Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems promise efficient spectrum utilization by jointly supporting radar sensing and wireless communication. This paper presents a deep learning-driven framework for enhancing physical-layer security in multicarrier ISAC systems under imperfect channel state information (CSI) and in the presence of unknown eaves-dropper (Eve) locations. Unlike conventional ISAC-based friendly jamming (FJ) approaches that require Eve’s CSI or precise angle-of-arrival (AoA) estimates, our method exploits radar echo feedback to guide directional jamming without explicit Eve’s information. To enhance robustness to radar sensing uncertainty, we propose a radar-aware neural network that jointly optimizes beamforming and jamming by integrating a novel nonparametric Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) estimator based on f-divergence. The jamming design satisfies the Cramér–Rao lower bound (CRLB) constraints even in the presence of noisy AoA. For efficient implementation, we introduce a quantized tensor train-based encoder that reduces the model size by more than 100 times with negligible performance loss. We also integrate a non-overlapping secure scheme into the proposed framework, in which specific sub-bands can be dedicated solely to communication. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed solution achieves significant improvements in secrecy rate, reduced block error rate (BLER), and strong robustness against CSI uncertainty and angular estimation errors, under-scoring the effectiveness of the proposed deep learning–driven friendly jamming framework under practical ISAC impairments.

Data trading has become a fundamental category of commerce in the current digital era, bringing along substantial opportunities for economic activities. The emergence of blockchain facilitates decentralized data trading, empowering users to maintain complete control over their own data and enabling direct peer-to-peer transactions. However, while users possess complete control over their data product and asset in a decentralized trading environment, they must take responsibility for their behaviors and face the consequences of dishonest behaviors either from themselves or counterparties. Therefore, behavior fairness problems arise, such as the seller refusing to deliver the correct data product after receiving the money and the buyer failing to pay the outstanding balance after receiving the data product. This article addresses these issues by proposing a decentralized fair data trading ecosystem leveraging the capability of cryptography and smart contracts. A novel verifiable proxy re-encryption (VPRE) scheme is designed, which introduces the verifiability of re-encryption keys into the original PRE schemes. The scheme is implemented using smart contracts, which ensures that trading can succeed if and only if the data seller provides a valid re-encryption key and the buyer pays the correct amount of money. Furthermore, experiments are conducted to evaluate the proposed ecosystem in terms of trading fairness, security, and cost. The results show that the proposed scheme can effectively terminate transactions involving fairness violations with affordable costs ranging from 39 276 Gwei to 296 983 Gwei. Without our solution, these unfair transactions will proceed and consume 77 301 Gwei to 754 447 Gwei gas fees.

In this paper, we propose an effective blockchain-enabled information management framework, named Smart Blockchain-based Web 3.0 (SBW 3.0). Our framework aims to handle information within Web 3.0 efficiently, enhance data security and privacy, create new revenue streams, and encourage users to contribute valuable information to websites. To this end, SBW 3.0 employs blockchain technology and smart contracts to manage the decentralized data collection in Web 3.0. Moreover, we introduce a robust consensus mechanism grounded in Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) to reward user contributions. Furthermore, we develop a non-cooperative game model to examine user behavior in this context and conduct thorough analysis to prove the uniqueness of the Nash equilibrium in our proposed system. Through simulations, we evaluate the performance of SBW 3.0 and analyze the effects of various critical parameters on information contribution. Our results validate the theoretical analysis, showing that the proposed consensus mechanism successfully encourages nodes and users to provide more information, thus overcoming the current limitations of Web 3.0 regarding data decentralization and management.

This paper introduces a novel joint user association and resource allocation framework to efficiently deal with eavesdropping attacks without requiring prior information about eavesdroppers. Specifically, the co-channel interference when reusing resource blocks is leveraged to disrupt the signal reception at eavesdroppers. To maximize the secure area, defined as the area where eavesdroppers cannot wiretap the channel due to co-channel interference, we first formulate the system by using the Markov decision process to capture the dynamics and uncertainty of mobile users and wireless communications. Then, a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based approach is proposed to obtain the joint optimal user association and resource allocation policy to utilize the co-channel interference and maximize the secure area. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that by intelligently associating users and allocating resource blocks to them, our proposed solution can help to effectively defeat eavesdropping attacks without requiring prior information of eavesdroppers which may not be readily available in practice. In addition, the proposed DRL-based algorithm can converge to the optimal policy quickly and achieve better performance compared to existing solutions.

Network energy saving has received great attention from operators and vendors to reduce energy consumption and CO2 emissions to the environment as well as significantly reduce costs for mobile network operators. However, the design of energy-saving networks also needs to ensure that mobile users' (MUs) QoS requirements such as throughput requirements (TR). This work considers a mobile cellular network including many ground base stations (GBSs), and some GBSs are intentionally turned off due to network energy saving (NES) or crash, so the MUs located in these outage GBSs are not served in time. Based on this observation, we propose the problem of maximizing the total achievable throughput in the network by optimizing the GBSs' antenna tilt and adaptive transmission power with a given number of served MUs satisfied. Notice that, the MU is considered successfully served if its Reference Signal Received Power (RSRP) and throughput requirement are satisfied. The formulated optimization problem becomes difficult to solve with multiple binary variables and nonconvex constraints along with random throughput requirements and random placement of MUs. We propose a Deep Q-learning-based algorithm to help the network learn the uncertainty and dynamics of the transmission environment. Extensive simulation results show that our proposed algorithm achieves much better performance than the benchmark schemes.

Wireless communications are particularly vulnerable to eavesdropping attacks due to their broadcast nature. To effectively deal with eavesdroppers, existing security techniques usually require accurate channel state information (CSI), e.g., for friendly jamming (FJ), and/or additional computing resources at transceivers, e.g., cryptography-based solutions, which unfortunately may not be feasible in practice. This challenge is even more acute in low-end IoT devices. We thus introduce a novel deep learning-based FJ framework that can effectively defeat eavesdropping attacks with imperfect CSI and even without CSI of legitimate channels. In particular, we first develop an autoencoder-based communication architecture with FJ, namely, AEFJ, to jointly maximize the secrecy rate and minimize the block error rate (BLER) at the receiver without requiring perfect CSI of the legitimate channels. In addition, to deal with the case without CSI, we leverage the mutual information neural estimation (MINE) concept and design a MINE-based FJ scheme that can achieve comparable security performance to the conventional FJ methods that require perfect CSI. Extensive simulations in a multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) system demonstrate that our proposed solution can effectively deal with eavesdropping attacks in various settings. Moreover, the proposed framework can seamlessly integrate MIMO security and detection tasks into a unified end-to-end learning process. This integrated approach can significantly maximize the throughput and minimize the BLER, offering a good solution for enhancing communication security in wireless communication systems.

The success of artificial intelligence (AI) in multiple disciplines and vertical domains in recent years has promoted the evolution of mobile networking and the future Internet toward an AI-integrated Internet of Things (IoT) era. Nevertheless, most AI techniques rely on data generated by physical devices (e.g., mobile devices and network nodes) or specific applications (e.g., fitness trackers and mobile gaming). Therefore, generative AI (GAI), a.k.a. AI-generated content (AIGC), has emerged as a powerful AI paradigm; thanks to its ability to efficiently learn complex data distributions and generate synthetic data to represent the original data in various forms. This impressive feature is projected to transform the management of mobile networking and diversify the current services and applications provided. On this basis, this work presents a concise tutorial on the role of GAIs in mobile and wireless networking. In particular, this survey first provides the fundamentals of GAI and representative GAI models, serving as an essential preliminary to the understanding of GAI’s applications in mobile and wireless networking. Then, this work provides a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art studies and GAI applications in network management, wireless security, semantic communication, and lessons learned from the open literature. Finally, this work summarizes the current research on GAI for mobile and wireless networking by outlining important challenges that need to be resolved to facilitate the development and applicability of GAI in this edge-cutting area.

This article introduces a novel lightweight framework using ambient backscattering communications to counter eavesdroppers. In particular, our framework divides an original message into two parts. The first part, i.e., the active-transmit message, is transmitted by the transmitter using conventional RF signals. Simultaneously, the second part, i.e., the backscatter message, is transmitted by an ambient backscatter tag that backscatters upon the active signals emitted by the transmitter. Notably, the backscatter tag does not generate its own signal, making it difficult for an eavesdropper to detect the backscattered signals unless they have prior knowledge of the system. Here, we assume that without decoding/knowing the backscatter message, the eavesdropper is unable to decode the original message. Even in scenarios where the eavesdropper can capture both messages, reconstructing the original message is a complex task without understanding the intricacies of the message-splitting mechanism. A challenge in our proposed framework is to effectively decode the backscattered signals at the receiver, often accomplished using the maximum likelihood (MLK) approach. However, such a method may require a complex mathematical model together with perfect channel state information (CSI). To address this issue, we develop a novel deep meta-learning-based signal detector that can not only effectively decode the weak backscattered signals without requiring perfect CSI but also quickly adapt to a new wireless environment with very little knowledge. Simulation results show that our proposed learning approach, without requiring perfect CSI and complex mathematical model, can achieve a bit error ratio close to that of the MLK-based approach. They also clearly show the efficiency of the proposed approach in dealing with eavesdropping attacks and the lack of training data for deep learning models in practical scenarios.

End-to-End (E2E) learning-based concept has been recently introduced to jointly optimize both the transmitter and the receiver in wireless communication systems. Unfortunately, this E2E learning architecture requires a prior differentiable channel model to jointly train the deep neural networks (DNNs) at the transceivers, which is hardly obtained in practice. This paper aims to solve this issue by developing a deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG)-based framework. In particular, the proposed solution uses the loss value of the receiver DNN as the reward to train the transmitter DNN. The simulation results then show that our proposed solution can jointly train the transmitter and the receiver without requiring the prior channel model. In addition, we demonstrate that the proposed DDPG-based solution can achieve better detection performance compared to the state-of-the-art solutions.

Unlike conventional anti-eavesdropping methods that always require additional energy or computing resources (e.g., in friendly jamming and cryptography-based solutions), this work proposes a novel anti-eavesdropping solution that comes with mostly no extra power nor computing resource requirement. This is achieved by leveraging the ambient backscatter technology in which secret information can be transmitted by backscattering it over ambient radio signals. Specifically, the original message at the transmitter is first encoded into two parts: (i) active transmit message and (ii) backscatter message. The active transmit message is then transmitted by using the conventional wireless transmission method while the backscatter message is transmitted by backscattering it on the active transmit signals via an ambient backscatter tag. As the backscatter tag does not generate any active RF signals, it is intractable for the eavesdropper to detect the backscatter message. Therefore, secret information, e.g., a secret key for decryption, can be carried by the backscattered message, making the adversary unable to decode the original message. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed solution can significantly enhance security protection for communication systems.

Unmanned-aerial-vehicle (UAV)-assisted data collection has been emerging as a prominent application due to its flexibility, mobility, and low operational cost. However, under the dynamic and uncertainty of Internet of Things data collection and energy replenishment processes, optimizing the performance for UAV collectors is a very challenging task. Thus, this article introduces a novel framework that jointly optimizes the flying speed and energy replenishment for each UAV to significantly improve the overall system performance (e.g., data collection and energy usage efficiency). Specifically, we first develop a Markov decision process to help the UAV automatically and dynamically make optimal decisions under the dynamics and uncertainties of the environment. Although traditional reinforcement learning algorithms, such as$Q$-learning and deep$Q$-learning, can help the UAV to obtain the optimal policy, they often take a long time to converge and require high computational complexity. Therefore, it is impractical to deploy these conventional methods on UAVs with limited computing capacity and energy resource. To that end, we develop advanced transfer learning techniques that allow UAVs to “share” and “transfer” learning knowledge, thereby reducing the learning time as well as significantly improving learning quality. Extensive simulations demonstrate that our proposed solution can improve the average data collection performance of the system up to 200% and reduce the convergence time up to 50% compared with those of conventional methods.

In heterogeneous networks (HetNets), the overlap of small cells and the macro cell causes severe cross-tier interference. Although there exist some approaches to address this problem, they usually require global channel state information, which is hard to obtain in practice, and get the sub-optimal power allocation policy with high computational complexity. To overcome these limitations, we propose a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) based power control scheme for the HetNet, where each access point makes power control decisions independently based on local information. To promote cooperation among agents, we develop a penalty-based Q learning (PQL) algorithm for MADRL systems. By introducing regularization terms in the loss function, each agent tends to choose an experienced action with high reward when revisiting a state, and thus the policy updating speed slows down. In this way, an agent’s policy can be learned by other agents more easily, resulting in a more efficient collaboration process. We then implement the proposed PQL in the considered HetNet and compare it with other distributed-training-and-execution (DTE) algorithms. Simulation results show that our proposed PQL can learn the desired power control policy from a dynamic environment where the locations of users change episodically and outperform existing DTE MADRL algorithms.

Unlike theoretical analysis of distributed learning (DL) in the literature, DL over wireless edge networks faces the inherent dynamics/uncertainty of wireless connections and edge nodes, making DL less efficient or even inapplicable under the highly dynamic wireless edge networks. This article addresses these problems by leveraging recent advances in coded computing and the deep dueling neural network architecture. By introducing coded structures/redundancy, a distributed learning task can be completed without waiting for straggling nodes. Unlike conventional coded computing that only optimizes the code structure, coded distributed learning over the wireless edge also requires to optimize the selection/scheduling of wireless edge nodes with heterogeneous connections, computing capability, and straggling effects. However, even neglecting the aforementioned dynamics/uncertainty, the resulting joint optimization of coding and scheduling to minimize the distributed learning time turns out to be NP-hard. To tackle this and to account for the dynamics and uncertainty of wireless connections and edge nodes, we reformulate the problem as a Markov Decision Process and design a novel deep reinforcement learning algorithm that employs the deep dueling neural network architecture to find the jointly optimal coding scheme and the best set of edge nodes for different learning tasks without explicit information about the wireless environment and edge nodes’ straggling parameters. Simulations show that the proposed framework reduces the average learning delay in wireless edge computing up to 66% compared with other DL approaches. The jointly optimal framework in this article is also applicable to any distributed learning scheme with heterogeneous and uncertain computing nodes.

With outstanding features, machine learning (ML) has become the backbone of numerous applications in wireless networks. However, the conventional ML approaches face many challenges in practical implementation, such as the lack of labeled data, the constantly changing wireless environments, the long training process, and the limited capacity of wireless devices. These challenges, if not addressed, can impede the effectiveness and applicability of ML in wireless networks. To address these problems, transfer learning (TL) has recently emerged to be a promising solution. The core idea of TL is to leverage and synthesize distilled knowledge from similar tasks and valuable experiences accumulated from the past to facilitate the learning of new problems. By doing so, TL techniques can reduce the dependence on labeled data, improve the learning speed, and enhance the ML methods’ robustness to different wireless environments. This article aims to provide a comprehensive survey on the applications of TL in wireless networks. Particularly, we first provide an overview of TL, including formal definitions, classification, and various types of TL techniques. We then discuss diverse TL approaches proposed to address emerging issues in wireless networks. The issues include spectrum management, signal recognition, security, caching, localization, and human activity recognition, which are all important to next-generation networks, such as 5G and beyond. Finally, we highlight important challenges, open issues, and future research directions of TL in future wireless networks.

This paper develops a novel framework to defeat a super-reactive jammer, one of the most difficult jamming attacks to deal with in practice. Specifically, the jammer has an unlimited power budget and is equipped with the self-interference suppression capability to simultaneously attack and listen to the transmitter’s activities. Consequently, dealing with super-reactive jammers is very challenging. Thus, we introduce a smart deception mechanism to attract the jammer to continuously attack the channel and then leverage jamming signals to transmit data based on the ambient backscatter communication technology. To detect the backscattered signals, the maximum likelihood detector can be adopted. However, this method is notorious for its high computational complexity and requires the model of the current propagation environment as well as channel state information. Hence, we propose a deep learning-based detector that can dynamically adapt to any channels and noise distributions. With a Long Short-Term Memory network, our detector can learn the received signals’ dependencies to achieve a performance close to that of the optimal maximum likelihood detector. Through simulation and theoretical results, we demonstrate that with our approaches, the more power the jammer uses to attack the channel, the better bit error rate performance the transmitter can achieve.

This paper proposes a novel framework that can effectively address key challenges for the development of distributed learning over wireless edge networks. In particular, we first introduce a highly effective distributed learning model leveraging the most recent advanced coded distributed computing algorithm together with collaborative computing resources from wireless edge nodes to securely and effectively execute learning tasks. To minimize the average delay of learning tasks, the coding and scheduling policies must be jointly optimized. However, determining the optimal coding scheme together with the optimal edge nodes for different learning tasks is NP-hard due to the dynamics and uncertainty of the wireless environment and straggling problems at the computing nodes. Thus, we develop a highly effective approach utilizing advances of both reinforcement learning algorithms and the dueling network architecture to quickly find the optimal coding scheme together with the best edge nodes for different learning tasks without requiring completed information about the surrounding environment and straggling parameters in advance. Through extensive simulation results, we show that our proposed framework can reduce the average delay for the whole system up to 66% compared with other conventional learning and optimization approaches.

Conventional anti-jamming solutions like frequency hopping and rate adaptation that are more suitable for proactive jammers are not effective in dealing with reactive jammers. These advanced jammers with recent advances in signal detection can discern the activities of legitimate radios then attack them as soon as the transmission is detected. To combat this type of jammer, we develop an intelligent deception strategy in which the transmitter generates "fake" transmissions to attract the jammer. After that, the transmitter can either harvest energy from the jamming signals or backscatter the jamming signals to transmit data. As such, we can leverage jamming signals to improve the average throughput and reduce the packet loss. To effectively learn from and adapt to the dynamic and uncertainty of jamming attacks, we develop a Markov decision process (MDP) that can dynamically construct two decision epochs in each time slot to capture the special properties of our proposed deception mechanism. The Q-learning algorithm then can be adopted to find the optimal deception strategy for the transmitter. Nevertheless, due to very-slow convergence rates, conventional Q-learning algorithms may not be effective in dealing with smart jamming attacks. We thus develop an advanced deep reinforcement learning model based on deep dueling architecture to quickly obtain the optimal defense policy. Simulation results show that the proposed framework can improve the system throughput up to 173% and reduce the packet loss by 42% compared with other anti-jamming strategies that are not equipped with the proposed deception mechanism.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been emerging as an effective solution for IoT data collection networks thanks to their outstanding flexibility, mobility, and low operation costs. However, due to the limited energy and uncertainty from the data collection process, speed control is one of the most important factors while optimizing the energy usage efficiency and performance for UAV collectors. This work aims to develop a novel autonomous speed control approach to address this issue. To that end, we first formulate the dynamic speed control task of a UAV as a Markov decision process taking into account its energy status and location. In this way, the Q-learning algorithm can be adopted to obtain the optimal speed control policy for the UAV. To further improve the system performance, we develop a highly-effective deep dueling double Q-learning algorithm utilizing outstanding features of the deep neural networks as well as advanced dueling architecture to quickly stabilize the learning process and obtain the optimal policy. Through simulations, we show that our proposed solution can achieve up to 40% greater performance, i.e., an average throughput of the system, compared with other conventional methods. Importantly, the simulation results also reveal significant impacts of UAV's energy and charging time on the system performance.

In intelligent transportation systems (ITS), vehicles are expected to feature with advanced applications and services which demand ultra-high data rates and low-latency communications. For that, the millimeter wave (mmWave) communication has been emerging as a very promising solution. However, incorporating the mmWave into ITS is particularly challenging due to the high mobility of vehicles and the inherent sensitivity of mmWave beams to dynamic blockages. This article addresses these problems by developing an optimal beam association framework for mmWave vehicular networks under high mobility. Specifically, we use the semi-Markov decision process to capture the dynamics and uncertainty of the environment. The Q-learning algorithm is then often used to find the optimal policy. However, Q-learning is notorious for its slow-convergence. Instead of adopting deep reinforcement learning structures (like most works in the literature), we leverage the fact that there are usually multiple vehicles on the road to speed up the learning process. To that end, we develop a lightweight yet very effective parallel Q-learning algorithm to quickly obtain the optimal policy by simultaneously learning from various vehicles. Extensive simulations demonstrate that our proposed solution can increase the data rate by 47% and reduce the disconnection probability by 29% compared to other solutions.

In this paper, we introduce DeepFake, a novel deep reinforcement learning-based deception strategy to deal with reactive jamming attacks. In particular, for a smart and reactive jamming attack, the jammer is able to sense the channel and attack the channel if it detects communications from the legitimate transmitter. To deal with such attacks, we propose an intelligent deception strategy which allows the legitimate transmitter to transmit “fake” signals to attract the jammer. Then, if the jammer attacks the channel, the transmitter can leverage the strong jamming signals to transmit data by using ambient backscatter communication technology or harvest energy from the strong jamming signals for future use. By doing so, we can not only undermine the attack ability of the jammer, but also utilize jamming signals to improve the system performance. To effectively learn from and adapt to the dynamic and uncertainty of jamming attacks, we develop a novel deep reinforcement learning algorithm using the deep dueling neural network architecture to obtain the optimal policy with thousand times faster than those of the conventional reinforcement algorithms. Extensive simulation results reveal that our proposed DeepFake framework is superior to other anti-jamming strategies in terms of throughput, packet loss, and learning rate.

This article studies the strategic interactions between an IoT service provider (IoTSP) which consists of heterogeneous IoT devices and its energy service provider (ESP). To that end, we propose an economic framework using the Stackelberg game to maximize the network throughput and energy efficiency of both the IoTSP and ESP. To obtain the Stackelberg equilibrium (SE), we apply a backward induction technique which first derives a closed-form solution for the ESP (follower). Then, to tackle the non-convex optimization problem for the IoTSP (leader), we leverage theblock coordinate descentandconvex-concave proceduretechniques to design two partitioning schemes (i.e., partial adjustment (PA) and joint adjustment (JA)) to find the optimal energy price and service time that constitute local SEs. Numerical results reveal that by jointly optimizing the energy trading and time allocation for IoT devices, one can achieve significant improvements in terms of the IoTSP’s profit compared with those of conventional transmission methods (up to 38.7 folds). Different tradeoffs between the ESP’s and IoTSP’s profits and complexities of the PA/JA schemes can also be numerically tuned. Simulations also show that the obtained local SEs approach the optimal social welfare when the benefit per transmitted bit exceeds a given threshold.

This paper develops a beam association framework for mm Wave vehicular networks to improve the system performance in terms of handover, disconnection time, and data rate under the high mobility of vehicles. In particular, we recruit the semi Markov decision process to capture the uncertainty and dynamic of the environment such as locations of beams, received signal strength indicator profiles, velocities, and blockages. Instead of adopting complex deep learning structures such as deep dueling and double deep Q-learning, we develop a lightweight yet very effective parallel Q-learning algorithm to quickly derive the optimal beam association policy by simultaneously learning from various vehicles on the road. Through extensive simulation results, we demonstrate that the proposed framework can reduce the average disconnection time by 33% and increase the data rate by 60% compared to other solutions. We also observed that the proposed parallel Q-learning algorithm converges much faster to the optimal solution than state-of-the-art deep-learning based algorithms.

In this paper, an economic model is proposed to jointly optimize profits for participants in a heterogeneous IoT wireless-powered backscatter communication network. In the network under considerations, a power beacon and IoT devices (with various communication types and energy constraints) are assumed to belong to different service providers, i.e., energy service provider (ESP) and IoT service provider (ISP), respectively. To jointly maximize the utility for both service providers in terms of energy efficiency and network throughput, a Stackelberg game model is proposed to study the strategic interaction between the ISP and ESP. In particular, the ISP first evaluates its benefits from providing IoT services to its customers and then sends its requested price together with the service time to the ESP. Based on the request from the ISP, the ESP offers an optimized transmission power that maximizes its utility while meeting energy demands of the ISP. To study the Stackelberg equilibrium, we first obtain a closed-form solution for the ESP and propose a low-complexity iterative method based on block coordinate descent (BCD) to address the non-convex optimization problem for the ISP. Through simulation results, we show that our approach can significantly improve the profits for both providers compared with those of conventional transmission methods, e.g., bistatic backscatter and harvest-then-transmit communication methods.

Among all wireless jammers, dealing with reactive ones is most challenging. This kind of jammer attacks the channel whenever it detects transmission from legitimate radios. With recent advances in self-interference suppression or in-band full-duplex radios, a reactive jammer can jam and simultaneously sense/discern/detect the legitimate transmission. Such a jammer is referred to as a smart reactive jammer. However, all existing solutions, e.g., frequency hopping and rate adaptation, cannot effectively deal with this type of jammer. This is because a smart reactive jammer with sufficient power budget can theoretically jam most, if not all, frequency channels at sufficiently high power. This work proposes to augment the transmitter with an ambient backscatter tag. Specifically, when the jammer attacks the channel, the transmitter deceives it by continuing to transmit data to attract the jammer while the tag backscatters data based on both the jamming signals and active signals from the jammer and transmitter, respectively. However, backscattering signals from multiple radio sources results in a high bit error rate (BER). Thus, we propose to use multiple antennas at the receiver. The theoretical analysis and simulation results show that by using multiple antennas at the receiver, the BER and hence the throughput of the system can be significantly improved. More importantly, we demonstrate that with our proposed solutions, the average throughput increases and the BER decreases when the jammer attacks with higher power levels. We believe that this is the first anti-jamming solution that can cope effectively with a high- or even unlimited-power jammers.

Practical and efficient network slicing often faces real-time dynamics of network resources and uncertain customer demands. This work provides an optimal and fast resource slicing solution under such dynamics by leveraging the latest advances in deep learning. Specifically, we first introduce a novel system model which allows the network provider to effectively allocate its combinatorial resources, i.e., spectrum, computing, and storage, to various classes of users. To allocate resources to users while taking into account the dynamic demands of users and resources constraints of the network provider, we employ a semi-Markov decision process framework. To obtain the optimal resource allocation policy for the network provider without requiring environment parameters, e.g., uncertain service time and resource demands, a Q-learning algorithm is adopted. Although this algorithm can maximize the revenue of the network provider, its convergence to the optimal policy is particularly slow, especially for problems with large state/action spaces. To overcome this challenge, we propose a novel approach using an advanced deep Q-learning technique, called deep dueling that can achieve the optimal policy at few thousand times faster than that of the conventional Q-learning algorithm. Simulation results show that our proposed framework can improve the long-term average return of the network provider up to 40% compared with other current approaches.

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to jointly address energy management and network throughput maximization problems for heterogeneous IoT low-power wireless communication networks. In particular, we consider a low-power communication network in which the IoT devices can harvest energy from a dedicated RF energy source to support their transmissions or backscatter the signals of the RF energy source to transmit information to the gateway. Different IoT devices may have dissimilar hardware configurations, and thus they may have various communications types and energy requirements. In addition, the RF energy source may have a limited energy supply source which needs to be minimized. Thus, to maximize the network throughput, we need to jointly optimize energy usage and operation time for the IoT devices under different energy demands and communication constraints. However, this optimization problem is non-convex due to the strong relation between energy supplied by the RF energy source and the IoT communication time, and thus obtaining the optimal solution is intractable. To address this problem, we study the relation between energy supply and communication time, and then transform the non-convex optimization problem to an equivalent convex-optimization problem which can achieve the optimal solution. Through simulation results, we show that our solution can achieve greater network throughputs (up to five times) than those of other conventional methods, e.g., TDMA. In addition, the simulation results also reveal some important information in controlling energy supply and managing low-power IoT devices in heterogeneous wireless communication networks.

Effective network slicing requires an infrastructure/network provider to deal with the uncertain demands and real-time dynamics of the network resource requests. Another challenge is the combinatorial optimization of numerous resources, e.g., radio, computing, and storage. This paper develops an optimal and fast real-time resource slicing framework that maximizes the long-term return of the network provider while taking into account the uncertainty of resource demands from tenants. Specifically, we first propose a novel system model that enables the network provider to effectively slice various types of resources to different classes of users under separate virtual slices. We then capture the real-time arrival of slice requests by a semi-Markov decision process. To obtain the optimal resource allocation policy under the dynamics of slicing requests, e.g., uncertain service time and resource demands, a Q-learning algorithm is often adopted in the literature. However, such an algorithm is notorious for its slow convergence, especially for problems with large state/action spaces. This makes Q-learning practically inapplicable to our case, in which multiple resources are simultaneously optimized. To tackle it, we propose a novel network slicing approach with an advanced deep learning architecture, called deep dueling, that attains the optimal average reward much faster than the conventional Q-learning algorithm. This property is especially desirable to cope with the real-time resource requests and the dynamic demands of the users. Extensive simulations show that the proposed framework yields up to 40% higher long-term average return while being few thousand times faster, compared with the state-of-the-art network slicing approaches.

With conventional anti-jamming solutions like frequency hopping or spread spectrum, legitimate transceivers often tend to “escape” or “hide” themselves from jammers. These reactive anti-jamming approaches are constrained by the lack of timely knowledge of jamming attacks (especially from smart jammers). Bringing together the latest advances in neural network architectures and ambient backscattering communications, this work allows wireless nodes to effectively “face” the jammer (instead of escaping) by first learning its jamming strategy, then adapting the rate or transmitting information right on the jamming signals (i.e., backscattering modulated information on the jamming signals). Specifically, to deal with unknown jamming attacks (e.g., jamming strategies, jamming power levels, and jamming capability), existing work often relies on reinforcement learning algorithms, e.g., Q -learning. However, the Q -learning algorithm is notorious for its slow convergence to the optimal policy, especially when the system state and action spaces are large. This makes the Q -learning algorithm pragmatically inapplicable. To overcome this problem, we design a novel deep reinforcement learning algorithm using the recent dueling neural network architecture. Our proposed algorithm allows the transmitter to effectively learn about the jammer and attain the optimal countermeasures (e.g., adapt the transmission rate or backscatter or harvest energy or stay idle) thousand times faster than that of the conventional Q -learning algorithm. Through extensive simulation results, we show that our design (using ambient backscattering and the deep dueling neural network architecture) can improve the average throughput (under smart and reactive jamming attacks) by up to 426% and reduce the packet loss by 24%. By augmenting the ambient backscattering capability on devices and using our algorithm, it is interesting to observe that the (successful) transmission rate increases with the jamming power. Our proposed solution can find its applications in both civil (e.g., ultra-reliable and low-latency communications or URLLC) and military scenarios (to combat both inadvertent and deliberate jamming).

Ambient backscatter has been introduced with a wide range of applications for low power wireless communications. In this paper, we propose an optimal and low-complexity dynamic spectrum access framework for the RF-powered ambient backscatter system. In this system, the secondary transmitter not only harvests energy from ambient signals but also reflects these signals to transmit its modulated data to the receiver. Under the dynamics of the ambient signals, we first adopt the Markov decision process (MDP) framework to obtain the optimal policy for the secondary transmitter, aiming to maximize the system throughput. However, the MDP-based optimization requires complete knowledge of environment parameters, e.g., the probability of a channel to be idle and the probability of a successful packet transmission, that may not be practical to obtain. To cope with such incomplete knowledge of the environment, we develop a low-complexity online reinforcement learning algorithm that allows the secondary transmitter to “learn” from its decisions and then attain the optimal policy. Simulation results show that the proposed learning algorithm not only efficiently deals with the dynamics of the environment but also improves the average throughput up to 50% and reduces the blocking probability and delay up to 80% compared with conventional methods.

For an RF-powered cognitive radio network with ambient backscattering capability, while the primary channel is busy, the RF-powered secondary user (RSU) can either backscatter the primary signal to transmit its own data or harvest energy from the primary signal (and store in its battery). The harvested energy then can be used to transmit data when the primary channel becomes idle. To maximize the throughput for the secondary system, it is critical for the RSU to decide when to backscatter and when to harvest energy. This optimal decision has to account for the dynamics of the primary channel, energy storage capability, and data to be sent. To tackle that problem, we propose a Markov decision process (MDP)-based framework to optimize RSU's decisions based on its current states, e.g., energy, data as well as the primary channel state. As the state information may not be readily available at the RSU, we then design a low-complexity online reinforcement learning algorithm that guides the RSU to find the optimal solution without requiring prior-and complete-information from the environment. The extensive simulation results then clearly show that the proposed solution achieves higher throughputs, i.e., up to 50%, than that of conventional methods.

We propose a novel edge computing network architecture that enables edge nodes to cooperate in sharing computing and radio resources to minimize the total energy consumption of mobile users while meeting their delay requirements. To find the optimal task offloading decisions for mobile users, we first formulate the joint task offloading and resource allocation optimization problem as a mixed integer non-linear programming (MINLP). The optimization involves both binary (offloading decisions) and real variables (resource allocations), making it an NP-hard and computational intractable problem. To circumvent, we relax the binary decision variables to transform the MINLP to a relaxed optimization problem with real variables. After proving that the relaxed problem is a convex one, we propose two solutions namely ROP and IBBA. ROP is adopted from the interior point method and IBBA is developed from the branch and bound algorithm. Through the numerical results, we show that our proposed approaches allow minimizing the total energy consumption and meet all delay requirements for mobile users.