Driven by the demand for high transmission efficiency in 6G networks, semantic communication has attracted significant interest recently. While most existing works focus on optimizing semantic communication system design to enhance end-to-end transmission performance, they often overlook the integration of quality of service (QoS) requirements. To address this gap, we employ the Alpha-Beta-Gamma (ABG) formula to empirically approximate the relationship between end-to-end transmission quality and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Based on this model, we first design an optimal beamforming scheme that minimizes transmission power while ensuring real-time QoS guarantees. Furthermore, to account for inevitable channel state information (CSI) estimation errors in practical scenarios, we propose robust beamforming design schemes under QoS constraints for both bounded and unbounded CSI estimation errors. These optimization problems are efficiently solved using semidefinite relaxation (SDR),S-lemma, and Bernstein-type inequalities. Finally, experimental results demonstrate that our proposed optimal beamforming design scheme outperforms conventional beamforming methods, while the robust beamforming schemes achieve superior performance in handling CSI estimation errors compared to existing computational approaches.

Wireless sensing has recently found widespread applications in diverse environments, including homes, offices, and public spaces. By analyzing patterns in channel state information (CSI), it is possible to infer human actions for tasks such as person identification, gesture recognition, and fall detection. However, CSI is highly sensitive to environmental changes, where even minor alterations can significantly distort the CSI patterns. This sensitivity often leads to performance degradation or outright failure when applying wireless sensing models trained in one environment to another. To address this challenge, Domain Alignment Learning (DAL) has been widely adopted for cross-domain classification tasks, as it focuses on aligning the global distributions of the source and target domains in feature space. Despite its popularity, DAL often neglects inter-category relationships, which can lead to misalignment between categories across domains, even when global alignment is achieved. To overcome these limitations, we propose K-Nearest Neighbors Maximum Mean Discrepancy (KNN-MMD), a novel few-shot method for cross-domain wireless sensing. Our approach begins by constructing a “help set” using K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) from the target domain, enabling local alignment between the source and target domains within each category using Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD). Additionally, we address a key instability issue commonly observed in cross-domain methods, where model performance fluctuates sharply between epochs. Further, most existing methods struggle to determine an optimal stopping point during training due to the absence of labeled data from the target domain. Our method resolves this by excluding the support set from the target domain during training and employing it as a validation set to determine the stopping criterion. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method across several cross-domain Wi-Fi sensing tasks, including gesture recognition, person identification, fall detection, and action recognition, using both a public dataset and a self-collected dataset. In a one-shot scenario, our method achieves accuracy rates of 93.26%, 81.84%, 77.62%, and 75.30% for the respective tasks. The dataset and code are publicly available athttps://github.com/RS2002/KNN-MMD.

Channel state information (CSI) is a fundamental component in both wireless communication and sensing systems, enabling critical functions such as radio resource optimization and environmental perception. In wireless sensing, data scarcity and packet loss hinder efficient model training, while in wireless communication, high-dimensional CSI matrices and short coherent times caused by high mobility present challenges in CSI estimation. To address these issues, we propose a unified framework named CSI-BERT2 for CSI prediction and classification tasks, built on our previous work CSI-BERT, which adapts BERT to capture the complex relationships among CSI sequences through a bidirectional self-attention mechanism. We introduce a two-stage training method that first uses a mask language model (MLM) to enable the model to learn general feature extraction from scarce datasets in an unsupervised manner, followed by fine-tuning for specific downstream tasks. Specifically, we extend MLM into a mask prediction model (MPM), which efficiently addresses the CSI prediction task. To further enhance the representation capacity of CSI data, we modify the structure of the original CSI-BERT. We introduce an adaptive re-weighting layer (ARL) to enhance subcarrier representation and a multi-layer perceptron (MLP)-based temporal embedding module to mitigate temporal information loss problem inherent in the original Transformer. Extensive experiments on both real-world collected and simulated datasets demonstrate that CSI-BERT2 achieves state-of-the-art performance across all tasks. Our results further show that CSI-BERT2 generalizes effectively across varying sampling rates and robustly handles discontinuous CSI sequences caused by packet loss-challenges that conventional methods fail to address. The dataset and code are publicly available athttps://github.com/RS2002/CSI-BERT2.

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence and the dramatic growth of communication services, the sixth-generation (6G) wireless network needs to handle communication tasks more flexibly and efficiently, significantly exacerbating the challenge of resource allocation. For the access network scenarios in 6G networks, the existing single-layer reinforcement learning resource allocation algorithms are hard to satisfy the diverse demands of users due to the complex and variable state space. Therefore, we propose a reinforcement learning-based two-timescale resource allocation scheme, aiming to jointly enhance the quality of service and system resource utilization. The proposed method comprises an upper-layer controller that allocates network resources to lower-layer controllers on a large time scale. Then, lower-layer controllers refine the resources based on user service types on a smaller time scale. To implement the proposed two-timescale allocation scheme, we propose a two-layer reinforcement learning framework consisting of a deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) and a dueling deep Q network (Dueling-DQN). Furthermore, recognizing that coupling multiple reinforcement learning processes may slow down algorithm convergence, we employ asynchronous training, transfer learning, and prediction-based action space simplification to expedite the model’s convergence speed. Finally, we build a prototyping network to verify the performance of the proposed small-timescale and the large-timescale allocation algorithms. Our proposed scheme demonstrates significant improvements in both resource utilization and quality of service compared to existing schemes.

Reconstructing accurate radio maps is crucial for optimizing wireless network performance and managing spectrum efficiently. In real-world scenarios, radio map data, often sparse and incompletely labelled, poses significant challenges to traditional learning techniques. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become instrumental in efficiently reconstructing radio maps (RMR) in such environments by effectively encoding correlations in unstructured data. Existing GNN-based methods, however, are limited as they typically consider only single factors like location, environment, or transmitter characteristics during correlation encoding. To overcome this limitation, we introduce RadioGAT, a propagation model-based approach that comprehensively integrates these factors. We further utilize Graph Attention Networks to enable semi-supervised learning, enhancing the accuracy of radio map reconstruction. Our experimental results demonstrate the superiority and robustness of RadioGAT, particularly at low sampling rates, and highlight the importance of selecting appropriate correlation encoding methods based on the data availability for RMR.

In this article, we exploit the positioning results for communication, and propose an integrated positioning and communication (IPAC) framework for terahertz (THz) massive multi-input-multioutput (MIMO) networks. Specifically, we derive an explicit expression for the Cramér-Rao bound (CRB), which is used to evaluate the positioning performance. Furthermore, based on the established relationship between positioning and communication, we propose a joint beam tracking and power allocation scheme for mobile users in THz massive MIMO networks, which minimizes the positioning error under both the data transmission outage constraint and total power constraints. Unfortunately, the joint beam tracking and power allocation optimization problem is nonconvex, and intractable due to the outage constraint. To address this challenge, we decompose the nonconvex problem into a beam tracking subproblem and a power allocation subproblem, and propose a proximal policy optimization beam tracking (PPO-BT) algorithm for the beam tracking subproblem and a robust power allocation (RPA) algorithm for the power allocation subproblem. Furthermore, we extend the proposed THz IPAC scheme to more practical 3-D scenarios. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed THz IPAC framework can satisfy positioning and communication requirements at the same time, and our proposed methods outperform existing methods.

In this article, we propose a digital semantic feature division multiple access (SFDMA) paradigm in multiuser broadcast (broadcast communication (BC)) networks for the inference and the image reconstruction tasks. In this SFDMA scheme, the multiuser semantic information is encoded into discrete approximately orthogonal representations, and the encoded semantic features of multiple users can be simultaneously transmitted in the same time-frequency resource. Specifically, for inference tasks, we design a SFDMA digital BC network based on robust information bottleneck (RIB), which can achieve a tradeoff between inference performance, data compression and multiuser interference. Moreover, for image reconstruction tasks, we develop a SFDMA digital BC network by utilizing a Swin Transformer, which significantly reduces multiuser interference. More importantly, SFDMA can protect the privacy of users’ semantic information, in which each receiver can only decode its own semantic information. Furthermore, we establish a relationship between performance and signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR), which is fitted by an Alpha-Beta–Gamma (ABG) function. Furthermore, an optimal power allocation method is developed for the inference and reconstruction tasks. Extensive simulations verify the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed SFDMA scheme.

In recent years, Wi-Fi sensing has garnered significant attention due to its numerous benefits, such as privacy protection, low cost, and penetration ability. Extensive research has been conducted in this field, focusing on areas, such as gesture recognition, people identification, and fall detection. However, many data-driven methods encounter challenges related to domain shift, where the model fails to perform well in environments different from the training data. One major factor contributing to this issue is the limited availability of Wi-Fi sensing datasets, which makes models learn excessive irrelevant information and over-fit to the training set. Unfortunately, collecting large-scale Wi-Fi sensing datasets across diverse scenarios is a challenging task. To address this problem, we propose CrossFi, a siamese network-based approach that excels in both in-domain scenario and cross-domain scenario, including few-shot, zero-shot scenarios, and even works in few-shot new-class scenario where testing set contains new categories. The core component of CrossFi is a sample-similarity calculation network called CSi-Net, which improves the structure of the siamese network by using an attention mechanism to capture similarity information, instead of simply calculating the distance or cosine similarity. Based on it, we develop an extra Weight-Net that can generate a template for each class, so that our CrossFi can work in different scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that our CrossFi achieves state-of-the-art performance across various scenarios. In gesture recognition task, our CrossFi achieves an accuracy of 98.17% in in-domain scenario, 91.72% in one-shot cross-domain scenario, 64.81% in zero-shot cross-domain scenario, and 84.75% in one-shot new-class scenario. The code for our model is publicly available athttps://github.com/RS2002/CrossFi.

Due to the black-box characteristics of deep learning based semantic encoders and decoders, finding a tractable method for the performance analysis of semantic communications is a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose an Alpha-Beta-Gamma (ABG) formula to model the relationship between the end-to-end measurement and SNR, which can be applied for both image reconstruction tasks and inference tasks. Specifically, for image reconstruction tasks, the proposed ABG formula can well fit the commonly used DL networks, such as SCUNet, and Vision Transformer, for semantic encoding with the multi scale-structural similarity index measure (MS-SSIM) measurement. Furthermore, we find that the upper bound of the MS-SSIM depends on the number of quantized output bits of semantic encoders, and we also propose a closed-form expression to fit the relationship between the MS-SSIM and quantized output bits. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first theoretical expression between end-to-end performance metrics and SNR for semantic communications. Based on the proposed ABG formula, we investigate an adaptive power control scheme for semantic communications over random fading channels, which can effectively guarantee quality of service (QoS) for semantic communications, and then design the optimal power allocation scheme to maximize the energy efficiency of the semantic communication system. Furthermore, by exploiting the bisection algorithm, we develop the power allocation scheme to maximize the minimum QoS of multiple users for OFDMA downlink semantic communication Extensive simulations verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed ABG formula and power allocation schemes.

In this article, we consider a practical indoor 3-D mobile online visible light positioning (VLP) system, where the orientation of the user equipment (UE) is arbitrary. Based on the received signal strength (RSS) of multiple photodetectors (PDs), we formulate the 3-D VLP problem as a nonlinear least squares (NLSs) optimization problem, and then propose a sequential quadratic programming (SQP) positioning algorithm to efficiently calculate UE’s location. To obtain more accurate positioning solutions, we further leverage the advantages of deep learning and develop a stochastic gradient descent (SGD)-based VLP algorithm, and achieve an average positioning error of 1.77 cm, which significantly outperforms existing RSS VLP localization methods. Moreover, we design a 3-D mobile online VLP system prototype by using a portable RaspberryPi 4 Model B as the positioning signal processor and data memory, and establish the first publicly available 3-D VLP measured data set, including both RSS and orientation. The proposed positioning schemes are implemented and evaluated via the designed prototype system, which can achieve centimeter-level positioning accuracy (below 1 cm in certain condition).

Multi-band radiomap reconstruction (MB-RMR) is a key component in wireless communications for tasks such as spectrum management and network planning. However, traditional machine-learning-based MB-RMR methods, which rely heavily on simulated data or complete structured ground truth, face significant deployment challenges. These challenges stem from the differences between simulated and actual data, as well as the scarcity of real-world measurements. To address these challenges, our study presents RadioGAT, a novel framework based on Graph Attention Network (GAT) tailored for MB-RMR within a single area, eliminating the need for multi-region datasets. RadioGAT innovatively merges model-based spatial-spectral correlation encoding with data-driven radiomap generalization, thus minimizing the reliance on extensive data sources. The framework begins by transforming sparse multi-band data into a graph structure through an innovative encoding strategy that leverages radio propagation models to capture the spatial-spectral correlation inherent in the data. This graph-based representation not only simplifies data handling but also enables tailored label sampling during training, significantly enhancing the framework’s adaptability for deployment. Subsequently, The GAT is employed to generalize the radiomap information across various frequency bands. Extensive experiments using raytracing datasets based on real-world environments have demonstrated RadioGAT’s enhanced accuracy in supervised learning settings and its robustness in semi-supervised scenarios. These results underscore RadioGAT’s effectiveness and practicality for MB-RMR in environments with limited data availability.

Light fidelity (LiFi) is a potential key technology for future 6G networks. However, its feasibility of supporting mobile communications has not been fundamentally discussed. In this paper, we investigate the time-varying channel characteristics of mobile LiFi based on measured mobile phone rotation and movement data. Specifically, we define LiFi channel coherence time to evaluate the correlation of the channel timing sequence. Then, we derive the expression of LiFi transmission rate based on the m-pulse-amplitude-modulation (M-PAM). The derived rate expression indicates that mobile LiFi communications is feasible by using at least two photodiodes (PDs) with different orientations. Further, we propose two channel estimation schemes, and propose a LiFi channel tracking scheme to improve the communication performance. Finally, our experimental results show that the channel coherence time is on the order of tens of milliseconds, which indicates a relatively stable channel. In addition, based on the measured data, better communication performance can be realized in the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) scenario with a rate of 36Mbit/s, compared to other scenarios. The results also show that the proposed channel estimation and tracking schemes are effective in designing mobile LiFi systems.

With the ever-increasing user density and quality of service (QoS) demand, 5G networks with limited spectrum resources are facing massive access challenges. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose a novel discrete semantic feature division multiple access (SFDMA) paradigm for multi-user digital interference networks. Specifically, by utilizing deep learning technology, SFDMA extracts multi-user semantic information into discrete representations in distinguishable semantic subspaces, which enables multiple users to transmit simultaneously over the same time-frequency resources. Furthermore, based on a robust information bottleneck, we design a SFDMA based multi-user digital semantic interference network for inference tasks, which can achieve approximate orthogonal transmission. Moreover, we propose a SFDMA based multi-user digital semantic interference network for image reconstruction tasks, where the discrete outputs of the semantic encoders of the users are approximately orthogonal, which significantly reduces multi-user interference. Furthermore, we propose an Alpha-Beta-Gamma (ABG) formula for semantic communications, which is the first theoretical relationship between inference accuracy and transmission power. Then, we derive adaptive power control methods with closed-form expressions for inference tasks. Extensive simulations verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed SFDMA.

Single-user semantic communications have attracted extensive research recently, but multi-user semantic broadcast communication (BC) is still in its infancy. In this paper, we propose a practical robust features-disentangled multi-user semantic BC framework, where the transmitter includes a feature selection module and each user has a feature completion module. Instead of broadcasting all extracted features, the semantic encoder extracts the disentangled semantic features, and then only the users’ intended semantic features are selected for broadcasting, which can further improve the transmission efficiency. Within this framework, we further investigate two information-theoretic metrics, including the ultimate compression rate under both the distortion and perception constraints, and the achievable rate region of the semantic BC. Furthermore, to realize the proposed semantic BC framework, we design a lightweight robust semantic BC network by exploiting a supervised autoencoder (AE), which can controllably disentangle sematic features. Moreover, we design the first hardware proof-of-concept prototype of the semantic BC network, where the proposed semantic BC network can be implemented in real time. Simulations and experiments demonstrate that the proposed robust semantic BC network can significantly improve transmission efficiency.

Channel state information (CSI)-based human activity recognition (HAR) receives increasing research interests due to its broad applications such as human-computer interaction, health care, and security surveillance. Deep learning (DL) methods have been widely adopted on CSI-based HAR tasks to extract features automatically, overcoming the complexity and unstableness of manual feature extraction process. However, many DL approaches fail to customize the designed model structure with the input CSI tensor shape, applying DL models recklessly. In addition, some researchers utilize attention mechanism yet independently along temporal, spatial, or frequency dimension. To address these issues, we propose an end-to-end comprehensive residual convolution framework, namely CHA-Sens, for general CSI-based human activity sensing. CHA-Sens consists of several comprehensive residual convolution modules (CRCM) that feature adaptive kernel size and stride, regional parameter-free attention mechanism and shortcut of identity mapping. Extensive experiments are conducted on three public CSI datasets for recognizing both single human activity (SHA) and human-to-human interaction (HHI) to show the superiority of the proposed design over other state-of-the-art benchmarks.

The indoor location based services are fascinating in many applications such as commercial recommendation, surveillance, and navigation. In this paper, we propose a high-precision indoor single-link passive tracking method based on Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) using WiFi channel state information (CSI), namely UKFWiTr. In this method, both the CSI-quotient and Space-Alternating Generalized Expectation-maximization algorithm are used to estimate Doppler frequency shift and Time-of-Flight. Then, an Arrival-of-Angle optimization method and a tracking accuracy improvement method both based on UKF are put forward in UKFWiTr. The experimental results show that the average tracking error in different environments is less than 1.3m, and can even achieve 0.49m in particular scenarios.

In this paper, we investigate an energy efficient waveform design for integrated visible light positioning and communication (VLPC) systems by exploiting the relationship between visible light positioning (VLP) and visible light communication (VLC). We propose that the direct current component and the alternating current component of the VLPC signals are utilized for positioning and communication, respectively. With a single LED-lamp, we propose a received-signal-strength based 3D VLP scheme, and further derive the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB). Then, by exploiting the inherent coupling relationship between VLP and VLC, the positioning results are utilized for channel estimation of VLC, which can significantly reduce the channel estimation pilot overhead. Furthermore, we optimize the waveform design by minimizing the CRLB, while satisfying both the outage probability of communication rate and total transmit power constraints. However, this problem turns to be non-convex and intractable. To address this challenging problem, we utilize the Conditional Value-at-Risk to conservatively transform the outage probability constraint into a deterministic form. By exploiting the block coordinate descent algorithm, the waveform design problem can be efficiently solved by alternately optimizing VLP and VLC convex sub-problems and dual problem. Finally, simulation results verify both the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed waveform design.

Integrated visible light positioning and communication (VLPC), capable of combining advantages of visible light communications (VLC) and visible light positioning (VLP), is a promising key technology for the future Internet of Things. In VLPC networks, positioning and communications are inherently coupled, which has not been sufficiently explored in the literature. We propose a robust power allocation scheme for integrated VLPC Networks by exploiting the intrinsic relationship between positioning and communications. Specifically, we derive explicit relationships between random positioning errors, following both a Gaussian distribution and an arbitrary distribution, and channel state information errors. Then, we minimize the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) of positioning errors, subject to the rate outage constraint and the power constraints, which is a chance-constrained optimization problem and generally computationally intractable. To circumvent the nonconvex challenge, we conservatively transform the chance constraints to deterministic forms by using the Bernstein-type inequality and the conditional value-at-risk for the Gaussian and arbitrary distributed positioning errors, respectively, and then approximate them as convex semidefinite programs. Finally, simulation results verify the robustness and effectiveness of our proposed integrated VLPC design schemes.

Semantic communications utilize the transceiver computing resources to alleviate scarce transmission resources, such as bandwidth and energy. Although the conventional deep learning (DL) based designs may achieve certain transmission efficiency, the uninterpretability issue of extracted features is the major challenge in the development of semantic communications. In this paper, we propose an explainable and robust semantic communication framework by incorporating the well-established bit-level communication system, which not only extracts and disentangles features into independent and semantically interpretable features, but also only selects task-relevant features for transmission, instead of all extracted features. Based on this framework, we derive the optimal input for rate-distortion-perception theory, and derive both lower and upper bounds on the semantic channel capacity. Furthermore, based on the$\beta $-variational autoencoder ($\beta $-VAE), we propose a practical explainable semantic communication system design, which simultaneously achieves semantic features selection and is robust against semantic channel noise. We further design a real-time wireless mobile semantic communication proof-of-concept prototype. Our simulations and experiments demonstrate that our proposed explainable semantic communications system can significantly improve transmission efficiency, and also verify the effectiveness of our proposed robust semantic transmission scheme.

We propose covert beamforming design frameworks for integrated radar sensing and communication (IRSC) systems, where the radar can covertly communicate with legitimate users under the cover of the probing waveforms without being detected by the eavesdropper. Specifically, by jointly designing the target detection beamformer and communication beamformer, we aim to maximize the radar detection mutual information (MI) (or the communication rate) subject to the covert constraint, the communication rate constraint (or the radar detection MI constraint), and the total power constraint. For the perfect eavesdropper’s channel state information (CSI) scenario, we transform the covert beamforming design problems into a series of convex subproblems, by exploiting semidefinite relaxation, which can be solved via the bisection search method. Considering the high complexity of iterative optimization, we further propose a single-iterative covert beamformer design scheme based on the zero-forcing criterion. For the imperfect eavesdropper’s CSI scenario, we develop a relaxation and restriction method to tackle the robust covert beamforming design problems. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed covert beamforming schemes for perfect and imperfect CSI scenarios.

In this paper, we propose joint beamforming and photo-detector (PD) orientation (BO) optimization schemes for mobile visible light communication (VLC) with the orientation adjustable receiver (OAR). Since VLC is sensitive to line-of-sight propagation, we first establish the OAR model and the human body blockage model for mobile VLC user equipment (UE). To guarantee the quality of service (QoS) of mobile VLC, we jointly optimize BO with minimal UE the power consumption for both fixed and random UE orientation cases. For the fixed UE orientation case, since the transmit beamforming and the PD orientation are mutually coupled, the joint BO optimization problem is nonconvex and intractable. To address this challenge, we propose an alternating optimization algorithm to obtain the transmit beamforming and the PD orientation. For the random UE orientation case, we further propose a robust alternating BO optimization algorithm to ensure the worst-case QoS requirement of the mobile UE. Finally, the performance of joint BO optimization design schemes are evaluated for mobile VLC through numerical experiments.

In this article, we consider covert beamforming design for intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks, where Alice utilizes IRS to covertly transmit a message to Bob without being recognized by Willie. We investigate the joint beamformer design of Alice and IRS to maximize the covert rate of Bob when the knowledge about Willie’s channel state information (WCSI) is perfect and imperfect at Alice, respectively. For the former case, we develop a covert beamformer under the perfect covert constraint by applying semidefinite relaxation. For the latter case, the optimal decision threshold of Willie is derived, and we analyze the false alarm and the missed detection probabilities. Furthermore, we utilize the property of the Kullback–Leibler divergence to develop the robust beamformer based on a relaxation,$S$-Lemma, and alternate iteration approach. Finally, the numerical experiments evaluate the performance of the proposed covert beamformer design and robust beamformer design.

In this paper, we investigate an integrated visible light positioning and communication (VLPC) system with a single LED-lamp. First, by leveraging the fact that the VLC channel model is a function of the receiver’s location, we propose a system model that estimates the channel state information (CSI) based on the positioning information without transmitting pilot sequences. Second, we derive the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) on the positioning error variance and a lower bound on the achievable rate with on-off keying modulation. Third, based on the derived performance metrics, we optimize the power allocation to minimize the CRLB, while satisfying the rate outage probability constraint. To tackle this non-convex optimization problem, we apply the worst-case distribution of the Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) and the block coordinate descent (BCD) methods to obtain the feasible solutions. Finally, the effects of critical system parameters, such as outage probability, rate threshold, total power threshold, are revealed by numerical results.

In this paper, we investigate the optimal probabilistic constellation shaping design for covert communication systems from a practical view. Different from conventional covert communications with equiprobable constellations modulation, we propose non-equiprobable constellations modulation schemes to further enhance the covert rate. Specifically, we derive covert rate expressions for practical discrete constellation inputs for the first time. Then, we study the covert rate maximization problem by jointly optimizing the constellation distribution and power allocation. In particular, an approximate gradient descent method is proposed for obtaining the optimal probabilistic constellation shaping. To strike a balance between the computational complexity and the transmission performance, we further develop a framework that maximizes a lower bound on the achievable rate where the optimal probabilistic constellation shaping problem can be solved efficiently using the Frank-Wolfe method. Extensive numerical results show that the optimized probabilistic constellation shaping strategies provide significant gains in the achievable covert rate over the state-of-the-art schemes.

In this paper, we investigate the performance of a practical aggregated LiFi-WiFi system with the discrete constellation inputs from a practical view. We derive the achievable rate expressions of the aggregated LiFi-WiFi system for the first time. Then, we study the rate maximization problem via optimizing the constellation distribution and power allocation jointly. Specifically, a multilevel mercy-filling power allocation scheme is proposed by exploiting the relationship between the mutual information and minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) of discrete inputs. Meanwhile, an inexact gradient descent method is proposed for obtaining the optimal probability distributions. To strike a balance between the computational complexity and the transmission performance, we further develop a framework that maximizes the lower bound of the achievable rate where the optimal power allocation can be obtained in closed forms and the constellation distributions problem can be solved efficiently by Frank-Wolfe method. Extensive numerical results show that the optimized strategies are able to provide significant gains over the state-of-the-art schemes in terms of the achievable rate.

The bound of the information transmission rate of direct current biased optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DCO-OFDM) for visible light communication (VLC) with finite-alphabet inputs is yet unknown, where the corresponding spectral efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE) stems out as the open research problems. In this paper, we derive the exact achievable rate of the DCO-OFDM system with finite-alphabet inputs for the first time. Furthermore, we investigate SE maximization problems of the DCO-OFDM system subject to both electrical and optical power constraints. By exploiting the relationship between the mutual information and the minimum mean-squared error, we propose a multi-level mercury-water-filling power allocation scheme to achieve the maximum SE. Moreover, the EE maximization problems of the DCO-OFDM system are studied, and the Dinkelbach-type power allocation scheme is developed for the maximum EE. Numerical results verify the effectiveness of the proposed theories and power allocation schemes.

The ever-growing number of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices makes multiaccess edge computing (MEC)-assisted status update system more and more attractive, which can be deployed to enable remote data acquisition and analysis from urban space. The ambient computing resource at edge automatically extracts valuable status update information from the data collected by IoT devices, which supports the real-time remote monitoring applications. In this article, we employ the concept of Age of Information (AoI) to quantify the freshness of status updates. To combat the limited battery capacity at IoT devices, energy harvesting (EH) is leveraged to capture the green energy from ambient environment. Specifically, we investigate an age minimization problem by considering the randomness in energy arrivals, heterogeneity in harvesting mode, and the stochasticity in transmission and computing process. The formulated problem is a long-term stochastic optimization problem. Then, we transform the original problem into a series of per-time slot deterministic optimization problem. An online scheduling policy is proposed to obtain the energy management decisions at devices, and the transmission and computing scheduling decisions among multiple devices without any prior knowledge on the network dynamics, which is facilitated to be implemented. Simulation results show that the performance of our proposed algorithm is competitive when compared with other existing schemes.

The advent of vehicle-to-everything communication facilitates the emergence of vehicular sensing networks, where vehicles equipped with advanced sensors continuously sample informative status updates of its surroundings and forward the sampled data to roadside infrastructure based on a certain routing strategy. The collected data is analyzed to obtain real-time situational awareness to impose certain behaviors on the vehicles. In such networked control systems, the timeliness of collected data is of critical importance to system performance, which can be quantified by the concept of Age of Information. Note that to obtain timely perception of its surroundings, each vehicle tends to sample status updates at the maximum frequency, which may congest the network due to limited communication resource. Moreover, the highly dynamic nature of vehicular network poses a great challenge in finding a reliable route for timely data forwarding. Therefore, the data collection scheme should be carefully designed to balance the timeliness of collected information and network stability. In this article, we study an age optimization problem by jointly considering the data sampling at source vehicles and the data forwarding process for multiple information flows across the network. We employ the Lyapunov optimization technique to develop a distributed age-aware data collection scheme consists of a threshold-based sampling strategy at source vehicles and a learning-based data forwarding strategy. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme outperforms existing strategies in collecting status updates in a timely manner.

In this paper, we consider a common unicast beamforming network where Alice utilizes the communication to Carol as a cover and covertly transmits a message to Bob without being recognized by Willie. We investigate the beamformer design of Alice to maximize the covert rate to Bob when Alice has either perfect or imperfect knowledge about Willie's channel state information (WCSI). For the perfect WCSI case, the problem is formulated under the perfect covert constraint, and we develop a covert beamformer by applying semidefinite relaxation and the bisection method. Then, to reduce the computational complexity, we further propose a zero-forcing beamformer design with a single iteration processing. For the case of the imperfect WCSI, the robust beamformer is developed based on a relaxation and restriction approach by utilizing the property of Kullback-Leibler divergence. Furthermore, we derive the optimal decision threshold of Willie, and analyze the false alarm and the missed detection probabilities in this case. Finally, the performance of the proposed beamformer designs is evaluated through numerical experiments.

The mobility status of self and surrounding vehicles provides important information to various tasks in autonomous driving (AD) and intelligent transportation system (ITS). Accordingly, a precise, stable, and robust mobility tracking framework is essential. Compared with self-tracking that relies only on mobility observations from onboard sensors [e.g., global positioning system (GPS), inertial measurement unit (IMU), and camera], cooperative tracking markedly increases the precision and reliability of the mobility information by integrating observations from roadside units (RSUs) and nearby vehicles through vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). Nevertheless, cooperative tracking can be quite vulnerable if there are malicious users sending bogus observations in the cooperative network. In this article, we present a malicious user detection framework, which includes two sequential detection algorithms and a secure mobility data exchange and fusion model to detect and remove bogus mobility information and integrate proposed detection algorithms with previous data fusion algorithms, which secures the cooperative mobility tracking in AD, ITS. Simulations validate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework under different types of attacks.

As a newly emerging communication assistant equipment, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be exploited to dispatch data files quickly to specific areas and support rapid deployment of communication links in complex terrain, which is of great significance for specific communication demands in disaster and remote areas. Nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA), as a rosy technology in the fifth generation (5G) and future mobile communication systems, has been widely studied because of its ability in improving spectral efficiency and reducing transmission latency to enhance the overall Quality of Service (QoS) and meet the strict communication requirements. Based on these, in this article, we propose a device-to-device (D2D)-enhanced UAV-NOMA network architecture, in which D2D is introduced to increase the file dispatching efficiency. In our proposed D2D-enhanced UAV-NOMA network, the ground users (GUEs) that have already received file blocks (FBs) are allowed to reuse the time-frequency resources assigned to NOMA links to share their FBs with other GUEs, which significantly improves the efficiency of file dispatching. But this also leads to a complicated interference environment. In order to effectively manage the interference and minimize the UAV-assisted file dispatching mission time, we propose a graph-based file dispatching (GFD) protocol, in which the complicated joint optimization problem is decomposed to be solved efficiently and graph theory-based algorithms are proposed for resource allocation. The simulation results verify the advantages of our proposed D2D-enhanced UAV-NOMA network architecture and the efficiency of our designed GFD protocol in minimizing the total UAV-assisted file dispatching mission time.

The aggregated visible light communication (VLC) and radio frequency (RF) system, which can be viewed as a heterogeneous multi-input-multi-output system, can improve data rate compared to the conventional RF communication systems. In this paper, we first develop optimal power allocation schemes for the aggregated VLC-RF systems for the single and the multi-light-emitting diode scenarios under different dimming control setups. Moreover, we study the energy efficiency maximization problem of the considered system with the minimum rate requirement, transmitted power constraint, and the dimming control consideration which is non-convex. By using the Dinkelbach-type algorithm, we tackle this problem by solving a sequence of convex problems which converges to the global solution. Finally, the effect of critical parameters, such as total power threshold, dimming level, and bandwidths, are revealed by some selected numerical results.

In this study, we investigated the nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) for visible light communication (VLC) Internet of Things (IoT) networks and provided a promising system design for 5G and beyond 5G applications. Specifically, we studied the capacity region of a practical uplink NOMA for multiple IoT devices with discrete and continuous inputs, respectively. For discrete inputs, we proposed an entropy approximation method to approach the channel capacity and obtain the discrete inner and outer bounds. For the continuous inputs, we derived the inner and outer bounds in closed forms. Based on these results, we further investigated the optimal receiver beamforming design for the multiple access channel (MAC) of VLC IoT networks to maximize the minimum uplink rate under receiver power constraints. By exploiting the structure of the achievable rate expressions, we showed that the optimal beamformers are the generalized eigenvectors corresponding to the largest generalized eigenvalues. Numerical results show the tightness of the proposed capacity regions and the superiority of the proposed beamformers for VLC IoT networks.

Energy harvesting (EH) technique has attracted great attention in Internet of things (IoT) system as it may significantly increase the network lifetime by using renewable energy sources. In this paper, we consider a simple uplink system composed of one base station (BS) and multiple EH user equipments (UEs), where the system control is modeled as a Markov decision process without any prior knowledge assumed on the energy dynamics. The central controller is the BS, which is in charge of scheduling a subset of UEs to access the limited orthogonal channels and regulating transmission power for the scheduled UEs. We propose an actor-critic deep Q-network based (DQN) reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm to handle such a technically challenging problem with continuous state and action spaces. Experiment results show that the proposed RL algorithm can achieve better performances compared with the existing benchmarks.

Energy harvesting (EH) is a promising technique to fulfill the long-term and self-sustainable operations for Internet of Things (IoT) systems. In this paper, we study the joint access control and battery prediction problems in a small-cell IoT system including multiple EH user equipments (UEs) and one base station (BS) with limited uplink access channels. Each UE has a rechargeable battery with finite capacity. The system control is modeled as a Markov decision process without complete prior knowledge assumed at the BS, which also deals with large sizes in both state and action spaces. First, to handle the access control problem assuming causal battery and channel state information, we propose a scheduling algorithm that maximizes the uplink transmission sum rate based on reinforcement learning (RL) with deep Q -network enhancement. Second, for the battery prediction problem, with a fixed round-robin access control policy adopted, we develop an RL-based algorithm to minimize the prediction loss (error) without any model knowledge about the energy source and energy arrival process. Finally, the joint access control and battery prediction problem is investigated, where we propose a two-layer RL network to simultaneously deal with maximizing the sum rate and minimizing the prediction loss: the first layer is for battery prediction, the second layer generates the access policy based on the output from the first layer. Experiment results show that the three proposed RL algorithms can achieve better performances compared with existing benchmarks.

The Internet of Things (IoT) application has a crucial need for long-term and self-sustainable operations. Energy harvesting (EH) technique has attracted great attention in IoT as it may significantly increase the network lifetime by using renewable energy sources. In this paper, we study a simple IoT system composed of one base station (BS) and multiple EH user equipments (UEs), where the system control is modeled as a Markov decision process without any prior knowledge assumed on the energy dynamics. The central controller, i.e., the BS, is in charge of scheduling a subset of UEs to access the limited orthogonal channels and regulating transmission power for the scheduled UEs. Applying reinforcement learning (RL) methods in this situation is technically challenging since the state and action spaces are continuous. With a long short-term memory (LSTM)-based algorithm to predict the UEs' battery states, we propose an actor-critic deep Q-network (DQN) RL algorithm to simultaneously deal with the access and continuous power control problem, by considering both the sum rate and prediction loss. The experimental results show that the proposed RL algorithm can achieve better performances when compared with the existing benchmarks.

In this paper, we focus on the fundamental issues of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) visible light communication (VLC) networks: achievable rates and optimal power allocation schemes for both static and mobile users. First, we derive both a lower bound and an upper bound of the achievable rates with closed-form expressions for static users in NOMA VLC networks. With the derived lower bound, we minimize transmit power under the minimum rate requirements and individual light emitting diodes (LED) power constraints, which turns out to be NP-hard. By exploiting the semidefinite relaxation (SDR) technique, the optimal power allocation scheme can be obtained by solving a convex semidefinite program (SDP). Second, we develop an optimal power allocation scheme for mobile users. Due to users' movement, the estimated channel state information (CSI) may be inaccurate. We first characterize the CSI uncertainties as ellipsoidal regions, and derive a lower bound of the achievable rate expression. Then, we study the transmit power minimization problem for mobile users, which is non-convex. By applying S-lemma and SDR, the transmit power minimization problem can be reformulated as a convex SDP. Simulation results are presented to verify the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed power allocation schemes.

In this paper, we investigate the channel capacity region of interference channel and develop both centralized and distributed interference management schemes for visible light communication (VLC) networks. For a typical multiuser and multi-LED scenario, we derive both discrete inner and outer bounds of the channel capacity region, and such a proposed inner bound is numerically shown to be the highest among the existing inner bounds. Moreover, with continuous input signals, we develop the channel capacity region bounds in a closed form, termed (α, β, γ) (ABG) inner bound and ABG outer bound, which are tight for the large amplitude-to-variance ratio. Then, based on the derived ABG inner bounds, we investigate a centralized beamforming design problem to minimize the total transmit power under three practical constraints: peak optical power, average optical power, and average electrical power. By utilizing semidefinite relaxation technique, we reformulate this NP-hard problem as a convex semidefinite program and obtain the optimal beamformers. Furthermore, to reduce the cost of channel station information exchange, we propose a distributed coordinated interference management scheme by adopting the alternating direction method of multipliers method. Finally, numerical results are presented to evaluate the performance of the proposed interference management schemes in VLC networks.

In this paper, we investigate a novel simultaneous lightwave information and power transfer (SLIPT) in visible light communication (VLC) systems, where a photo diode (PD) and a solar panel are utilized as the information receiver and the energy harvester, respectively. By systematically analyzing both the information receiver and the energy harvester, we obtain the explicit expressions to characterize the illumination-rate-energy region. Based on the derived expressions, we investigate the downlink unicast transmission of multi-LED multi-user SLIPT VLC networks, and study the total transmit power minimization problem under the rate requirements, the minimum energy harvesting requirements, and dimming control constraints. To solve such non-convex problem, we exploit the semidefinite relaxation (SDR) technique and relax the problem into a convex problem, which can be efficiently solved via interior-point methods. Moreover, for the sake of users' fairness, we further investigate the beamformer design to maximize the minimal rate under both minimum energy harvesting and dimming control constraints. Finally, the numerical results are provided to evaluate the proposed SLIPT system.

In this paper, we study an uplink wireless system including N energy harvesting (EH) user equipments (UEs) and one base station (BS) with limited access channels. Each UE has a rechargeable battery with finite capacity. The system control is modeled as a Markov decision process without complete prior knowledge assumed at the BS, which also deals with large sizes in both state and action spaces. To handle such an access control problem, we propose a scheduling algorithm that maximizes the expected sum discounted uplink transmission rate based on reinforcement learning (RL) with deep Q-network (DQN) enhancement. Different from the traditional access control solutions that usually assume strong model knowledges, our goal is to achieve a more stable and balanced transmission over a long time horizon in a data-driven fashion. Finally, experiment results show that the proposed RL algorithm can achieve better performances compared with existing benchmarks.

In a social network, influence maximization is the problem of identifying a set of users that own the maximum influence ability across the network. In this paper, a novel credit distribution (CD) based model, termed as the multi-action CD (mCD) model, is introduced to quantify the influence ability of each user. Compared to existing models, the new model can work with practical datasets where one type of action is recorded for multiple times. Based on this model, influence maximization is formulated as a submodular maximization problem under a knapsack constraint, which is NP-hard. An efficient streaming algorithm is developed to achieve$(\frac{1}{3}-\epsilon)$approximation of the optimality. Experiments conducted on real Twitter dataset demonstrate that the mCD model enjoys high accuracy compared to the conventional CD model in estimating the total number of people who get influenced in a social network. Furthermore, compared to the greedy algorithm, the proposed single-pass streaming algorithm achieves similar performance in terms of influence maximization, while running several orders of magnitude faster.

Energy harvesting communication has raised great research interests due to its wide applications and its feasibility of commercialization. In this paper, the multiuser energy diversity is investigated in energy harvesting communication systems. Considering centralized access schemes, the scaling of the average throughput over the number of transmitters is studied, along with the scaling of corresponding available energy in the batteries that store the harvested energy. It is shown that the throughput gain mainly comes from two aspects: the increase of total available energy harvested over time/space; and the combined dynamics of batteries that lead to the improvement in effective transmission power.

This paper considers a heterogeneous ad hoc network with multiple transmitter-receiver pairs, in which all transmitters are capable of harvesting renewable energy from the environment and compete for one shared channel by random access. In particular, we focus on two different scenarios: the constant energy harvesting (EH) rate model where the EH rate remains constant within the time of interest and the i.i.d. EH rate model where the EH rates are independent and identically distributed across different contention slots. To quantify the roles of both the energy state information (ESI) and the channel state information (CSI), a distributed opportunistic scheduling (DOS) framework with two-stage probing and save-then-transmit energy utilization is proposed. Then, the optimal throughput and the optimal scheduling strategy are obtained via one-dimension search, i.e., an iterative algorithm consisting of the following two steps in each iteration: First, assuming that the stored energy level at each transmitter is stationary with a given distribution, the expected throughput maximization problem is formulated as an optimal stopping problem, whose solution is proven to exist and then derived for both models; second, for a fixed stopping rule, the energy level at each transmitter is shown to be stationary and an efficient iterative algorithm is proposed to compute its steady-state distribution. Finally, we validate our analysis by numerical results and quantify the throughput gain compared with the best-effort delivery scheme.

Energy harvesting (EH) based communication has raised great research interests due to its wide applications and the feasibility of commercialization. In this paper, we consider wireless communications with EH constraints at the transmitter. First, for delay-tolerant traffic, we investigate the long-term average throughput maximization problem and analytically compare the throughput performance against that of a system supported by conventional power supplies. Second, for delay-sensitive traffic, we analyze the outage probability by studying its asymptotic behavior in the high energy arrival rate regime, where the new concept of energy diversity is formally introduced. Moreover, we show that the speed of outage probability approaching zero, termed energy diversity gain, varies under different power supply models.

This paper considers an ad hoc network with multiple transmitter-receiver pairs, in which all transmitters are capable of harvesting renewable energy from the environment and compete for the same channel by random access. To quantify the roles of both the energy state information (ESI) and the channel state information (CSI), a distributed opportunistic scheduling (DOS) framework with a save-then-transmit scheme is proposed. First, in the channel probing stage, each transmitter probes the CSI via channel contention; next, in the data transmission stage, the successful transmitter decides to either give up the channel (if the expected reward calculated over the CSI and ESI is small) or hold and utilize the channel by optimally exploring the energy harvesting and data transmission tradeoff. With a constant energy arrival model, i.e., the energy harvesting rate keeps identical over the time of interest, the expected throughput maximization problem is formulated as an optimal stopping problem, whose solution is shown to exist and have a threshold-based structure, for both the homogeneous and heterogenous cases. Furthermore, we prove that there exists a steady-state distribution for the stored energy level at each transmitter, and propose an efficient iterative algorithm for its computation. Finally, we show via numerical results that the proposed scheme can achieve a potential 175% throughput gain compared with the method of best-effort delivery.