Yijin Zhang

Jie Zhang, Jun Li, Yijin Zhang et al.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is envisioned to be widely applied in future wireless networks. In this paper, we investigate a multi-user communication system assisted by cooperative IRS devices with the capability of energy harvesting. Aiming to maximize the long-term average achievable system rate, an optimization problem is formulated by jointly designing the transmit beamforming at the base station (BS) and discrete phase shift beamforming at the IRSs, with the constraints on transmit power, user data rate requirement and IRS energy buffer size. Considering time-varying channels and stochastic arrivals of energy harvested by the IRSs, we first formulate the problem as a Markov decision process (MDP) and then develop a novel multi-agent Q-mix (MAQ) framework with two layers to decouple the optimization parameters. The higher layer is for optimizing phase shift resolutions, and the lower one is for phase shift beamforming and power allocation. Since the phase shift optimization is an integer programming problem with a large-scale action space, we improve MAQ by incorporating the Wolpertinger method, namely, MAQ-WP algorithm to achieve a sub-optimality with reduced dimensions of action space. In addition, as MAQ-WP is still of high complexity to achieve good performance, we propose a policy gradient-based MAQ algorithm, namely, MAQ-PG, by mapping the discrete phase shift actions into a continuous space at the cost of a slight performance loss. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed MAQ-WP and MAQ-PG algorithms can converge faster and achieve data rate improvements of 10.7% and 8.8% over the conventional multi-agent DDPG, respectively.

Yan Lin, Jinming Bao, Yijin Zhang et al.

Proactive edge association is capable of improving wireless connectivity at the cost of increased handover (HO) frequency and energy consumption, while relying on a large amount of private information sharing required for decision making. In order to improve the connectivity-cost trade-off without privacy leakage, we investigate the privacy-preserving joint edge association and power allocation (JEAPA) problem in the face of the environmental uncertainty and the infeasibility of individual learning. Upon modelling the problem by a decentralized partially observable Markov Decision Process (Dec-POMDP), it is solved by federated multi-agent reinforcement learning (FMARL) through only sharing encrypted training data for federatively learning the policy sought. Our simulation results show that the proposed solution strikes a compelling trade-off, while preserving a higher privacy level than the state-of-the-art solutions.

Tsai-Lien Wong, Kangkang Xu, Yuan-Hsun Lo et al.

A conflict-avoiding code (CAC) of length L and weight w is used for deterministic multiple-access without feedback. When the number of simultaneous active users is less than or equal to w, such a code is able to provide a hard guarantee that each active user has a successful transmission within every consecutive L time slots. Recently, CACs were extended to multichannel CAcs (MC-CACs) over M orthogonal channels with the aim of increasing the number of potential users that can be supported. While most existing results on MC-CAC are derived under the assumption that M is not less than w, this paper focuses on the case that M is less than w, which is more relevant to practical application scenarios. In this paper, we first introduce the concept of exceptional codewords in MC-CACs. By employing some techniques from additive combinatorics, we derive a series of optimal MC-CACs. Along the way, several previously known optimal CAC results are generalized. Finally, our results extend naturally to AM-OPPTS MC-CACs and mixed-weight MC-CACs, two classes of relevant codes.

Simin Wan, Feng Shu, Jinhui Lu et al.

In this paper, given the beamforming vector of confidential messages and artificial noise (AN) projection matrix and total power constraint, a power allocation (PA) strategy of maximizing secrecy rate (Max-SR) is proposed for secure directional modulation (DM) networks. By the method of Lagrange multiplier, the analytic expression of the proposed PA strategy is derived. To confirm the benefit from the Max-SR-based PA strategy, we take the null-space projection (NSP) beamforming scheme as an example and derive its closed-form expression of optimal PA strategy. From simulation results, we find the following facts: in the medium and high signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) regions, compared with three typical PA parameters such $β=0.1, 0.5$, and $0.9$, the optimal PA shows a substantial SR performance gain with maximum gain percent up to more than $60\%$. Additionally, as the PA factor increases from 0 to 1, the achievable SR increases accordingly in the low SNR region whereas it first increases and then decreases in the medium and high SNR regions, where the SR can be approximately viewed as a convex function of the PA factor. Finally, as the number of antennas increases, the optimal PA factor becomes large and tends to one in the medium and high SNR region. In other words, the contribution of AN to SR can be trivial in such a situation.