategy (TWF), and an informative weight enhancing strategy (IWE). Moreover, based on four standard data sets, TrisaFed is evaluated. As shown by the result, compared with four state-of-the-art baselines, TrisaFed can not only dramatically reduce the communication cost by over 80% but also can significantly improve the learning performance in terms of model accuracy and training speed by over 8% and 70%, respectively.

The envisioned wireless networks of the future entail the provisioning of massive numbers of connections, heterogeneous data traffic, ultra-high spectral efficiency, and low latency services. This vision is spurring research activities focused on defining a next generation multiple access (NGMA) protocol that can accommodate massive numbers of users in different resource blocks, thereby, achieving higher spectral efficiency and increased connectivity compared to conventional multiple access schemes. In this article, we present a multiple access scheme for NGMA in wireless communication systems assisted by multiple reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs). In this regard, considering the practical scenario of static users operating together with mobile ones, we first study the interplay of the design of NGMA schemes and RIS phase configuration in terms of efficiency and complexity. Based on this, we then propose a multiple access framework for RIS-assisted communication systems, and we also design a medium access control (MAC) protocol incorporating RISs. In addition, we give a detailed performance analysis of the designed RIS-assisted MAC protocol. Our extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed MAC design outperforms the benchmarks in terms of system throughput and access fairness, and also reveal a trade-off relationship between the system throughput and fairness.

The emerging technology of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) is provisioned as an enabler of smart wireless environments, offering a highly scalable, low-cost, hardware-efficient, and almost energy-neutral solution for dynamic control of the propagation of electromagnetic signals over the wireless medium, ultimately providing increased environmental intelligence for diverse operation objectives. One of the major challenges with the envisioned dense deployment of RISs in such reconfigurable radio environments is the efficient configuration of multiple metasurfaces with limited, or even the absence of, computing hardware. In this article, we consider multiuser and multi-RIS-empowered wireless systems and present a thorough survey of the online machine learning approaches for the orchestration of their various tunable components. Focusing on the sum-rate maximization as a representative design objective, we present a comprehensive problem formulation based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL). We detail the correspondences among the parameters of the wireless system and the DRL terminology, and devise generic algorithmic steps for the artificial neural network training and deployment while discussing their implementation details. Further practical considerations for multi-RIS-empowered wireless communications in the sixth-generation (6G) era are presented along with some key open research challenges. Different from the DRL-based status quo, we leverage the independence between the configuration of the system design parameters and the future states of the wireless environment, and present efficient multiarmed bandits approaches, whose resulting sum-rate performances are numerically shown to outperform random configurations, while being sufficiently close to the conventional deep$Q$network (DQN) algorithm, but with lower implementation complexity.

Information about the spatiotemporal flow of humans within an urban context has a wide plethora of applications. Currently, although there are many different approaches to collect such data, there lacks a standardized framework to analyze it. The focus of this article is on the analysis of the data collected through passive Wi-Fi sensing, as such passively collected data can have a wide coverage at low cost. We propose a systematic approach by using unsupervised machine learning methods, namely$k$-means clustering and hierarchical agglomerative clustering (HAC) to analyze data collected through such a passive Wi-Fi sniffing method. We examine three aspects of clustering of the data, namely by time, by person, and by location, and we present the results obtained by applying our proposed approach on a real-world dataset collected over five months.

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have been recently considered as a promising candidate for energy-efficient solutions in future wireless networks. Their dynamic and low-power configuration enables coverage extension, massive connectivity, and low-latency communications. Due to a large number of unknown variables referring to the RIS unit elements and the transmitted signals, channel estimation and signal recovery in RIS-based systems are the ones of the most critical technical challenges. To address this problem, we focus on the RIS-assisted wireless communication system and present two joint channel estimation and signal recovery schemes based on message passing algorithms in this paper. Specifically, the proposed bidirectional scheme applies the Taylor series expansion and Gaussian approximation to simplify the sum-product procedure in the formulated problem. In addition, the inner iteration that adopts two variants of approximate message passing algorithms is incorporated to ensure robustness and convergence. Two ambiguities removal methods are also discussed in this paper. Our simulation results show that the proposed schemes show the superiority over the state-of-art benchmark method. We also provide insights on the impact of different RIS parameter settings on the proposed schemes.

Conventional multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) mainly focused on Gaussian signaling, independent and identically distributed (IID) channels, and a limited number of users. It will be laborious to cope with the heterogeneous requirements in next-generation wireless communications, such as various transmission data, complicated communication scenarios, and unprecedented massive user access. Therefore, this paper studies a generalized MU-MIMO (GMU-MIMO) system with more generalized and practical constraints, i.e., practical channel coding, non-Gaussian signaling, right-unitarily-invariant channels (covering Rayleigh fading channel matrices, certain ill-conditioned and correlated channel matrices, etc.), and massive users and antennas. These generalized assumptions bring new challenges in theory and practice. For example, there is no accurate constrained capacity region analysis for GMU-MIMO. In addition, it is unclear how to achieve constrained-capacity-optimal performance with practical complexity. To address these challenges, a unified framework is proposed to derive the constrained capacity region of GMU-MIMO and design a constrained-capacity-optimal transceiver, which jointly considers encoding, modulation, detection, and decoding. Group asymmetry is developed to group users according to their rates, which makes a tradeoff between user rate allocation and implementation complexity. Specifically, the constrained capacity region of group-asymmetric GMU-MIMO is characterized by using the minimum mean-square error (MMSE) optimality of orthogonal/vector approximate message passing (OAMP/VAMP) and the relationship between mutual information and MMSE. Furthermore, a theoretically optimal multi-user OAMP/VAMP receiver and practical multi-user low-density parity-check (MU-LDPC) codes are proposed to achieve the constrained capacity region of group-asymmetric GMU-MIMO. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed MU-LDPC coded GMU-MIMO systems achieve asymptotic performance within 0.2 dB from the theoretical sum capacity. Moreover, their finite-length performances are about 1~2 dB away from the associated sum capacity of GMU-MIMO.

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) are required to operate safely and efficiently in dynamic environments. For this, the AVs equipped with Joint Radar-Communications (JRC) functions can enhance the driving safety by utilizing both radar detection and data communication functions. However, optimizing the performance of the AV system with two different functions under uncertainty and dynamic of surrounding environments is very challenging. In this work, we first propose an intelligent optimization framework based on the Markov Decision Process (MDP) to help the AV make optimal decisions in selecting JRC operation functions under the dynamic and uncertainty of the surrounding environment. We then develop an effective learning algorithm leveraging recent advances of deep reinforcement learning techniques to find the optimal policy for the AV without requiring any prior information about surrounding environment. Furthermore, to make our proposed framework more scalable, we develop a Transfer Learning (TL) mechanism that enables the AV to leverage valuable experiences for accelerating the training process when it moves to a new environment. Extensive simulations show that the proposed transferable deep reinforcement learning framework reduces the obstacle miss detection probability by the AV up to 67% compared to other conventional deep reinforcement learning approaches. With the deep reinforcement learning and transfer learning approaches, our proposed solution can find its applications in a wide range of autonomous driving scenarios from driver assistance to full automation transportation.

This paper proposes an effective and novel multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL)-based method for solving the joint virtual network function (VNF) placement and routing (P&R), where multiple service requests with differentiated demands are delivered at the same time. The differentiated demands of the service requests are reflected by their delay- and cost-sensitive factors. We first construct a VNF P&R problem to jointly minimize a weighted sum of service delay and resource consumption cost, which is NP-complete. Then, the joint VNF P&R problem is decoupled into two iterative subtasks: placement subtask and routing subtask. Each subtask consists of multiple concurrent parallel sequential decision processes. By invoking the deep deterministic policy gradient method and multi-agent technique, an MADRL-P&R framework is designed to perform the two subtasks. The newjoint reward and internal rewardsmechanism is proposed to match the goals and constraints of the placement and routing subtasks. We also propose the parameter migration-based model-retraining method to deal with changing network topologies. Corroborated by experiments, the proposed MADRL-P&R framework is superior to its alternatives in terms of service cost and delay, and offers higher flexibility for personalized service demands. The parameter migration-based model-retraining method can efficiently accelerate convergence under moderate network topology changes.

The energy efficiency (EE) of femtocells is always limited by the surrounding radio environments in heterogeneous networks (HetNets), such as walls and obstacles. In this paper, we propose to deploy reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) to improve the EE of femtocells. However, perfect channel state information is more difficult to obtain due to the passive characteristics of RISs and non-cooperative relationship between different tiers. Besides, the low-cost transceivers and reflecting units suffer nontrivial hardware impairments (HWIs) due to the hardware limitations of practical systems. To this end, we investigate a realistic robust beamforming design based on max-min fairness for an RIS-aided HetNet under channel uncertainties and residual HWIs. The joint optimization of transmit beamforming vectors of femto base stations (FBSs) and the phase-shift matrices of RISs is formulated as a non-convex problem to maximize the minimum EE of the femtocell subject to the constraints of the maximum transmit power of FBSs, the quality of service of users, and unit modulus phase-shift constraints of RISs. We develop an iterative block coordinate descent-based algorithm which exploits the semi-definite relaxation, the S-procedure, and the singular value decomposition method. Simulation results reveal that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing algorithms in terms of fairness, EE, and outage probability.

Increasing demands of multimedia contents brings a great profit to the content providers, but also a challenge of how to efficiently delivery contents to make users have a good Quality of Experience (QoE). Take the advantage of owning wireless infrastructures, the telco operator is motivated to build a content platform for entering the market of content. In this paper, we consider a content platform belonging to the telco operator, which can provide periodically-updated contents with small Age of Information (AoI), namely, fresh contents. The content update consumes radio resource resulting in a trade-off between the AoI and the latency. We adopt the contract theory to monetize contents considering the above two factors in a realistic asymmetric information scenario. Necessary and sufficient conditions are derived to ensure the feasibility of the contract. We further propose the optimal update schemes and the corresponding fees, which maximizes the utility of the operator. Simulation reveals that the proposed contract enables the users, who attach importance to the freshness, to obtain frequently updating contents.

The sustaining evolution of sensing and advancement in communications technologies has revolutionized prognostics and health management for various electrical equipment toward data-driven ways. This revolution delivers a promising solution for the health monitoring problem of the heat pump (HP) system, a vital device widely deployed in modern buildings for heating use, to timely evaluate its operation status to avoid unexpected downtime. Many HPs were practically manufactured and installed many years ago, resulting in fewer sensors available due to technology limitations and cost control at that time. It raises a dilemma to safeguard HPs at an affordable cost. In this article, we propose a hybrid scheme by integrating industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) and intelligent health monitoring algorithms to handle this challenge. To start with, an IIoT network is constructed to sense and store measurements. Specifically, temperature sensors are properly chosen and deployed at the inlet and outlet of the water tank to measure water temperature. Second, with temperature information, we propose an unsupervised learning algorithm named mixture slow feature analysis (MSFA) to timely evaluate the health status of the integrated HP. Characterized by frequent operation switches of different HPs due to the variable demand for hot water, various heating patterns with different heating speeds are observed. Slowness, a kind of dynamics to measure the varying speed of steady distribution, is properly considered in MSFA for both heating pattern division and health evaluation. Finally, the efficacy of the proposed method is verified through a real integrated HP with five connected HPs installed ten years ago. The experimental results show that MSFA is capable of accurately identifying health status of the system, especially failure at a preliminary stage compared to its competing algorithms.

In this article, we propose a transfer learning (TL) enabled edge convolutional neural network (CNN) framework for 5G industrial edge networks with privacy-preserving characteristic. In particular, the edge server can use the existing image dataset to train the CNN in advance, which is further fine-tuned based on the limited datasets uploaded from the devices. With the aid of TL, the devices that are not participating in the training only need to fine-tune the trained edge-CNN model without training from scratch. Due to the energy budget of the devices and the limited communication bandwidth, a joint energy and latency problem is formulated, which is solved by decomposing the original problem into an uploading decision subproblem and a wireless bandwidth allocation subproblem. Experiments using ImageNet demonstrate that the proposed TL-enabled edge-CNN framework can achieve almost 85% prediction accuracy of the baseline by uploading only about 1% model parameters, for a compression ratio of 32 of the autoencoder.

Recent advancements in edge computing and edge caching provide a feasible solution to support a plethora of new applications such as on-demand videos, AR/VR, road surveillance. However, to apply edge caching in vehicular scenarios is still difficult due to the unkonwn request pattern of vehicular users and intermittent service links between vehicles and edge servers (e.g., Road Side Units, RSUs). In this paper, we aim to investigate the vehicular edge caching problem in practical vehicular scenarios by considering higher hit ratio, while avoiding interruption of caching services. Specifically, to obtain a higher hit ratio, we firstly propose an on-demand adaptive cache algorithm. The algorithm can adjust the eviction time of cached contents by tracking the dynamics of requests and content popularity. We then develop an analysis framework to model the interruption performance of caching services from RSUs. Through diffraction approximation theory, the service process can be modeled as a joint process of the movement and stopping of vehicles to deduce the interruption ratio. To apply the on-demand adaptive cache algorithm in practical scenarios, the final caching decisions should be corrected by incorporating the interruption performance. Therefore, a$\alpha $-fair utility-oriented vehicular edge caching scheme is developed, which can achieve the tradeoff of hit ratio and interruption ratio. Performance evaluation shows the advantages of our proposed vehicular caching scheme in hit ratio, accuracy of analysis model, utility, respectively.

We consider the extra degree of freedom offered by the rotation of the reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) plane and investigate its potential in improving the performance of RIS-assisted wireless communication systems. By considering radiation pattern modeling at all involved nodes, we first derive the composite channel gain and present a closed-form upper bound for the system ergodic capacity over cascade Rician fading channels. Then, we reconstruct the composite channel gain by taking the rotations at the RIS plane, transmit antenna, and receive antenna into account, and extract the optimal rotation angles after investigating their impacts on the capacity. Moreover, we present a location-dependent expression of the ergodic capacity and investigate the RIS deployment strategy, i.e. the joint rotation adjustment and location selection. Finally, simulation results verify the accuracy of the theoretical analyses and deployment strategy. Although the RIS location has a big impact on the performance, our results showcase that the RIS rotation plays a more important role. In other words, we can obtain a considerable improvement by properly rotating the RIS rather than moving it over a wide area. For instance, we can achieve more than 200% performance improvement through rotating the RIS by 42.14°, while an 150% improvement is obtained by shifting the RIS over 400 meters.

In this paper, we investigate a cell-free massive MIMO system with both access points (APs) and user equipments (UEs) equipped with multiple antennas over jointly-correlated Rayleigh fading channels. We study four uplink implementations, from fully centralized processing to fully distributed processing, and derive their achievable spectral efficiency (SE) expressions with minimum mean-squared error successive interference cancellation (MMSE-SIC) detectors and arbitrary combining schemes. Furthermore, the global and local MMSE combining schemes are derived based on full and local channel state information (CSI) obtained under pilot contamination, which can maximize the achievable SE for the fully centralized and distributed implementation, respectively. We study a two-layer decoding implementation with an arbitrary combining scheme in the first layer and optimal large-scale fading decoding (LSFD) in the second layer. Besides, we compute novel closed-form SE expressions for the two-layer decoding implementation with maximum ratio (MR) combining. In the numerical results, we compare the SE performance for different implementation levels, combining schemes, and channel models. It is important to note that increasing the number of antennas per UE may degrade the SE performance.

Increasing concerns on intelligent spectrum sensing call for efficient training and inference technologies. In this paper, we propose a novel federated learning (FL) framework, dubbed federated spectrum learning (FSL), which exploits the benefits of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) and overcomes the unfavorable impact of deep fading channels. Distinguishingly, we endow conventional RISs with spectrum learning capabilities by leveraging a fully-trained convolutional neural network (CNN) model at each RIS controller, thereby helping the base station to cooperatively infer the users who request to participate in FL at the beginning of each training iteration. To fully exploit the potential of FL and RISs, we address three technical challenges: RISs phase shifts configuration, user-RIS association, and wireless bandwidth allocation. The resulting joint learning, wireless resource allocation, and user-RIS association design is formulated as an optimization problem whose objective is to maximize the system utility while considering the impact of FL prediction accuracy. In this context, the accuracy of FL prediction interplays with the performance of resource optimization. In particular, if the accuracy of the trained CNN model deteriorates, the performance of resource allocation worsens. The proposed FSL framework is tested by using real radio frequency (RF) traces and numerical results demonstrate its advantages in terms of spectrum prediction accuracy and system utility: a better CNN prediction accuracy and FL system utility can be achieved with a larger number of RISs and reflecting elements.

In this paper, the problem of optimal passive beamforming design is studied for a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) assisted full-duplex (FD) communication system. In the studied model, two devices communicate with each other using one RIS under the FD mode. Each of the device will receive not only the message from the other device but also the self-interference. The main problem of this work is to minimize the sum transmit power by jointly optimizing the reflection coefficients matrix and the transmit power of devices. To solve this problem, a dual method is proposed, where the dual problem is formulated as a semidefinite programming problem. After solving the dual problem, the phase beamforming of the RIS is obtained in the closed form. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can reduce up to 66% sum transmit power compared to a conventional RIS assisted half-duplex mode.

The state of health (SOH) estimation plays an essential role in battery-powered applications to avoid unexpected breakdowns due to battery capacity fading. However, few studies have paid attention to the problem of uneven length of degrading cycles, simply employing manual operation or leaving to the automatic processing mechanism of advanced machine learning models, like long short-term memory (LSTM). As a result, this causes information loss and caps the full capability of the data-driven SOH estimation models. To address this challenge, this paper proposes an innovative cycle synchronization way to change the existing coordinate system using dynamic time warping (DTW), not only enabling the equal length inputs of the estimation model but also preserving all information. By exploiting the time information of the time series, the proposed method embeds the time index and the original measurements into a novel indicator to reflect the battery degradation status, which could have the same length over cycles. Adopting the LSTM as the basic estimation model, the cycle-synchronization-based SOH model could significantly improve the prediction accuracy by more than 30% compared to the traditional LSTM.

Relative localization between autonomous robots without infrastructure is crucial to achieve their navigation, path planning, and formation in many applications, such as emergency response, where acquiring a prior knowledge of the environment is not possible. The traditional Ultra-WideBand (UWB)-based approach provides a good estimation of the distance between the robots, but obtaining the relative pose (including the displacement and orientation) remains challenging. We propose an approach to estimate the relative pose between a group of robots by equipping each robot with multiple UWB ranging nodes. We determine the pose between two robots by minimizing the residual error of the ranging measurements from all UWB nodes. To improve the localization accuracy, we propose to utilize the odometry constraints through a sliding window-based optimization. The optimized pose is then fused with the odometry in a particle filtering for pose tracking among a group of mobile robots. We have conducted extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

There has been an increasing demand to automate the non-patient care matters so that the clinical staff can focus on delivering patient care. For example, out-patients undergoing chemotherapy increases their toilet usage frequency due to the treatment. As they are undergoing chemotherapy, their output waste contains a level of chemical. This task is compulsory yet troublesome and time-consuming so it is often desired to be removed from the nursing staff for them to focus on patient care. Hence, in this paper, we propose a manipulator system to automatically dispose the bedpan used by patients undergoing chemotherapy. The main technical challenge lies in the removal of the bedpan from the commode as the interaction of the grasping is highly dynamic, along with the different conditions of the bedpans. To address this manipulation issue, a Residual Reinforcement Learning (RRL) method that leverages vision-based commode pose estimation and the reinforcement learning (RL)-based uncertainty compensation for improvement of the grasping accuracy is proposed to increase the robustness of the disposal. The experiments conducted show that the manipulator can dispose the bedpan without human intervention and the proposed method achieves a 100 % success rate while the traditional method without RL is only 50 %.

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have been recently considered as a promising candidate for energy-efficient solutions in future wireless networks. Their dynamic and low-power configuration enables coverage extension, massive connectivity, and low-latency communications. Due to a large number of unknown variables referring to the RIS unit elements and the transmitted signals, channel estimation and signal recovery in RIS-based systems are the ones of the most critical technical challenges. To address this problem, we focus on the RIS-assisted multi-user wireless communication system and present a joint channel estimation and signal recovery algorithm in this paper. Specifically, we propose a bidirectional approximate message passing algorithm that applies the Taylor series expansion and Gaussian approximation to simplify the sum-product algorithm in the formulated problem. Our simulation results show that the proposed algorithm shows the superiority over a state-of-art benchmark method. We also provide insights on the impact of different RIS parameter settings on the proposed algorithms.

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs) have been recently considered as an energy-efficient solution for future wireless networks. Their dynamic and low-power configuration enables coverage extension, massive connectivity, and low-latency communications. Channel estimation and signal recovery in RIS-based systems are among the most critical technical challenges, due to the large number of unknown variables referring to the RIS unit elements and the transmitted signals. In this paper, we focus on the downlink of a RIS-assisted multi-user Multiple Input Single Output (MISO) communication system and present a joint channel estimation and signal recovery scheme based on the PARAllel FACtor (PARAFAC) decomposition. This decomposition unfolds the cascaded channel model and facilitates signal recovery using the Bilinear Generalized Approximate Message Passing (BiG-AMP) algorithm. The proposed method includes an alternating least squares algorithm to iteratively estimate the equivalent matrix, which consists of the transmitted signals and the channels between the base station and RIS, as well as the channels between the RIS and the multiple users. Our selective simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms a benchmark scheme that uses genie-aided information knowledge. We also provide insights on the impact of different RIS parameter settings on the proposed scheme.

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is a promising reflective radio technology for improving the coverage and rate of future wireless systems by reconfiguring the wireless propagation environment. The current work mainly focuses on the physical layer design of RIS. However, enabling multiple devices to communicate with the assistance of RIS is a crucial challenging problem. Motivated by this, we explore RIS-assisted communications at the medium access control (MAC) layer and propose an RIS-assisted MAC framework. In particular, RIS-assisted transmissions are implemented by prenegotiation and a multidimension reservation (MDR) scheme. Based on this, we investigate RIS-assisted single-channel multiuser (SCMU) communications. Wherein the RIS regarded as a whole unity can be reserved by one user to support the multiple data transmissions, thus achieving high efficient RIS-assisted connections at the user. Moreover, under frequency-selective channels, implementing the MDR scheme on the RIS group division, RIS-assisted multichannel multiuser (MCMU) communications are further explored to improve the service efficiency of the RIS and decrease the computation complexity. Besides, a Markov chain is built based on the proposed RIS-assisted MAC framework to analyze the system performance of SCMU/MCMU. Then the optimization problem is formulated to maximize the overall system capacity of SCMU/MCMU with energy-efficient constraint. The performance evaluations demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of each.

With the advancement of the Internet of Things (IoT) and communication platform, large-scale sensor deployment can be easily implemented in an urban city to collect various information. To date, there are only a handful of research studies about understanding the usage of urban public spaces. Leveraging IoT, various sensors have been deployed in an urban residential area to monitor and study public space utilization patterns. In this article, we propose a data processing system to generate space-centric insights about the utilization of an urban residential region of multiple Points of Interests (PoIs) that consists of 190 000 m2real estate. We identify the activeness of each PoI based on the spectral clustering, and then study their corresponding static features, which are composed of transportation, commercial facilities, population density, along with other characteristics. Through the heuristic features inferring, the residential density and commercial facilities are the most significant factors affecting public place utilization.

Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is an emerging concept that is believed to help realize the vision of intelligent transportation systems (ITSs). IoV has become an important research area of impactful applications in recent years due to the rapid advancements in vehicular technologies, high throughput satellite communication, the Internet of Things, and cyber-physical systems. IoV enables the integration of smart vehicles with the Internet and system components attributing to their environments, such as public infrastructures, sensors, computing nodes, pedestrians, and other vehicles. By allowing the development of a common information exchange platform between vehicles and heterogeneous vehicular networks, this integration aims to create a better environment and public space for the people as well as to enhance safety for all road users. Being a participatory data exchange and storage, the underlying information exchange platform of IoV needs to be secure, transparent, and immutable in order to achieve the intended objectives of ITS. In this connection, the adoption of blockchain as a system platform for supporting the information exchange needs of IoV has been explored. Due to their decentralized and immutable nature, IoV applications enabled by blockchain are believed to have a number of desirable properties, such as decentralization, security, transparency, immutability, and automation. In this article, we present a contemporary survey on the latest advancement in blockchain for IoV. Particularly, we highlight the different application scenarios of IoV after carefully reviewing the recent literature. We also investigate several key challenges where blockchain is applied in IoV. Furthermore, we present the future opportunities and explore further research directions of IoV as a key enabler of ITS.

Energy efficiency (EE) is a significant performance indicator in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted communication networks for providing a balance between power consumption minimization and transmission rate maximization. However, most of the current works focus on the transmission rate maximization under perfect channel state information (CSI) and exact coordinate information, which is too ideal in practical systems due to channel estimation errors and coordinate estimation errors. Thus, robust resource allocation algorithms with imperfect CSI and coordinate information are critically important to reduce users’ outages and improve system robustness. In this article, a robust EE maximization problem with channel uncertainties and coordinate uncertainties is formulated for an energy harvesting-based device-to-device (D2D) communication underlaying UAV-assisted network under some necessary constraints, which involve the outage probability constraints of ground terminals, the flight altitude constraint of the UAV, the minimum harvested energy constraints of D2D users, and the transmission time constraint. Both radio resource allocation and the flight altitude are jointly optimized based on the worst case approach. The considered nonconvex problem is transformed into a convex one by exploiting variable relaxation and variable substitution approaches. The Lagrange dual theory is used to derive the closed-form expressions of robust resource allocation. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm by comparing it with the benchmark algorithms in terms of EE and robustness.

The empowering unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been extensively used in providing intelligence such as target tracking. In our field experiments, a pretrained convolutional neural network (CNN) is deployed at UAV to identify a target (a vehicle) from the captured video frames and enable the UAV to keep tracking. However, this kind of visual target tracking demands a lot of computational resources due to the desired high inference accuracy and stringent delay requirement. This motivates us to consider offloading this type of deep learning (DL) tasks to a mobile-edge computing (MEC) server due to the limited computational resource and energy budget of the UAV and further improve the inference accuracy. Specifically, we propose a novel hierarchical DL tasks distribution framework, where the UAV is embedded with lower layers of the pretrained CNN model while the MEC server (MES) with rich computing resources will handle the higher layers of the CNN model. An optimization problem is formulated to minimize the weighted-sum cost, including the tracking delay and energy consumption introduced by communication and computing of UAVs while taking into account the quality of data (e.g., video frames) input to the DL model and the inference errors. Analytical results are obtained and insights are provided to understand the tradeoff between the weighted-sum cost and inference error rate in the proposed framework. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed offloading framework.

The aerial-terrestrial communication system constitutes an efficient paradigm for supporting and complementing terrestrial communications. However, the benefits of such a system cannot be fully exploited, especially when the line-of-sight (LoS) transmissions are prone to severe deterioration due to complex propagation environments in urban areas. The emerging technology of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) has recently become a potential solution to mitigate propagation-induced impairments and improve wireless network coverage. Motivated by these considerations, in this paper, we address the coverage and link performance problems of the aerial-terrestrial communication system by proposing an RIS-assisted transmission strategy. In particular, we design an adaptive RIS-assisted transmission protocol, in which the channel estimation, transmission strategy, and data transmission are independently implemented in a frame. On this basis, we formulate an RIS-assisted transmission strategy optimization problem as a mixed-integer non-linear program (MINLP) to maximize the overall system throughput. We then employ multi-task learning to speed up the solution to the problem. Benefiting from multi-task learning, the computation time is reduced by about four orders of magnitude. Numerical results show that the proposed RIS-assisted transmission protocol significantly improves the system throughput and reduces the transmit power.

Wireless communication in the TeraHertz band (0.1--10 THz) is envisioned as one of the key enabling technologies for the future sixth generation (6G) wireless communication systems scaled up beyond massive multiple input multiple output (Massive-MIMO) technology. However, very high propagation attenuations and molecular absorptions of THz frequencies often limit the signal transmission distance and coverage range. Benefited from the recent breakthrough on the reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) for realizing smart radio propagation environment, we propose a novel hybrid beamforming scheme for the multi-hop RIS-assisted communication networks to improve the coverage range at THz-band frequencies. Particularly, multiple passive and controllable RISs are deployed to assist the transmissions between the base station (BS) and multiple single-antenna users. We investigate the joint design of digital beamforming matrix at the BS and analog beamforming matrices at the RISs, by leveraging the recent advances in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to combat the propagation loss. To improve the convergence of the proposed DRL-based algorithm, two algorithms are then designed to initialize the digital beamforming and the analog beamforming matrices utilizing the alternating optimization technique. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme is able to improve 50\% more coverage range of THz communications compared with the benchmarks. Furthermore, it is also shown that our proposed DRL-based method is a state-of-the-art method to solve the NP-hard beamforming problem, especially when the signals at RIS-assisted THz communication networks experience multiple hops.

Underwater environments create a challenging channel for communications. In this paper, we design a novel receiver system by exploring the machine learning technique–Deep Belief Network (DBN) – to combat the signal distortion caused by the Doppler effect and multi-path propagation. We evaluate the performance of the proposed receiver system in both simulation experiments and sea trials. Our proposed receiver system comprises of DBN based de-noising and classification of the received signal. First, the received signal is segmented into frames before the each of these frames is individually pre-processed using a novel pixelization algorithm. Then, using the DBN based de-noising algorithm, features are extracted from these frames and used to reconstruct the received signal. Finally, DBN based classification of the reconstructed signal occurs. Our proposed DBN based receiver system does show better performance in channels influenced by the Doppler effect and multi-path propagation with a performance improvement of 13.2dB at 10−3Bit Error Rate (BER).

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs) have been recently considered as an energy-efficient solution for future wireless networks due to their fast and low-power configuration, which has increased potential in enabling massive connectivity and low-latency communications. Accurate and low-overhead channel estimation in RIS-based systems is one of the most critical challenges due to the usually large number of RIS unit elements and their distinctive hardware constraints. In this paper, we focus on the uplink of a RIS-empowered multi-user Multiple Input Single Output (MISO) uplink communication systems and propose a channel estimation framework based on the parallel factor decomposition to unfold the resulting cascaded channel model. We present two iterative estimation algorithms for the channels between the base station and RIS, as well as the channels between RIS and users. One is based on alternating least squares (ALS), while the other uses vector approximate message passing to iteratively reconstruct two unknown channels from the estimated vectors. To theoretically assess the performance of the ALS-based algorithm, we derived its estimation Cramér-Rao Bound (CRB). We also discuss the downlink achievable sum rate computation with estimated channels and different precoding schemes for the base station. Our extensive simulation results show that our algorithms outperform benchmark schemes and that the ALS technique achieves the CRB. It is also demonstrated that the sum rate using the estimated channels always reach that of perfect channels under various settings, thus, verifying the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed estimation algorithms.

Edge caching is an efficient technique for mitigating redundant data transmissions over backhaul links. Contents are constantly evolving, and thus the cached contents should be updated timely to guarantee freshness. Information freshness is captured by the Age of Information (AoI) metric. In this paper, we explore a content resale problem, where a Network Service Provider (NSP) purchases contents from Content Providers (CPs) then sells contents to users. We model the problem as a three-stage sequential problem. Then we decompose the problem into two sub-problems on deciding the contents to be purchased and cached, and the respective prices. We solve the sub-problems through the framework of Stackelberg game and auction respectively. For the content purchase, we consider four different cases to design the auction mechanisms. In the auctions, the NSP has to reveal its private information due to the AoI characteristics. Furthermore, we prove that such disclosure will not bring the loss of the NSP’s utility. Finally, numerical results in different cases are provided to show that the NSP can efficiently exploit the benefit from the knowledge about CPs’ production costs and the competition among CPs under our proposed mechanism.

Along with the popularization of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), societal concerns related to security, privacy, and public safety have gained more attention, thus opening a new avenue for small UAV surveillance. However, the conventional radar technologies pose challenges for the surveillance of small UAVs due to the high cost, small radar cross section, low flying altitude, and slow flying speed. In this article, we propose a novel micro-Doppler signature-based surveillance method using machine learning techniques, for detection, classification, and localization of small UAVs. Via extensive experiments, we demonstrate the performance gain of our proposed method by applying long short-term memory neural network.

Accurate and reliable state of charge (SoC) estimation becomes increasingly important to provide a stable and efficient environment for Lithium-ion batteries (LiBs) powered devices. Most data-driven SoC models are built for a fixed ambient temperature, which neglect the high sensitivity of LiBs to temperature and may cause severe prediction errors. Nevertheless, a systematic evaluation of the impact of temperature on SoC estimation and ways for a prompt adjustment of the estimation model to new temperatures using limited data has been hardly discussed. To solve these challenges, a novel SoC estimation method is proposed by exploiting temporal dynamics of measurements and transferring consistent estimation ability among different temperatures. First, temporal dynamics, which is presented by correlations between the past fluctuation and the future motion, are extracted using canonical variate analysis. Next, two models, including a reference SoC estimation model and an estimation ability monitoring model, are developed with temporal dynamics. The monitoring model provides a path to quantitatively evaluate the influences of temperature on SoC estimation ability. After that, once the inability of the reference SoC estimation model is detected, consistent temporal dynamics between temperatures are selected for transfer learning. Finally, the efficacy of the proposed method is verified through a benchmark. Our proposed method not only reduces prediction errors at fixed temperatures (e.g., reduced by 24.35% at -20°C, 49.82% at 25°C) but also improves prediction accuracies at new temperatures.

For health prognostic task, ever-increasing efforts have been focused on machine learning based methods, which are capable of yielding accurate remaining useful life (RUL) estimation for industrial equipment or components without exploring the degradation mechanism. A prerequisite ensuring the success of these methods depends on a wealth of run-to-failure data; however, run-to-failure data may be insufficient in practice. That is, conducting a substantial amount of destructive experiments not only is of high cost but also may cause catastrophic consequences. Out of this consideration, an enhanced RUL framework focusing on data self-generation is put forward for both noncyclic and cyclic degradation patterns for the first time. It is designed to enrich data from a data-driven way, generating realistic-like time-series to enhance current RUL methods. First, high-quality data generation is ensured through the proposed convolutional recurrent generative adversarial network, which adopts a two-channel fusion convolutional recurrent neural network. Next, a hierarchical framework is proposed to combine generated data into current RUL estimation methods. Finally, in this article the efficacy of the proposed method is verified through both noncyclic and cyclic degradation systems. With the enhanced RUL framework, an aero-engine system following noncyclic degradation has been tested using three typical RUL models. State-of-the-art RUL estimation results are achieved by enhancing capsule network with generated time-series. Specifically, estimation errors evaluated by the index score function have been reduced by 21.77$\%$ and 32.67$\%$ for the two employed operating conditions, respectively. Besides, the estimation error is reduced to zero for the lithium-ion battery system, which presents cyclic degradation.

With the rapid development of autonomous driving technologies, it becomes difficult to reconcile the conflict between ever-increasing demands for high process rate in the intelligent automotive tasks and resource-constrained on-board processors. Fortunately, vehicular edge computing (VEC) has been proposed to meet the pressing resource demands. Due to the delay-sensitive traits of automotive tasks, only a heterogeneous vehicular network with multiple access technologies may be able to handle these demanding challenges. In this article, we propose an intelligent task offloading framework in heterogeneous vehicular networks with three Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication technologies, namely Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC), cellular-based V2X (C-V2X) communication, and millimeter wave (mmWave) communication. Based on stochastic network calculus, this article firstly derives the delay upper bounds of different offloading technologies with certain failure probabilities. Moreover, we propose a federated Q-learning method that optimally utilizes the available resources to minimize the communication/computing budgets and the offloading failure probabilities. Simulation results indicate that our proposed algorithm can significantly outperform the existing algorithms in terms of resource cost and offloading failure probability.

Coupled Matrix Tensor Factorization (CMTF) facilitates the integration and analysis of multiple data sources and helps discover meaningful information. Nonnegative CMTF (N-CMTF) has been employed in many applications for identifying latent patterns, prediction, and recommendation. However, due to the added complexity with coupling between tensor and matrix data, existing N-CMTF algorithms exhibit poor computation efficiency. In this paper, a computationally efficient N-CMTF factorization algorithm is presented based on the column-wise element selection, preventing frequent gradient updates. Theoretical and empirical analyses show that the proposed N-CMTF factorization algorithm is not only more accurate but also more computationally efficient than existing algorithms in approximating the tensor as well as in identifying the underlying nature of factors.

In mobile cloud computing, offloading resource-demanded applications from mobile devices to remote cloud servers can alleviate the resource scarcity of mobile devices, whereas long distance communication may incur high communication latency and energy consumption. As an alternative, fortunately, recent studies show that exploiting the unused resources of the nearby mobile devices for task execution can reduce the energy consumption and communication latency. Nevertheless, it is non-trivial to encourage mobile devices to share their resources or execute tasks for others. To address this issue, we construct an auction model to facilitate the resource trading between the owner of the tasks and the mobile devices participating in task execution. Specifically, the owners of the tasks act as bidders by submitting bids to compete for the resources available at mobile devices. We design a distributed auction mechanism to fairly allocate the tasks, and determine the trading prices of the resources. Moreover, an efficient payment evaluation process is proposed to prevent against the possible dishonest activity of the seller on the payment decision, through the collaboration of the buyers. We prove that the proposed auction mechanism can achieve certain desirable properties, such as computational efficiency, individual rationality, truthfulness guarantee of the bidders, and budget balance. Simulation results validate the performance of the proposed auction mechanism.

With the rapid deployment of the Internet of Things (IoT), fifth-generation (5G) and beyond 5G networks are required to support massive access of a huge number of devices over limited radio spectrum radio. In wireless networks, different devices have various quality-of-service (QoS) requirements, ranging from ultra-reliable low latency communications (URLLC) to high transmission data rates. In this context, we present a joint energy-efficient subchannel assignment and power control approach to manage massive access requests while maximizing network energy efficiency (EE) and guaranteeing different QoS requirements. The latency constraint is transformed into a data rate constraint which makes the optimization problem tractable before modelling it as a multi-agent reinforcement learning problem. A distributed cooperative massive access approach based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is proposed to address the problem while meeting both reliability and latency constraints on URLLC services in massive access scenario. In addition, transfer learning and cooperative learning mechanisms are employed to enable communication links to work cooperatively in a distributed manner, which enhances the network performance and access success probability. Simulation results clearly show that the proposed distributed cooperative learning approach outperforms other existing approaches in terms of meeting EE and improving the transmission success probability in massive access scenario.

We study the tradeoff between energy efficiency (EE) and spectral efficiency (SE) in multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) uplink communications aided by a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) equipped with discrete phase shifters. For reducing the required signaling overhead and energy consumption, our design is based on the partial channel state information (CSI), including the statistical CSI between the RIS and user terminals (UTs) and the instantaneous CSI between the RIS and the base station. To investigate the EE-SE tradeoff, we develop a framework for the joint optimization of UTs' transmit precoding and RIS reflective beamforming to maximize a metric called resource efficiency. Based on the closed-form solutions of all UTs' optimal transmit subspace and an asymptotic objective expression, an optimization framework is proposed via exploiting the quadratic transformation, the homotopy, accelerated projected gradient, and majorization-minimization methods. Numerical results illustrate the effectiveness of our optimization framework for the considered RIS-aid communications.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) that enables the control of wireless propagation environment has recently emerged as a promising cost-effective technology for boosting the spectral and energy efficiency of future wireless communication systems. Prior works on IRS are mainly based on the ideal phase shift model assuming full signal reflection by each of its elements regardless of the phase shift, which, however, is practically difficult to realize. In contrast, we propose in this paper a practical phase shift model that captures the phase-dependent amplitude variation in the element-wise reflection design. Based on the proposed model and considering an IRS-aided multiuser system with one IRS deployed to assist in the downlink communications from a multi-antenna access point (AP) to multiple single-antenna users, we formulate an optimization problem to minimize the total transmit power at the AP by jointly designing the AP transmit beamforming and the IRS reflect beamforming, subject to the users' individual signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) constraints. Iterative algorithms are proposed to find suboptimal solutions to this problem efficiently by utilizing the alternating optimization (AO) as well as penalty-based optimization techniques. Moreover, to draw essential insight, we analyze the asymptotic performance loss of the IRS-aided system that employs practical phase shifters but assumes the ideal phase shift model for beamforming optimization, as the number of IRS elements goes to infinity. Simulation results unveil substantial performance gains achieved by the proposed beamforming optimization based on the practical phase shift model as compared to the conventional ideal model.