Industrial time series often display complex, non-stationary behaviors with trends, periodicity, and abrupt fluctuations. Generating high-quality synthetic data in such domains is essential for simulation, forecasting, and anomaly detection in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications. However, distributional heterogeneity, sparse failure patterns, and long-term dependencies make this task highly challenging. We introduce HNRF-TS, a rectified flow framework with hybrid noise initialization, designed for scalable and robust time series generation. The hybrid prior combines isotropic Gaussian noise with structured codes from a lightweight generative adversarial network (GAN), yielding semantically aligned and diverse latent representations. To improve sampling efficiency, we propose a bimodal adaptive strategy that allocates denser ordinary differential equation (ODE) steps at the beginning and end of the trajectory while using coarser steps in smoother middle regions. This preserves critical temporal features while lowering computational cost. We further enhance fidelity with modules dedicated to modeling trends and seasonality, which capture global drifts and periodic signals inherent in industrial data. Across multiple IIoT datasets, HNRF-TS outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, including GAN-based and diffusion-based methods. It achieves up to 75.8% reduction in Context-FID and over 60% improvement in correlation metrics on long-horizon tasks. Moreover, high-quality samples can be generated with as few as 20 sampling steps, offering significant efficiency gains without sacrificing accuracy.

Computation offloading has been extensively studied in recent years for the internet of vehicles (IoV), where roadside units (RSUs) are deployed to assist computation offloading. However, it is still challenging to decide when to offload regarding to multiple factors, such as load differences among RSUs, a vehicle’s moving speed, and a vehicle’s energy constraint. In this paper, an optimal offloading decision method is proposed based on optimal stopping theory (OST) to decide when to offload considering the aforementioned factors. Firstly, two offloading decision problems with and without energy constraint are constructed to find the optimal RSU which can minimize expected cost, where the expected cost is determined by the decision on offloading to the current RSU or continuing observing the next RSU. Then, OST is utilized to solve these two problems. Specifically, a sequence of thresholds are pre-calculated based on the OST. An offloading decision can be made by comparing the load of current RSU with the threshold. Moreover, some facts on a vehicle’s moving speed in the environment without energy constraint and the number of observations on RSUs in the environment with energy constraint are revealed. What’s more, the optimal moving speed which can minimize the expected cost is also provided. Finally, extensive simulations are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The effects of a vehicle’s moving speed and the number of observations on the performance of the proposed method are also verified. Comparing to the benchmarks, the proposed method can achieve superior performance in terms of cost and hit ratio, and has comparable performance with the best offloading method which has full RSUs’ load information. Moreover, the proposed method is robust to the estimation deviation of RSUs’ load distribution.

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) has emerged as a promising technology to enhance both achievable rate and energy efficiency in next-generation wireless networks. This article investigates a novel energy-efficient UAV-RIS-assisted architecture for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) in integrated ground–aerial–space networks, where a satellite cooperates with multiple UAV-RISs to provide downlink wireless energy transfer (WET) and support uplink wireless information transmission (WIT) for energy-constrained IoT devices in remote environments. We formulate an alternating iterative joint optimization problem (AIJOP) that aims to maximize the system sum achievable rate while ensuring causality of device energy via jointly optimizing UAV-RIS trajectories, RIS phase shift matrices, and satellite power allocation and time allocation between WET and WIT. The problem is highly non-convex due to the strong coupling among variables. To address this challenge, we propose a trajectory–phase–power–time alternating optimization algorithm (TPPTAOA), which decomposes the original problem into four tractable subproblems and solves them iteratively. Specifically, the UAV-RIS trajectories is first optimized via using a device scheduling and TSP-based path planning approach to solve the first subproblem, followed by the proposition of a two-stage heuristic phase optimization algorithm under fixed parameters to solve the second subproblem. Subsequently, the satellite power allocation is solved using a Lagrangian dual method, while the time allocation is optimized through a two-stage strategy combining grid-based coarse search with gradient-based refinement. Simulation results under various system settings verify the fast convergence, robustness, and superior performance of the proposed TPPTAOA, showing significant improvements in both energy efficiency and uplink achievable rate compared with benchmark schemes.

Semantic-aware Vehicular Edge Computing (VEC) has emerged as a novel paradigm to significantly reduce transmission costs and edge resource consumption by offloading extracted task-driven semantic information. However, excessive semantic extraction may impose additional computational workload. In the face of unknown environmental dynamics, the semantic extraction ratio must be jointly designed with task offloading for resource-constrained VEC. To this end, we conceive a multiple-objective (MO) semantic-aware task offloading framework for VEC by jointly optimizing semantic extraction ratio, transmit power and task scheduling strategies aimed at minimizing both long-term age-of-information (AoI) and energy consumption while guaranteeing queue stability. Subsequently, we propose a Lyapunov-guided multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL)-based semantic-aware joint task scheduling and resource allocation (SJTSRA) solution. Specifically, Lyapunov optimization method is first leveraged to transform the original problem into a multi-objective Markov decision process (MOMDP). Then, the concave-augmented Pareto Q-learning (CAPQL) algorithm is employed to find Pareto optimal solutions through introducing uniform weight sampling and entropy regularization, where the convergence can be guaranteed theoretically. Simulation results show that the proposed solution achieves the closest approximation to the Pareto front with the highest hypervolume, and superior energy-AoI trade-offs across varying environment parameters compared to all benchmarks.

The accuracy and stability of pathology image segmentation have become critical factors in clinical applications such as cancer screening and tumor grading. However, the presence of complex local structures, uncertain regions, and subtle morphological variations in pathological images continues to pose significant challenges. Most existing feature fusion approaches rely on the simplistic aggregation of extracted features, neglecting the unique characteristics and relative importance of distinct feature representations, which ultimately limits their potential to enhance model performance. To address these issues, we propose a Gestalt-Inspired Feature Integration Network (GeNet), a novel architecture inspired by Gestalt theory that mirrors the human visual system's ability to derive holistic understanding from partial information. Embracing the principle that 'the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,' GeNet introduces a mechanism to synergistically leverage multi-scale information, which assesses the similarity between features to achieve a more meaningful fusion of global context and local detail. Given the variability in target appearance within pathological images, we use information entropy to quantify feature uncertainty, allowing the model to prioritize uncertain regions and reduce the occurrence of ambiguous results. To explicitly eliminate multi-feature redundancy and misalignment, the refinement block utilizes parallel convolutional recalibration to fully leverage the advantages of various features. Extensive experiments on multiple pathological image segmentation datasets, including GlaS, GCaSeg, and EBHI-Seg, demonstrate that GeNet achieves high accuracy and strong robustness, offering a new perspective for joint modeling of global and local features in medical image analysis.

This paper investigates an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) aided wireless federated learning (FL) system, where an access point (AP) coordinates multiple edge devices to train a machine leaning model without sharing their own raw data. During the training process, we exploit the joint channel recon figuration via IRS and resource allocation design to reduce the latency of a FL task. Particularly, we propose three transmission protocols for assisting the local model uploading from multiple devices to an AP, namely IRS aided time division multiple access (I-TDMA), IRS aided frequency division multiple access (I-FDMA), and IRS aided non-orthogonal multiple access (I NOMA), to investigate the impact of IRS on the multiple access for FL. Under the three protocols, we minimize the per-round latency subject to a given training loss by jointly optimizing the device scheduling, IRS phase-shifts, and communication computation resource allocation. For the associated problem under I-TDMA, an efficient algorithm is proposed to solve it optimally by exploiting its intrinsic structure, whereas the high quality solutions of the problems under I-FDMA and I-NOMA are obtained by invoking a successive convex approximation (SCA) based approach. Then, we further develop a theoretical framework for the performance comparison of the proposed three transmission protocols. Sufficient conditions for ensuring that I-TDMA outperforms I-NOMA and those of its opposite are unveiled, which is fundamentally different from that NOMA always outperforms TDMA in the system without IRS. Simulation results validate our theoretical findings and also demonstrate the usefulness of IRS for enhancing the fundamental tradeoff between the learning latency and learning accuracy.

The rapid proliferation of networked devices and emerging applications has driven the evolution of computing power networks (CPNs) as a key architecture to meet the demands of sixth-generation (6G) communication. However, terrestrial CPNs still face challenges such as limited coverage, vulnerability to wireless impairments, and slow responsiveness in emergency or disaster scenarios. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a UAV-enabled computing power network (UCPN) that leverages the flexible deployment and line-of-sight communication advantages of UAVs to enhance transmission reliability and service continuity. In particular, we design a 1+1 protection transmission mechanism tailored for UCPNs, in which duplicated task data are forwarded over node-disjoint multi-hop UAV paths and recovered through interval-aware packet scheduling, enabling reliable task delivery under UAV failures and dynamic wireless conditions. Building upon this protection mechanism, we further develop a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL)–based node assignment and routing optimization algorithm, referred to as MAPPO-NARO. Unlike existing MARL-based UAV routing or task offloading approaches that primarily focus on single-path transmission or isolated node selection, the proposed algorithm explicitly incorporates 1+1 protection decisions into the MARL formulation, jointly learning access UAV selection, computing UAV assignment, and fault-tolerant dual-path routing under resource and latency constraints. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves lower packet loss, better load balance, and higher reliability compared with the baseline methods. Moreover, when UAV failures occur due to adverse weather conditions, signal interference, or hardware malfunctions, the proposed scheme still maintains high service availability, which indicates that it is well suited for emergency scenarios.

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is a key technology for future 6G networks. Most existing studies focus on monostatic and/or bistatic setups with limited coverage and capabilities. Networked ISAC systems with distributed base stations (BSs) can overcome these limitations. Moreover, movable antenna (MA) architectures offer improved ISAC performance over fixed-position antennas (FPAs) by enabling adaptable antenna movement. In this paper, we utilize the MA to promote communication capability with guaranteed sensing performance via jointly designing beamforming, power allocation, receiving filters and position configuration of transmit/receive MA towards maximizing the sum rate for both downlink (DL) and uplink (UL) users. The optimization problem is highly difficult due to the unique channel model derived from the position coefficient of the MA. To resolve this challenge, via leveraging the cutting-the-edge majorization-minimization (MM) method, we develop an efficient solution that optimizes all variables via convex optimization techniques. Extensive simulation results verify the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms and demonstrate the substantial performance promotion by deploying the MA framework in the networked ISAC system.

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have been recognized as a revolutionary technology for future wireless networks. However, RIS-assisted communications have to continuously tune phase-shifts relying on accurate channel state information (CSI) that is generally difficult to obtain due to the large number of RIS channels. The joint design of CSI acquisition and subsection RIS phase-shifts remains a significant challenge in dynamic environments. In this paper, we propose a diffusion-enhanced decision Transformer (DEDT) framework consisting of a diffusion model (DM) designed for efficient CSI acquisition and a decision Transformer (DT) utilized for phase-shift optimizations. Specifically, we first propose a novel DM mechanism, i.e., conditional imputation based on denoising diffusion probabilistic model, for rapidly acquiring real-time full CSI by exploiting the spatial correlations inherent in wireless channels. Then, we optimize beamforming schemes based on the DT architecture, which pre-trains on historical environments to establish a robust policy model. Next, we incorporate a fine-tuning mechanism to ensure rapid beamforming adaptation to new environments, eliminating the retraining process that is imperative in conventional reinforcement learning (RL) methods. Simulation results demonstrate that DEDT can enhance efficiency and adaptability of RIS-aided communications with fluctuating channel conditions compared to state-of-the-art RL methods.

Quantum networks are an actively researched and promising field, aiming to achieve efficient quantum information transmission by interconnecting quantum nodes. In large-scale quantum networks, end-to-end throughput is a critical factor that affects the overall performance of the network. The maximum flow problem, extensively studied in classical network theory, identifies a set of paths between the source and destination nodes that maximizes the total flow. This study extends the maximum flow problem to quantum networks, focusing on coordinating multiple paths for multi-path quantum communication. We propose a Quantum Multi-Path Communication Protocol (QMCP) that employs maximum flow theory to allocate transmission resources across multiple nodes efficiently, thus maximizing the total transmission capacity from the source to the destination. Our evaluation demonstrates that QMCP significantly enhances end-to-end throughput in quantum networks.

Intelligent fault diagnosis (IFD) plays a crucial role in ensuring the safe operation of industrial machinery and improving production efficiency. However, traditional supervised deep learning methods require a large amount of training data and labels, which are often located in different clients. Additionally, the cost of data labeling is high, making labels difficult to acquire. Meanwhile, differences in data distribution among clients may also hinder the model’s performance. To tackle these challenges, this paper proposes a semi-supervised federated learning framework, SSFL-DCSL, which integrates dual contrastive loss and soft labeling to address data and label scarcity for distributed clients with few labeled samples while safeguarding user privacy. It enables representation learning using unlabeled data on the client side and facilitates joint learning among clients through prototypes, thereby achieving mutual knowledge sharing and preventing local model divergence. Specifically, first, a sample weighting function based on the Laplace distribution is designed to alleviate bias caused by low confidence in pseudo labels during the semi-supervised training process. Second, a dual contrastive loss is introduced to mitigate model divergence caused by different data distributions, comprising local contrastive loss and global contrastive loss. Third, local prototypes are aggregated on the server with weighted averaging and updated with momentum to share knowledge among clients. To evaluate the proposed SSFL-DCSL framework, experiments are conducted on two publicly available datasets and a dataset collected on motors from the factory. In the most challenging task, where only 10% of the data are labeled, the proposed SSFL-DCSL can improve accuracy by 1.15% to 7.85% over state-of-the-art methods.

In this article, a novel multistream downlink communication system based on the transmissive reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) transceiver is proposed. Specifically, a transmissive RIS transceiver architecture is first elaborated, where the downlink communication mechanism and the difference from the conventional multiantenna transceivers are introduced, respectively. More importantly, the generation of RIS element control signals based on time-modulated array (TMA) is illustrated in detail, which can jointly take into account multistream modulation signals and beamforming design. Correspondingly, the harmonic signal extraction scheme at the user is also given. Then, since the design of beamforming has an impact on the system performance, we propose a beamforming optimization algorithm based on matrix lifting, successive convex approximation (SCA) and difference-convex (DC) programming under the constraints of user signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and available useful power of RIS elements. Furthermore, we analyze the bit error rate (BER) performance of the proposed architecture from two perspectives of transmit multiplexing and transmit diversity. Finally, the convergence behavior of the beamforming algorithm, the impact of different system parameter configurations on system performance and the BER performance of different schemes under the system are verified by numerical simulations.

Blockchain-assisted federated learning (BFL) can achieve decentralized storage and management of model data without relying on a central server. However, security issues caused by deliberate attacks in distributed systems and efficiency issues induced by heterogeneous computing consumption in resource-limited systems need to be urgently addressed in BFL. To address these issues, we propose a decentralized reputation management (DRM) mechanism for a trustworthy BFL (T-BFL) network, that explores, stores, and utilizes the endogenous reputation of distributed nodes to promote system security and efficiency. The proposed DRM includes three core modules, i.e., decentralized reputation evaluation, reputation-based model aggregation, and reputation-based blockchain consensus. Specifically, in the off-chain phase of T-BFL, the reputation value of each node is evaluated based on model quality, which other peer nodes can verify. This reputation value further determines the weight of global aggregation at each node. In the on-chain phase, the reputation of each node serves as the stake to dynamically adjust its consensus difficulty. Furthermore, we investigate the convergence rate of the T-BFL network under the poisoning attack, and dynamically optimize the energy allocation of local training, consensus, and communications by minimizing the upper bound of the global loss function. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of T-BFL on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and Cifar-10 datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that, compared with traditional BFL, T-BFL can achieve up to 56.12% accuracy improvement and$8.6\times $acceleration for reaching the target learning accuracy under the poisoning attack.

Accurate modeling and estimation of the threshold voltages of the flash memory can facilitate the efficient design of channel codes and detectors. However, most flash memory channel models are based on Gaussian distributions, which fail to capture certain key properties of the threshold voltages, such as their heavy-tails. To enhance the model accuracy, we first propose a piecewise student's t-distribution mixture model (PSTMM), which features degrees of freedom to control the left and right tails of the voltage distributions. We further propose an PSTMM based expectation maximization (PSTMM-EM) algorithm to estimate model parameters for flash memories by alternately computing the expected values of the missing data and maximizing the likelihood function with respect to the model parameters. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm exhibits superior stability and can effectively extend the flash memory lifespan by 1700 program/erase (PE) cycles compared with the existing parameter estimation algorithms.

This paper presents a novel multi-stream downlink communication system that utilizes a transmissive reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) transceiver. Specifically, we elaborate the downlink communication scheme using time-modulated array (TMA) technology, which enables high order modulation and multi-stream beamforming. Then, an optimization problem is formulated to maximize the minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) with user fairness, which takes into account the constraint of the maximum available power for each transmissive element. Due to the non-convex nature of the formulated problem, finding optimal solution is challenging. To mitigate the complexity, we propose a linear-complexity beamforming algorithm based on consensus alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). Specifically, by introducing a set of auxiliary variables, the problem can be decomposed into multiple sub-problems that are amenable to parallel computation, where the each sub-problem can yield closed-form expressions, bringing a significant reduction in the computational complexity. The overall problem achieves convergence by iteratively addressing these sub-problems in an alternating manner. Finally, the convergence of the proposed algorithm and the impact of various parameter configurations on the system performance are validated through numerical simulations.

In this paper, we propose a transmissive reconfigurable intelligent surface (TRIS)-empowered distributed cooperative integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) network, which enhances the coverage and wireless environment understanding through the joint design of cooperative users (CUEs) and destination users (DUEs). Rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) is implemented at the base station (BS), where the common stream is decoded and recoded by the CUEs and forwarded to the DUEs, while the private stream meets the CUEs’ own communication requirements. We construct an optimization problem with the objective of maximizing the minimum Radar mutual information (RMI), and jointly optimize the BS beamforming matrix, the CUE beamforming matrixs, common stream rate, and user scheduling vectors. To address the challenges of the nonconvex optimization problem, the consensus alternating direction multiplier framework (ADMM) is utilized to decouple the variables, and the subproblems are solved independently through iterative optimization until overall convergence is achieved. Numerical results validate the superiority of the proposed scheme in terms of improving communication sum-rate and RMI, and greatly reduce the algorithm complexity.

Decentralized federated learning (DFL) has the potential to address the issue of the aggregator’s single-point failure. However, in the absence of centralized coordination, DFL systems are vulnerable to malicious behaviors from clients. In this article, we propose a blockchain-based DFL framework to regulate the behaviors of enterprise clients in the context of cross-enterprise modeling. To be specific, we first design a novel mechanism for model plagiarism detection, wherein pseudonoise sequences are incorporated into local models, enabling to identify enterprises’ plagiarism behaviors. Then, we propose a model aggregation algorithm to improve the learning performance of the global model. Furthermore, we develop a plagiarism-aware proof-of-work consensus mechanism by adaptively adjusting enterprises’ mining difficulty based on their plagiarism records, which can efficiently demotivate them from engaging in plagiarism. The experimental results based on industrial datasets, including CWRU, PU, Milan, PV, NEU-CLS, and X-SDD, demonstrate that the proposed framework can achieve approximately 4%, 7%, and 12% of the learning accuracy improvement in the scenarios of 20%, 40%, and 60% plagiarism rates, respectively, compared to the conventional DFL system.

Traditional federated learning (FL) frameworks rely on a central server for model coordination among distributed mobile terminals (MTs). The centralization faces two critical challenges, i.e., single point of failure and potential privacy leakage. Differentially private decentralized FL (DP-DFL) has been proposed to address these challenges, wherein the MTs exchange models in a decentralized manner and maintain the differential privacy (DP) guarantee by adding noise to local models before model interaction. However, existing DP-DFL frameworks confront difficulty in achieving the expected privacy and convergence performance, simultaneously. To address this issue, we propose a novel DP-DFL framework (called randomized DP-DFL) that employs a randomized model interaction scheme to lower the model exposure frequency and hence reduce privacy budget consumption. Specifically, the scheme includes two sequential steps, i.e., randomized terminal assignment and randomized model transmission. In Step 1), the model interaction phase of DFL is further divided into several sequential substages. MTs are randomly assigned to each sub-stage. In Step 2), each MT sequentially transmits either a model previously received from its neighbors or its own local model according to the assigned sub-stage order. The proposed scheme enhances the MTs' privacy of DFL since the exposure probabilities of the MTs' local models are significantly reduced via these two randomized steps. Besides, we theoretically analyze the convergence and privacy performance of randomized DP-DFL. In particular, properly tuning the number of sub-stages in randomized DP-DFL can achieve an optimal balance between privacy and convergence. Experimental results show that randomized DP-DFL consistently outperforms traditional frameworks. Compared with baselines, randomized DP-DFL reduces 40.9% privacy loss under the same target accuracy while improving 9.5% learning accuracy under the same privacy loss on EMNIST and CIFAR-10, respectively

Vehicular edge computing (VEC) has driven the proliferation of computation-intensive and delay-sensitive vehicular services by deploying computing and energy resources at the edge. However, the exploitation of edge resources faces challenges due to unpredictable environmental dynamics and partial observability. To this end, this paper investigates the computing energy efficiency (CEE) problem in twin-timescale VEC scenarios by dynamically adjusting the offloading policy. Based upon modeling the problem as a decentralized partially observable Markov decision process (Dec-POMDP), a pair of non-cooperative and cooperative offloading solutions are proposed relying on multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), respectively. Specifically, the non-cooperative solution employs multi-agent independent proximal policy optimization (IPPO) to enable vehicular user equipments (VUEs) to learn their policies in a fully distributed manner without any information sharing. By contrast, the cooperative solution combines the multi-agent shared PPO with graph attention networks (MAPPO-GAT), where the relationship among agents is learned cooperatively and the historical learning experience is shared. Additionally, we compare the computational complexity and analyze the convergence. Simulation results show that in terms of the trade-off between offloading delay and offloading energy consumption, the proposed cooperative solution is superior to the non-cooperative counterpart with the cost of moderate training overhead for cooperative learning.

In ultra-dense autonomous aerial vehicle (AAV) networks, it is challenging to coordinate the resource allocation and interference management among large-scale AAVs, for providing flexible and efficient service coverage to the ground users (GUs). In this paper, we propose a learning-based resource allocation scheme in an ultra-dense AAV communication network, where the GUs’ service demands are time-varying with unknown distributions. We formulate the non-cooperative game among multiple co-channel AAVs as a stochastic game, where each AAV jointly optimizes its trajectory, user association, and downlink power control to maximize the expectation of its locally cumulative energy efficiency under the interference and energy constraints. To cope with the scalability issue in a large-scale network, we further formulate the problem as a mean-field game (MFG), which simplifies the interactions among the AAVs into a two-player game between a representative AAV and a mean-field. We prove the existence and uniqueness of the equilibrium for the MFG, and propose a model-free mean-field reinforcement learning algorithm named maximum entropy mean-field deep Q network (ME-MFDQN) to solve the mean-field equilibrium in both fully and partially observable scenarios. The simulation results reveal that the proposed algorithm improves the energy efficiency compared with the benchmark algorithms. Moreover, the performance can be further enhanced if the GUs’ service demands exhibit higher temporal correlation or if the AAVs have wider observation capabilities over their nearby GUs.

With the great amount of available data, especially collected from the ubiquitous Internet of Things (IoT), the issue of privacy leakage has been an increasing concern recently. To preserve the privacy of IoT datasets, traditional methods usually calibrate random noises on the data values to achieve differential privacy (DP) [1]. However, the amount of calibrating noises should be carefully designed and a heedless value will definitely degrade the availability of datasets.

With the rapid development of cutting-edge technologies such as software-defined networking, edge computing, and deep learning (DL), the application of the field of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has been deepening, especially in the areas of fault diagnosis, defect detection, and production management, which has shown great potential. Federated learning (FL) is a collaborative model training approach that allows multiple clients to work together while maintaining data privacy. This method is particularly useful for DL methods in industrial surface defect classification, which often require a large amount of training data that can be hard to gather due to its distributed nature across various sources. However, the aggregated model in federated learning may not perform well when there is a discrepancy between the training dataset (source domain) and the testing dataset (target domain), as well as when individual users face data scarcity. To counter these challenges, we propose a novel federated transfer learning framework with multi-scale aggregation (FTL-MSA) for surface defect classification in the IIoT system. A dynamic central loss function, which takes into account both intra-instance and inter-instance contrasting, is proposed to enhance the model's accuracy. Furthermore, we introduce a multi-scale model aggregation technique for FL. This technique considers the distances between the source domain and the target domain at multiple scales, which utilizes the Jensen-Shannon distance for statistical consistency, and the cosine distance for directional consistency, thereby effectively mitigating the impacts of domain differences. Empirical validation on two public steel defect datasets shows that our FTL-MSA framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving accuracy improvements of 3.12%-12.51%.

In the face of increasingly computing-intensive and delay-sensitive vehicular applications, vehicular edge computing (VEC) has become a promising computing paradigm by deploying computing resources at the edge. This paper investigates an age of information (AoI)-aware vehicular edge offloading problem by dynamically adjusting the edge offloading ratio and selecting the VEC server, taking into account the computing energy efficiency (CEE). To adapt to the time-varying network topology of VEC, we propose a multi-agent cooperative edge offloading solution relying on actor-attention-critic framework, where each vehicular user equipment (VUE) employs an attention mechanism to regulate its attention to other VUEs, facilitating selective focus on important information to enhance policy learning. The simulation results show that the proposed solution can achieve a more compelling trade-off between AoI and CEE compared with the baseline solutions.

Abstract Due to the explosive growth of communication devices and vehicles, the ever‐increasing communication data traffic is a challenge for mobile communication in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). A practical solution is to offload the traffic from cellular networks to Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN), that is, WiFi, where the spectrum is license‐free. However, the coordination of unlicensed spectrum severely reduces the utilization rate on the spectrum. In this case, unlicensed networks assisted access is proposed to facilitate long‐term evolution technology in unlicensed spectrum (LTE‐U). To improve the data rate for LTE‐U and WLAN users, an allocation optimization scheme for the resources of the licensed and unlicensed spectrum is proposed. Accordingly, the data rate of LTE‐U users and WLAN users can be maximized by adjusting the transmit power and the frequency occupancy time ratio of the unlicensed spectrum for the small cell and WLAN users. Numerical results show that the proposed hybrid LTE networks with WLAN can improve the communication efficiency for the served users.

Free space optical (FSO) transmission has emerged as a key candidate technology for 6G to expand new spectrum and improve network capacity due to its advantages of large bandwidth, low-electromagnetic interference, and high-energy efficiency. Resonant beam operating in the infrared band utilizes spatially separated laser cavities to enable safe and mobile high-power energy and high-rate information transmission but is limited by Line-of-Sight (LoS) channel. In this article, we propose a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) assisted resonant beam simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) system and establish an optical field propagation model to analyze the channel state information (CSI), in which LoS obstruction can be detected sensitively and non line-of-sight (NLoS) transmission can be realized by changing the phased of resonant beam in RIS. Numerical results demonstrate that, apart from the transmission distance, the NLoS performance depends on both the horizontal and vertical positions of RIS. The maximum NLoS energy efficiency can achieve 55% within a transfer distance of 10 m, a translation distance of ±4 mm, and rotation angle of ±50°.

In this article, we propose a novel uplink communication system enabled by a transmissive reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) transceiver, where orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) is applied to multiple users. Specifically, we explore a novel receiver architecture that includes a transmissive RIS and a single horn antenna for reception. Additionally, a channel model based on both planar and spherical waves is developed, accounting for far-field and near-field effects. To achieve the maximum system sum-rate of uplink communications while adhering to Quality-of-Service (QoS) constraints, we propose a joint optimization problem that optimizes power allocation, subcarrier allocation, and transmissive RIS coefficient. However, this problem is nonconvex in view of the strong interdependence among the optimization variables, posing significant challenges for direct solution. Thus, the alternating optimization (AO) algorithm architecture is employed, which decouples optimization variables and divide the problem into two subproblems. The first subproblem focuses on jointly optimizing power allocation and subcarrier allocation, and it is addressed by utilizing the Lagrangian dual decomposition method. Meanwhile, concerning the design of the transmissive RIS coefficient, the second subproblem is tackled by means of the successive convex approximation (SCA) approach. Subsequently, these two subproblems are solved in an alternating manner until the convergence criterion is met. Finally, the numerical results indicate that the proposed algorithm exhibits excellent convergence performance and effectively enhances the system sum-rate compared to other benchmark algorithms.

Federated learning (FL) based on the centralized design faces both challenges regarding the trust issue and a single point of failure. To alleviate these issues, blockchain-aided decentralized FL (BDFL) introduces the decentralized network architecture into the FL training process, which can effectively overcome the defects of centralized architecture. However, deploying BDFL in wireless networks usually encounters challenges, such as limited bandwidth, computing power, and energy consumption. Driven by these considerations, a dynamic stochastic optimization problem is formulated to minimize the average training delay by jointly optimizing the resource allocation and client selection under the constraints of limited energy budget and client participation. We solve the long-term mixed integer nonlinear programming problem by employing the tool of Lyapunov optimization and thereby propose the dynamic resource allocation and client scheduling BDFL (DRC-BDFL) algorithm. Furthermore, we analyse the learning performance of DRC-BDFL and derive an upper bound for convergence regarding the global loss function. Extensive experiments conducted on the SVHN and CIFAR-10 data sets demonstrate that the DRC-BDFL achieves comparable accuracy to the baseline algorithms while significantly reducing the training delay by 9.24% and 12.47%, respectively.

In this paper, a novel transmissive reconfigurable intelligent surface (TRIS) transceiver empowered integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) system is proposed for future multi-demand terminals. To address interference management, we implement rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA), where the common stream is independently designed for the sensing service. We introduce the sensing quality of service (QoS) criteria based on this structure and construct an optimization problem with the sensing QoS criteria as the objective function to optimize the sensing stream precoding matrix and the communication stream precoding matrix. Due to the coupling of optimization variables, the formulated problem is a non-convex optimization problem that cannot be solved directly. To tackle the above-mentioned challenging problem, alternating optimization (AO) is utilized to decouple the optimization variables. Specifically, the problem is decoupled into three subproblems about the sensing stream precoding matrix, the communication stream precoding matrix, and the auxiliary variables, which is solved alternatively through AO until the convergence is reached. For solving the problem, successive convex approximation (SCA) is applied to deal with the sum-rate threshold constraints on communications, and difference-of-convex (DC) programming is utilized to solve rank-one non-convex constraints. Numerical simulation results verify the superiority of the proposed scheme in terms of improving the communication and sensing QoS.

In this article, we investigate the performance of reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided spatial shift keying (SSK) wireless communication systems with imperfect channel state information (CSI). Specifically, we study the average bit error probability (ABEP) of two RIS-SSK systems based on intelligent reflection and blind reflection modes. For the intelligent RIS-SSK scheme, we first derive the conditional pairwise error probability of the composite channel through maximum-likelihood (ML) detection. Subsequently, we derive the probability density function of the combined channel. Due to the intricacies of the composite channel formulation, an exact closed-form ABEP expression is unattainable through direct derivation. To this end, we resort to employing the Gaussian–Chebyshev quadrature method to estimate the results. Additionally, we employ$Q$-function approximation to derive the nonexact closed-form expression in the presence of channel estimation errors. For the blind RIS-SSK scheme, we derive both closed-form ABEP expression and asymptotic ABEP expression with imperfect CSI by adopting the ML detector. To offer deeper insights, we explore the impact of discrete reflection phase shifts on the performance of the RIS-SSK system. Finally, we extensively validate all the analytical derivations via Monte Carlo simulations.

The NAND flash memory channel is corrupted by different types of noises, such as the data retention noise and the wear-out noise, which lead to unknown channel offset and make the flash memory channel non-stationary. In the literature, machine learning-based methods have been proposed for data detection for flash memory channels. However, these methods require a large number of training samples and labels to achieve a satisfactory performance, which is costly. Furthermore, with a large unknown channel offset, it may be impossible to obtain enough correct labels. In this paper, we reformulate the data detection for the flash memory channel as a transfer learning (TL) problem. We then propose a model-based deep TL (DTL) algorithm for flash memory channel detection. It can effectively reduce the training data size from 106samples to less than 104samples. Moreover, we propose an unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA)-based DTL algorithm using moment alignment, which can detect data without any labels. Hence, it is suitable for scenarios where the decoding of error-correcting code fails and no labels can be obtained. Finally, a UDA-based threshold detector is proposed to eliminate the need for a neural network. Both the channel raw error rate analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed DTL-based detection schemes can achieve near-optimal bit error rate (BER) performance with much less training data and/or without using any labels.

This paper studies the fair transmission design for an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) aided rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA). IRS is used to establish a good signal propagation environment and enhance the RSMA transmission performance. The fair rate adaption problem is constructed as a max-min optimization problem. To solve the optimization problem, we adopt an alternative optimization (AO) algorithm to optimize the power allocation, beamforming, and decoding order, respectively. A generalized power iteration (GPI) method is proposed to optimize the receive beamforming, which can improve the minimum rate of devices and reduce the optimization complexity. At the base station (BS), a successive group decoding (SGD) algorithm is proposed to tackle the uplink signal estimation, which trades off the fairness and complexity of decoding. At the same time, we also consider robust communication with imperfect channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT), which studies robust optimization by using lower bound expressions on the expected data rates. Extensive numerical results show that the proposed optimization algorithm can significantly improve the performance of fairness. It also provides reliable results for uplink communication with imperfect CSIT.

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted index modulation system schemes are considered to be a promising technology for sixth-generation (6G) wireless communication systems, which can enhance various system capabilities such as coverage and reliability. However, obtaining perfect channel state information (CSI) is challenging due to the lack of a radio frequency chain in RIS. In this paper, we investigate the RIS-assisted full-duplex (FD) two-way space shift keying (SSK) system under imperfect CSI, where the signal emissions are augmented by deploying RISs in the vicinity of two FD users. The maximum likelihood detector is utilized to recover the transmit antenna index. With this in mind, we derive closed-form average bit error probability (ABEP) expression based on the Gaussian-Chebyshev quadrature (GCQ) method, and provide the upper bound and asymptotic ABEP expressions in the presence of channel estimation errors. To gain more insights, we also derive the outage probability and provide the throughput of the proposed scheme with imperfect CSI. The correctness of the analytical derivation results is confirmed via Monte Carlo simulations. It is demonstrated that increasing the number of elements of RIS can significantly improve the ABEP performance of the FD system over the half-duplex (HD) system. Furthermore, in the high SNR region, the ABEP performance of the FD system is better than that of the HD system.

Federated learning (FL), as a type of distributed machine learning, is vulnerable to external attacks during parameter transmissions between learning agents and a model aggregator. In particular, malicious participant clients in FL can purposefully craft their uploaded model parameters to manipulate system outputs, which is know as a model poisoning (MP) attack. In this paper, we propose effective MP algorithms to attack the classical defensive aggregation Krum at the aggregator. The proposed algorithms are designed to evade detection, i.e., covert MP (CMP). Specifically, we first formulate the MP as an optimization problem by minimizing the Euclidean distance between the manipulated model and designated one, constrained by Krum. Then, we develop CMP algorithms against the Krum based on the solutions of this optimization problem. Furthermore, to reduce the optimization complexity, we propose low complexity CMP algorithms having only a slight performance degradation. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CMP algorithms are effective and can substantially outperform existing attack mechanisms, such as Arjun's attack and the label flipping attack. More specifically, our original CMP can achieve a high rate of the attacker's accuracy ($\approx 90\%$). For example, in our experiments using the MNIST dataset, the proposed CMP attacking algorithm against Krum can successfully manipulate the aggregated model to incorrectly classify a given digit as a different one (e.g., 9 as 8). Meanwhile, our CMP algorithm with an approximated constraint can achieve a rate of 87% in terms of the attacker's accuracy (attacker-desired results), with a 73% complexity reduction compared to the original CMP.

This paper investigates an aerial reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided communication system under the probabilistic line-of-sight (LoS) channel, where an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with an RIS is deployed to assist two ground nodes in their information exchange. An optimization problem with the objective of maximizing the minimum average achievable rate is formulated to jointly design the communication scheduling, the RIS’s phase shift, and the three-dimensional (3D) UAV trajectory. To solve such a non-convex problem, we propose an efficient iterative algorithm to obtain its suboptimal solution. Simulation results show that our proposed design significantly outperforms the existing schemes and provides new insights into the elevation angle and distance trade-off for the UAV-borne RIS communication system.

Intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) have been fueled by the rapid development of communication technologies, sensor technologies, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Nonetheless, due to the dynamic characteristics of the vehicle networks, it is rather challenging to make timely and accurate decisions of vehicle behaviors. Moreover, in the presence of mobile wireless communications, the privacy and security of vehicle information are at constant risk. In this context, a new paradigm is urgently needed for various applications in dynamic vehicle environments. As a distributed machine learning technology, federated learning (FL) has received extensive attention due to its outstanding privacy protection properties and easy scalability. We conduct a comprehensive survey of the latest developments in FL for ITS. Specifically, we initially research the prevalent challenges in ITS and elucidate the motivations for applying FL from various perspectives. Subsequently, we review existing deployments of FL in ITS across various scenarios, and discuss specific potential issues in object recognition, traffic management, and service providing scenarios. Furthermore, we conduct a further analysis of the new challenges introduced by FL deployment and the inherent limitations that FL alone cannot fully address, including uneven data distribution, limited storage and computing power, and potential privacy and security concerns. We then examine the existing collaborative technologies that can help mitigate these challenges. Lastly, we discuss the open challenges that remain to be addressed in applying FL in ITS and propose several future research directions.

Federated learning (FL) can train collaboratively with several mobile terminals (MTs), which faces critical challenges in communication, resource, and privacy. Existing privacy-preserving methods usually adopt instance-level differential privacy (DP), which provides a rigorous privacy guarantee but with several bottlenecks: performance degradation, transmission overhead, and resource constraints. Therefore, we propose Fed-LTP, an efficient and privacy-enhanced FL framework withLotteryTicketHypothesis (LTH) and zero-concentrated DP(zCDP). It generates a pruned global model on the server side and conducts sparse-to-sparse training from scratch with zCDP on the client side. On the server side, two pruning schemes are proposed: (i) the weight-based pruning (LTH) determines the pruned global model structure; (ii) the iterative pruning further shrinks the size of the pruned model. Meanwhile, the performance of Fed-LTP is boosted via model validation based on the Laplace mechanism. On the client side, we use sparse-to-sparse training to solve the resource-constraints issue and provide tighter privacy analysis to reduce the privacy budget. We evaluate the effectiveness of Fed-LTP on several real-world datasets in both independent and identically distributed (IID) and non-IID settings. The results confirm the superiority of Fed-LTP over state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in communication, computation, and memory efficiencies while realizing a better utility-privacy trade-off.

In decentralized federated learning (DFL), clients exchange their models with each other for global aggregation. Due to a lack of centralized supervision, a client may easily duplicate shared models to save its computing resources. Generally, this plagiarism behavior is hard to detect, while it is harmful to model training performance. To address this issue, we propose an anti-plagiarism DFL framework to efficiently detect plagiarism misconduct. Specifically, we first design a method for detecting plagiarism by adding a time-shift pseudo-noise (PN) sequence to each client's local model before broadcasting. Second, we develop an upper bound of the loss function of DFL with the proposed PN sequence detection method, which is proved to be the convex function of both the amplitude of PN sequences ($\alpha$) and the detection threshold ($\lambda$). Next, we propose an adaptive plagiarism detection (APD) algorithm by jointly optimizing$\alpha$and$\lambda$to enhance the learning performance. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on MNIST, Adult, Cifar-10, and SVHN datasets to demonstrate that our analytical bounds are consistent with the experimental results. Remarkably, the proposed framework can recover up to a 10% classification accuracy loss in the presence of 40% plagiaristic clients.

Intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) have recently attained growing popularity in wireless networks owning to their capability to customize the wireless channel via smartly configured passive reflections. In addition to optimizing IRS reflection patterns, the flexible deployment of IRSs offers another design degree of freedom (DoF) to reconfigure the wireless propagation environment in favour of signal transmission. To unveil the impact of IRS deployment on the system capacity, we investigate the capacity of a broadcast channel with a multi-antenna base station (BS) sending independent messages to multiple users, aided by IRSs with N elements. In particular, both the distributed and centralized IRS deployment architectures are considered. Regarding the distributed IRS, the N IRS elements form multiple IRSs and each of them is installed near a user cluster; while for the centralized IRS, all IRS elements are located in the vicinity of the BS. To draw essential insights, we first derive the maximum capacity achieved by the distributed IRS and centralized IRS, respectively, under the assumption of line-of-sight (LoS) propagation and homogeneous channel setups. By carefully capturing the fundamental tradeoff between the spatial multiplexing gain and passive beamforming gain, we rigourously prove that the capacity of the distributed IRS is higher than that of the centralized IRS provided that the total number of IRS elements is above a threshold. Motivated by the superiority of the distributed IRS, we then focus on the transmission and element allocation design under the distributed IRS. By exploiting the user channel correlation of intra-clusters and inter-clusters, an efficient hybrid multiple access scheme relying on both spatial and time domains is proposed to fully exploit both the passive beamforming gain and spatial DoF. Moreover, the IRS element allocation problem is investigated for the objectives of the sum-rate maximization and the minimum user rate maximization, respectively. Finally, extensive numerical results are provided to validate our theoretical finding and also to unveil the effectiveness of the distributed IRS for improving the system capacity under various system setups.

With the rapid proliferation of smart mobile devices, federated learning (FL) has been widely considered for application in wireless networks for distributed model training. However, data heterogeneity, e.g., non-independently identically distributions and different sizes of training datasets among clients, poses major challenges to wireless FL. Limited communication resources complicate the implementation of fair scheduling which is required for training on heterogeneous data, and further deteriorate the overall performance. To address this issue, this paper focuses on performance analysis and optimization for wireless FL, considering data heterogeneity, combined with wireless resource allocation. Specifically, we first develop a closed-form expression for an upper bound on the FL loss function, with a particular emphasis on data heterogeneity described by a dataset size vector and a data divergence vector. Then we formulate the loss function minimization problem, under constraints on long-term energy consumption and latency, and jointly optimize client scheduling, uplink transmission power, channel allocation and the number of local epochs. Next, via the Lyapunov drift technique, we transform the optimization problem into a series of tractable problems. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms other benchmarks in terms of the learning accuracy and energy consumption.

In this paper, a novel system utilizing a hybrid relay-intelligent reflecting surface (HR-IRS) to boost the security performance of directional modulation (DM) is established. In particular, the malicious attacker works in full-duplex (FD) mode and it will eavesdrop on confidential message (CM) as well as send malicious jamming. To maximize the secrecy rate (SR), a joint problem of optimizing the receive beamforming, transmit beamforming, power allocation (PA) factor, and phase shift matrix (PSM) of HR-IRS is formulated. Since the optimization problem is un-convex and the variables are coupled with each other, we address this problem by iteratively optimizing these variables. First, the receive beamforming is designed based on the generalized Rayleigh-Ritz theorem. Then, the transmit beamforming and PA factor are optimized via Dinkelbach’s Transform and successive convex approximation methods. And for PSM, two strategies, called separate optimization of PSM (SO-PSM) and joint optimization of PSM (JO-PSM), are proposed. Thus, two iterative schemes are proposed accordingly, namely maximizing SR based on SO-PSM (Max-SR-SOP) and maximizing SR based on JO-PSM (Max-SR-JOP). The former has a better performance and the latter has a lower complexity. Simulation results show that given a sufficient power budget of HR-IRS, the proposed Max-SR-SOP and Max-SR-JOP can enable HR-IRS-aided DM network to obtain a higher SR than that aided by passive IRS.

In an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted wireless communication system, obtaining the real-time channel state information (CSI) through channel estimation (CE) is crucial for achieving the IRS’s passive beamforming gain, which however shortens the effective data transmission time due to the CSI feedback overhead. It is of utmost importance to decide how often to estimate the channels in an IRS-assisted system. In this paper, we propose an integrated CE and beamforming scheme to jointly optimize the adaptive CE interval and passive beamforming strategy, based on the past observation sequences composed of imperfect CSI and data rate feedback. We formulate the two-stage optimization problem as a bilevel partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), aiming to maximize the expectation of cumulative throughput of the system. We propose two bilevel deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms, namely recurrent neural network (RNN) based proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm and Belief-based PPO algorithm, to solve this problem. In these two algorithms, the CSI features from the past observation sequences are implicitly extracted by the RNN network or explicitly inferred by the belief network, which then serve as the inputs for the two-stage policy networks to determine the necessity of CE and the IRS beamforming vector based on the PPO algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed adaptive CE scheme over the periodic counterpart in terms of throughput. Moreover, the results show that it is profitable to estimate the channels less frequently if the channels exhibit a higher correlation across time.

In this paper, we investigate a practical structure of reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-based double spatial scattering modulation (DSSM) for millimeter-wave (mmWave) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. A suboptimal detector is proposed, in which the beam direction is first demodulated according to the received beam strength, and then the remaining information is demodulated by adopting the maximum likelihood algorithm. Based on the proposed suboptimal detector, we derive the conditional pairwise error probability expression. Further, the exact numerical integral and closed-form expressions of unconditional pairwise error probability (UPEP) are derived via two different approaches. To provide more insights, we derive the upper bound and asymptotic expressions of UPEP. In addition, the diversity gain of the RIS-DSSM scheme was also given. Furthermore, the union upper bound of average bit error probability (ABEP) is obtained by combining the UPEP and the number of error bits. Simulation results are provided to validate the derived upper bound and asymptotic expressions of ABEP. We found an interesting phenomenon that the ABEP performance of the proposed system-based phase shift keying is better than that of the quadrature amplitude modulation. Additionally, the performance advantage of ABEP is more significant with the increase in the number of RIS elements.

Multi-objective segmentation (MOS) in medical images is to simultaneously extract multiple regions of interest in the medical images. Due to the unbalanced distribution of samples and the similarity and significant differences between features in medical images, current methods still struggle to achieve satisfactory results. In this context, we propose a novel Morphological Guided Causal Constrain segmentation network (MCCSeg) for medical image multi-object segmentation. We introduced a Causal Constrain Module (CCM) for feature decorrelation by sample reweighting. The morphological guidance module (MG) is designed to extract the boundary features as the prior shape information for enhancing feature representation. Our experiments demonstrate that MCCSeg outperforms other state-of-the-art methods, obtaining up 3.76% and 5.41% improvements in DICE and HD95 scores on Synapse dataset, respectively.

A critical security issue in the blockchain-aided cooperative spectrum sensing (B-CSS) network is that, blockchain cannot guarantee the reliability of off-chain data source, even though the data has been recorded on the chain. Furthermore, the performance optimization of the B-CSS networks is constrained by an underlying tradeoff between throughput and security. Driven by these issues, we first develop a novel B-CSS framework with a decentralized reputation management (DRM) mechanism, wherein nodes not only collaborate to detect the availability of target spectrum off the chain, but also act as the blockchain nodes to maintain global decisions on the chain. In the off-chain phase, the DRM mechanism can enhance the trustworthiness of CSS by evaluating each node's reputation according to its contribution to the global detection. Furthermore, in light of the on-chain throughput-and-security tradeoff, verifiable reputation can be utilized as the consensus stake to adjust the difficulty level of block generation. Then, given the on-chain reputation consensus, we maximize the average throughput of the proposed framework by jointly optimizing the block size, sensing time, and block generation time. Simulation results demonstrate the optimized performance of the proposed framework. Moreover, compared with the baseline schemes, our proposal is more robust to the threat of malicious attacks such as data-tampering attack and collusion attack.

In this paper, we investigate a state-of-the-art reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted spatial scattering modulation (SSM) scheme for millimeter-wave (mmWave) systems, where a more practical scenario that the RIS is near the transmitter while the receiver is far from RIS is considered. To this end, the line-of-sight (LoS) and non-LoS links are utilized in the transmitter-RIS and RIS-receiver channels, respectively. By employing the maximum likelihood detector at the receiver, the conditional pairwise error probability (CPEP) expression for the RIS-SSM scheme is derived under the two scenarios that the received beam demodulation is correct or not. Furthermore, the union upper bound of average bit error probability (ABEP) is obtained based on the CPEP expression. Finally, the derivation results are exhaustively validated by the Monte Carlo simulations.

Non-volatile memory (NVM) channels suffer from unknown offsets due to the presence of various impairments of the memory devices. Machine learning based methods have been proposed for data detection for NVMs under unknown channel offsets. However, the existing methods require a large number of training samples and labels to achieve a satisfactory data detection performance, which will result in large read latency and more power consumption. In this paper, we formulate a deep learning based data detection framework as a transfer learning problem. A deep transfer learning (DTL) based data detection scheme is proposed to reduce the number of required training samples and labels. The optimal symbol error rate is also derived as the performance benchmark by assuming that the perfect channel knowledge is known to the detector. Our experiment results demonstrate that the proposed DTL-based data detection scheme can achieve near-optimal performance with the training data size being reduced by two orders of magnitude compared with the original deep learning-based detector.

Federated self-supervised learning (FedSSL) is an emerging method in the domain of machine learning. It collaboratively learns a powerful feature extractor among multiple participants by utilizing distributed unlabeled data. However, conventional FedSSL suffers from statistical heterogeneity due to the non-independent and identically distributed (Non-IID) data among participants. In this work, we introduce a novel method to tackle the Non-IID data issue in FedSSL. First, the relation knowledge distillation is utilized to enhance the learning from global models. Then, we dynamically update the local model with divergence-aware update (DAU) method to preserve the client’s knowledge of Non-IID data. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms other methods by up to 8% on linear evaluation, verifying the effectiveness of our approach.

This paper proposes a dynamic resource trading scheme in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted mobile edge computing (MEC) network. A UAV-assisted MEC server adaptively adjusts its trajectory to sell the computation offloading services to the mobile users (MUs), where the MUs have stochastic task arrivals. In this context, we formulate the sequential resource trading problem as a stochastic Stackelberg game, which is composed of two stages for each trading round. In the first stage, the self-interested UAV jointly optimizes its trajectory and service price to maximize its long-term profits. In the second stage, the non-cooperative MUs optimize their binary offloading decisions to minimize the average task processing delay and service payment. However, it is challenging to obtain the equilibrium across the fully decentralized agents with constantly evolving and tightly coupled policies, where each agent is confronted with a non-stationary environment. To solve this problem, we propose an opponent modeling based double deep Q learning (OM-DDQN) algorithm, where each agent adopts opponent modeling to effectively predict the trading strategies of other agents in the network. Simulation results demonstrate that, compared with the baseline algorithms, the proposed algorithm can achieve a win-win resource trading outcome that not only enhances the UAV's profit but also reduces the MUs' costs.

This paper proposes a dynamic spectrum sharing scheme in an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) assisted cognitive radio network. The UAV serves as a secondary base station to provide communication services to multiple secondary users (SUs) by adaptively utilizing the spatio-temporal spectrum opportunities of multiple device-to-device primary users (PUs), where each PU’s spectrum occupancy follows a two-state Markov process. We jointly optimize the UAV’s trajectory and user association to maximize the expectation of its cumulative energy efficiency subject to the interference constraint of the PUs. We formulate this problem as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), where the UAV can only observe the spectrum occupancy status of the adjacent PUs. Due to the lack of the PUs’ spectrum occupancy statistics, we propose a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm named partially observable double deep Q network (PO-DDQN) to obtain the near-optimal spectrum sharing policy. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm outperforms the baseline policy gradient (PG) algorithm in terms of convergence speed and the UAV’s energy efficiency. Additionally, the spectrum utilization efficiency can be further enhanced when the UAV has wider observation radius, or if the PUs’ spectrum occupancy exhibits stronger temporal correlation.

In this article, we propose a state-of-the-art downlink communication transceiver design for transmissive reconfigurable metasurface (RMS)-enabled simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) networks. Specifically, a feed antenna is deployed in the transmissive RMS-based transceiver, which can be used to implement beamforming. According to the relationship between wavelength and propagation distance, the spatial propagation models of plane and spherical waves are built. Then, in the case of imperfect channel state information (CSI), we formulate a robust system sum-rate maximization problem that jointly optimizes RMS transmissive coefficient, transmit power allocation, and power splitting ratio design while taking account of the nonlinear energy harvesting model and outage probability criterion. Since the coupling of optimization variables, the whole optimization problem is nonconvex and cannot be solved directly. Therefore, the alternating optimization (AO) framework is implemented to decompose the nonconvex original problem. In detail, the whole problem is divided into three subproblems to solve. For the nonconvexity of the objective function, successive convex approximation (SCA) is used to transform it, and the penalty function method and difference-of-convex (DC) programming are applied to deal with the nonconvex constraints. Finally, we alternately solve the three subproblems until the entire optimization problem converges. Numerical results show that our proposed algorithm has convergence and better performance than other benchmark algorithms.

The covert communication technology has emerged as a novel method for network authentication, copyright protection, and providing the evidence of cybercrimes. However, how to design the covert communication scheme in the physical layer of wireless networks and how to optimize the data rate for the covert communication channels are very challenging. In this article, we propose a wireless covert communication system (CCS), where the transmit antennas are selected and coded to generate a covert codebook. According to the covert codebook, the antennas can be dynamically combined to transmit different covert messages. In addition, we adopt a modulation scheme, named covert quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), to modulate the covert messages, where the precoding method is designed to deviate the constellations for covert information bits from those for the public information bits. Furthermore, we derive the closed-form expressions of capacity and bit error ratio (BER) for the proposed CCS. To maximize the covert data rate of the CCS, we formulate an optimization problem of the covert data rate and solve the problem to find the optimal precoding matrix. To reduce the covert information leakage, artificial noise is introduced to the system to jam the communication between the transmitting and watching nodes. We design a beamforming scheme to maximize the secure rate for the CCS, where the leakage of covert information can be minimized while the covert communication is not influenced. Simulation results show that the proposed CCS can significantly improve the covert data rate and reduce the covert BER in comparison with the traditional CCSs.

Federated Learning (FL) empowers Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) with distributed intelligence of industrial automation thanks to its capability of distributed machine learning without any raw data exchange. However, it is rather challenging for lightweight IIoT devices to perform computation-intensive local model training over large-scale deep neural networks (DNNs). Driven by this issue, we develop a communication-computation efficient FL framework for resource-limited IIoT networks that integrates DNN partition technique into the standard FL mechanism, wherein IIoT devices perform local model training over the bottom layers of the objective DNN, and offload the top layers to the edge gateway side. Considering imbalanced data distribution, we derive the device-specific participation rate to involve the devices with better data distribution in more communication rounds. Upon deriving the device-specific participation rate, we propose to minimize the training delay under the constraints of device-specific participation rate, energy consumption and memory usage. To this end, we formulate a joint optimization problem of device scheduling and resource allocation (i.e. DNN partition point, channel assignment, transmit power, and computation frequency), and solve the long-term min-max mixed integer non-linear programming based on the Lyapunov technique. In particular, the proposed dynamic device scheduling and resource allocation (DDSRA) algorithm can achieve a trade-off to balance the training delay minimization and FL performance. We also provide the FL convergence bound for the DDSRA algorithm with both convex and non-convex settings. Experimental results demonstrate the derived device-specific participation rate in terms of feasibility, and show that the DDSRA algorithm outperforms baselines in terms of test accuracy and convergence time.

Motivated by the advancing computational capacity of distributed end-user equipment (UE), as well as the increasing concerns about sharing private data, there has been considerable recent interest in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) that can be processed on distributed UEs. Specifically, in this paradigm, parts of an ML process are outsourced to multiple distributed UEs. Then, the processed information is aggregated on a certain level at a central server, which turns a centralized ML process into a distributed one and brings about significant benefits. However, this new distributed ML paradigm raises new risks in terms of privacy and security issues. In this article, we provide a survey of the emerging security and privacy risks of distributed ML from a unique perspective of information exchange levels, which are defined according to the key steps of an ML process, i.e., we consider the following levels: 1) the level of preprocessed data; 2) the level of learning models; 3) the level of extracted knowledge; and 4) the level of intermediate results. We explore and analyze the potential of threats for each information exchange level based on an overview of current state-of-the-art attack mechanisms and then discuss the possible defense methods against such threats. Finally, we complete the survey by providing an outlook on the challenges and possible directions for future research in this critical area.

As the underlying consensus protocol of Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains, Proof-of-Work (PoW) features a cryptographic mathematical puzzle whose solution is easy to verify but extremely hard to solve. Under PoW, miners maintain the security of blockchain by devoting computing powers to solve the puzzle; the miner who has solved the puzzle successfully generates a block, along with a reward (e.g., a set of cryptocurrency). The average waiting time to generate a block is inversely proportional to the computing power of the miner. To reduce the average block generation time, a group of individual miners can form a centralized mining pool to aggregate their computing power to solve the puzzle together and share the reward contained in the block. However, if the aggregated computing power of the pool forms a substantial portion of the total computing power in the network, the pooled mining undermines the core spirit of blockchain, i.e., the decentralization, and harms its security. To discourage the pooled mining, we develop a new consensus protocol called Proof-of-Age (PoA) that builds upon the native PoW protocol. The core idea of PoA lies in using Age-of-Work (AoW) to measure the effective mining periods that the miners have devoted to maintaining the security of blockchain. Unlike in the native PoW protocol, in our PoA protocol, miners benefit from its effective mining periods even if they have not successfully mined a block. We first employ a continuous time Markov chain (CTMC) to model the block generation process of the PoA based blockchain. Based on this CTMC model, we then analyze the block generation rates of the mining pool and solo miners respectively. Our analytical results verify that under PoA, the block generation rates of miners in the mining pool are reduced compared to that of solo miners, thereby disincentivizing the pooled mining. Finally, we simulate the mining process in the PoA blockchain to demonstrate the consistency of the analytical results.

Designing efficient random access is a vital problem for urgency-constrained packet delivery in uplink Internet of Things (IoT), which has not been investigated in depth so far. In this paper, we focus on unpredictable frame-synchronized traffic, which captures a number of scenarios in IoT communications, and generalize prior studies on this issue by considering a general ALOHA-like protocol, a general single-packet reception (SPR) channel, urgency-dependent throughput (UDT) based on a general urgency function, and the dynamic programming optimality. With a complete knowledge of the number of active users, we use the theory of Markov Decision Process (MDP) to explicitly obtain optimal policies for maximizing the UDT, and prove that a myopic policy is in general optimal. With an incomplete knowledge of the number of active users, we use the theory of Partially Observable MDP (POMDP) to seek optimal policies, and show that a myopic policy is in general not optimal by presenting a counterexample. Because of the prohibitive complexity to obtain optimal or near-optimal policies for this case, we propose two practical policies that utilize the inherent property of our MDP framework and channel model. Simulation results show that both outperform other alternatives. The robustness under relaxed system settings is also examined.

This paper investigates the reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) assisted spatial scattering modulation (SSM) scheme for millimeter-wave (mmWave) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, in which line-of-sight (LoS) and non-line-of-sight (NLoS) paths are respectively considered in the transmitter-RIS and RIS-receiver channels. Based on the maximum likelihood detector, the expression for the conditional pairwise error probability (CPEP) of the RIS-SSM scheme is derived for both cases of correct demodulation of the received beam or not. Furthermore, we derive the closed-form expressions of the unconditional pairwise error probability (UPEP) by employing two different methods: the probability density function and the moment-generating function expressions with a descending order of scatterer gains. To provide more useful insights, we derive the asymptotic UPEP and the diversity gain of the RIS-SSM scheme in the high SNR region. Depending on UPEP and the corresponding Euclidean distance, we further give the union upper bound of the average bit error probability (ABEP). To acquire the effective capacity of the proposed system, a new framework for ergodic capacity analysis is also provided. Finally, all derivation results are validated via extensive Monte Carlo simulations and reveal that the proposed RIS-SSM scheme outperforms the benchmarks in terms of reliability.

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have attracted increasing attention recently owing to their impressive abilities to generate realistic samples with high privacy protection. Without directly interacting with training examples, the generative model can be used to estimate the underlying distribution of an original dataset while the discriminator can examine model quality of the generated samples by comparing the label values with training examples. In considering privacy issues in GANS, existing works focus on perturbing the parameters and analyzing the corresponding privacy protection capability, and the parameters are not directly exchanged between the generator and discriminator in GANs. Thus, in this work, we propose a Rényi-differentially private-GAN (RDP-GAN), which achieves differential privacy (DP) in a GAN by carefully adding random Gaussian noise to the value of the exchanged loss function during training. Moreover, we derive analytical results characterizing the total privacy loss under the subsampling method and cumulative iterations, which show its effectiveness for the privacy budget allocation. In addition, in order to mitigate the negative impact of injecting noises, we enhance the proposed algorithm by adding an adaptive noise tuning step, which will change the amount of added noise according to the testing accuracy. Through extensive experimental results, we verify that the proposed algorithm can achieve a better privacy level while producing high-quality samples compared with a benchmark DP-GAN scheme based on noise perturbation on training gradients.

While preserving the privacy of federated learning (FL), differential privacy (DP) inevitably degrades the utility (i.e., accuracy) of FL due to model perturbations caused by DP noise added to model updates. Existing studies have considered exclusively noise with persistent root-mean-square amplitude and overlooked an opportunity of adjusting the amplitudes to alleviate the adverse effects of the noise. This paper presents a new DP perturbation mechanism with a time-varying noise amplitude to protect the privacy of FL and retain the capability of adjusting the learning performance. Specifically, we propose a geometric series form for the noise amplitude and reveal analytically the dependence of the series on the number of global aggregations and the (ϵ,δ)-DP requirement. We derive an online refinement of the series to prevent FL from premature convergence resulting from excessive perturbation noise. Another important aspect is an upper bound developed for the loss function of a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) trained by FL running the new DP mechanism. Accordingly, the optimal number of global aggregations is obtained, balancing the learning and privacy. Extensive experiments are conducted using MLP, supporting vector machine, and convolutional neural network models on four public datasets. The contribution of the new DP mechanism to the convergence and accuracy of privacy-preserving FL is corroborated, compared to the state-of-the-art Gaussian noise mechanism with a persistent noise amplitude.

Personalized federated learning (PFL), as a novel federated learning (FL) paradigm, is capable of generating personalized models for heterogenous clients. Combined with with a meta-learning mechanism, PFL can further improve the convergence performance with few-shot training. However, meta-learning based PFL has two stages of gradient descent in each local training round, therefore posing a more serious challenge in information leakage. In this paper, we propose a differential privacy (DP) based PFL (DP-PFL) framework and analyze its convergence performance. Specifically, we first design a privacy budget allocation scheme for inner and outer update stages based on the Rényi DP composition theory. Then, we develop two convergence bounds for the proposed DP-PFL framework under convex and non-convex loss function assumptions, respectively. Our developed convergence bounds reveal that 1) there is an optimal size of the DP-PFL model that can achieve the best convergence performance for a given privacy level, and 2) there is an optimal tradeoff among the number of communication rounds, convergence performance and privacy budget. Evaluations on various real-life datasets demonstrate that our theoretical results are consistent with experimental results. The derived theoretical results can guide the design of various DP-PFL algorithms with configurable tradeoff requirements on the convergence performance and privacy levels.

The booming of the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) brings an exponential increase in industrial devices, calling for more flexible and low-cost communications. The fifth generation and beyond (B5G) communication technologies provide a dedicated solution by supporting two industry-targeted technologies: Massive machine-type communications (mMTC) and ultra reliable low-latency communications (URLLC). In this article, we design a B5G-aided quality test system in advanced manufacturing, where various sensors are connected to the base station (BS) and send contextual information via mMTC. The BS and quality test machine transmit short length commands and small size feedback to each other, respectively, via URLLC. We formulate a long-term optimization problem to improve the product qualification rate by maximizing the expected average reward with limited testing capacity and changing configurations. To address this problem, we develop a novel context-aware combinatorial quality test (CC-QT) algorithm based on bandit learning (BL), which integrates contextual information to predict the product quality, and a combinatorial method to decrease the complexity of the BL process. Furthermore, we derive a performance upper bound of the proposed CC-QT and analyze its computational complexity. Experimental results illustrate the performance of CC-QT and substantiate its superiority over the existing algorithms.

In this paper, we utilize a concatenation scheme to construct new families of quantum error correction codes achieving the quantum Gilbert-Varshamov (GV) bound asymptotically. Weconcatenate alternant codes with any linear code achievingthe classical GV bound to construct Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS) codes. We show that the concatenated code can achieve the quantum GV bound asymptotically and can approach the Hashing bound for asymmetric Pauli channels. By combing Steane’s enlargement construction of CSS codes, we derive a family of enlarged stabilizer codes achieving the quantum GV bound for enlarged CSS codes asymptotically. Asapplications, we derive two families of fast encodable and decodable CSS codes with parameters$\mathscr {Q}_{1}=[[N,\Omega (\sqrt {N}),\Omega (\sqrt {N})]]$, and$\mathscr {Q}_{2}=[[N,\Omega (N/\log N),\Omega (N/\log N)/\Omega (\log N)]]$. We show that$\mathscr {Q}_{1}$can be encoded very efficiently by circuits of size$O(N)$and depth$O(\sqrt {N})$. For an input error syndrome,$\mathscr {Q}_{1}$can correct any adversarial error of weight up to half the minimum distance bound in$O(N)$time.$\mathscr {Q}_{1}$can also be decoded in parallel in$O(\sqrt {N})$time by using$O(\sqrt {N})$classical processors. For an input error syndrome, we proved that$\mathscr {Q}_{2}$can correct a linear number of${X}$-errors with high probability and an almost linear number of${Z}$-errors in$O(N)$time. Moreover,$\mathscr {Q}_{2}$can be decoded in parallel in$O(\log (N))$time by using$O(N)$classical processors.

Traffic congestion at signalized intersections often leads to serious impacts on adjacent intersections on a corridor. To enhance intersections’ throughput efficiency, traffic signals are commonly coordinated across intersections. Traditional signal coordination methods control the adjacent intersections by setting a fixed phase offset. However, these traditional coordination methods may have poor adaptability to dynamic traffic conditions, which can cause additional congestion. To reduce arterial traffic delays, this paper develops an adaptive coordination control method based on multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Most existing MARL-based methods rely on impractical assumptions to improve their performance in complex and dynamic traffic scenarios. To overcome these assumptions, this paper proposes a fully scalable MARL algorithm for arterial traffic signal coordination based on the proximal policy optimization algorithm. We apply a parameter-sharing training protocol to mitigate the slow convergence due to nonstationarity and to reduce computational requirements. In addition, a new action setting is designed by using the lead-lag phase sequence to simultaneously improve the implementation and coordination flexibility of the method. Extensive simulation experiments and comparisons with existing methods demonstrate that the proposed method performed stably in both simulated and real-world arterial corridors. Hence, the proposed signal coordination method can alleviate traffic congestion more effectively than existing traditional and MARL-based methods.

With the great amount of available data, especially collecting from the ubiquitous Internet of Things (IoT), the issue of privacy leakage arises increasingly concerns recently. To preserve the privacy of IoT datasets, traditional methods usually calibrate random noises on the data values to achieve differential privacy (DP). However, the amount of the calibrating noises should be carefully designed and a heedless value will definitely degrade the availability of datasets. Thus, in this work, we propose a stochastic perturbation method to sanitize the dataset, where the perturbation is obtained from the rest samples in the same dataset. In addition, we derive the expression of the utility level based on its unique framework and prove that the proposed algorithm can achieve the$\epsilon$-DP. To show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, we conduct extensive experiments on real-life datasets by various functions, such as query answers and machine learning tasks. By comparing with the state-of-the-art methods, our proposed algorithm can achieve a better performance under the same privacy level.

Building upon the prevailing concept of edge computing (EC), a distributed EC market requires decentralized and verified transaction management to trade computing resources. Towards this goal, we study a blockchain-aided EC market wherein each data service operator (DSO) rents a group of edge computing nodes (ECNs) and leases the ECNs to the user terminals (UTs) to provide computation offloading services. A trustworthiness model is introduced to evaluate the quality of each network entity throughout the transactions. We develop a two-level trading mechanism over smart contract to enable the automatic and efficient transactions among the network entities and provide high quality services. First, we propose a smart contract based matching mechanism to establish the renting association between the DSOs and ECNs with the aim of maximizing the social welfare. Second, we propose a social welfare improved double auction (SWIDA) mechanism to build up the leasing association between the DSOs and UTs, and determine the pricing of the winners. We show that the proposed double auction mechanism can achieve individual rationality, balanced budget, truthfulness in expectation, and an improved social welfare than the benchmark mechanisms. Moreover, we put forth a trustworthiness driven Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism to enable verified transaction and fair allocation of block generation reward. Following the principle of PoS, we formulate the block generation as a coalitional game, wherein each stakeholder votes according to its trustworthiness and coinage, and shares the reward among the coalition according to the Shapley values. The simulation results show that the proposed PoS consensus mechanism can reduce the wealth inequality among the network entities compared with the conventional consensus mechanisms.

Deep neural network (DNN)-task enabled mobile edge computing (MEC) is gaining ubiquity due to outstanding performance of artificial intelligence. By virtue of characteristics of DNN, this paper develops a joint design of task partitioning and offloading for a DNN-task enabled MEC network that consists of a single server and multiple mobile devices (MDs), where the server and each MD employ the well-trained DNNs for task computation. The main contributions of this paper are as follows: First, we propose a layer-level computation partitioning strategy for DNN to partition each MD's task into the subtasks that are either locally computed at the MD or offloaded to the server. Second, we develop a delay prediction model for DNN to characterize the computation delay of each subtask at the MD and the server. Third, we design a slot model and a dynamic pricing strategy for the server to efficiently schedule the offloaded subtasks. Fourth, we jointly optimize the design of task partitioning and offloading to minimize each MD's cost that includes the computation delay, the energy consumption, and the price paid to the server. In particular, we propose two distributed algorithms based on the aggregative game theory to solve the optimization problem. Finally, numerical results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is scalable to different types of DNNs and shows the superiority over the baseline schemes in terms of processing delay and energy consumption.

The convergence of mobile edge computing (MEC) and blockchain is transforming the current computing services in mobile networks, by offering task offloading solutions with security enhancement empowered by blockchain mining. Nevertheless, these important enabling technologies have been studied separately in most existing works. This article proposes a novel cooperative task offloading and block mining (TOBM) scheme for a blockchain-based MEC system where each edge device not only handles data tasks but also deals with block mining for improving the system utility. To address the latency issues caused by the blockchain operation in MEC, we develop a new Proof-of-Reputation consensus mechanism based on a lightweight block verification strategy. A multi-objective function is then formulated to maximize the system utility of the blockchain-based MEC system, by jointly optimizing offloading decision, channel selection, transmit power allocation, and computational resource allocation. We propose a novel distributed deep reinforcement learning-based approach by using a multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient algorithm. We then develop a game-theoretic solution to model the offloading and mining competition among edge devices as a potential game, and prove the existence of a pure Nash equilibrium. Simulation results demonstrate the significant system utility improvements of our proposed scheme over baseline approaches.

Blockchain technology has been extensively studied to enable distributed and tamper-proof data processing in federated learning (FL). Most existing blockchain assisted FL (BFL) frameworks have employed a third-party blockchain network to decentralize the model aggregation process. However, decentralized model aggregation is vulnerable to pooling and collusion attacks from the third-party blockchain network. Driven by this issue, we propose a novel BFL framework that features the integration of training and mining at the client side. To optimize the learning performance of FL, we propose to maximize the long-term time average (LTA) training data size under a constraint of LTA energy consumption. To this end, we formulate a joint optimization problem of training client selection and resource allocation (i.e., the transmit power and computation frequency at the client side), and solve the long-term mixed integer non-linear program based on a Lyapunov technique. In particular, the proposed dynamic resource allocation and client scheduling (DRACS) algorithm can achieve a trade-off of [$\mathcal {O}(1/V)$,$\mathcal {O}(\sqrt {V})$] to balance the maximization of the LTA training data size and the minimization of the LTA energy consumption with a control parameter$V$. Our experimental results show that the proposed DRACS algorithm achieves better learning accuracy than benchmark client scheduling strategies with limited time or energy consumption.

Data-aided channel estimation is a promising solution to improve channel estimation accuracy by exploiting data symbols as pilot signals for updating an initial channel estimate. In this paper, we propose a semi-data-aided channel estimator for multiple-input multiple-output communication systems. Our strategy is to leverage reinforcement learning (RL) for selecting reliable detected symbols, then update the channel estimate by utilizing only the selected symbols as additional pilot signals. Towards this end, we first define a Markov decision process (MDP) which sequentially decides whether to use each detected symbol as an additional pilot signal. We then develop an RL algorithm to find an effective policy of the MDP based on a Monte Carlo tree search approach. In this algorithm, we exploit the a-posteriori probability for approximating both the optimal future actions and the corresponding state transitions of the MDP and derive a closed-form expression for the optimal policy under the approximations. A key advantage of the proposed channel estimator is that it requires less computational complexity than conventional iterative data-aided channel estimators. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed channel estimator effectively mitigates both channel estimation error and detection performance loss caused by insufficient pilot signals.

Driven by unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)’s advantages of flexible observation and enhanced communication capability, it is expected to revolutionize the existing integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system and promise a more flexible joint design. Nevertheless, the existing works on ISAC mainly focus on exploring the performance of both functionalities simultaneously during the entire considered period, which may ignore the practical asymmetric sensing and communication requirements. In particular, always forcing sensing along with communication may make it is harder to balance between these two functionalities due to shared spectrum resources and limited transmit power. To address this issue, we propose a new integrated periodic sensing and communication (IPSAC) mechanism for the UAV-enabled ISAC system to provide a more flexible trade-off between two integrated functionalities. Specifically, the system achievable rate is maximized via jointly optimizing UAV trajectory, user association, target sensing selection, and transmit beamforming, while meeting the sensing frequency and beam pattern gain requirement for the given targets. Despite that this problem is highly non-convex and involves closely coupled integer variables, we derive the closed-form optimal beamforming vector to dramatically reduce the complexity of beamforming design, and present a tight lower bound of the achievable rate to facilitate UAV trajectory design. Based on the above results, we propose a two-layer penalty-based algorithm to efficiently solve the considered problem. To draw more important insights, the optimal achievable rate and the optimal UAV location are analyzed under a special case of infinity number of antennas. Furthermore, we prove the structural symmetry between the optimal solutions in different ISAC frames without location constraints in our considered UAV-enabled ISAC system. Based on this, we propose an efficient algorithm for solving the problem with location constraints. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of our proposed designs and also unveil a more flexible trade-off in ISAC systems over benchmark schemes.

In this paper, we investigate the energy-efficiency (EE) problem in edge association for heterogeneous Internet of Vehicles (IoV), when the dynamic environmental information can not be known in advance. Aiming to maximize the long-term tradeoff between EE and handover (HO) overhead, we propose a cooperative multi-agent edge association solution, where vehicular user equipments (VUEs) make decisions cooperatively relying on their local observations under centralized training. Specifically, we first construct a multi-agent partially observable Markov decision process (MA-POMDP) problem and decompose the system value function into the local value functions for implicit individual learning. Next, through sharing learning experience and approximating the global state, each VUE is able to obtain its own optimal/suboptimal policy given its local observations and historical information. Simulation results show that the proposed solution outperforms the non-cooperative counterpart and other baselines in terms of improving EE with the most appropriate number of HOs.

Federated learning (FL) has become a promising machine learning (ML) paradigm for training machine learning models over distributed datasets, owing to its low communication costs and privacy preserving property. To date, the most commonly adopted model fusion mechanism in FL is average aggregation. However, it has been shown that this average aggregation mechanism performs poorly in heterogeneous systems, especially for non-independent and identically distributed (NonIID) data. In order to address this challenge, we propose a weighted FL model aggregation strategy for each client based on clustering, termed CluFL. Specifically, CluFL first measures the similarities among uploaded models from clients through their parameters using a spectral clustering algorithm. Then, CluFL assigns aggregation weights according to the similarity of the intra-cluster global model for each cluster and the average model across the clusters. Further, we derive a convergence bound on the CluFL algorithm considering a practical nonconvex setting of neural network training. This bound reveals that the proposed CluFL algorithm can achieve a convergence speed in the order of O(1/T). Extensive experiments have been conducted on both FashionMNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets and show that CluFL outperforms the state-of-the-art FL algorithms in terms of accuracy and communication efficiency.

Abstract The error‐correcting performance of multi‐level‐cell (MLC) NAND flash memory is closely related to the block length of error‐correcting codes (ECCs) and log‐likelihood‐ratios of the read‐voltage thresholds. Driven by this issue, this paper optimizes the read‐voltage thresholds for MLC flash memory to improve the decoding performance of ECCs with finite block length. First, through the analysis of channel coding rate and decoding error probability under finite block length, the optimization problem of read‐voltage thresholds to minimize the maximum decoding error probability is formulated. Second, a cross‐iterative search algorithm to optimize read‐voltage thresholds under the perfect knowledge of flash memory channel is developed. However, it is challenging to analytically characterize the voltage distribution under the effect of data retention noise. To address this problem, a deep neural network (DNN)‐aided optimization strategy to optimize the read‐voltage thresholds is developed, where a multi‐layer perception network is employed to learn the relationship between voltage distribution and read‐voltage thresholds. Simulation results show that, compared with the existing schemes, the proposed DNN‐aided read‐voltage threshold optimization strategy with a well‐designed Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) code can not only improve the program‐and‐erase endurance but also reduce the read latency.

Vehicular edge computing (VEC) has become a promising enabler for ultrareliable and low-latency communications (URLLC) vehicular networks by providing computational resources for task offloading. In this article, we investigate an online task offloading problem for heterogeneous VEC (HVEC) network in the face of unknown environment dynamics. To overcome the unavailability of state information, we aim for minimizing the expectation of total offloading energy consumption while satisfying stringent delay requirements by learning the relationship between historical observations and rewards. Hence, this problem constitutes a contextual multiarmed bandit (MAB) problem. By grouping users according to their task preferences, we propose a contextual clustering of bandits-based online vehicular task offloading (CBTO) solution, which is aware of the task popularity. Simulation results reveal that the proposed solution outperforms other contextual and context-free benchmarkers in terms of both offloading energy consumption and delay performance.

The sixth-generation (6G) wireless communication networks are envisioned to revolutionize customer services and applications via the Internet of Things (IoT) toward a future of fully intelligent and autonomous systems. In this article, we explore the emerging opportunities brought by 6G technologies in IoT networks and applications, by conducting a holistic survey on the convergence of 6G and IoT. We first shed light on some of the most fundamental 6G technologies that are expected to empower future IoT networks, including edge intelligence, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, space–air–ground–underwater communications, Terahertz communications, massive ultrareliable and low-latency communications, and blockchain. Particularly, compared to the other related survey papers, we provide an in-depth discussion of the roles of 6G in a wide range of prospective IoT applications via five key domains, namely, healthcare IoTs, Vehicular IoTs and Autonomous Driving, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Satellite IoTs, and Industrial IoTs. Finally, we highlight interesting research challenges and point out potential directions to spur further research in this promising area.

In Internet of Vehicles (IoV), information freshness is a significant indicator to indemnify road traffic safety, which is measured by Age of Information (AoI). In this article, we consider the coexistence scenario of vehicular user pairs and cellular users, where the base station (BS) acts as an agent to allocate channels and transmit power for vehicular user pairs. With the goal of minimizing the sum of the average AoI of all links and the average power consumption of all vehicular user pairs, we formulate this optimization problem as a discrete-time Markov decision process (MDP) problem and adopt the trust region policy optimization (TRPO) algorithm, which has the advantage of fast convergence and high stability. Then, an AoI-aware joint spectrum and power dynamic allocation scheme based on the TRPO algorithm is proposed. Simulation results show that the TRPO-based scheme significantly outperforms both the deep$Q$network (DQN)-based scheme and the random scheme in terms of average cumulative reward, convergence speed, and stability.

In this article, we investigate the anti-jamming problem with joint channel and power allocation for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks. In particular, we focus on avoiding both mutual interference among UAVs and external malicious jamming to maximize the system Quality of Experience (QoE) relevant to the power consumption. To simultaneously capture the competition and coordination among UAVs, we first model the problem as a local interaction Markov game and then prove it as an exact potential game with at least one Nash equilibrium. Next, we propose a collaborative multiagent layered Q learning (MALQL)-based anti-jamming communication algorithm to reduce the high dimensionality of the action space and analyze the asymptotic convergence of the proposed algorithm. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, which outperforms the traditional multiagent$Q$learning algorithm when suffering from different jamming strategies.

In federated learning (FL), model training is distributed over clients and local models are aggregated by a central server. The performance of uploaded models in such situations can vary widely due to imbalanced data distributions, potential demands on privacy protections, and quality of transmissions. In this paper, we aim to minimize FL training delay over wireless channels, constrained by overall training performance as well as each client’s differential privacy (DP) requirement. We solve this problem in a multi-agent multi-armed bandit (MAMAB) framework to deal with the situation where there are multiple clients confronting different unknown transmission environments, e.g., channel fading and interference. Specifically, we first transform long-term constraints on both training performance and each client’s DP into a virtual queue based on the Lyapunov drift technique. Then, we convert the MAMAB to a max-min bipartite matching problem at each communication round, by estimating rewards with the upper confidence bound (UCB) approach. More importantly, we propose two efficient solutions to this matching problem, i.e., a modified Hungarian algorithm and greedy matching with a better alternative (GMBA), of which the former can achieve the optimal solution with high complexity while the latter approaches a better trade-off by enabling verified low-complexity with little performance loss. In addition, we develop an upper bound on the expected regret of this MAMAB based FL framework, which shows a linear growth over the logarithm of communication rounds, justifying its theoretical feasibility. Extensive experimental results are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms, and the impacts of various parameters on the FL performance over wireless edge networks are also discussed.

In this paper, a novel intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted wireless powered communication network (WPCN) architecture is proposed for power-constrained Internet-of-Things (IoT) smart devices, where IRS is exploited to improve the performance of WPCN under imperfect channel state information (CSI). We formulate a hybrid access point (HAP) transmit energy minimization problem by jointly optimizing time allocation, HAP energy beamforming, receiving beamforming, user transmit power allocation, IRS energy reflection coefficient and information reflection coefficient under the imperfect CSI and non-linear energy harvesting model. On account of the high coupling of optimization variables, the formulated problem is a non-convex optimization problem that is difficult to solve directly. To address the above-mentioned challenging problem, alternating optimization (AO) technique is applied to decouple the optimization variables to solve the problem. Specifically, through AO, time allocation, HAP energy beamforming, receiving beamforming, user transmit power allocation, IRS energy reflection coefficient and information reflection coefficient are divided into three sub-problems to be solved alternately. The difference-of-convex (DC) programming is used to solve the non-convex rank-one constraint in solving IRS energy reflection coefficient and information reflection coefficient. Numerical simulations verify the superiority of the proposed optimization algorithm in decreasing HAP transmit energy compared with other benchmark schemes.

In this paper, a massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relay assisted multi-tier computing (MC) system is employed to enhance the task computation. We investigate the joint design of the task scheduling, service caching and power allocation to minimize the total task scheduling delay. To this end, we formulate a robust non-convex optimization problem taking into account the impact of imperfect channel state information (CSI). In particular, multiple task nodes (TNs) offload their computational tasks either to computing and caching nodes (CCN) constituted by nearby massive MIMO-aided relay nodes (MRN) or alternatively to the cloud constituted by nearby fog access nodes (FAN). To address the non-convexity of the optimization problem, an efficient alternating optimization algorithm is developed. First, we solve the non-convex power allocation optimization problem by transforming it into a linear optimization problem for a given task offloading and service caching result. Then, we use the classic Lagrange partial relaxation for relaxing the binary task offloading as well as caching constraints and formulate the dual problem to obtain the task allocation and software caching results. Given both the power allocation, as well as the task offloading and caching result, we propose an iterative optimization algorithm for finding the jointly optimized results. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms the benchmark schemes, where the power allocation may be controlled by the asymptotic form of the effective signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR).

Wireless powered mobile edge computing (WP-MEC) has been widely studied as a promising technology to liberate wireless terminals from the computation-intensive and energy-consuming tasks. This article considers a WP-MEC system consisting of multiple base stations (BSs) and mobile devices (MDs), where the MDs offload tasks to the BSs for computational resources and the BSs charge the MDs using wireless power transfer (WPT). In practice, each BS and MD are equipped with a task buffer with limited size and a battery with limited capacity. First, we develop a time slotted WP-MEC system with task and energy queuing dynamics to study long-term system performance under time-varying fading channels and stochastic task and energy arrivals. Second, we propose a dynamic throughput maximum (DTM) algorithm based on perturbed Lyapunov optimization to maximize the system throughput under task and energy queue stability constraints, by optimizing the allocation of communication, computation, and energy resources. For the DTM algorithm, we characterize a throughput-backlog trade-off of [$\mathcal {O}(1/V)$,$\mathcal {O}(V)$] to indicate that the system throughput goes up as the queue backlog increases, where$V$is a control parameter between the system throughput and the queue backlog. However, we find that, as$V$goes large, the system throughput can be pushed arbitrarily close to the optimum at the cost of linearly increasing queue backlog (i.e.,$\mathcal {O}(V)$). To reduce the cost, we further develop an improved dynamic throughput maximum (IDTM) algorithm, and verify that the IDTM algorithm can achieve a trade-off of [$\mathcal {O}(1/V)$,$\mathcal {O}((\log (V))^2)$] between the system throughput and the queue backlog. The simulation results demonstrate that IDTM retains close system throughput to DTM with only$\mathcal {O}((\log (V))^2)$queue backlog.

Federated learning (FL), as a type of collaborative machine learning framework, is capable of preserving private data from mobile terminals (MTs) while training the data into useful models. Nevertheless, from a viewpoint of information theory, it is still possible for a curious server to infer private information from the shared models uploaded by MTs. To address this problem, we first make use of the concept of local differential privacy (LDP), and propose a user-level differential privacy (UDP) algorithm by adding artificial noise to the shared models before uploading them to servers. According to our analysis, the UDP framework can realize$(\epsilon _{i}, \delta _{i})$-LDP for the$i$th MT with adjustable privacy protection levels by varying the variances of the artificial noise processes. We then derive a theoretical convergence upper-bound for the UDP algorithm. It reveals that there exists an optimal number of communication rounds to achieve the best learning performance. More importantly, we propose a communication rounds discounting (CRD) method. Compared with the heuristic search method, the proposed CRD method can achieve a much better trade-off between the computational complexity of searching and the convergence performance. Extensive experiments indicate that our UDP algorithm using the proposed CRD method can effectively improve both the training efficiency and model quality for the given privacy protection levels.

Federated learning (FL), as a distributed machine learning paradigm, promotes personal privacy by local data processing at each client. However, relying on a centralized server for model aggregation, standard FL is vulnerable to server malfunctions, untrustworthy servers, and external attacks. To address these issues, we propose a decentralized FL framework by integrating blockchain into FL, namely, blockchain assisted decentralized federated learning (BLADE-FL). In a round of the proposed BLADE-FL, each client broadcasts its trained model to other clients, aggregates its own model with received ones, and then competes to generate a block before its local training on the next round. We evaluate the learning performance of BLADE-FL, and develop an upper bound on the global loss function. Then we verify that this bound is convex with respect to the number of overall aggregation rounds$K$, and optimize the computing resource allocation for minimizing the upper bound. We also note that there is a critical problem of training deficiency, caused by lazy clients who plagiarize others’ trained models and add artificial noises to disguise their cheating behaviors. Focusing on this problem, we explore the impact of lazy clients on the learning performance of BLADE-FL, and characterize the relationship among the optimal$K$, the learning parameters, and the proportion of lazy clients. Based on the MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets, we see that the experimental results are consistent with the analytical ones. To be specific, the gap between the developed upper bound and experimental results is lower than$5\%$, and the optimized$K$based on the upper bound can effectively minimize the loss function.

Mobile edge computing (MEC) enables computing services at the network edge closer to mobile users (MUs) to reduce network transmission latency and energy consumption. Deploying edge computing servers in small base stations (SBSs), operators make profit by offering MUs with computing services, while MUs purchase services to solve their own computation tasks quickly and energy-efficiently. In this context, it is of particular importance to optimize computing resource allocation and computing service pricing in each SBS, subject to its limited computing and communication resources. To address this issue, we formulate an optimization problem of computing resource management and trading in small-cell networks and tackle this problem using a two-tier matching. Specifically, the first tier targets at the association algorithm between MUs and SBSs to achieve maximum social welfare, and the second tier focuses on the collaboration algorithm among SBSs to make efficient usage of limited computing resources. We further show that the two proposed algorithms contribute to stable matchings and achieve weak Pareto optimality. In particular, we verify that the first algorithm arrives at a competitive equilibrium. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed algorithms can achieve a better network social welfare than baseline algorithms while retaining a close-optimal performance.

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is a promising approach that can reduce the latency of task processing by offloading tasks from user equipments (UEs) to MEC servers. Existing works always assume that the MEC server is capable of executing the offloaded tasks, without considering the impact of improper load on task processing efficiency. In this article, we present a two-stage computing offloading scheme to minimize the task processing delay while managing the server load properly. To minimize the task processing delay, each UE optimizes how much workload to be offloaded to the MEC server. To improve the task processing efficiency of the server, we arrange the processing order of offloading tasks by introducing an aggregative game with an instantaneous load billing mechanism. The proposed game can obtain the optimal task offloading and processing strategy with limited information and a small number of iterations. Simulation results show that our scheme approaches the optimal offloading strategy in terms of minimizing task processing delay for each UE and improving processing efficiency for the server.

This paper proposes a novel network framework of intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) networks, where IRS is used to enhance the NOMA performance and the wireless power transfer (WPT) efficiency of SWIPT. We formulate a problem of minimizing base station (BS) transmit power by jointly optimizing successive interference cancellation (SIC) decoding order, BS transmit beamforming vector, power splitting (PS) ratio and IRS phase shift while taking into account the quality-of-service (QoS) requirement and energy harvested threshold of each user. The formulated problem is non-convex optimization problem, which is difficult to solve it directly. Hence, a two-stage algorithm is proposed to solve the above-mentioned problem by applying semidefinite relaxation (SDR), Gaussian randomization and successive convex approximation (SCA). Specifically, after determining SIC decoding order by designing IRS phase shift in the first stage, we alternately optimize BS transmit beamforming vector, PS ratio, and IRS phase shift to minimize the BS transmit power. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of our proposed optimization algorithm in reducing BS transmit power compared to other baseline algorithms. Meanwhile, compared with non-IRS-assisted network, the IRS-assisted SWIPT NOMA network can decrease BS transmit power by 51.13%.

In this paper, we propose anew dynamic IRS beamformingframework to boost the sum throughput of an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) aided wireless powered communication network (WPCN). Specifically, the IRS phase-shift vectors across time and resource allocation are jointly optimized to enhance the efficiencies of both downlink wireless power transfer (DL WPT) and uplink wireless information transmission (UL WIT) between a hybrid access point (HAP) and multiple wirelessly powered devices. To this end, we first study three special cases of the dynamic IRS beamforming, namelyuser-adaptiveIRS beamforming,UL-adaptiveIRS beamforming, andstatic IRS beamforming, by characterizing their optimal performance relationships and proposing corresponding algorithms. Interestingly, it is rigorously proved that the latter two cases achieve the same throughput, thus helping halve the number of IRS phase shifts to be optimized and signalling overhead practically required for UL-adaptive IRS beamforming. Then, we propose a general optimization framework for dynamic IRS beamforming, which is applicable for any given number of IRS phase-shift vectors available. Despite of the non-convexity of the general problem with highly coupled optimization variables, we propose two algorithms to solve it and particularly, the low-complexity algorithm exploits the intrinsic structure of the optimal solution as well as the solutions to the cases with user-adaptive and static IRS beamforming. Simulation results validate our theoretical findings, illustrate the practical significance of IRS with dynamic beamforming for spectral and energy efficient WPCNs, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed designs over various benchmark schemes.

The combination of mobile edge computing (MEC) and blockchain is transforming the current computing services in Internet of Things networks, by offering task offloading solutions with security enhancement enabled by blockchain mining. Nevertheless, these important enabling technologies have been studied separately in most existing works. This article proposes a novel cooperative task offloading and block mining (TOBM) scheme to optimize the system utility in blockchain-empowered MEC. Herein, each edge device (ED) not only handles data tasks but also deals with block mining which makes the system design and optimization highly complex. Therefore, we develop a novel cooperative deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approach which allows EDs to cooperatively offload their data tasks to the MEC server and perform block mining based on a Proof-of-Reputation consensus mechanism. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme significantly improves offloading utility, reduces blockchain mining latency, and achieves better system utility, compared to other non-cooperative and cooperative schemes.

A sharded blockchain with the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus protocol has advantages in increasing throughput and reducing energy consumption, enabling the resource-limited participants to manage transactions and in a decentralized way and obtain rewards at a lower cost, e.g., Internet-of-Things (IoT) users. However, the latest PoS (e.g., Casper) requires a steep security deposit, which is the key to provide more robust security guarantees than Proof of Work, but not practical for the owners of heterogeneous IoT devices. This article considers any individual and institute who owns the IoT devices as the potential participant and focuses on designing the proper security deposits in a practical scenario with hidden information and hidden action. To bridge blockchain and the IoT users, we study the problem of balancing the security incentive and the economic incentive under two cases: 1) stake oriented and 2) effort oriented. We propose two joint models under the contract theory framework to efficiently address the problems: 1) joint adverse selection and moral hazard and 2) joint adverse selection and tournament. Both optimal contracts can provide a maximized profit for blockchain. The optimal rewards and security deposits for different types of participants can be determined accordingly. Simulations indicate that the proposed models can overcome asymmetric information and offer feasible contracts. Moreover, it demonstrates that both joint models can provide an economic incentive for the participants without reducing security incentives for the sharded blockchain.

Owing to the low communication costs and privacy-promoting capabilities, federated learning (FL) has become a promising tool for training effective machine learning models among distributed clients. However, with the distributed architecture, low-quality models could be uploaded to the aggregator server by unreliable clients, leading to a degradation or even a collapse of training. In this article, we model these unreliable behaviors of clients and propose a defensive mechanism to mitigate such a security risk. Specifically, we first investigate the impact on the models caused by unreliable clients by deriving a convergence upper bound on the loss function based on the gradient descent updates. Our bounds reveal that with a fixed amount of total computational resources, there exists an optimal number of local training iterations in terms of convergence performance. We further design a novel defensive mechanism, named deep neural network-based secure aggregation (DeepSA). Our experimental results validate our theoretical analysis. In addition, the effectiveness of DeepSA is verified by comparing with other state-of-the-art defensive mechanisms.

Mobile-edge computing (MEC) has been envisioned as a promising paradigm to handle the massive volume of data generated from ubiquitous mobile devices for enabling intelligent services with the help of artificial intelligence (AI). Traditionally, AI techniques often require centralized data collection and training in a single entity, e.g., an MEC server, which is now becoming a weak point due to data privacy concerns and high overhead of raw data communications. In this context, federated learning (FL) has been proposed to provide collaborative data training solutions, by coordinating multiple mobile devices to train a shared AI model without directly exposing their underlying data, which enjoys considerable privacy enhancement. To improve the security and scalability of FL implementation, blockchain as a ledger technology is attractive for realizing decentralized FL training without the need for any central server. Particularly, the integration of FL and blockchain leads to a new paradigm, called FLchain, which potentially transforms intelligent MEC networks into decentralized, secure, and privacy-enhancing systems. This article presents an overview of the fundamental concepts and explores the opportunities of FLchain in MEC networks. We identify several main issues in FLchain design, including communication cost, resource allocation, incentive mechanism, security and privacy protection. The key solutions and the lessons learned along with the outlooks are also discussed. Then, we investigate the applications of FLchain in popular MEC domains, such as edge data sharing, edge content caching and edge crowdsensing. Finally, important research challenges and future directions are also highlighted.

This work considers unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks for collecting data covertly from ground users. The full-duplex (FD) UAV intends to gather critical information from a scheduled user (SU) through wireless communication and generate artificial noise (AN) with random transmit power in order to ensure a negligible probability of the SU’s transmission being detected by the unscheduled users (USUs). To enhance the system performance, we jointly design the UAV’s trajectory and its maximum AN transmit power together with the user scheduling strategy subject to practical constraints, e.g., a covertness constraint, which is explicitly determined by analyzing each USU’s detection performance, and a binary constraint induced by user scheduling. The formulated design problem is a mixed-integer non-convex optimization problem, which is challenging to solve directly, but tackled by our developed penalty successive convex approximation (P-SCA) scheme. An efficient UAV trajectory initialization is also presented based on the successive hover-and-fly (SHAF) trajectory, which also serves as a benchmark scheme. Our examination shows the developed P-SCA scheme significantly outperforms the benchmark scheme in terms of achieving a higher max-min average transmission rate (ATR) from all the SUs to the UAV.

Developing resource allocation algorithms for the uplink sparse code multiple access (SCMA) scheme to satisfy multiple objectives is challenging, especially where users are randomly distributed. In this paper, we aim to address this challenge by developing a joint resource allocation method as a multi-objective optimization (MO) problem to maximize the average sum rate and fairness among users as key and sub-key objectives, respectively. For this purpose, the exact analytical expressions for the average sum rate and users' individual rate are extracted based on an adaptive weighted graph matrix (AWGM). An AWGM matrix beneficially replaces the factor graph and the power allocation matrices to simplify the MO problem based on the asymmetric modified bipartite matching (AMBM) algorithm. The power allocation strategy is utilized during the optimal resource assignment process using the AMBM algorithm. After the AMBM process, we propose a low-complexity four-step algorithm to obtain the AWGM. The simulation results show that our proposed method can compromise and improve the multiple objectives' performance and guarantees a stable range of network performance at different times.

In this paper, we present a new construction of asymmetric quantum codes (AQCs) by combining classical concatenated codes (CCs) with tensor product codes (TPCs), called asymmetric quantum concatenated and tensor product codes (AQCTPCs) which have the following three advantages. First, only the outer codes in AQCTPCs need to satisfy the orthogonal constraint in quantum codes, and any classical linear code can be used for the inner, which makes AQCTPCs very easy to construct. Second, most AQCTPCs are highly degenerate, which means they can correct many more errors than their classical TPC counterparts. Consequently, we construct several families of AQCs with better parameters than known results in the literature. Third, AQCTPCs can be efficiently decoded although they are degenerate, provided that the inner and outer codes are efficiently decodable. In particular, we significantly reduce the inner decoding complexity of TPCs from$\Omega (n_{2}a^{n_{1}})(a>1)$to$O(n_{2})$by considering error degeneracy, where$n_{1}$and$n_{2}$are the block length of the inner code and the outer code, respectively. Furthermore, we generalize our concatenation scheme by using the generalized CCs and TPCs correspondingly.

This paper investigates a cache-aided cloud radio access network (C-RAN), comprising a central unit, K base stations (BSs) each with NTantennas, and M users each with NRantennas, where each BS and user have local caches to store some popular contents from the central unit. For this cache-aided network, we propose the linear network coded (NC) wireless caching that consists of linear wireless network coding assisted cache placement phase and signal-space alignment (SSA) enabled content delivery phase. In the cache placement phase, we design a joint NC caching function at the BSs to store linear combinations of messages from the central unit, as a form of linear wireless network coding. In the content delivery phase, we design the SSA pattern based on the NC caching to guide the precoding designs at BSs. Then, each user can reliably decode its requested messages by receiver shaping and reverse NC operation. The primary contribution of this work is to achieve the coding gain induced by the integration of linear wireless network coding and SSA, which has been not exploited in the field of wireless coded caching. In particular, to deal with high temporal variability of user requests, we show that the proposed cache placement is invariant to different user requests in the worst-case caching, without any shared caching messages at different BSs. Furthermore, we verify that the proposed scheme is also compatible with the insufficient caching scenario at the BSs. In addition, we analyze the achievable sum degrees of freedom (DoF) for the proposed caching network. Both analytical and numerical results verify that the proposed caching scheme achieves a higher sum DoF than the existing related works.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is of low-cost and energy-efficiency and will be a promising technology for the future wireless communications like sixth generation. To address the problem of conventional directional modulation (DM) that Alice only transmits single confidential bit stream (CBS) to Bob with multiple antennas in a line-of-sight channel, IRS is proposed to create friendly multipaths for DM such that two CBSs can be transmitted from Alice to Bob. This will significantly enhance the secrecy rate (SR) of DM. To maximize the SR (Max-SR), a general non-convex optimization problem is formulated with the unit-modulus constraint of IRS phase-shift matrix (PSM), and the general alternating iterative (GAI) algorithm is proposed to jointly obtain the transmit beamforming vectors (TBVs) and PSM by alternately optimizing one and fixing another. To reduce its high complexity, a low-complexity iterative algorithm for Max-SR is proposed by placing the constraint of null-space (NS) on the TBVs, called NS projection (NSP). Here, each CBS is transmitted separately in the NSs of other CBS and AN channels. Simulation results show that the SRs of the proposed GAI and NSP can approximately double that of IRS-based DM with single CBS for massive IRS in the high signal-to-noise ratio region.

The energy-efficient task offloading problem of a massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)-aided fog computing system is solved, where multiple task nodes offload their computational tasks to be solved via a massive MIMO-aided fog access node to multiple processing nodes in the fog for execution. By considering realistic imperfect channel state information (CSI), we formulate a joint task offloading and power allocation problem for minimizing the total energy consumption, including both computation and communication power consumptions. We solve the resultant non-convex optimization problem in two steps. First, we solve the computational task allocation and computational resource allocation for a given power allocation. Then, we conceive a sequential optimization framework for determining the specific power allocation decision that minimizes the total energy consumption of the fog access node. Given the computational tasks, the computational resources, and the power allocation, we propose an iterative algorithm for the system optimization. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme significantly reduces the total energy consumption compared to the benchmark schemes.

Edge nodes (ENs) in Internet of Things commonly serve as gateways to cache sensing data while providing accessing services for data consumers. This paper considers multiple ENs that cache sensing data under the coordination of the cloud. Particularly, each EN can fetch content generated by sensors within its coverage, which can be uploaded to the cloud via fronthaul and then be delivered to other ENs beyond the communication range. However, sensing data are usually transient with time whereas frequent cache updates could lead to considerable energy consumption at sensors and fronthaul traffic loads. Therefore, we adopt Age of Information to evaluate data freshness and investigate intelligent caching policies to preserve data freshness while reducing cache update costs. Specifically, we model the cache update problem as a cooperative multi-agent Markov decision process with the goal of minimizing the long-term average weighted cost. To efficiently handle the exponentially large number of actions, we devise a novel reinforcement learning approach, which is a discrete multi-agent variant of soft actor-critic (SAC). Furthermore, we generalize the proposed approach into a decentralized control, where each EN can make decisions based on local observations only. Simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed SAC-based caching schemes.

In this paper, a novel training beam sequence design for multiuser millimeter wave tracking systems is proposed. For each receiver, a single-path channel model is firstly investigated, where we introduce a maximum a posteriori (MAP) criterion to estimate the time-varying angle of departure (AoD), followed by an extended Kalman filter to update the stale complex path gain. We then employ training beam sequence design to minimize the estimated AoD’s average mean squared error (AMSE), which however has no explicit expression. We firstly derive a closed-form upper bound for the AMSE and then simplify this upper bound into a tractable form, based on which a nonlinear optimization problem (NLP) is formulated. By solving this NLP optimally using its corresponding Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions, we obtain an efficient training beam sequence. The proposed MAP criterion and its associated training beam sequence design are further extended to multi-path scenarios, where a joint estimation of the multiple paths is firstly discussed, followed by a sequential estimation as a low-complexity alternative. Numerical results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed scheme over the existing benchmark methods, especially in the case when the receivers’ channels change rapidly.

In this paper, a resource allocation and data gathering scenario of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) assisted wireless powered sensor network is investigated, in which the sensor nodes (SNs) are remotely powered by power beacons (PBs) via radio-frequency wireless power transmission (RF-WPT). A time-block structure with two phases is proposed to accommodate operations in the proposed system. During Phase-I, SNs harvest energy from PBs and periodically send its sensed data to the selected cluster heads (CHs). In Phase-II, an UAV collects the data from CHs to be delivered to the data sink for further processing avoiding the need for long range transmission and multi hop communication to the data sink. Then, a closed-form expression for outage probability of the proposed system over Rayleigh and Rician fading channels is derived. Next, outage probability minimization problem is formulated to obtain optimal time allocation for RF-WPT energy harvesting to improve the system performance. Due to the complexity of the problem, Lagrangian duality method is used to develop an asymptotic optimal solution with less execution complexity avoiding complex brute force/ exhaustive search approach. Furthermore, a heuristic method is presented to further lower the computation complexity. Simulation results reveal the superiority of the proposed methods compare to brute force/ exhaustive search approach via analysis, comparison and insights of the system performance results. Finally, the performance superiority of the proposed system is demonstrated with compare to identified baseline WSNs.

Publishing datasets plays an essential role in open data research and promoting transparency of government agencies. However, such data publication might reveal users' private information. One of the most sensitive sources of data is spatiotemporal trajectory datasets. Unfortunately, merely removing unique identifiers cannot preserve the privacy of users. Adversaries may know parts of the trajectories or be able to link the published dataset to other sources for the purpose of user identification. Therefore, it is crucial to apply privacy preserving techniques before the publication of spatiotemporal trajectory datasets. In this paper, we propose a robust framework for the anonymization of spatiotemporal trajectory datasets termed as machine learning based anonymization (MLA). By introducing a new formulation of the problem, we are able to apply machine learning algorithms for clustering the trajectories and propose to use k-means algorithm for this purpose. A variation of k-means algorithm is also proposed to preserve the privacy in overly sensitive datasets. Moreover, we improve the alignment process by considering multiple sequence alignment as part of the MLA. The framework and all the proposed algorithms are applied to T-Drive, Geolife, and Gowalla location datasets. The experimental results indicate a significantly higher utility of datasets by anonymization based on MLA framework.

Recent years have seen rising needs for location-based services in our everyday life. Aside from the many advantages provided by these services, they have caused serious concerns regarding the location privacy of users. Adversaries can monitor the queried locations by users to infer sensitive information, such as home addresses and shopping habits. To address this issue, dummy-based algorithms have been developed to increase the anonymity of users, and thus, protecting their privacy. Unfortunately, the existing algorithms only assume a limited amount of side information known by adversaries, which may face more severe challenges in practice. In this paper, we develop an attack model termed as Viterbi attack, which represents a realistic privacy threat on user trajectories. Moreover, we propose a metric called transition entropy that enables the evaluation of dummy-based algorithms, followed by developing a robust algorithm that can defend users against the Viterbi attack while maintaining significantly high performance in terms of the traditional metrics. We compare and evaluate our proposed algorithm and metric on a publicly available dataset published by Microsoft, i.e., Geolife dataset.

In this work, we develop a contract theory framework to tackle the allocations of heterogeneous baseband processing units (BBUs) in cloud radio access network. We first model a monopoly market by viewing the BBUs as a kind of resource. The infrastructure provider (InP), as the monopolist, owns all the heterogeneous BBUs of different processing abilities and maintaining costs, and leases them to multiple mobile network operators (MNOs) to gain profit. At the same time, the MNOs intend to rent reasonable amount of BBUs to provide services to their mobile clients. Then we propose a contract theory framework, in which contract items are optimized to maximize the InP’s utility, while maintain the welfare of the MNOs. We design the optimal contracts with complete and asymmetric information on the MNOs. Our contract design achieves the near optimum solution to heterogeneous computational resource allocation even under the information asymmetric case. Our derivations indicate that the optimal contracts with asymmetric information achieve a lower utility for the InP than the ones with complete information and the utility reduction is higher when the BBUs are heterogeneous rather than homogeneous. Numerical results demonstrate that, the InP having heterogeneous BBUs can achieve a higher utility relative to having homogeneous BBUs, which is more profitable and realistic for the InP. Moreover, we regard Stackelberg game theoretic approach as a comparison, and show that our method is more realistic.

Wireless caching technologies have been proposed to relieve the transmission pressures, especially, the transmission redundancy on back-haul channels. In this paper, we consider a two-layer caching network, consisting of traditional macro-cell base station (MBS) aided back-haul channels and small-cell base stations (SBSs) aided local links. The network service provider (NSP), who is in charge of the two layers, leases its resources of the secondary layer, i.e., coverage of the SBSs, to content providers (CPs) for making extra profits and releasing pressures on the back-haul channels. At the same time, CPs will evaluate whether they are provided with proper incentives to pre-cache their files in the SBSs. Considering different quality of services (QoS) provided by the two layers as well as the economical impact of the traditional layer on the secondary layer, the NSP designs the optimal incentive mechanisms within the framework of contract theory for maximizing its own profits. First, we formulate the utility of the NSP and CPs. Then, the minimum transmission requirement, reserve price and limited resources are considered as constraints in designing the optimal contract. Also, some important properties of these constraints are analyzed to facilitate the optimal contract determination process. At last, an optimal contract determination scheme is proposed, based on which the optimal coverage set is determined first, and then the corresponding optimal prices are derived with the aid of equal cost line. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed optimal contract in increasing the NSP's profits and incentivizing CPs to transmit on the secondary layer.

Federated learning is a privacy-preserving approach to train a global model at a central server by collaborating with wireless devices, each with its own local training data set. In this paper, we present a compressive sensing approach for federated learning over massive multiple-input multiple-output communication systems in which the central server equipped with a massive antenna array communicates with the wireless devices. One major challenge in system design is to reconstruct local gradient vectors accurately at the central server, which are computed-and-sent from the wireless devices. To overcome this challenge, we first establish a transmission strategy to construct sparse transmitted signals from the local gradient vectors at the devices. We then propose a compressive sensing algorithm enabling the server to iteratively find the linear minimum-mean-square-error (LMMSE) estimate of the transmitted signal by exploiting its sparsity. We also derive an analytical threshold for the residual error at each iteration, to design the stopping criterion of the proposed algorithm. We show that for a sparse transmitted signal, the proposed algorithm requires less computationally complexity than LMMSE. Simulation results demonstrate that the presented approach outperforms conventional linear beamforming approaches and reduces the performance gap between federated learning and centralized learning with perfect reconstruction.

Introducing cooperative coded caching into small cell networks is a promising approach to reducing traffic loads. By encoding content via maximum distance separable (MDS) codes, coded fragments can be collectively cached at small-cell base stations (SBSs) to enhance caching efficiency. However, content popularity is usually time-varying and unknown in practice. As a result, cached content is anticipated to be intelligently updated by taking into account limited caching storage and interactive impacts among SBSs. In response to these challenges, we propose a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework to intelligently update cached content in dynamic environments. With the goal of minimizing long-term expected fronthaul traffic loads, we first model dynamic coded caching as a cooperative multi-agent Markov decision process. Owing to the use of MDS coding, the resulting decision-making falls into a class of constrained reinforcement learning problems with continuous decision variables. To deal with this difficulty, we custom-build a novel DRL algorithm by embedding homotopy optimization into a deep deterministic policy gradient formalism. Next, to empower the caching framework with an effective trade-off between complexity and performance, we propose centralized, and partially and fully decentralized caching controls by applying the derived DRL approach. Simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed multi-agent framework.

In most Internet of Things (IoT) networks, edge nodes are commonly used as to relays to cache sensing data generated by IoT sensors as well as provide communication services for data consumers. However, a critical issue of IoT sensing is that data are usually transient, which necessitates temporal updates of caching content items while frequent cache updates could lead to considerable energy cost and challenge the lifetime of IoT sensors. To address this issue, we adopt the Age of Information (AoI) to quantity data freshness and propose an online cache update scheme to obtain an effective tradeoff between the average AoI and energy cost. Specifically, we first develop a characterization of transmission energy consumption at IoT sensors by incorporating a successful transmission condition. Then, we model cache updating as a Markov decision process to minimize average weighted cost with judicious definitions of state, action, and reward. Since user preference towards content items is usually unknown and often temporally evolving, we therefore develop a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm to enable intelligent cache updates. Through trial-and-error explorations, an effective caching policy can be learned without requiring exact knowledge of content popularity. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework.

This paper presents a data-aided channel estimator that reduces the channel estimation error of the conventional linear minimum-mean-squared-error (LMMSE) method for multiple-input multiple-output communication systems. The basic idea is to selectively exploit detected symbol vectors obtained from data detection as additional pilot signals. To optimize the selection of the detected symbol vectors, a Markov decision process (MDP) is defined which finds the best selection to minimize the mean-squared-error (MSE) of the channel estimate. Then a reinforcement learning algorithm is developed to solve this MDP in a computationally efficient manner. Simulation results demonstrate that the presented channel estimator significantly reduces the MSE of the channel estimate and therefore improves the block error rate of the system, compared to the conventional LMMSE method.

Caching popular contents at heterogeneous devices, e.g., fog nodes (FNs) or fog access points (FAPs), constitutes a promising technique of reducing both the traffic and the energy consumption of the backhaul links. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient caching and node association algorithm for cache-aided fog networks. First, we solve the problem of energy-efficient content caching and delivery in the FNs/FAPs. In both caching scenarios, we investigate the relationship between the caching probability of the file and the energy-efficient content delivery by formulating the associated energy efficiency (EE) optimization problem. Then, we derive a joint modulation mode allocation strategy and caching policy for each content caching node and conceive a joint node association and caching algorithm. Finally, we quantify both the overall EE and throughput for demonstrating that the proposed caching and transmission strategy achieves significant performance improvements.

Federated learning (FL), as a type of distributed machine learning, is capable of significantly preserving clients’ private data from being exposed to adversaries. Nevertheless, private information can still be divulged by analyzing uploaded parameters from clients, e.g., weights trained in deep neural networks. In this paper, to effectively prevent information leakage, we propose a novel framework based on the concept of differential privacy (DP), in which artificial noise is added to parameters at the clients’ side before aggregating, namely, noising before model aggregation FL (NbAFL). First, we prove that the NbAFL can satisfy DP under distinct protection levels by properly adapting different variances of artificial noise. Then we develop a theoretical convergence bound on the loss function of the trained FL model in the NbAFL. Specifically, the theoretical bound reveals the following three key properties: 1) there is a tradeoff between convergence performance and privacy protection levels, i.e., better convergence performance leads to a lower protection level; 2) given a fixed privacy protection level, increasing the number$N$of overall clients participating in FL can improve the convergence performance; and 3) there is an optimal number aggregation times (communication rounds) in terms of convergence performance for a given protection level. Furthermore, we propose a$K$-client random scheduling strategy, where$K$($1\leq K< N$) clients are randomly selected from the$N$overall clients to participate in each aggregation. We also develop a corresponding convergence bound for the loss function in this case and the$K$-client random scheduling strategy also retains the above three properties. Moreover, we find that there is an optimal$K$that achieves the best convergence performance at a fixed privacy level. Evaluations demonstrate that our theoretical results are consistent with simulations, thereby facilitating the design of various privacy-preserving FL algorithms with different tradeoff requirements on convergence performance and privacy levels.

Currently, deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved a great success in various applications. Traditional deployment for DNNs in the cloud may incur a prohibitively serious delay in transferring input data from the end devices to the cloud. To address this problem, the hybrid computing environments, consisting of the cloud, edge, and end devices, are adopted to offload DNN layers by combining the larger layers (more amount of data) in the cloud and the smaller layers (less amount of data) at the edge and end devices. A key issue in hybrid computing environments is how to minimize the system cost while accomplishing the offloaded layers with their deadline constraints. In this article, a self-adaptive discrete particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm using the genetic algorithm (GA) operators is proposed to reduce the system cost caused by data transmission and layer execution. This approach considers the characteristics of DNNs partitioning and layers off-loading over the cloud, edge, and end devices. The mutation operator and crossover operator of GA are adopted to avert the premature convergence of PSO, which distinctly reduces the system cost through enhanced population diversity of PSO. The proposed off-loading strategy is compared with benchmark solutions, and the results show that our strategy can effectively reduce the system cost of off-loading for DNN-based applications over the cloud, edge and end devices relative to the benchmarks.

The surging Deep Neural Network (DNN) based applications are becoming increasingly popular in mobile computing. However, they impose significant challenges for mobile computing, as DNN tasks lead to much more computation complexity and data volume compared with traditional tasks. To alleviate this, mobile edge computing (MEC) provides a feasible approach through task partitioning and offloading. In this paper, we investigate a DNN based MEC scheme considering multiple mobile devices and one MEC server. To facilitate task partitioning, we first develop a processing delay prediction mechanism for typical DNN tasks. To achieve the minimal processing delay as well as to release the computing burden of mobile devices, a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) based DNN task partitioning and offloading mechanism is presented. Evaluations show that our mechanism can achieve up to 90.5% and 69.5% processing delay reduction compared with MEC server only and mobile device only schemes respectively.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are envisaged to play a new and important role in future cellular networks. In this paper, we analyze the uplink performance of heterogeneous networks with UAVs in terms of coverage probability and area spectral efficiency (ASE). To be more specific, we first investigate the system performance under a general channel model, with practical considerations such as (1) line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight components, (2) antenna height difference L between the UAVs and the base stations (BSs), and (3) idle mode capabilities (IMCs) at the BSs to mitigate inter-cell interference. Thereafter, we study the system performance under the latest UAV path loss model defined by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project. Under this special case, we provide a more detailed analysis of the coverage probability as well as the ASE, and explore the impacts of difference system parameters on the system performance. Numerical results validate the analytical expressions and show that (1) the IMC can improve the coverage probability and the ASE, especially when the network is dense, (2) the overall system performance degrades when L increases, and (3) the fractional power control factor has a negligible impact on the UAVs performance when L is large enough.

The unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can serve for key applications in wireless communications. Cellular systems can be assisted by UAVs to provide ubiquitous coverage and additional capacity to overloaded base- stations. In this paper, we present the performance analysis of UAV assisted wireless communication system for ubiquitous coverage. In the considered system, the source and the destination terminals have single transmit and receive antennas, on the other hand the UAV node has multiple transmit and receive antennas. The closed form expression of the bit error rate (BER) performance for the considered system over generalized two-wave with diffused power (TWDP) fading is derived in particular. The performance analysis is done considering direct line of sight (LOS) and multi-path components between source-UAV- destination links. The results are analyzed for Rician and Rayleigh fading channel as a specific case of TWDP distribution. Moreover, in order to get the better insights of the system, we also perform the asymptotic analysis for the considered system. Simulation results are presented for different scenarios and it is observed that simulation results shows excellent agreement with the analytical results.

In this paper, the problem of content caching in 5G cellular networks relying on social-aware device-to-device communications (DTD) is investigated. Our focus is on how to efficiently select important users (IUs) and how to allocate content files to the storage of these selected IUs to form a distributed caching system. We aim at proposing a novel approach for minimizing the downloading latency and maximizing the social welfare simultaneously. In particular, we first model the problem of maximizing the social welfare as a many-to-one matching game based on the social property of mobile users. We study this game by exploiting users' social properties to generate the utility functions of the two-side players, i.e., content providers (CPs) and IUs. Then we model the problem of minimizing the downloading latency as a many-to-many matching problem. For solving these games, we design a many-to-one IU selection (MOIS) matching algorithm and a many-to-many file allocation (MMFA) matching algorithm, respectively. Simulation and analytical results show that the proposed mechanisms are stable, and are capable of offering a better performance than other benchmarks in terms of social welfare and network downloading latency.

The hybrid wireless and power line communication (HWPLC) networks address the problem that mobile wireless sensors and power line communication (PLC) sensors cannot communicate with each other within an Internet of Things (IoT) network. In this paper, we design a relay equipped with a dual wireless and PLC interface, which connects both the PLC and wireless sensors into an IoT network. Furthermore, the dual-interface relay forwards messages by adaptively selecting a interface according to the channel state. A general mathematical probability model of the dual-interface relaying system is presented. The probability density function of the output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is developed, which is based on explicit closed-form expressions derived from the statistics character of the PLC and wireless channel. Furthermore, the average capacity, bit-error rate (BER) expressions, and the outage probability formulas are derived. Numerical results show that the HPLWC relaying system with the dual-interface can significantly improve the performance of capacity, BER, and outage probability by adaptively selecting the interface with the optimal received SNR.

Secure wireless information and power transfer based on directional modulation is conceived for amplify-and-forward relaying networks. Explicitly, we first formulate a secrecy rate maximization (SRM) problem, which can be decomposed into a twin-level optimization problem and solved by a one-dimensional (1D) search and semidefinite relaxation (SDR) technique. Subsequently, in order to reduce the search complexity, we formulate an optimization problem based on maximizing the signal-to-leakage-AN-noise-ratio (Max-SLANR) criterion, and transform it into a SDR problem. In addition, the relaxation is proved to be tight according to the classic Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions. Finally, to reduce the computational complexity, a successive convex approximation (SCA) scheme is proposed to find a near-optimal solution. The complexity of the SCA scheme is much lower than that of the SRM and the Max-SLANR schemes. Simulation results demonstrate that the performance of the SCA scheme is very close to that of the SRM scheme in terms of its secrecy rate and bit error rate, but much better than that of the zero forcing scheme.

This paper considers a multiple-access system with multiple-packet reception (MPR) capability γ, i.e., a packet can be successfully received as long as it overlaps with γ -1 or fewer other packets at any instant during its lifetime. To efficiently utilize the MPR capability, this paper generalizes p-persistent carrier-sense multiple access (CSMA) to consider that a user with carrier sensing capability c adopts the transmission probability p, if this user has sensed n ongoing transmissions for n = 0, 1,⋯, c - 1. This paper aims to model the characteristics of such CSMA and to design transmission probabilities for achieving maximum saturation throughput. To this end, we first formulate such CSMA as a parameterized Markov decision process (MDP) and use the long-run average performance to evaluate the saturation throughput. Second, by observing that the exact values of optimal transmission probabilities are in general infeasible to find, we modify this MDP to establish an upper bound on the maximum throughput, and modify this MDP again to propose a heuristic design with near-optimal performance. Simulations with respect to a wide range of configurations are provided to validate our study. The throughput performance under more general models and the robustness of our design are also investigated.

Evidence indicates that demands from mobile users (MU) on popular cloud content, e.g., video clips, account for a dramatic increase in data traffic over cellular networks. The repetitive downloading of hot content from cloud servers will inevitably bring a vast quantity of redundant data transmissions to networks. A strategy of distributively pre-storing popular cloud content in the memories of small-cell base stations (SBS), namely, small-cell caching, is an efficient technology for reducing the communication latency whilst mitigating the redundant data streaming substantially. In this paper, we establish a commercialized small-cell caching system consisting of a network service provider (NSP), several video providers (VP), and randomly distributed MUs. We conceive this system in the context of 5G cellular networks, where the SBSs are ultra-densely deployed with the intensity much higher than that of the MUs. In such a system, the NSP, in charge of the SBSs, wishes to lease these SBSs to the VPs for the purpose of making profits, whilst the VPs, after pushing popular videos into the rented SBSs, can provide faster local video transmissions to the MUs, thereby gaining more profits. Specifically, we first model the MUs and SBSs as two independent Poisson point processes, and develop, via stochastic geometry theory, the probability of the specific event that an MU obtains the video of its choice directly from the memory of an SBS. Then, with the help of the probability derived, we formulate the profits of both the NSP and the VPs. Next, we solve the profit maximization problem based on the framework of contract theory, where the NSP acts as a monopolist setting up the optimal contract according to the statistical information of the VPs. Incentive mechanisms are also designed to motivate each VP to choose a proper resource-price item offered by the NSP. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of our proposed contract framework for the commercial caching system.

One of the key metrics in measuring system quality of service (QoS) is the delay performance. Most existing papers have focused on the studies of decreasing transmission delay. However, as the wireless communication traffic increasing dramatically, queueing delay in the wireless networks becomes a non-negligible issue. Martingale theory, which fits any arrival and service process, providing a much tighter delay bound compared to the effective bandwidth theory, has been proposed to analyze the system queueing delay bound, especially in a bursty traffic scenario. In this paper, we propose to study the resource allocation problem based on the delay bounds derived from martingale theory. In specific, we first revisit some basic knowledge about stochastic network calculus, and present the delay bounds derived from martingale theory in certain typical bursty service models. Then, we setup a resource allocation problem in a computation offloading scenario, where multiple computation nodes with distinct computation capacities are considered. User's computation tasks are usually bursty, and are required to be executed within a limited time. We propose to minimize the system delay violation probability by properly allocating the computation tasks to different computation nodes. A closed-form solution is derived for the computation offloading problem, using a special kind of water-filling policy. Moreover, we discuss two potential models of martingale-based resource allocation, and provide the corresponding system architectures. Finally, numerical results are presented to demonstrate the performances of the proposed scheme. The proposed water-filling scheme achieves a smaller system delay violation probability compared to the benchmark.

In this paper, we investigate the impact of the absolute height difference between base station (BS) and user equipment (UE) antennas on the uplink performance of dense small cell networks. We use a path loss model adopted by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project to increase the accuracy of our analysis, where transmissions via both line-of-sight and non-line-of- sight paths are considered. To achieve more practical results, we also consider that UEs are associated with the BS that has the smallest path loss. Based on the performance derived, we then prove that the coverage probability and the area spectral efficiency (ASE) will continuously decrease to zero as the density of BSs grows. To prevent this ASE crash to zero, we also show that reducing the antenna height difference between the BSs and UEs is an effective method. Moreover, our results reveal that the existence of the BS-to-UE antenna height difference changes the optimal operation point of the fractional path loss compensation factor $\epsilon$.

In this work, we propose a covert communication scheme where the transmitter attempts to hide its transmission to a full-duplex receiver, from a warden that is to detect this covert transmission using a radiometer. Specifically, we first derive the detection error rate at the warden, based on which the optimal detection threshold for its radiometer is analytically determined and its expected detection error rate over wireless fading channels is achieved in a closed-form expression. Our analysis indicates that the artificial noise deliberately produced by the receiver with a random transmit power, although causes self-interference, offers the capability of achieving a positive effective covert rate for any transmit power (can be infinity) subject to any given covertness requirement on the expected detection error rate. This work is the first study on the use of the full- duplex receiver with controlled artificial noise for achieving covert communications and invites further investigation in this regard.

A large number of computation-hungry mobile applications have led to an ever-increasing computation demands. Mobile edge computing (MEC) has been considered as an emerging paradigm to alleviate the demand effectively by offloading the computationally intensive tasks from mobile devices (MD) to the adjacent MEC servers. It is expected that the quality of computation experience, e.g., the computing energy and the execution latency, can be greatly improved by the MEC. In this paper, we will investigate the computing task offloading problem via the MEC in the context of small-cell base-station (SBS) networks, where each SBS is equipped with an MEC server. Specifically, we first formulate the optimization problem to minimize the objective, i.e., the weighted sum of energy consumption and execution duration. The parameters to be optimized are the allocations of the MD's tasks to be offloaded to the MEC servers. Then we propose a novel belief propagation (BP) algorithm to optimize the task allocation in a distributed manner. Next, we develop the factor graph according to the network topology and decompose the object function into multiple local utilities to fit the factor graph. Finally, we transform local utilities into the estimations of marginal distributions and propose a distributed BP algorithm to solve the estimations. Simulations demonstrate that our BP algorithm can effectively approach the optimal solutions via exhaustive search.

With the burst of mobile data, it is necessary to make use of idle mobile equipment for caching space. Caching in the femto-cells is proposed for reducing transmission latency between the WiFi points and its mobile users (MU) and better user service. In this paper, we firstly take the copyright of the files as the allocation resource and the WiFi points with caching space want to rent these copyrights. We propose a multi-rounds double auction mechanism for this problem and take the popularity parameter of the files as the quality weight. This game can help multiple content providers (CP) lease copyrights of the files to multiple WiFi points effectively. Different from traditional double auctions, it will take the failed buyers and sellers into consideration and they are allowed to change their requests in the next auction process. This mechanism can largely improve efficiency of the game and is budget balanced. We also prove that the allocation process is monotone and with the set of the critical payment rule, we prove the truthfulness of the mechanism. Additionally, we prove that the mechanism can form a conditional equilibrium. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism and compare with the traditional one-round double auction.

In this paper, we propose an effective read-voltage optimization method for multi-level-cell (MLC) NAND flash memory to improve the performance of error correcting codes (ECCs) with finite blocklength. Specifically, we first obtain the maximal channel coding rate achievable at a given blocklength and error probability of quantized channel. Based on this finite-blocklength channel-coding rate (FCR), we convert the optimization problem into minimizing the error probability instead of the channel coding rate. Then, we develop a cross iterative search (CIS) method and the genetic algorithm to solve this optimization problem. In our simulations, for a well-designed LDPC code, our read-voltage optimization method improves program-and-erase (PE) endurance up to about 900 and 600 cycles against the maximizing the mutual information (MMI) and entropy-based optimization methods, respectively, at a frame-error-rate (FER) of 2×10-4.

As a promising wireless network virtualization technology, virtualized base station (BS) has been proposed to tackle the problem of low-efficient utilization of BS's computing resources, e.g., baseband processing units (BPU). In this paper, we design a novel scheme to achieve the efficient BPU allocation based on a contract-theoretic approach. To achieve this, we consider the BPUs as a kind of trading resources. We establish a monopoly market, where the infrastructure provider (InP) is the monopolist owning all the BPUs, and multiple mobile network operators (MNOs) intend to rent BPUs from the InP for processing their baseband signals. In such a market, the InP offers a set of quantity-price contract items to the MNOs based on statistical information of their types, and at the same time, the MNOs are stimulated to accept the offers for the purpose of making profit. We propose the optimal contract design to maximize the InP's profit, as well as develop an incentive mechanism to guarantee each MNO choosing a proper contract item. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of our incentive mechanism for BPU resource allocation.

In this paper, a practical wireless transmission scheme is proposed to transmit confidential messages to the desired user securely and precisely by the joint use of multiple techniques, including artificial noise (AN) projection, phase alignment/beamforming, and random subcarrier selection (RSCS) based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), and directional modulation (DM), namely RSCS-OFDM-DM. This RSCS-OFDM-DM scheme provides an extremely low-complexity structure for the desired receiver and makes the secure and precise wireless transmission realizable in practice. For illegal eavesdroppers, the receive power of confidential messages is so weak that their receivers cannot intercept these confidential messages successfully once it is corrupted by AN. In such a scheme, the design of phase alignment/beamforming vector and AN projection matrix depends intimately on the desired direction angle and distance. It is particularly noted that the use of RSCS leads to a significant outcome that the receive power of confidential messages mainly concentrates on the small neighboring region around the desired receiver and only small fraction of its power leaks out to the remaining large broad regions. This concept is called secure precise transmission. The probability density function of real-time receive signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) is derived. Also, the average SINR and its tight upper bound are attained. The approximate closed-form expression for average secrecy rate is derived by analyzing the first-null positions of the SINR and clarifying the wiretap region. Simulation and analysis show that the proposed scheme actually can achieve a secure and precise wireless transmission of confidential messages in line-of-propagation channel, and the derived theoretical formula of average secrecy rate is verified to coincide with the exact results well for medium and large scale transmit antenna array or in the low and medium SNR regions.

In this paper, we study the impact of the base station (BS) idle mode capacity (IMC) on the network performance of multi-tier and dense heterogeneous cellular networks (HCNs) with both line-of-sight (LoS) and non-line-of-sight transmissions. Different from most existing works that investigated network scenarios with an infinite number of user equipments (UEs), we consider a more practical set-up with a finite number of UEs in our analysis. Moreover, in our model, the small BSs (SBSs) apply a positive power bias in the cell association procedure, so that macrocell UEs are actively encouraged to use the more lightly loaded SBSs. In addition, to address the severe interference that these cell range expanded UEs may suffer, the macro BSs (MBSs) apply enhanced inter-cell interference coordination, in the form of almost blank subframe (ABS) mechanism. For this model, we derive the coverage probability and the rate of a typical UE in the whole network or a certain tier. The impact of the IMC on the performance of the network is shown to be significant. In particular, it is important to note that there will be a surplus of BSs when the BS density exceeds the UE density, and thus a large number of BSs switch off. As a result, the overall coverage probability, as well as the area spectral efficiency, will continuously increase with the BS density, addressing the network outage that occurs when all BSs are active and the interference becomes LoS dominated. Finally, the optimal ABS factors are investigated in different BS density regions. One of major findings is that MBSs should give up all resources in favor of the SBSs when the small cell networks go ultra-dense. This reinforces the need for orthogonal deployments, shedding new light on the design and deployment of the future 5G dense HCNs.

A large-scale fully digital receive antenna array can provide very high-resolution direction of arrival (DOA) estimation, but resulting in a significantly high RF-chain circuit cost. Thus, a hybrid analog and digital (HAD) structure is preferred. Two phase alignment (PA) methods, HAD PA (HADPA) and hybrid digital and analog PA (HDAPA), are proposed to estimate DOA based on the parametric method. Compared to analog PA (APA), they can significantly reduce the complexity in the PA phases. Subsequently, a fast root multiple signal classification HDAPA (root-MUSIC-HDAPA) method is proposed specially for this hybrid structure to implement an approximately analytical solution. Due to the HAD structure, there exists the effect of direction-finding ambiguity. A smart strategy of maximizing the average receive power is adopted to delete those spurious solutions and preserve the true optimal solution by linear searching over a set of limited finite candidate directions. This results in a significant reduction in computational complexity. Eventually, the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) of finding emitter direction using the HAD structure is derived. Simulation results show that our proposed methods, root-MUSIC-HDAPA and HDAPA, can achieve the hybrid CRLB with their complexities being significantly lower than those of pure linear searching-based methods, such as APA.

Covert wireless communication aims to hide the very existence of wireless transmissions in order to guarantee a strong security in wireless networks. In this paper, we examine the possibility and achievable performance of covert communication in amplify-and-forward one-way relay networks. Specifically, the relay is greedy and opportunistically transmits its own information to the destination covertly on top of forwarding the source's message, while the source tries to detect this covert transmission to discover the illegitimate usage of the resource (e.g., power and spectrum) allocated only for the purpose of forwarding the source's information. We propose two strategies for the relay to transmit its covert information, namely rate-control and power-control transmission schemes, for which the source's detection limits are analyzed in terms of detection error probability and the achievable effective covert rates from the relay to destination are derived. Our examination determines the conditions under which the rate-control transmission scheme outperforms the power-control transmission scheme, and vice versa, which enables the relay to achieve the maximum effective covert rate. Our analysis indicates that the relay has to forward the source's message to shield its covert transmission and the effective covert rate increases with its forwarding ability (e.g., its maximum transmits power).

Covert communications hide the transmission of a message from a watchful adversary while ensuring a certain decoding performance at the receiver. In this paper, a wireless communication system under fading channels is considered where covertness is achieved by using a full-duplex receiver. More precisely, the receiver of covert information generates artificial noise with a varying power causing uncertainty at the adversary, Willie, regarding the statistics of the received signals. Given that Willie's optimal detector is a threshold test on the received power, we derive a closed-form expression for the optimal detection performance of Willie averaged over the fading channel realizations. Furthermore, we provide guidelines for the optimal choice of artificial noise power range, and the optimal transmission probability of covert information to maximize the detection errors at Willie. Our analysis shows that the transmission of artificial noise, although causing self-interference, provides the opportunity of achieving covertness but its transmit power levels need to be managed carefully. We also demonstrate that the prior transmission probability of 0.5 is not always the best choice for achieving the maximum possible covertness when the covert transmission probability and artificial noise power can be jointly optimized.

nonPeerReviewed

Wireless caching is an efficient mechanism for reducing downloading delay and reducing the traffic pressure over backhual channels by caching some popular content, e.g., video clips, in small base stations (SBSs). In this paper, we consider a commercialized small-cell caching system consisting of a network service provider (NSP), several video retailers (VRs) and mobile users (MUs). The NSP leases its SBSs to VRs in order to earn profits, while the VRs store popular videos into the lent SBSs, thereby gaining profits from providing better services to the MUs. We conceive the system within the framework of contract theory by designing the optimal quality-price contract. We establish the profit function of NSP and VRs and solve the profit maximization problem through contract theory. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of our incentive mechanism for the system.

Evidences indicate that wireless video traffic has played an important role in cellular networks. Caching mechanisms which store popular contents into local small-cell base stations (SBSs) in cellular networks are proposed to further reduce transmission delay and release the traffic pressure over backhaul channels. In this paper, we consider a commercialized small-cell caching system consisting of a network service provider (NSP), several video retailers (VRs) and multiple mobile users (MUs). The NSP as a network facility monopoly releases its resources to the VRs in order to maximize its own profits. The distribution of VR's type is known to the NSP, while the actual type of a given VR is not known. We research on such an information asymmetric market within the framework of contract theory, formulated as an adverse selection problem. The MUs and SBSs are modeled as two independent Poisson point processes, and the directly downloading probability from the adjacent SBS is derived via stohastic geometry theory. Based on the probability, we formulate the utility functions of the NSP and the VRs. Then, the optimal contract problem is constructed. Also, we provide the feasibility of the contract, and the optimal contract is proposed when VR's popularity parameter γ takes different values. Numerical results are provided to show the optimal quality and the optimal price designed for each VR.

To offer communication capability in an easy and simple deployment, power line communications (PLCs) have recently attracted interest from the smart grid. The effective sub‐channel assignment can increase throughput of In‐Home (IH) PLC networks with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing scheme distributed over low‐voltage areas. Given a logical topology of an IH PLC network, the authors present a formulation to optimise the sub‐channel assignment problem as a linear programming with an objective function of maximising the network throughput. It takes into account constraints of the network topology, interference and traffic fairness. According to the solution of the optimising sub‐channel assignment problem, the scheduling algorithm of links to obtain channels is developed for every time slot. Evaluation demonstrates that the proposed approach performs much better in improving overall network throughput and ensuring the traffic fairness of network users than conventional ones.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been widely used in a plenty of applications. To achieve higher efficiency for data collection, WSNs are often partitioned into several disjointed clusters, each with a representative cluster head in charge of the data gathering and routing process. Such a partition is balanced and effective, if the distance between each node and its cluster head can be bounded within a constant number of hops, and any two cluster heads are connected. Finding such a cluster partition with minimum number of clusters and connectors between cluster heads is defined as minimum connected d-hop dominating set (d-MCDS) problem, which is proved to be NP-complete. In this paper, we propose a distributed approximation named CS-Cluster to address the d-MCDS problem under unit disk graph. CS-Cluster constructs a sparser d-hop maximal independent set (d-MIS), connects the d-MIS, and finally checks and removes redundant nodes. We prove the approximation ratio of CS-Cluster is (2d + 1)λ, where λ is a parameter related with d but is no more than 18.4. Compared with the previous best result O(d2), our approximation ratio is a great improvement. Our evaluation results demonstrate the outstanding performance of our algorithm compared with previous works.

Recently, content-aware-enabled distributed caching relying on local small-cell base stations (SBSs), namely, smallcell caching, has been intensively studied for reducing transmission latency as well as alleviating the traffic load over backhaul channels. In this paper, we consider a commercialized small-cell caching system consisting of a network service provider (NSP), several content providers (CPs), and multiple mobile users (MUs). The NSP, as a network facility monopolist in charge of the SBSs, leases its resources to the CPs for gaining profits. At the same time, the CPs are intended to rent the SBSs for providing better downloading services to the MUs. We focus on solving the profit maximization problem for the NSP within the framework of contract theory. To be specific, we first formulate the utility functions of the NSP and the CPs by modeling the MUs and SBSs as two independent Poisson point processes. Then, we develop the optimal contract problem for an information asymmetric scenario, where the NSP only knows the distribution of CPs' popularity among the MUs. Also, we derive the necessary and sufficient conditions of feasible contracts. Lastly, the optimal contract solutions are proposed with different CPs' popularity parameter γ. Numerical results are provided to show the optimal quality and the optimal price designed for each CP. In addition, we find that the proposed contract-based mechanism is superior to the benchmarks from the perspective of maximizing the NSP's profit.

In this paper, a novel distributed caching strategy in mobile social networks based on device-to-device communications is proposed. The proposed approach combines the characters of social networks to handle some practical issues, e.g., the selfishness of users. In order to maximize the throughput of the whole system, a fast convergence learning automaton, called the discrete generalized pursuit algorithm is utilized. Incorporating with social characters, the algorithm not only optimizes the content placement problems in caching theory, but also satisfies the physical and social constraints appropriately. Simulation results show that, compared with other investigated caching strategies, the proposed algorithm has higher convergence speed and at the same time, it can reduce the transmission delay and improve the system throughput. Moreover, the proposed algorithm can get a better performance in higher density district.

Evidence indicates that downloading on-demand videos accounts for a dramatic increase in data traffic over cellular networks. Caching popular videos in the storage of small-cell base stations (SBS), namely, small-cell caching, is an efficient technology for reducing the transmission latency while mitigating the redundant transmissions of popular videos over back-haul channels. In this paper, we consider a commercialized small-cell caching system consisting of a network service provider (NSP), several video retailers (VRs), and mobile users (MUs). The NSP leases its SBSs to the VRs for the purpose of making profits, and the VRs, after storing popular videos in the rented SBSs, can provide faster local video transmissions to the MUs, thereby gaining more profits. We conceive this system within the framework of Stackelberg game by treating the SBSs as specific types of resources. We first model the MUs and SBSs as two independent Poisson point processes, and develop, via stochastic geometry theory, the probability of the specific event that an MU obtains the video of its choice directly from the memory of an SBS. Then, based on the probability derived, we formulate a Stackelberg game to jointly maximize the average profit of both the NSP and the VRs. In addition, we investigate the Stackelberg equilibrium by solving a non-convex optimization problem. With the aid of this game theoretic framework, we shed light on the relationship between four important factors: the optimal pricing of leasing an SBS, the SBSs allocation among the VRs, the storage size of the SBSs, and the popularity distribution of the VRs. Monte Carlo simulations show that our stochastic geometry-based analytical results closely match the empirical ones. Numerical results are also provided for quantifying the proposed game-theoretic framework by showing its efficiency on pricing and resource allocation.

In this paper, spatial channel pairing (SCP) is introduced to coherent combining at the relay in relay networks. Closed-form solution to optimal coherent combining is derived. Given coherent combining, the approximate SCP solution is presented. Finally, an alternating iterative structure is developed. Simulation results and analysis show that, given the symbol error rate and data rate, the proposed alternating iterative structure achieves signal-to-noise ratio gains over existing schemes in maximum ratio combining (MRC) plus matched filter, MRC plus antenna selection, and distributed space-time block coding due to the use of SCP and iterative structure.

In wideband multi-pair two-way relay networks, the performance of beamforming at a relay station (RS) is intimately related to the accuracy of the channel state information (CSI) available. The accuracy of CSI is determined by Doppler spread, delay between beamforming and channel estimation, and density of pilot symbols, including transmit power of pilot symbols. The coefficient of the Gaussian-Markov CSI error model is modeled as a function of CSI delay, Doppler spread, and signal-to-noise ratio, and can be estimated in real time. In accordance with the real-time estimated coefficients of the error model, an adaptive robust maximum signal-to-interferenceand- noise ratio (Max-SINR) plus maximum signal-to-leakage-and-noise ratio (Max-SLNR) beamformer at an RS is proposed to track the variation of the CSI error. From simulation results and analysis, it is shown that: compared to existing non-adaptive beamformers, the proposed adaptive beamformer is more robust and performs much better in the sense of bit error rate (BER); with increase in the density of transmit pilot symbols, its BER and sum-rate performances tend to those of the beamformer of Max-SINR plus Max-SLNR with ideal CSI.

Abstract In this paper, a novel covert channel, called covert behavior channel, is proposed according to behaviors of network users to solve the security and efficiency problem of the traditional covert channel. In the proposed channel, operation sequences of the network protocols are used as carriers of covert information. An encryption‐based information embedding scheme is designed to improve security of the covert information. With the help of Markov model, the capacity of the proposed covert channel with time‐varying noise is derived. The formulation for analyzing the covert behavior channel is presented against the channel noise aroused by discarding packets. By introducing corrected entropy‐based algorithm to detect the covert behavior channel, the security of the channel is verified. Numerical results show that the proposed covert behavior channel is more secure than covert storage channels and achieves a better bit rate and robustness than that of covert timing channels. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We study the repair problem in distributed storage systems where storage nodes are connected through packet erasure channels and some nodes are dedicated to repair [termed as dedicated-for-repair (DR) storage nodes]. We first investigate the minimum required repair-bandwidth in an asymptotic setup, in which the stored file is assumed to have an infinite size. The result shows that the asymptotic repair-bandwidth over packet erasure channels with a fixed erasure probability has a closed-form relation to the repair-bandwidth in lossless networks. Next, we show the benefits of DR storage nodes in reducing the repair bandwidth, and then we derive the necessary minimal storage space of DR storage nodes. Finally, we study the repair in a nonasymptotic setup, where the stored file size is finite. We study the minimum practical-repair-bandwidth, i.e., the repair-bandwidth for achieving a given probability of successful repair. A combinatorial optimization problem is formulated to provide the optimal practical-repair-bandwidth for a given packet erasure probability. We show the gain of our proposed approaches in reducing the repair-bandwidth.

In this paper, we propose adaptive techniques for multiuser multiple-input and multiple-output (MU-MIMO) cellular communication systems, to solve the problem of energy efficient communications with heterogeneous delay-aware traffic. In order to minimize the total transmission power of the MU-MIMO, we investigate the relationship between the transmission power and the M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (MQAM) constellation size and get the energy efficient modulation for each transmission stream based on the minimum mean square error (MMSE) receiver. Since the total power consumption is different for MU-MIMO and multiuser single input and multiple output (MU-SIMO), by exploiting the intrinsic relationship among the total power consumption model, and heterogeneous delay-aware services, we propose an adaptive transmission strategy, which is a switching between MU-MIMO and MU-SIMO. Simulations show that in order to maximize the energy efficiency and consider different Quality of Service (QoS) of delay for the users simultaneously, the users should adaptively choose the constellation size for each stream as well as the transmission mode.

In this paper, we consider wireless powered communication networks (WPCNs) where multiple users harvest energy from a dedicated power station and then communicate with an information receiving station in a time-division manner. Thereby, our goal is to maximize the weighted sum of the user energy efficiencies (WSUEEs). In contrast to the existing system-centric approaches, the choice of the weights provides flexibility for balancing the individual user EEs via joint time allocation and power control. We first investigate the WSUEE maximization problem without the quality of service constraints. Closed-form expressions for the WSUEE as well as the optimal time allocation and power control are derived. Based on this result, we characterize the EE tradeoff between the users in the WPCN. Subsequently, we study the WSUEE maximization problem in a generalized WPCN where each user is equipped with an initial amount of energy and also has a minimum throughput requirement. By exploiting the sum-of-ratios structure of the objective function, we transform the resulting non-convex optimization problem into a two-layer subtractive-form optimization problem, which leads to an efficient approach for obtaining the optimal solution. The simulation results verify our theoretical findings and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), there is no predefined infrastructure. Nodes need to frequently flood messages to discover routes, which badly decreases the network performance. To overcome such drawbacks, WSNs are often grouped into several disjointed clusters, each with a representative cluster head (CH) in charge of the routing process. In order to further improve the efficiency of WSNs, it is crucial to find a cluster partition with minimum number of clusters and the distance between each node to its corresponding CH can be bounded by a constant number of hops. Finding such a partition is defined as minimum d-hop cluster head set (d-MCHS) problem, which is proved to be NP-hard. In this paper, we propose a distributed approximation algorithm, named d2-Cluster, to address d-MCHS problem and prove that the approximation ratio of d2-Cluster under unit disk graph (UDG) is a constant factor λ which is related to d. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first constant approximation ratio for d-MDS problem in UDG.

In this paper we propose a novel distributed caching scheme in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks (HCN). We are interested in optimizing the content placement in order to minimize the downloading latency. We achieve this in a decentralized manner, based on a game of independent learning automata (LA). First, we propose a faster-converging discrete generalist pursuit algorithm (DGPA) for a single LA based on the concept of conditional inaction (CI), referred to as CI-DGPA. Then we develop a framework for a game of LA based on CIDGPA defining the information exchange between learners and the environment. Within this framework, we design a reward function that approaches the performance of a greedy algorithm and show that a smart partition of the search space can double the game convergence speed, thereby halving the overhead due to signalling. Simulations show that our scheme can approach the greedy algorithm with a very small performance gap while providing a much lower computational complexity.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been widely used in plenty of applications. To achieve higher efficiency for data collection, WSNs are often partitioned into several disjointed clusters, each with a representative cluster head in charge of the data gathering and routing process. Such a partition is balanced and effective if the distance between each node and its cluster head can be bounded within a constant number of hops, and any two cluster heads are connected. Finding such a cluster partition with minimum number of clusters and connectors between cluster heads is defined as minimum connected d-hop dominating set (d-MCDS) problem, which is proved to be NP-complete. In this paper, we propose a distributed approximation algorithm, named CS-Cluster, to address the d-MCDS problem. CS-Cluster constructs a sparser d-hop maximal independent set (d-MIS), connects the d-MIS and finally checks and removes redundant nodes. We prove the approximation ratio of CS-Cluster is (2d + l)λ, where λ is a parameter related with d but is no more than 18.4. Compared with the previous best result O(d2), our approximation ratio is a great improvement. Our evaluation results demonstrate the outstanding performance of our algorithm compared with previous works.

In this paper, we propose a novel network coded non-binary low-density generator matrix (LDGM) code structure for a multi-access relay system, where multiple sources transmit lattice signals to a destination with the help of a relay. Specifically, we first develop a network coded non-binary LDGM code structure by jointly considering lattice-signal transmissions at the sources and the relay. Then we derive the achievable computation rate (ACR) for the proposed system and on that basis optimize the key parameters in the proposed structure to maximize the ACR. Furthermore, we optimize the network coded non-binary LDGM codes based on lattices to approach the ACR. Simulation results show that the optimal setting of the parameters is consistent with that obtained from our analysis and the proposed code structure outperforms the designed reference scheme.

This paper proposes a new power efficient multilevel threshold based soft quantization (MLT- SQ+PA) scheme for a multiple access relay system (MARS). In the proposed MLTSQ+ PA protocol, the relay computes the reliabilities, expressed as log-likelihood ratios (LLRs), of the received signals from the two sources. We provide an analytical closed form expression for the optimized power allocation factor at the relay. The relay evaluates the LLRs of the network-coded packet, quantizes and scales these using the optimum power allocation factor, forwarding the resulting "quantized soft symbols" to the destination. Compared to competing schemes, the performance of our system is superior in terms of BER when the same amount of channel state information (CSI) is exploited.

In this paper, we investigate a two-way relaying power line communication (PLC) network with analog network coding. We focus on the analysis of the system outage probability, symbol error rate, and average capacity. Specifically, we first derive the probability density function (PDF) of the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) with a closed form, by exploiting the statistical properties of the PLC channel. Then with the help of this PDF, we develop the outage probability, symbol error rate, and average capacity with closed forms, based on the Hermite polynomial. Simulations show that the derived analytical results are consistent with those by Monte Carlo simulation.

Heterogeneous cellular networks (HCNs) with embedded small cells are considered, where multiple mobile users wish to download network content of different popularity. By caching data into the small-cell base stations, we will design distributed caching optimization algorithms via belief propagation (BP) for minimizing the downloading latency. First, we derive the delay-minimization objective function and formulate an optimization problem. Then, we develop a framework for modeling the underlying HCN topology with the aid of a factor graph. Furthermore, a distributed BP algorithm is proposed based on the network's factor graph. Next, we prove that a fixed point of convergence exists for our distributed BP algorithm. In order to reduce the complexity of the BP, we propose a heuristic BP algorithm. Furthermore, we evaluate the average downloading performance of our HCN for different numbers and locations of the base stations and mobile users, with the aid of stochastic geometry theory. By modeling the nodes distributions using a Poisson point process, we develop the expressions of the average factor graph degree distribution, as well as an upper bound of the outage probability for random caching schemes. We also improve the performance of random caching. Our simulations show that 1) the proposed distributed BP algorithm has a near-optimal delay performance, approaching that of the high-complexity exhaustive search method; 2) the modified BP offers a good delay performance at low communication complexity; 3) both the average degree distribution and the outage upper bound analysis relying on stochastic geometry match well with our Monte-Carlo simulations; and 4) the optimization based on the upper bound provides both a better outage and a better delay performance than the benchmarks.

In this paper, we propose a generalized analog network coding (GANC) scheme for a non-orthogonal multiple-access relay channel (MARC), where two sources transmit their information simultaneously to the destination with the help of a relay. In the GANC scheme, the relay receives interfered signals from the two sources and generates signals to be transmitted with a relay function. We focus on the design of the optimal relay function to achieve the minimum pair-wise error probability (PEP) of the system. Specifically, we first covert the relay function optimization problem to a transformation matrix (TM) design problem by presenting the received complex signals as signal matrices composed of real and imaginary parts. Then, we propose an optimization criteria, i.e.,maximizing the minimal squared Euclidean distance(MMSED), to improve the PEP performance, since the PEP is determined by the Euclidean distance of the received constellation at destination. Next, we prove that the MMSED can be equivalently converted to a convex problem by introducing an intermediate matrix. We solve this convex problem by using the Lagrangian method and obtain the closed-form expression of the optimal TM. We further improve the PEP performance by optimizing transmission power of the two sources. Simulation results show that the proposed GANC scheme has a better PEP performance compared to other alternative schemes.

This paper investigates the joint transmitter and receiver optimization for the energy efficiency (EE) in orthogonal frequency-division multiple-access (OFDMA) systems. We first establish a holistic power dissipation model for OFDMA systems, including the transmission power, signal processing power, and circuit power from both the transmitter and receiver sides, while existing works only consider the one side power consumption and also fail to capture the impact of subcarriers and users on the system EE. The EE maximization problem is formulated as a combinatorial fractional problem that is NP-hard. To make it tractable, we transform the problem of fractional form into a subtractive-form one by using the Dinkelbach transformation and then propose a joint optimization method, which leads to the asymptotically optimal solution. To reduce the computational complexity, we decompose the joint optimization into two consecutive steps, where the key idea lies in exploring the inherent fractional structure of the introduced individual EE and the system EE. In addition, we provide a sufficient condition under which our proposed two-step method is optimal. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed methods, and the effect of imperfect channel state information is also characterized.

In this paper, we investigate the resource allocation for joint transmitter and receiver energy efficiency maximization in orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems. An elaborate power dissipation model is proposed for OFDMA systems considering the transmission power from the base station side, the signal processing power and radio frequency (RF) circuit power from both sides. Then we formulate the energy efficiency maximization problem and propose a two-step method based on the relationship analysis of the single subcarrier-user (SU) pair energy efficiency and system energy efficiency. Specifically, we first pair each subcarrier with the user resulting in highest SU pair energy efficiency, which is motivated by a special case study. Then, we propose a linear complexity scheme by exploring the inherent fractional structure of the system energy efficiency, which is proved to be optimal for the power allocation with given SU pairing in the first step. Finally, we provide a sufficient condition under which our proposed two-step method is globally optimal. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and we also find that exploiting more user diversity is not always beneficial from the perspective of energy efficiency.

In this paper, we propose a novel estimate-and-forward (EF) transmission protocol, and combine it with the essence of compressive sensing (CS) for a network consisting of two correlated sources, one relay and one destination. Compared with the conventional estimate-and-forward (EF) protocol, in our protocol, correlation is exploited in calculating the soft symbols at the relay. Then we transform the network coded soft symbol vector into a sparse vector, which is suitable for compression by using CS. We analyze that the soft symbols in the proposed protocol are more suitable than those in the EF protocol for CS. Simulations show that our protocol can achieve as good bit error rate performance as the uncompressed EF protocol with reduced transmission time at the relay, thus improving the system throughput performance.

In this paper, we propose a threshold-based one-bit soft forwarding (TOB-SF) protocol for a multi-source relaying uplink system with network coding. In the TOB-SF protocol, the relay calculates the log-likelihood ratio (LLR) value of each network coded symbol, compares this LLR value with a pre-optimized threshold, and determines whether to transmit or keep silent. We first derive the bit error rate (BER) expression at the destination, based on which, we optimize the threshold to minimize the BER. Then we theoretically prove that the system can achieve the full diversity gain by using this threshold. Further, we optimize the power allocation at the relay to achieve a higher coding gain. Simulation results show that the proposed TOB-SF protocol outperforms other conventional relaying protocols in terms of error performance.

In this paper, we propose a novel distributed optimization method for dynamic user association in a downlink Heterogeneous cellular network (Hetnet). We aim at maximizing the utilization of the base stations (BSs) in such a network by jointly considering the effect of the channel gains and load balancing of different BSs. Specifically, we first formulate the user association as a combinatorial optimization problem, whose global optimal solution is difficult to obtain. This is due to the high complexity caused by the large network scale and prohibitive signaling overhead. To address this issue, we then consider the optimization problem under the stochastic decision framework, and propose a distributed heuristic algorithm to independently and dynamically associate each user with the best BS. By posing a price factor to the BS evaluation update, the convergence of the heuristics is guaranteed. Numerical results indicate that the proposed heuristics can perform better than the conventional best-SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) method in the presence of large number of users, and achieves the nearly optimal solution.

In this paper we propose a new power adaptive network coding (PANC) strategy for a non-orthogonal multiple-access relay channel (MARC), where two sources transmit their information simultaneously to the destination with the help of a relay. In contrast to the conventional XOR-based network coding (CXNC), the relay in PANC generates network coded symbols by considering the coefficients of the source-to-relay channels, and forwards each symbol with a pre-optimized power level. Next, we obtain the optimal power level by decomposing it as a multiplication of a power scaling factor and a power adaptation factor. We prove that with the power scaling factor at the relay, our PANC scheme can achieve a full diversity gain, i.e., an order of two diversity gain, while the CXNC can achieve only an order of one diversity gain. In addition, we optimize the power adaptation factor at the relay to minimize the SPER at the destination by considering of the relationship between SPER and minimum Euclidean distance of the received constellation, resulting in an improved coding gain. Simulation results show that the PANC scheme with power adaptation optimizations and power scaling factor design can achieve a full diversity, and obtain a much higher coding gain than other network coding schemes.

In heterogeneous networks (HetNets), the load between macro-cell base stations (MBSs) and small-cell BSs (SBSs) is imbalanced due to transmit power disparities and ad-hoc deployment of SBSs. This significantly impacts the system performance and user experience. Associating more users to the SBSs is an effective way to solve this problem. In this paper, we formulate the user-BS association problem as a distributed optimization problem with proportional fairness as the objective. Specifically, we propose a novel distribute algorithm based on the belief propagation (BP) method to solve the user-BS association problem via iteratively message passing between the users and BSs. Also, we develop an approximation calculation in the BP method to reduce the computational complexity and transmission overhead of message passing. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm well approaches the optimal system performance (by exhausting search) with low complexity and fast convergence.

This paper proposes the novel technique of multilevel threshold based soft quantization (MLT-SQ) for a multiple access relay system (MARS). The scheme is suitable for systems using binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) and network coding at the relay. In the proposed MLT-SQ protocol, the relay evaluates the reliabilities, expressed as log-likelihood ratios (LLRs), of the received signals from the two sources. It then computes the LLRs of the network-coded packet and quantizes these using a set of optimized multilevel thresholds, forwarding the resulting “quantized soft symbols” to the destination. We provide the derivation for the bit error rate (BER) at the destination, based on which we optimize the multilevel thresholds to minimize the BER. Compared to competing schemes, the performance of our system is superior in terms of BER when the same amount of channel state information (CSI) is exploited.

This paper investigates a low-density parity-check (LDPC) coded soft-decode-and-forward (SDF) relaying protocol for a two way relay channel (TWRC). In this SDF protocol, the relay evaluates the reliabilities, expressed as log-likelihood ratios (LLRs), of the received signals from the two sources. The relay then forwards a network-coded combination of the parity symbols of both sources, but in the “soft” domain to avoid error propagation from the relay. We introduce a model for the effective noise experienced by the soft network coded symbols, constituting the new parameters of soft scalar and soft error; this model is then used to compute the log-likelihood ratios (LLRs) at the destination. To facilitate this latter computation, we have derived an analytical expression for soft error variance, as well as a simplified expression based on a common assumption on the statistical behavior of the LLRs. This enables low-complexity computation and tracking of the soft error variance on-the-fly. The proposed system outperforms standard competing schemes reported in the literature in terms of error rate performance over Rayleigh fading links.

In this paper we investigate novel soft mutual information forwarding (MIF) protocols in a two-way relay channel (TWRC), where two sources exchange information with the help of an intermediate relay. Based on the estimated signals from the two sources, the relay calculates the soft mutual information, and then broadcasts it to the two sources. In specific, we propose two MIF protocols, namely, network coded MIF (NC-MIF) and superposition coded MIF (SC-MIF), suitable to different channel conditions. The expressions derived for the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the sources reveal that if both source-to-relay channels are in good conditions, the NC-MIF outperforms the SC-MIF. Otherwise, the SC-MIF is superior to the NC-MIF. For the TWRC with varying channels, we further develop an adaptive scheme, which enables the dynamic switch between the two protocols, depending on the received SNR at the sources. Furthermore, the threshold that determines the switch of the protocols is developed as a close-form expression. Simulation results show that our adaptive scheme outperforms all the existing relaying protocols in the fading channels.

In this paper, we propose a threshold-based one-bit soft forwarding (TOB-SF) protocol for a multi-source relaying system with network coding, where two sources communicate with the destination with the help of a relay. Specifically in the TOB-SF protocol, the relay calculates the log-likelihood ratio (LLR) value of each network coded symbol, compares this LLR value with a pre-optimized threshold, and determines whether to transmit or keep silent. We are interested in optimizing the TOB-SF protocol in fading channels, and consider both the uncoded and low-density parity check coded systems. In the uncoded system, we first derive the bit error rate (BER) expressions at the destination, based on which, we derive the optimal threshold. Then we theoretically prove that the system can achieve the full diversity gain by using this threshold. Further, we optimize the power allocation at the relay to achieve a higher coding gain. In the coded system, we first optimize the LLR threshold. Then we develop a methodology to track the BER evolution at the destination by using Gaussian approximations. Based on the BER evolution, we further optimize the power allocation at the relay which minimizes the system BER. Simulation results show that the proposed TOB-SF protocol outperforms other conventional relaying protocols in terms of error performance.

In this paper we propose a novel power adaptive network coding (PANC) for a non-orthogonal multiple-access relay channel (MARC), where two sources transmit their information simultaneously to the destination with the help of a relay. In contrast to the conventional XOR-based network coding (CXNC), the relay in PANC generates network coded symbols by considering the coefficients of the source-to-relay channels, and forwards each symbol with a pre-optimized power level. Specifically, by defining a symbol pair as two symbols from the two sources, we first derive the expression of symbol pair error rate (SPER) for the system. Noting that deriving the exact SPER are complex due to the irregularity of the decision regions caused by random channel coefficients, we propose a coordinate transform (CT) method on the received constellation to simplify the derivations of the SPER. Next, we obtain the optimal power level by decomposing it as a multiplication of a power scaling factor and a power adaptation factor. We prove that with the power scaling factor at the relay, our PANC scheme can achieve a full diversity gain, i.e., an order of two diversity gain, while the CXNC can achieve only an order of one diversity gain. In addition, we optimize the power adaptation factor at the relay to minimize the SPER at the destination by considering of the relationship between SPER and minimum Euclidean distance of the received constellation, resulting in an improved coding gain. Simulation results show that (1) the SPER derived based on our CT method can well approximate the exact SPER with a much lower complexity; (2) the PANC scheme with power adaptation optimizations and power scaling factor design can achieve a full diversity, and obtain a much higher coding gain than other network coding schemes.

In this paper, we consider the performance-optimized nonbinary low-density parity check code over general linear group, i.e.,$\bar{\cal C}$. A new methodology for constructing the binary representation [generalized binary representation (GBR)] of$\bar{\cal C}$is proposed, which can be optimized with regard to both degree distributions and girth. As to the decoding of the GBR, we develop a low-complexity hybrid parallel decoding process. It is shown that the decoding performance of the GBR under the proposed binary decoding process could closely approach the decoding performance of its mother code$\bar{\cal C}$under nonbinary belief propagation decoding. A simple code optimization algorithm for the GBR is also provided. Simulations show the comparative results and justify the advantages of the proposed constructions.

In this paper we design novel decoders for non-binary low density parity check (LDPC) codes. For a non-binary LDPC code C over the field Fqof size q for some q > 0, we propose two novel cooperative decoders, each composed of a binary component decoder and a q-ary component decoder in a concatenated manner, to obtain excellent decoding performance. Specifically to reduce the complexity of the cooperative decoders, we design a hybrid q-ary component decoder. Then, we propose an algorithm to construct the parity check matrix to eliminate the bit-level cycles. Simulations show that the decoding performance of the proposed algorithm approaches the capacity limit within 0.2dB at BER= 10−4.

In this paper, we propose a practical 1-bit soft forwarding protocol for a network-coded two-way relay channel. Different from the conventional estimate-and-forward (EF) protocol, the proposed protocol forwards 1-bit soft information at the relay. We employ the joint trellis coded quantization/modulation (TCQ/M) to implement 1-bit transmission of the soft information. Also, the codebooks in the TCQ are designed to be adaptive to the source-to-relay channel conditions so that the system can achieve the full diversity gain over fading channels. Specifically, in the low source-to-relay channel SNR region, we apply the TCQ/M to the soft information based on the codebook generated by the LloydMax quantizer. In the high source-to-relay channel SNR region, where the soft information is equivalent to its hard decision, we design the codebook by repeating the soft information. It has been shown that the proposed protocol outperforms both the amplify-and-forward (AF) and the decode-and-forward (DF) protocols over fading channels.

In this paper we propose a novel network coded LDPC code design for a multiple-access relay channel (MARC). We first investigate the achievable rate region for the MARC. Then we propose a novel physical layer network coded (PNC) LDPC code structure, named PNC-LDPC code. Next, an iterative detection-and-decoding receiver is designed to deal with the multi-user interference at the destination. Based on the code structure and the iterative receiver, we optimize the degree distribution of the PNC-LDPC code to approach the system achievable rate by utilizing the extrinsic mutual information transfer (EXIT) chart. Simulations show that the performance of our PNC-LDPC code, with a code length of 10000, at the destination, is 1:5 dB away from the capacity.

In this work we determine the achievable rate in a multi-source relaying system with Gaussian phase-fading channels. In our system, M sources simultaneously transmit their messages to a common destination in M separate frequency bands with the help of a single relay (an M − 1 − 1 system). The achievable rates of both a separate processing scheme at the relay, and a network coding scheme at the relay, are considered. For the separate processing scheme, we propose an new constrained water-filling algorithm which determines the power allocation at the relay in order to obtain the achievable rate. For the network coding scheme we derive the achievable rate based on the use of a new Galois field rate-splitting theorem, and discuss why power allocation at the relay in this scheme can be set using a traditional water-filling algorithm. We show how our network coding scheme will always obtain higher achievable rates relative to those obtained from a separate processing scheme.

In this paper, we focus on the realization of multiple interpretations (MI) in multi-way relay channels (MWRC) with fading, where multiple sources communicate with each other with the help of a relay. We first propose a novel nested convolutional lattice codes (NCLC) over the finite field, which can achieve the MI for each source in two time slots. Then we derive a theoretical upper bound for the codeword error rate (WER) of the NCLC. We further optimize our NCLC by developing a code design criterion which minimizes the derived WER. In simulations, we construct a specific NCLC based on our code design criterion. Simulation results show that our code can realize MI for each source in two time slots, and validate the derived upper bound in the high normalized signal-to-effective-noise ratio (SENRnorm) region.

In this paper, we focus on network coding design for the wireless sensor networks (WSNs), where multiple source nodes communicate with a common destination node with the help of multiple relay nodes in a two-hop fashion. Specifically, we propose an unequal error protection (UEP) distributed network-channel coding (DNCC) scheme based on Luby-transform (LT) codes. We analyse three properties of the proposed UEP DNCC scheme, i.e. effective weights, turning points, and thresholds of the source nodes' number. Also, we derive the upper and lower bit error rate (BER) bounds for the proposed UEP DNCC scheme over Rayleigh fading channels under maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding. Based on the analysis, it is observed that the proposed UEP DNCC scheme can achieve all protection levels required when the number of source nodes is large enough. Simulation results show that our UEP DNCC scheme can provide desirable UEP to all source nodes.

We investigate the use of rate-compatible lowdensity parity-check (RC-LDPC) codes as part of a soft decodeand- forward (SDF) protocol over the half-duplex relay channel. We propose a new methodology to design the degree distribution of the RC-LDPC codes with a lower triangular parity-check matrix, enabling the additional parity bits to be linearly and systematically encoded at the relay. Our proposed methodology introduces the concept of a K-layer doping matrix to represent the structure of a lower triangular parity-check matrix. As a result of our methodology, the asymptotic performance of RC-LDPC codes can be analyzed and predicted using the multi-edge-type density evolution. Then, we derive the soft-re-encoding of the additional parity symbols at the relay using our designed RCLDPC codes. Moreover, we propose a novel method, which we refer to as soft fading, to compute the log-likelihood ratio (LLR) of the received signal at the destination for the SDF protocol. We demonstrate that our proposed soft fading method outperforms the best known method in the literature by up to 0.7 dB in terms of BER performance. Finally, we derive a new bound for the power multiplication factor at the relay, which limits the amount of soft-errors forwarded by the relay to the destination. The BER performance of our new RC-LDPC codes improves significantly once the power multiplication factor at the relay satisfies this bound.

This paper investigates the throughput-reliability tradeoff (TRT) for dual-hop amplify-and-forward relay systems with one source, one destination, and multiple relays, and its relationship with the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT). The TRT was proposed in the context of MIMO block fading channels to reveal the interplay between the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), rate R, and outage probability that are not accessible through the DMT. The contributions of this paper include the calculation of the TRT expressions for two classes of amplify-and-forward protocols: the slotted amplify-and-forward and the non-orthogonal amplify-and-forward. Based on the derived expressions, relationships between the SNR, rate and outage probability are explored. The relationship between the TRT and the DMT is investigated. One of the goals of the TRT is to predict the slope and offset of the outage vs. SNR set of curves parameterized by different rates. We verify the accuracy of the TRT predictions in the context of amplify-and-forward relays.

This paper considers a multiple-access relay channel (MARC) with two sources, one relay and one destination, where the relay decides what it transmits to the destination according to the outage condition of source-relay links. The outage probability and the approximate bit error rate (BER) are derived, which are shown to be in tight match with Monte-Carlo simulation results. Simulation results reveal that adaptive DF strategy yields better performance than the traditional fixed DF strategies.

In relay networks, we may not possess the ability to tune all system parameters in order to achieve the maximum achievable rate promised by theoretical analysis. This paper investigates the pragmatic issue of sub-optimal relay networks, where we can only optimize either on the time allocation, or on the power allocation. Our study concludes that optimizing on the power allocation, or on the time allocation, can achieve more than 95% of the relaying gain relative to the optimization of both time and power simultaneously. To produce the result, we derive the closed-form expression of the optimum power allocation for the source and relay that obtains the achievable rate of the half-duplex relay channel with fixed (equal) time allocation. We also derive the closed-form expression of the optimum time allocation between the source and relay transmission that obtains the achievable rate of the half-duplex relay channel with fixed power allocation. We demonstrate that for small SNR, where relaying is most advantageous, almost all relaying gain can be achieved by only optimizing the power allocation. Conversely, optimizing the time allocation alone is sufficient to achieve most of the relaying gain when the system's SNR is large. This result is important for pragmatic designs of emerging relay communication systems.

In this paper, we analyze the error performance of the mutual information based forwarding (MIF) scheme for a memoryless parallel relay network in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels. The analytical expression for soft noise variance is first derived. Note that in the literature, the exact soft noise variance could only be evaluated by Monte Carlo simulation due to the lack of its analytical form. The derived soft noise variance expression only relies on the transmit signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), without the need to have the knowledge of actual or estimated information bits. With the expression of the soft noise variance, we derive an approximate bit error rate (BER) expression for a parallel relay network employing MIF scheme. The derived soft noise variance and system BER expressions are shown to be in tight match with Monte Carlo simulation results.

This paper studies the problem of determining the optimum degree distribution for distributed LDPC codes in two-way relay channels. Based on the framework of multi-edge type (MET) LDPC codes, we propose a methodology to asymptotically optimize the code's ensemble when different segments within the distributed codeword have been transmitted through different channels and experience different SNRs. An average noise threshold is formulated to compute the convergence threshold of the distributed LDPC codes under density evolution and acts as the performance gap between the optimized distributed codes and the theoretical limit. We demonstrate that the optimized distributed LDPC code using our proposed method performs asymptotically within a fraction of a dB away from the theoretical limit.

We study the design of network codes for M-source, N-relay wireless networks over slow fading channels. Specifically, vector-wise binary field network coding (BFNC) schemes are proposed. In the construction of our BFNC schemes, we utilize a diversity achieving criterion which can be expressed in terms of the linear independence of quasi-cyclic matrices. Our codes can be implemented with low-complexity encoders at the relays as only binary operations are used. Meanwhile at the destination, for small code lengths, ML decoder can be applied. For large code lengths, we propose a modified BP decoder with low decoding complexity. From analysis and simulations, we show that our proposed BFNC schemes can achieve full diversity for the ML decoder, as well as full diversity for the modified BP decoder we propose for large block lengths. Our simulations also show that our proposed BFNC schemes achieve a higher coding gain relative to previous network coding schemes.

This paper proposes a new soft decode-and-forward (SDF) protocol using LDPC codes in the half-duplex relay channels. In order for the encoding of the additional parity-check symbols at the relay to be linear and systematic, we introduce a structured rate-compatible (RC) LDPC code. We then develop the soft-decoding and soft-re-encoding algorithms for the proposed RC-LDPC code, which allows the relay to forward soft messages to the destination when the relay fails to decode the source's message. Furthermore, we propose a new method, which we refer to as soft fading, to compute the log-likelihood ratio (LLR) of the received signal at the destination for the SDF protocol. We show that our proposed method performs better when compared to a previous reported method in literature.

We investigate LDPC code design for a multi-source single-relay system, with uniform phase-fading Gaussian channels. We specifically consider the asymmetric channels for multiple sources, where the channel condition for each source in the system is different. We focus on LDPC code design when network coding (NC) at the relay is utilized. For the asymmetric sources, we firstly introduce a binary field rate splitting theorem which is used to discover an appropriate NC scheme at the relay. This NC scheme is then used to determine the achievable rates of each source and the whole system. These steps assist us in the development of the main contribution of our work, namely, network coded multi-edge type LDPC (NCMET-LDPC) code design. Extrinsic mutual information transfer (EXIT) chart analysis is utilized to optimize the code profiles. Our results demonstrate two key points. (1) From the whole system point of view, our NCMET-LDPC codes achieve better error performance than that of LDPC codes designed for the system without NC. (2) As a consequence of the binary field rate-splitting theorem, our NCMET-LDPC codes also guarantee better error performance of each asymmetric source. The improvement in error performance is typically about 0.3 dB relative to a system without NC.

It has been proved that wireless network coding can increase the throughput of multi-access system and bidirectional system by taking the advantage of the broadcast nature of electromagnetic waves. In this paper, we introduce the wireless network coding into cooperative multicast system. We establish a basic 2-source and 2-destination cooperative system model with arbitrary number of relays (2-N-2 system). Then two regenerative network coding (RNC) protocols are designed to execute the basic idea of network coding in complex field (RCNC) and Galois field respectively (RGNC). We illuminate how network coding can enhance the throughput distinctly in cooperative multicast system. Power allocation schemes as well as precoder design are also concentratively studied to improve the system performance in terms of system frame error probability.

Multicarrier code division multiple access (MCCDMA) is one of the most promising techniques considered for future broadband mobile services. However, the high peak to average power ratio (PAPR) problem associated with multicarrier systems significantly degrades the power efficiency and makes it less preferred by the industry. In this paper, we exploit the order of the CDMA spreading codes as an extra degree of freedom to devise an efficient PAPR reduction scheme for the downlink of MC-CDMA systems. Both lightly loaded and fully loaded systems are considered when using the orthogonal sets of Walsh-Hadamard and Golay complementary sequences. The proposed technique requires only slight modification to the MC-CDMA base station and negligible complexity to the mobile terminals. It will be demonstrated that it achieves significant PAPR reduction with low system complexity at both transmitter and receiver.

In this paper, we model the hierarchical structures inherent in cognitive radio networks as the priority queueing system in which primary users interact with the highest priority and secondary users belong to the lowest priority class. In a M/G/l system containing one primary user and multiple secondary users, we obtain analytical forms of delay and throughput for different users with the function of traffic and channel conditions. Based on the analysis, the secondary user is considered to act as a relaying terminal to assist the primary communication by adopting an amplify-and-forward TDMA protocol. Cooperative diversity gains are examined next and the benefits of the secondary: improvement of throughput, is discussed with respect of the primary traffic.

Network coding is a promising technology designed to reach the min-cut max-flow capacity in wired network. While in wireless cooperative environments, it has been proved that network coding can also increase the system throughput by taking the advantage of the broadcast nature of electromagnetic waves. In this paper, we establish a 2-source and 2-destination cooperative systems with arbitrary number of relays (2-N-2 system), and then the designed signal-superposition-and-forward based complex field network coding protocol (SiSF-CFNC) is applied to the model. We define the system frame error probability (SFEP) to measure the performance of cooperative multicast systems with the proposed protocol. Power allocation schemes as well as precoder design are concentratively studied to improve the system performance without cutting down the system throughput.

Cooperative transmission protocols are always designed to reach the largest diversity gain and the largest network capacity simultaneously. The concept of diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) in MIMO systems put forward by Zheng and Tse has been extended to this field. In fact, many works that follow from this famous rule have been done to achieve more perfect tradeoff curves. However, the concept of multiplexing gain in DMT constrains a better understanding of the asymptotic interplay between transmission rate, frame error probability (FEP) and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and also fails to predict FEP curves accurately. Another formulation called the throughput- reliability tradeoff (TRT) was then proposed to avoid such limitation. Under this new rule, Azarian and Gamal well elucidated the asymptotic trends exhibited by the FEP curves in block-fading MIMO channels. Meanwhile they doubted whether the new rule can be used in more general channels and protocols. In this paper, we will prove that it does hold true in amplify-and-forward (AF) cooperative protocols. We propose a symbol based slotted amplify-and-forward (SSAF) protocol as the infrastructure to deduce the relationship between DMT and TRT. Furthermore, we derive the theoretical FEP curves predicted by TRT. We show that the FEP curves by simulation will asymptotically overlap with the theoretical curves predicted by TRT under some circumstance.

In this letter, we propose two power allocation schemes based on the statistical channel state information (CSI) and instantaneous srarrr CSI at transmitters, respectively, for a 2-N-2 cooperative multicast system with nonregenerative network coding. Then the isolated precoder and the distributed precoder are, respectively, applied to the schemes to further improve the system performance by achieving the full diversity gain. Finally, we demonstrate that joint instantaneous srarrr CSI-based power allocation and distributed precoder design achieve the best performance.