Giuseppe Caire

Junyuan Gao, Weifeng Zhu, Yanmo Hu et al.

This paper considers multi-view imaging in a sixth-generation (6G) integrated sensing and communication network, which consists of a transmit base-station (BS), multiple receive BSs connected to a central processing unit (CPU), and multiple extended targets. Our goal is to devise an effective multi-view imaging technique that can jointly leverage the targets' echo signals at all the receive BSs to precisely construct the image of these targets. To achieve this goal, we propose a two-phase approach. In Phase I, each receive BS recovers an individual image based on the sample covariance matrix of its received signals. Specifically, we propose a novel covariance-based imaging framework to jointly estimate effective scattering intensity and grid positions, which reduces the number of estimated parameters leveraging channel statistical properties and allows grid adjustment to conform to target geometry. In Phase II, the CPU fuses the individual images of all the receivers to construct a high-quality image of all the targets. Specifically, we design edge-preserving natural neighbor interpolation (EP-NNI) to map individual heterogeneous images onto common and finer grids, and then propose a joint optimization framework to estimate fused scattering intensity and BS fields of view. Extensive numerical results show that the proposed scheme significantly enhances imaging performance, facilitating high-quality environment reconstruction for future 6G networks.

Tayyebeh Jahani-Nezhad, Mohammad Ali Maddah-Ali, Songze Li et al.

We propose SwiftAgg+, a novel secure aggregation protocol for federated learning systems, where a central server aggregates local models of $N \in \mathbb{N}$ distributed users, each of size $L \in \mathbb{N}$, trained on their local data, in a privacy-preserving manner. SwiftAgg+ can significantly reduce the communication overheads without any compromise on security, and achieve optimal communication loads within diminishing gaps. Specifically, in presence of at most $D=o(N)$ dropout users, SwiftAgg+ achieves a per-user communication load of $(1+\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{N}))L$ symbols and a server communication load of $(1+\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{N}))L$ symbols, with a worst-case information-theoretic security guarantee, against any subset of up to $T=o(N)$ semi-honest users who may also collude with the curious server. Moreover, the proposed SwiftAgg+ allows for a flexible trade-off between communication loads and the number of active communication links. In particular, for $T<N-D$ and for any $K\in\mathbb{N}$, SwiftAgg+ can achieve the server communication load of $(1+\frac{T}{K})L$ symbols, and per-user communication load of up to $(1+\frac{T+D}{K})L$ symbols, where the number of pair-wise active connections in the network is $\frac{N}{2}(K+T+D+1)$.

Çağkan Yapar, Ron Levie, Gitta Kutyniok et al.

In this article, we present a collection of radio map datasets in dense urban setting, which we generated and made publicly available. The datasets include simulated pathloss/received signal strength (RSS) and time of arrival (ToA) radio maps over a large collection of realistic dense urban setting in real city maps. The two main applications of the presented dataset are 1) learning methods that predict the pathloss from input city maps (namely, deep learning-based simulations), and, 2) wireless localization. The fact that the RSS and ToA maps are computed by the same simulations over the same city maps allows for a fair comparison of the RSS and ToA-based localization methods.

Tayyebeh Jahani-Nezhad, Mohammad Ali Maddah-Ali, Giuseppe Caire

In this paper, we propose ByzSecAgg, an efficient secure aggregation scheme for federated learning that is resistant to Byzantine attacks and privacy leakages. Processing individual updates to manage adversarial behavior, while preserving the privacy of the data against colluding nodes, requires some sort of secure secret sharing. However, the communication load for secret sharing of long vectors of updates can be very high. In federated settings, where users are often edge devices with potential bandwidth constraints, excessive communication overhead is undesirable. ByzSecAgg solves this problem by partitioning local updates into smaller sub-vectors and sharing them using ramp secret sharing. However, this sharing method does not admit bilinear computations, such as pairwise distances calculations, which are needed for distance-based outlier-detection algorithms, and effective methods for mitigating Byzantine attacks. To overcome this issue, each user runs another round of ramp sharing, with a different embedding of the data in the sharing polynomial. This technique, motivated by ideas from coded computing, enables secure computation of pairwise distance. In addition, to maintain the integrity and privacy of the local update, ByzSecAgg also uses a vector commitment method, in which the commitment size remains constant (i.e., does not increase with the length of the local update), while simultaneously allowing verification of the secret sharing process. In terms of communication load, ByzSecAgg significantly outperforms the related baseline scheme, known as BREA.

Çağkan Yapar, Fabian Jaensch, Ron Levie et al.

To foster research and facilitate fair comparisons among recently proposed pathloss radio map prediction methods, we have launched the ICASSP 2023 First Pathloss Radio Map Prediction Challenge. In this short overview paper, we briefly describe the pathloss prediction problem, the provided datasets, the challenge task and the challenge evaluation methodology. Finally, we present the results of the challenge.

Çağkan Yapar, Fabian Jaensch, Ron Levie et al.

In this paper, we study the localization problem in dense urban settings. In such environments, Global Navigation Satellite Systems fail to provide good accuracy due to low likelihood of line-of-sight (LOS) links between the receiver (Rx) to be located and the satellites, due to the presence of obstacles like the buildings. Thus, one has to resort to other technologies, which can reliably operate under non-line-of-sight (NLOS) conditions. Recently, we proposed a Received Signal Strength (RSS) fingerprint and convolutional neural network-based algorithm, LocUNet, and demonstrated its state-of-the-art localization performance with respect to the widely adopted k-nearest neighbors (kNN) algorithm, and to state-of-the-art time of arrival (ToA) ranging-based methods. In the current work, we first recognize LocUNet's ability to learn the underlying prior distribution of the Rx position or Rx and transmitter (Tx) association preferences from the training data, and attribute its high performance to these. Conversely, we demonstrate that classical methods based on probabilistic approach, can greatly benefit from an appropriate incorporation of such prior information. Our studies also numerically prove LocUNet's close to optimal performance in many settings, by comparing it with the theoretically optimal formulations.

Wenwen Chen, Bin Han, Yao Zhu et al.

Physical layer deception (PLD) combines physical layer security (PLS) with deception: the transmitter actively misleads the eavesdropper with falsified information. We model the transmitter-eavesdropper interaction as a Stackelberg game in which the transmitter commits to a resource allocation and encryption strategy, and each receiver best-responds by selecting among three decryption modes: Perception, Dropping, and Exclusion. Using semantic distortion as the metric, we derive closed-form switching surfaces that partition the parameter space into strategy regimes and identify conditions under which each regime dominates. The robust operating point, at the peak of the worst-case distortion envelope, is shown to be a Stackelberg equilibrium; iterative best-response dynamics oscillate around it with strictly lower time-averaged security. We evaluate the design under Nakagami-m fading with static and adaptive transmitter strategies, benchmarked against a classical PLS baseline. Numerical results validate the regime characterization and show 12-55% higher eavesdropper distortion than the erasure-only baseline across all fading conditions.

Edoardo Giusti, Krishan Kumar Tiwari, C. J. Reddy et al.

An Artificial Magnetic Conductor (AMC) frame capable of improving the impedance matching of a 2$\times$2 array for 6G applications without degrading isolation performance is presented. The proposed frame is integrated into the array without modifying the single radiating element design. By relying on accurate full-wave simulations, it results that the addition of the frame restores the impedance matching performance, achieving a bandwidth of 1.5 GHz at 28 GHz. The isolation between each port remains under -15 dB within the operating band, thanks to the vias in the rectangular patch metasurface. Moreover, the overall structure exhibits a gain of 11.81 dBi with an aperture efficiency of 69$\%$, satisfactorily for broadband communication purposes. The proposed AMC frame represents an effective method for improving array performance without the need to alter the shape or dimensions of the single radiating element.

Zhou Li, Xiang Zhang, Yizhou Zhao et al.

This paper investigates the fundamental limits of information-theoretic decentralized secure aggregation (DSA) with user dropouts. We consider a fully decentralized network where $K$ users communicate over broadcast channels without a trusted aggregation server. Each user holds a private input and aims to recover the sum of the surviving users' inputs (users may drop) while ensuring that no additional information about individual inputs is revealed to that user, even if it can collude with other users. A two-round communication protocol is considered, where we assume at least $U$ users survive and each user can collude with at most $T$ other users. For this setting, the optimal communication rate region is fully characterized: we show that DSA is infeasible if $U\le T+1$; otherwise, the optimal rate region is given by $R_1\geq 1$ and $R_2\geq \frac{1}{U-T-1}$, where $R_1$ and $R_2$ denote the first- and second-round communication rates, respectively. The proposed aggregation scheme is based on correlated secret keys constructed from $(T+1)$-private maximum distance separable (MDS) matrices, which simultaneously provide robustness against user dropouts and security against collusion. We also derive tight converse bounds that establish the optimality of the proposed scheme. Our result shows that the optimal second-round communication rate depends only on the effective redundancy level $U-T-1$ regardless the total number of users.

Gökhan Yılmaz, Franz Lampel, Hamdi Joudeh et al.

We study a joint communication and sensing setting comprising a transmitter, a receiver, and a sensor, all equipped with multiple antennas. The transmitter sends an encoded signal over the channel with the dual purpose of communicating an information message to the receiver, and enabling the sensor to estimate a target parameter vector by generating back-scattered signals. We assume that the transmitter and sensor are co-located, or fully connected, giving the latter access to the transmitted signal. The target parameter vector is randomly drawn from a continuous distribution, yet remains fixed throughout the transmission block. We establish the fundamental performance trade-off between the communication and sensing tasks, captured in terms of a capacity-MSE function. In doing so, we identify optimal coding schemes for this multi-antenna joint communication and sensing setting. Moreover, we particularize our result to two practically-inspired scenarios where we showcase optimal schemes and trade-offs.

Xudong You, Kai Wan, Xiang Zhang et al.

This paper considers a new secure gradient coding problem with uncoded groupwise keys, formalized as a (K, N, N_r, M, S) secure gradient coding model, where a user aims to compute the sum of the gradients from K datasets with the assistance of N distributed servers. We consider arbitrary heterogeneous data assignment, where each dataset is assigned to at least M servers. The user should recover the sum of gradients from the transmissions of any N_r servers. The security constraint guarantees that even if the user receives the transmitted messages from all servers, it cannot obtain any other information about the datasets except the sum of gradients. Compared to existing secure gradient coding works, we introduce a practical constraint on secret keys, namely uncoded groupwise keys, where the keys are mutually independent and each key is shared by precisely S servers. An achievable secure gradient coding scheme with uncoded groupwise keys is proposed, which is then proven to be optimal if S > M and to be order optimal within a factor of 2 otherwise.

Ting Yang, Kai Wan, Minquan Cheng et al.

This paper studies the multi-access coded caching (MACC) problem with arbitrary user-cache access topology, which extends existing MACC models that rely on highly structured and combinatorially designed topologies. We consider a MACC system consisting of a single server, $Λ$ cache-nodes, and $K$ user-nodes. The server stores $N$ equal-size files, each cache-node has a storage capacity of $M$ files, and each user-node $k\in[K]$ can access an arbitrary subset of cache-nodes $\mathcal{A}_k\subseteq[Λ]$ and retrieve the cached content stored in cache-nodes $\mathcal{A}_k$. The objective is to design a universal framework for the MACC delivery problem. Decoding conflicts among the requested packets are captured by a conflict graph, and the design of the delivery is reduced to a graph coloring problem, where achieving a lower transmission load corresponds to coloring the graph using fewer colors. Under this formulation, the classical DSatur algorithm achieves a transmission load close to the index-coding (IC) converse bound, thereby providing a practical benchmark. However, its computational complexity becomes prohibitive for large-scale graphs. To overcome this limitation, we develop a learning-driven approach using graph neural networks (GNNs) that efficiently constructs coded multicast transmissions with performance close to the theoretical bounds and generalizes across different user-cache access topologies and numbers of users. In addition, we extend the IC converse bound to MACC systems with arbitrary access topology and propose a low-complexity greedy approximation that closely matches the IC converse bound. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves performance close to the DSatur algorithm and the IC converse bound, while significantly reducing computational complexity, making it well-suited for large-scale MACC systems.

Mengyuan Li, Minquan Cheng, Kai Wan et al.

We consider the $(K,L,M,N)$ multi-access coded caching system introduced by Hachem et al., which consists of a central server with $N$ files and $K$ cache nodes, each of memory size $M$, where each user can access $L$ cache nodes in a cyclic wrap-around fashion. At present, several existing schemes achieve competitive transmission performance, but their subpacketization levels grow exponentially with the number of users. In contrast, schemes with linear or polynomial subpacketization always incur higher transmission loads. We aim to design a multi-access coded caching scheme with linear subpacketization $F$ while maintaining low transmission load. Recently, Cheng et al. proposed a construction framework for coded caching schemes with linear subpacketization (i.e., $F=K$) called non-half-sum disjoint packing (NHSDP). Inspired by this structure, we introduce a novel combinatorial structure named cyclic multi-access non-half-sum disjoint packing (CMA-NHSDP) by extending NHSDP to MACC system. By constructing CMA-NHSDP, we obtain a new class of multi-access coded caching schemes. Theoretical and numerical analyses show that our scheme achieves lower transmission loads than some existing schemes with linear subpacketization. Moreover, the proposed schemes achieves lower transmission load compared to existing schemes with exponential subpacketization in some case.

Zhou Li, Yizhou Zhao, Xiang Zhang et al.

We study the fundamental communication limits of information-theoretic secure aggregation in a hierarchical network consisting of a server, multiple relays, and multiple users per relay. Communication proceeds over two rounds and two hops, and the system is subject to arbitrary user and relay dropouts. Up to $T$ users may collude with either the server or any single relay. The server aims to recover the sum of the inputs of all users that survive the first round, while learning no additional information beyond the aggregate sum and the inputs of the colluding users. Each relay, however, must learn nothing about the users' inputs except for the information revealed by the inputs of the colluding users under the same collusion model. We introduce a four-dimensional rate tuple that captures the communication cost across rounds and hops. Under a delayed message availability model, we establish necessary and sufficient conditions for feasibility and fully characterize the optimal first-round communication rates. For the second round, we characterize the optimal user-to-relay rate and derive lower and upper bounds on the relay-to-server rate. While these bounds do not coincide in general, they are tight in certain regimes of interest. Our results reveal a sharp threshold phenomenon: secure aggregation is feasible if and only if the total number of surviving users across surviving relays exceeds the collusion threshold. Achievability is established via a vector linear coding scheme with carefully structured correlated randomness exhibiting MDS-like properties, ensuring correctness and information-theoretic security under all possible dropout patterns. Entropic converse bounds are also derived.

Lin Zhu, Weifeng Zhu, Shuowen Zhang et al.

High-Resolution three-dimensional (3D) radio maps (RMs) provide rich information about the radio landscape that is essential to a myriad of wireless applications in the future wireless networks. Although deep learning (DL) methods have shown their effectiveness in RM construction, existing approaches require massive high-resolution 3D RM samples in the training dataset, the acquisition of which is labor-intensive and time-consuming in practice. In this paper, our goal is to devise a data-friendly high-resolution 3D RM construction solution via training over a hybrid dataset, wherein the RMs associated with a small fraction of environment maps (EMs) are of high-resolution, while those corresponding to the majority of EMs are of low-resolution. To this end, we propose a Data-Friendly 3D Radio Map Estimator (DF-3DRME), which comprises two processing stages. Specifically, in the first stage, we leverage the abundant low-resolution 3D RM samples to train a neural network, termed the LR-Net, for predicting the low-resolution 3D RM from the input EM, which provides a coarse characterization of the spatial radio propagation. In the second stage, we employ an advanced super-resolution network, termed the SR-Net, to upscale the predicted low-resolution 3D RM to its high-resolution counterpart. Unlike the LR-Net, the SR-Net can be effectively trained with only the limited high-resolution 3D RM samples available in the hybrid dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves compelling reconstruction performance with only 4% of the EMs in the dataset having high-resolution 3D RM labels, which significantly reduces data acquisition overhead and facilitates practical deployment.

Hao Yan, Lei Liu, Yuhao Liu et al.

This paper proposes a coding framework for capacity-region-achieving sparse regression (SR) codes over MIMO multiple-access channels (MIMO-MAC), where a single SR code is used for each user at the transmitter. With random semi-unitary dictionary matrices applied for encoding, multiple-access OAMP (MA-OAMP) enables reliable parallel interference cancellation (PIC) at the receiver. Theoretically, an optimal coding principle with the MA-OAMP receiver, which achieves the sum capacity and, in combination with time sharing, achieves the entire capacity region, is established as the guiding principle for designing capacity-region-achieving codes. Accordingly, a coding scheme for capacity-region-achieving SR codes is proposed via proper power allocation over the position-modulated signals.

Xiang Zhang, Zhou Li, Shuangyang Li et al.

Motivated by the increasing demand for data security in decentralized federated learning (FL) and stochastic optimization, we formulate and investigate the problem of information-theoretic \emph{decentralized secure aggregation} (DSA). Specifically, we consider a network of $K$ interconnected users, each holding a private input, representing, for example, local model updates in FL, who aim to simultaneously compute the sum of all inputs while satisfying the security requirement that no user, even when colluding with up to $T$ others, learns anything beyond the intended sum. We characterize the optimal rate region, which specifies the minimum achievable communication and secret key rates for DSA. In particular, we show that to securely compute one bit of the desired input sum, each user must (i) transmit at least one bit to all other users, (ii) hold at least one bit of secret key, and (iii) all users must collectively hold no fewer than $K - 1$ independent key bits. Our result establishes the fundamental performance limits of DSA and offers insights into the design of provably secure and communication-efficient protocols for distributed learning systems.

Xiang Zhang, Han Yu, Zhou Li et al.

Information-theoretic topological secure aggregation (TSA)\cite{zhang2026information_regular} enables distributed users to compute neighborhood sums over arbitrary networks without revealing individual inputs, while remaining communication-efficient. It has broad applications, including secure model aggregation in decentralized federated learning (FL). Existing TSA formulations rely on arbitrarily correlated keys generated by a trusted key server, which introduces a single point of failure. In this paper, we instead study TSA with \tit{pairwise} secret keys, where each user pair $(i,j)$ shares an independent key $S_{i,j}$. Such keys can be established through inter-user communication, eliminating the need for a key server and improving robustness. Focusing on a ring topology with $K$ users, we characterize the minimum per-user communication rate: \tit{to securely compute one bit of the desired input sum, each user must send at least $1$ bit to its neighbors when $K=3,4$, and at least $2$ bits for all $K\ge 5$}. The higher rate in larger networks arises because each user must simultaneously satisfy two independent key-alignment constraints from its two neighborhoods, which cannot be resolved within a single broadcast symbol under pairwise key independence. We propose a linear pairwise-masking scheme that achieves these rates and prove its optimality via tight entropic converse bounds that exploit the dependency structure of the keys. Notably, for all $K\ge 4$, only a subset of the $\binom{K}{2}$ pairwise keys -- specifically, those between users at ring distance $2$ -- is sufficient to achieve optimality, revealing a nontrivial role of topological sparsity in secure aggregation.

Zhou Li, Xiang Zhang, Jiguang He et al.

We study the fundamental limits of multi-server secure aggregation over a two-hop network where multiple servers, each connected to a disjoint subset of users, jointly compute the sum of all users' inputs. The goal is to ensure that no server can infer any information about prescribed subsets of inputs beyond the desired aggregate, even when colluding with an arbitrary subset of users. Existing works largely focus on homogeneous security requirements, where all inputs are protected against colluding sets up to a given size. Such formulations are insufficient to capture more general scenarios in which different subsets of inputs may require protection against different collusion patterns. In this paper, we consider a general model with heterogeneous security requirements and arbitrary user collusion. We characterize the communication rates for all parameter regimes, and determine the minimum key rate required for secure aggregation in most regimes. In particular, we establish tight information-theoretic lower bounds and matching achievable schemes in a broad class of regimes. For the remaining regime, we derive a general lower bound together with an achievable scheme that attains it within a bounded gap. Our results reveal how the interplay between network topology and heterogeneous security constraints fundamentally determines the communication and key generation requirements, and generalize existing results on secure aggregation.

Kagan Akcay, MohammadJavad Salehi, Giuseppe Caire

Coded caching (CC) exploits cumulative cache memory at user devices and coding to transform unicast traffic into multicast transmissions. While information theoretic results show significant gains over uncoded caching for various network topologies, its practical benefits remain unclear. In this work, we investigate CC for on-demand video streaming over large wireless local area networks, where multiple users are served simultaneously by spatially distributed access points. Users asynchronously request video chunks from a content library. We propose a decentralized, asynchronous, and location-independent cache placement scheme combined with an "over IP" delivery mechanism operating at higher network layers, leaving the physical and MAC layers unchanged. For this scheme, we characterize the achievable goodput region, where goodput is defined as the number of video chunks per unit time delivered to users' playback buffers, and formulate the corresponding fairness problem as a convex maximization. We develop a dynamic scheduling algorithm that provably achieves the optimal fairness point under stationary conditions with reduced complexity, and introduce a heuristic to further lower complexity. Numerical results demonstrate significant gains over baseline schemes, including conventional prefix caching, orthogonal sub-channel allocation with spatial reuse, and a CSMA-inspired distributed coordination approach, showing that CC can be implemented as a scalable and compatible over IP solution for existing WLANs.

Fabian Jaensch, Giuseppe Caire, Begüm Demir

Over the last years, several works have explored the application of deep learning algorithms to determine the large-scale signal fading (also referred to as ``path loss'') between transmitter and receiver pairs in urban communication networks. The central idea is to replace costly measurement campaigns, inaccurate statistical models or computationally expensive ray-tracing simulations by machine learning models which, once trained, produce accurate predictions almost instantly. Although the topic has attracted attention from many researchers, there are few open benchmark datasets and codebases that would allow everyone to test and compare the developed methods and algorithms. We take a step towards filling this gap by releasing a publicly available dataset of simulated path loss radio maps together with realistic city maps from real-world locations and aerial images from open datasources. Initial experiments regarding model architectures, input feature design and estimation of radio maps from aerial images are presented and the code is made available.

Xiang Zhang, Zhou Li, Kai Wan et al.

Secure aggregation is motivated by federated learning (FL) where a cloud server aims to compute an averaged model (i.e., weights of deep neural networks) of the locally-trained models of numerous clients, while adhering to data security requirements. Hierarchical secure aggregation (HSA) extends this concept to a three-layer hierarchical network, where clustered users communicate with the server through an intermediate layer of relays. In HSA, beyond conventional server security, relay security is also enforced to ensure that the relays remain oblivious to the users' inputs (an abstraction of the local models in FL). Existing study on HSA assumes that each user is associated with only one relay, limiting opportunities for coding across inter-cluster users to achieve efficient communication and key generation. In this paper, we consider HSA with a cyclic association pattern where each user is connected to $B$ consecutive relays in a wrap-around manner. We propose an efficient aggregation scheme which includes a message design for the inputs inspired by gradient coding-a well-known technique for efficient communication in distributed computing-along with a highly non-trivial security key design. We also derive novel converse bounds on the minimum achievable communication and key rates using information-theoretic arguments.

Jinghan Zhang, Xitao Gong, Qi Wang et al.

Wireless radiance field (WRF) reconstruction aims to learn a continuous, queryable representation of radio frequency characteristics over 3D space and direction, from which specific quantities, such as the spatial power spectrum (SPS) at a receiver given a transmitter position, can be predicted. While Gaussian splatting (GS)-based method has surpassed Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF)-based method for this task, existing adaptations largely transplant vision pipelines, limiting physical interpretability and accuracy. We introduce BiSplat-WRF, a planar GS framework that retains the expressiveness of 3D GS while removing unnecessary projections and incorporating global EM coupling and mutual scattering among primitives. Each primitive is a 2D planar Gaussian with 3D coordinates, rendered directly on the angular domain of the SPS. A bilinear spatial transformer (BST) aggregates inter-primitive relations on an angular grid and, via attention, captures long-range electromagnetic dependencies, thereby enforcing globally aware EM interactions that reflect the complex physics of the wireless environment. On spatial spectrum synthesis task, BiSplat-WRF surpasses NeRF-based and prior GS-based baselines with respect to the Structural Similarity Index (SSIM); comprehensive ablation studies validate the contribution of BST. We also provide a larger BiSplat-WRF+ variant that further increases SSIM at a higher computation cost, serving as a strong reference for future studies.

Zhou Li, Xiang Zhang, Jiawen Lv et al.

Motivated by federated learning (FL), secure aggregation (SA) aims to securely compute, as efficiently as possible, the sum of a set of inputs distributed across many users. To understand the impact of network topology, hierarchical secure aggregation (HSA) investigated the communication and secret key generation efficiency in a 3-layer relay network, where clusters of users are connected to the aggregation server through an intermediate layer of relays. Due to the pre-aggregation of the messages at the relays, HSA reduces the communication burden on the relay-to-server links and is able to support a large number of users. However, as the number of users increases, a practical challenge arises from heterogeneous security requirements--for example, users in different clusters may require varying levels of input protection. Motivated by this, we study weakly-secure HSA (WS-HSA) with collusion resilience, where instead of protecting all the inputs from any set of colluding users, only the inputs belonging to a predefined collection of user groups (referred to as security input sets) need to be protected against another predefined collection of user groups (referred to as collusion sets). Since the security input sets and collusion sets can be arbitrarily defined, our formulation offers a flexible framework for addressing heterogeneous security requirements in HSA. We characterize the optimal total key rate, i.e., the total number of independent key symbols required to ensure both server and relay security, for a broad range of parameter configurations. For the remaining cases, we establish lower and upper bounds on the optimal key rate, providing constant-factor gap optimality guarantees.

Xiang Zhang, Zhou Li, Shuangyang Li et al.

In decentralized federated learning (FL), multiple clients collaboratively learn a shared machine learning (ML) model by leveraging their privately held datasets distributed across the network, through interactive exchange of the intermediate model updates. To ensure data security, cryptographic techniques are commonly employed to protect model updates during aggregation. Despite growing interest in secure aggregation, existing works predominantly focus on protocol design and computational guarantees, with limited understanding of the fundamental information-theoretic limits of such systems. Moreover, optimal bounds on communication and key usage remain unknown in decentralized settings, where no central aggregator is available. Motivated by these gaps, we study the problem of decentralized secure aggregation (DSA) from an information-theoretic perspective. Specifically, we consider a network of $K$ fully-connected users, each holding a private input -- an abstraction of local training data -- who aim to securely compute the sum of all inputs. The security constraint requires that no user learns anything beyond the input sum, even when colluding with up to $T$ other users. We characterize the optimal rate region, which specifies the minimum achievable communication and secret key rates for DSA. In particular, we show that to securely compute one symbol of the desired input sum, each user must (i) transmit at least one symbol to others, (ii) hold at least one symbol of secret key, and (iii) all users must collectively hold no fewer than $K - 1$ independent key symbols. Our results establish the fundamental performance limits of DSA, providing insights for the design of provably secure and communication-efficient protocols in distributed learning systems.

Xiang Zhang, Giuseppe Caire, Mingyue Ji

The packet type (PT)-based framework~\cite{zhang2026taming} provides a systematic and principled approach to designing device-to-device (D2D) coded caching schemes that achieve reduced \sbp while preserving the optimal communication rate. However, existing PT designs rely exclusively on homogeneous \sbp, where all packets have an identical size regardless of their types. This restriction limits the achievable \sbp reduction in certain parameter regimes. In this paper, we extend the PT framework to \emph{heterogeneous} \sbp, allowing packet sizes to vary across types under a refined type classification. The packet sizes, in conjunction with user grouping and multicast transmitter selection, are jointly optimized to minimize the overall \sbp level while preserving the optimal rate. Based on the heterogeneous PT framework, we construct a new class of D2D coded caching schemes for $(K, KM/N)=(2q+1, 2r)$ with $q,r \in \mathbb{N}_+$, where $K,N$ and $M$ denote the number of users, files and cache memory size, respectively. The proposed construction achieves a constant-factor reduction in \sbp compared to the Ji-Caire-Molisch (JCM) caching scheme~\cite{ji2016fundamental} and complements existing PT designs that are not applicable in this parameter regime.

Francesco Pezone, Sergio Barbarossa, Giuseppe Caire

This work introduces Semantically Masked Vector Quantized Generative Adversarial Network (SQ-GAN), a novel approach integrating semantically driven image coding and vector quantization to optimize image compression for semantic/task-oriented communications. The method only acts on source coding and is fully compliant with legacy systems. The semantics is extracted from the image computing its semantic segmentation map using off-the-shelf software. A new specifically developed semantic-conditioned adaptive mask module (SAMM) selectively encodes semantically relevant features of the image. The relevance of the different semantic classes is task-specific, and it is incorporated in the training phase by introducing appropriate weights in the loss function. SQ-GAN outperforms state-of-the-art image compression schemes such as JPEG2000, BPG, and deep-learning based methods across multiple metrics, including perceptual quality and semantic segmentation accuracy on the reconstructed image, at extremely low compression rates.

Tayyebeh Jahani-Nezhad, Parsa Moradi, Mohammad Ali Maddah-Ali et al.

Evaluating datasets in data marketplaces, where the buyer aim to purchase valuable data, is a critical challenge. In this paper, we introduce an innovative task-agnostic data valuation method called PriArTa which is an approach for computing the distance between the distribution of the buyer's existing dataset and the seller's dataset, allowing the buyer to determine how effectively the new data can enhance its dataset. PriArTa is communication-efficient, enabling the buyer to evaluate datasets without needing access to the entire dataset from each seller. Instead, the buyer requests that sellers perform specific preprocessing on their data and then send back the results. Using this information and a scoring metric, the buyer can evaluate the dataset. The preprocessing is designed to allow the buyer to compute the score while preserving the privacy of each seller's dataset, mitigating the risk of information leakage before the purchase. A key feature of PriArTa is its robustness to common data transformations, ensuring consistent value assessment and reducing the risk of purchasing redundant data. The effectiveness of PriArTa is demonstrated through experiments on real-world image datasets, showing its ability to perform privacy-preserving, augmentation-robust data valuation in data marketplaces.

Tayyebeh Jahani-Nezhad, Mohammad Ali Maddah-Ali, Songze Li et al.

We propose SwiftAgg, a novel secure aggregation protocol for federated learning systems, where a central server aggregates local models of $N$ distributed users, each of size $L$, trained on their local data, in a privacy-preserving manner. Compared with state-of-the-art secure aggregation protocols, SwiftAgg significantly reduces the communication overheads without any compromise on security. Specifically, in presence of at most $D$ dropout users, SwiftAgg achieves a users-to-server communication load of $(T+1)L$ and a users-to-users communication load of up to $(N-1)(T+D+1)L$, with a worst-case information-theoretic security guarantee, against any subset of up to $T$ semi-honest users who may also collude with the curious server. The key idea of SwiftAgg is to partition the users into groups of size $D+T+1$, then in the first phase, secret sharing and aggregation of the individual models are performed within each group, and then in the second phase, model aggregation is performed on $D+T+1$ sequences of users across the groups. If a user in a sequence drops out in the second phase, the rest of the sequence remain silent. This design allows only a subset of users to communicate with each other, and only the users in a single group to directly communicate with the server, eliminating the requirements of 1) all-to-all communication network across users; and 2) all users communicating with the server, for other secure aggregation protocols. This helps to substantially slash the communication costs of the system.

Çağkan Yapar, Ron Levie, Gitta Kutyniok et al.

This paper deals with the problem of localization in a cellular network in a dense urban scenario. Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) typically perform poorly in urban environments, where the likelihood of line-of-sight conditions is low, and thus alternative localization methods are required for good accuracy. We present LocUNet: A deep learning method for localization, based merely on Received Signal Strength (RSS) from Base Stations (BSs), which does not require any increase in computation complexity at the user devices with respect to the device standard operations, unlike methods that rely on time of arrival or angle of arrival information. In the proposed method, the user to be localized reports the RSS from BSs to a Central Processing Unit (CPU), which may be located in the cloud. Alternatively, the localization can be performed locally at the user. Using estimated pathloss radio maps of the BSs, LocUNet can localize users with state-of-the-art accuracy and enjoys high robustness to inaccuracies in the radio maps. The proposed method does not require pre-sampling of the environment; and is suitable for real-time applications, thanks to the RadioUNet, a neural network-based radio map estimator. We also introduce two datasets that allow numerical comparisons of RSS and Time of Arrival (ToA) methods in realistic urban environments.

Meysam Goodarzi, Vladica Sark, Nebojsa Maletic et al.

In this work, we propose a Deep neural network-assisted Particle Filter-based (DePF) approach to address the Mobile User (MU) joint synchronization and localization (sync\&loc) problem in ultra dense networks. In particular, DePF deploys an asymmetric time-stamp exchange mechanism between the MUs and the Access Points (APs), which, traditionally, provides us with information about the MUs' clock offset and skew. However, information about the distance between an AP and an MU is also intrinsic to the propagation delay experienced by exchanged time-stamps. In addition, to estimate the angle of arrival of the received synchronization packet, DePF draws on the multiple signal classification algorithm that is fed by Channel Impulse Response (CIR) experienced by the sync packets. The CIR is also leveraged on to determine the link condition, i.e. Line-of-Sight (LoS) or Non-LoS. Finally, to perform joint sync\&loc, DePF capitalizes on particle Gaussian mixtures that allow for a hybrid particle-based and parametric Bayesian Recursive Filtering (BRF) fusion of the aforementioned pieces of information and thus jointly estimate the position and clock parameters of the MUs. The simulation results verifies the superiority of the proposed algorithm over the state-of-the-art schemes, especially that of Extended Kalman filter- and linearized BRF-based joint sync\&loc. In particular, only drawing on the synchronization time-stamp exchange and CIRs, for 90$\%$of the cases, the absolute position and clock offset estimation error remain below 1 meter and 2 nanoseconds, respectively.

Çağkan Yapar, Ron Levie, Gitta Kutyniok et al.

Global Navigation Satellite Systems typically perform poorly in urban environments, where the likelihood of line-of-sight conditions between devices and satellites is low. Therefore, alternative location methods are required to achieve good accuracy. We present LocUNet: A convolutional, end-to-end trained neural network (NN) for the localization task, which is able to estimate the position of a user from the received signal strength (RSS) of a small number of Base Stations (BS). Using estimations of pathloss radio maps of the BSs and the RSS measurements of the users to be localized, LocUNet can localize users with state-of-the-art accuracy and enjoys high robustness to inaccuracies in the estimations of radio maps. The proposed method does not require generating RSS fingerprints of each specific area where the localization task is performed and is suitable for real-time applications. Moreover, two novel datasets that allow for numerical evaluations of RSS and ToA methods in realistic urban environments are presented and made publicly available for the research community. By using these datasets, we also provide a fair comparison of state-of-the-art RSS and ToA-based methods in the dense urban scenario and show numerically that LocUNet outperforms all the compared methods.

Xiang Zhang, Kai Wan, Hua Sun et al.

In the problem of cache-aided multiuser private information retrieval (MuPIR), a set of $K_{\rm u}$ cache-equipped users wish to privately download a set of messages from $N$ distributed databases each holding a library of $K$ messages. The system works in two phases: {\it cache placement (prefetching) phase} in which the users fill up their cache memory, and {\it private delivery phase} in which the users' demands are revealed and they download an answer from each database so that the their desired messages can be recovered while each individual database learns nothing about the identities of the requested messages. The goal is to design the placement and the private delivery phases such that the \emph{load}, which is defined as the total number of downloaded bits normalized by the message size, is minimized given any user memory size. This paper considers the MuPIR problem with two messages, arbitrary number of users and databases where uncoded prefetching is assumed, i.e., the users directly copy some bits from the library as their cached contents. We propose a novel MuPIR scheme inspired by the Maddah-Ali and Niesen (MAN) coded caching scheme. The proposed scheme achieves lower load than any existing schemes, especially the product design (PD), and is shown to be optimal within a factor of $8$ in general and exactly optimal at very high or low memory regime.

Samim Ahmadi, Jan Christian Hauffen, Linh Kästner et al.

Block-sparse regularization is already well-known in active thermal imaging and is used for multiple measurement based inverse problems. The main bottleneck of this method is the choice of regularization parameters which differs for each experiment. To avoid time-consuming manually selected regularization parameter, we propose a learned block-sparse optimization approach using an iterative algorithm unfolded into a deep neural network. More precisely, we show the benefits of using a learned block iterative shrinkage thresholding algorithm that is able to learn the choice of regularization parameters. In addition, this algorithm enables the determination of a suitable weight matrix to solve the underlying inverse problem. Therefore, in this paper we present the algorithm and compare it with state of the art block iterative shrinkage thresholding using synthetically generated test data and experimental test data from active thermography for defect reconstruction. Our results show that the use of the learned block-sparse optimization approach provides smaller normalized mean square errors for a small fixed number of iterations than without learning. Thus, this new approach allows to improve the convergence speed and only needs a few iterations to generate accurate defect reconstruction in photothermal super resolution imaging.

Osman Musa, Peter Jung, Giuseppe Caire

Deep unfolding showed to be a very successful approach for accelerating and tuning classical signal processing algorithms. In this paper, we propose learned Gaussian-mixture AMP (L-GM-AMP) - a plug-and-play compressed sensing (CS) recovery algorithm suitable for any i.i.d. source prior. Our algorithm builds upon Borgerding's learned AMP (LAMP), yet significantly improves it by adopting a universal denoising function within the algorithm. The robust and flexible denoiser is a byproduct of modelling source prior with a Gaussian-mixture (GM), which can well approximate continuous, discrete, as well as mixture distributions. Its parameters are learned using standard backpropagation algorithm. To demonstrate robustness of the proposed algorithm, we conduct Monte-Carlo (MC) simulations for both mixture and discrete distributions. Numerical evaluation shows that the L-GM-AMP algorithm achieves state-of-the-art performance without any knowledge of the source prior.

Linh Kästner, Samim Ahmadi, Florian Jonietz et al.

Spot welding is a crucial process step in various industries. However, classification of spot welding quality is still a tedious process due to the complexity and sensitivity of the test material, which drain conventional approaches to its limits. In this paper, we propose an approach for quality inspection of spot weldings using images from laser thermography data.We propose data preparation approaches based on the underlying physics of spot welded joints, heated with pulsed laser thermography by analyzing the intensity over time and derive dedicated data filters to generate training datasets. Subsequently, we utilize convolutional neural networks to classify weld quality and compare the performance of different models against each other. We achieve competitive results in terms of classifying the different welding quality classes compared to traditional approaches, reaching an accuracy of more than 95 percent. Finally, we explore the effect of different augmentation methods.

Xiang Zhang, Kai Wan, Hua Sun et al.

We consider the problem of cache-aided Multiuser Private Information Retrieval (MuPIR) which is an extension of the single-user cache-aided PIR problem to the case of multiple users. In MuPIR, each of the $K_{\rm u}$ cache-equipped users wishes to privately retrieve a message out of $K$ messages from $N$ databases each having access to the entire message library. The privacy constraint requires that any individual database learns nothing about the demands of all users. The users are connected to each database via an error-free shared-link. In this paper, we aim to characterize the optimal trade-off between users' memory and communication load for such systems. Based on the proposed novel approach of \emph{cache-aided interference alignment (CIA)}, first, for the MuPIR problem with $K=2$ messages, $K_{\rm u}=2$ users and $N\ge 2$ databases, we propose achievable retrieval schemes for both uncoded and general cache placement. The CIA approach is optimal when the cache placement is uncoded. For general cache placement, the CIA approach is optimal when $N=2$ and $3$ verified by the computer-aided approach. Second, when $K,K_{\rm u}$ and $N$ are general, we propose a new \emph{product design} (PD) which incorporates the PIR code into the linear caching code. The product design is shown to be order optimal within a multiplicative factor of 8 and is exactly optimal when the user cache memory size is large.

Çağkan Yapar, Ron Levie, Gitta Kutyniok et al.

This paper deals with the problem of localization in a cellular network in a dense urban scenario. Global Navigation Satellite System typically performs poorly in urban environments when there is no line-of-sight between the devices and the satellites, and thus alternative localization methods are often required. We present a simple yet effective method for localization based on pathloss. In our approach, the user to be localized reports the received signal strength from a set of base stations with known locations. For each base station we have a good approximation of the pathloss at each location in the map, provided by RadioUNet, an efficient deep learning-based simulator of pathloss functions in urban environment, akin to ray-tracing. Using the approximations of the pathloss functions of all base stations and the reported signal strengths, we are able to extract a very accurate approximation of the location of the user.

Ron Levie, Çağkan Yapar, Gitta Kutyniok et al.

In this paper we propose a highly efficient and very accurate deep learning method for estimating the propagation pathloss from a point $x$ (transmitter location) to any point $y$ on a planar domain. For applications such as user-cell site association and device-to-device link scheduling, an accurate knowledge of the pathloss function for all pairs of transmitter-receiver locations is very important. Commonly used statistical models approximate the pathloss as a decaying function of the distance between transmitter and receiver. However, in realistic propagation environments characterized by the presence of buildings, street canyons, and objects at different heights, such radial-symmetric functions yield very misleading results. In this paper we show that properly designed and trained deep neural networks are able to learn how to estimate the pathloss function, given an urban environment, in a very accurate and computationally efficient manner. Our proposed method, termed RadioUNet, learns from a physical simulation dataset, and generates pathloss estimations that are very close to the simulations, but are much faster to compute for real-time applications. Moreover, we propose methods for transferring what was learned from simulations to real-life. Numerical results show that our method significantly outperforms previously proposed methods.

Yi Song, Mahdi Barzegar Khalilsarai, Saeid Haghighatshoar et al.

In the spatial channel models used in multi-antenna wireless communications, the propagation from a single-antenna transmitter (e.g., a user) to an M-antenna receiver (e.g., a Base Station) occurs through scattering clusters located in the far field of the receiving antenna array. The Angular Spread Function (ASF) of the corresponding M-dim channel vector describes the angular density of the received signal power at the array. The modern literature on massive MIMO has recognized that the knowledge of covariance matrix of user channel vectors is very useful for various applications such as hybrid digital analog beamforming, pilot decontamination, etc. Therefore, most literature has focused on the estimation of such channel covariance matrices. However, in some applications such as uplink-downlink covariance transformation (for FDD massive MIMO precoding) and channel sounding some form of ASF estimation is required either implicitly or explicitly. It turns out that while covariance estimation is well-known and well-conditioned, the ASF estimation is a much harder problem and is in general ill-posed. In this paper, we show that under additional geometrically-consistent group-sparsity structure on the ASF, which is prevalent in almost all wireless propagation scenarios, one is able to estimate ASF properly. We propose sparse dictionary-based algorithms that promote this group-sparsity structure via suitable regularizations. Since generally it is difficult to capture the notion of group-sparsity through proper regularization, we propose another algorithm based on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) that learns this structure. We provide numerical simulations to assess the performance of our proposed algorithms. We also compare the results with that of other methods in the literature, where we re-frame those methods in the context of ASF estimation in massive MIMO.

Saeid Haghighatshoar, Giuseppe Caire

We study a Compressed Sensing (CS) problem known as Multiple Measurement Vectors (MMV) problem, which arises in joint estimation of multiple signal realizations when the signal samples have a common (joint) sparse support over a fixed known dictionary. Although there is a vast literature on the analysis of MMV, it is not yet fully known how the number of signal samples and their statistical correlations affects the performance of the joint estimation in MMV. Moreover, in many instances of MMV the underlying sparsifying dictionary may not be precisely known, and it is still an open problem to quantify how the dictionary mismatch may affect the estimation performance. In this paper, we focus on $\ell_{2,1}$-norm regularized least squares ($\ell_{2,1}$-LS) as a well-known and widely-used MMV algorithm in the literature. We prove an interesting decoupling property for $\ell_{2,1}$-LS, where we show that it can be decomposed into two phases: i) use all the signal samples to estimate the signal covariance matrix (coupled phase), ii) plug in the resulting covariance estimate as the true covariance matrix into the Minimum Mean Squared Error (MMSE) estimator to reconstruct each signal sample individually (decoupled phase). As a consequence of this decomposition, we are able to provide further insights on the performance of $\ell_{2,1}$-LS for MMV. In particular, we address how the signal correlations and dictionary mismatch affects its performance. Moreover, we show that by using the decoupling property one can obtain a variety of MMV algorithms with performances even better than that of $\ell_{2,1}$-LS. We also provide numerical simulations to validate our theoretical results.

Onur Günlü, Kittipong Kittichokechai, Rafael F. Schaefer et al.

The problem of secret-key based authentication under a privacy constraint on the source sequence is considered. The identifier measurements during authentication are assumed to be controllable via a cost-constrained "action" sequence. Single-letter characterizations of the optimal trade-off among the secret-key rate, storage rate, privacy-leakage rate, and action cost are given for the four problems where noisy or noiseless measurements of the source are enrolled to generate or embed secret keys. The results are relevant for several user-authentication scenarios including physical and biometric authentications with multiple measurements. Our results include, as special cases, new results for secret-key generation and embedding with action-dependent side information without any privacy constraint on the enrolled source sequence.

Saeid Haghighatshoar, Mahdi Barzegar Khalilsarai, Giuseppe Caire

In this paper, we study the problem of multi-band (frequency-variant) covariance interpolation with a particular emphasis towards massive MIMO applications. In a massive MIMO system, the communication between each BS with $M \gg 1$ antennas and each single-antenna user occurs through a collection of scatterers in the environment, where the channel vector of each user at BS antennas consists in a weighted linear combination of the array responses of the scatterers, where each scatterer has its own angle of arrival (AoA) and complex channel gain. The array response at a given AoA depends on the wavelength of the incoming planar wave and is naturally frequency dependent. This results in a frequency-dependent distortion where the second order statistics, i.e., the covariance matrix, of the channel vectors varies with frequency. In this paper, we show that although this effect is generally negligible for a small number of antennas $M$, it results in a considerable distortion of the covariance matrix and especially its dominant signal subspace in the massive MIMO regime where $M \to \infty$, and can generally incur a serious degradation of the performance especially in frequency division duplexing (FDD) massive MIMO systems where the uplink (UL) and the downlink (DL) communication occur over different frequency bands. We propose a novel UL-DL covariance interpolation technique that is able to recover the covariance matrix in the DL from an estimate of the covariance matrix in the UL under a mild reciprocity condition on the angular power spread function (PSF) of the users. We analyze the performance of our proposed scheme mathematically and prove its robustness under a sufficiently large spatial oversampling of the array. We also propose several simple off-the-shelf algorithms for UL-DL covariance interpolation and evaluate their performance via numerical simulations.

Mahdi Barzegar Khalilsarai, Saeid Haghighatshoar, Giuseppe Caire et al.

In this paper, we study the prediction of a circularly symmetric zero-mean stationary Gaussian process from a window of observations consisting of finitely many samples. This is a prevalent problem in a wide range of applications in communication theory and signal processing. Due to stationarity, when the autocorrelation function or equivalently the power spectral density (PSD) of the process is available, the Minimum Mean Squared Error (MMSE) predictor is readily obtained. In particular, it is given by a linear operator that depends on autocorrelation of the process as well as the noise power in the observed samples. The prediction becomes, however, quite challenging when the PSD of the process is unknown. In this paper, we propose a blind predictor that does not require the a priori knowledge of the PSD of the process and compare its performance with that of an MMSE predictor that has a full knowledge of the PSD. To design such a blind predictor, we use the random spectral representation of a stationary Gaussian process. We apply the well-known atomic-norm minimization technique to the observed samples to obtain a discrete quantization of the underlying random spectrum, which we use to predict the process. Our simulation results show that this estimator has a good performance comparable with that of the MMSE estimator.

Saeid Haghighatshoar, Giuseppe Caire

In this paper, we study the recovery of a signal from a set of noisy linear projections (measurements), when such projections are unlabeled, that is, the correspondence between the measurements and the set of projection vectors (i.e., the rows of the measurement matrix) is not known a priori. We consider a special case of unlabeled sensing referred to as Unlabeled Ordered Sampling (UOS) where the ordering of the measurements is preserved. We identify a natural duality between this problem and classical Compressed Sensing (CS), where we show that the unknown support (location of nonzero elements) of a sparse signal in CS corresponds to the unknown indices of the measurements in UOS. While in CS it is possible to recover a sparse signal from an under-determined set of linear equations (less equations than the signal dimension), successful recovery in UOS requires taking more samples than the dimension of the signal. Motivated by this duality, we develop a Restricted Isometry Property (RIP) similar to that in CS. We also design a low-complexity Alternating Minimization algorithm that achieves a stable signal recovery under the established RIP. We analyze our proposed algorithm for different signal dimensions and number of measurements theoretically and investigate its performance empirically via simulations. The results are reminiscent of phase-transition similar to that occurring in CS.

Saeid Haghighatshoar, Giuseppe Caire

Massive MIMO is a variant of multiuser MIMO where the number of base-station antennas $M$ is very large (typically 100), and generally much larger than the number of spatially multiplexed data streams (typically 10). Unfortunately, the front-end A/D conversion necessary to drive hundreds of antennas, with a signal bandwidth of the order of 10 to 100 MHz, requires very large sampling bit-rate and power consumption. In order to reduce such implementation requirements, Hybrid Digital-Analog architectures have been proposed. In particular, our work in this paper is motivated by one of such schemes named Joint Spatial Division and Multiplexing (JSDM), where the downlink precoder (resp., uplink linear receiver) is split into the product of a baseband linear projection (digital) and an RF reconfigurable beamforming network (analog), such that only a reduced number $m \ll M$ of A/D converters and RF modulation/demodulation chains is needed. In JSDM, users are grouped according to the similarity of their channel dominant subspaces, and these groups are separated by the analog beamforming stage, where the multiplexing gain in each group is achieved using the digital precoder. Therefore, it is apparent that extracting the channel subspace information of the $M$-dim channel vectors from snapshots of $m$-dim projections, with $m \ll M$, plays a fundamental role in JSDM implementation. In this paper, we develop novel efficient algorithms that require sampling only $m = O(2\sqrt{M})$ specific array elements according to a coprime sampling scheme, and for a given $p \ll M$, return a $p$-dim beamformer that has a performance comparable with the best p-dim beamformer that can be designed from the full knowledge of the exact channel covariance matrix. We assess the performance of our proposed estimators both analytically and empirically via numerical simulations.

Kittipong Kittichokechai, Giuseppe Caire

We consider the problem of identification and authentication based on secret key generation from some user-generated source data (e.g., a biometric source). The goal is to reliably identify users pre-enrolled in a database as well as authenticate them based on the estimated secret key while preserving the privacy of the enrolled data and of the generated keys. We characterize the optimal tradeoff between the identification rate, the compression rate of the users' source data, information leakage rate, and secret key rate. In particular, we provide a coding strategy based on layered random binning which is shown to be optimal. In addition, we study a related secure identification/authentication problem where an adversary tries to deceive the system using its own data. Here the optimal tradeoff between the identification rate, compression rate, leakage rate, and exponent of the maximum false acceptance probability is provided. The results reveal a close connection between the optimal secret key rate and the false acceptance exponent of the identification/authentication system.

Kittipong Kittichokechai, Giuseppe Caire

We consider problems of authentication using secret key generation under a privacy constraint on the enrolled source data. An adversary who has access to the stored description and correlated side information tries to deceive the authentication as well as learn about the source. We characterize the optimal tradeoff between the compression rate of the stored description, the leakage rate of the source data, and the exponent of the adversary's maximum false acceptance probability. The related problem of secret key generation with a privacy constraint is also studied where the optimal tradeoff between the compression rate, leakage rate, and secret key rate is characterized. It reveals a connection between the optimal secret key rate and security of the authentication system.

Konstantin Miller, Dilip Bethanabhotla, Giuseppe Caire et al.

Recently, the way people consume video content has been undergoing a dramatic change. Plain TV sets, that have been the center of home entertainment for a long time, are losing grounds to Hybrid TV's, PC's, game consoles, and, more recently, mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones. The new predominant paradigm is: watch what I want, when I want, and where I want. The challenges of this shift are manifold. On the one hand, broadcast technologies such as DVB-T/C/S need to be extended or replaced by mechanisms supporting asynchronous viewing, such as IPTV and video streaming over best-effort networks, while remaining scalable to millions of users. On the other hand, the dramatic increase of wireless data traffic begins to stretch the capabilities of the existing wireless infrastructure to its limits. Finally, there is a challenge to video streaming technologies to cope with a high heterogeneity of end-user devices and dynamically changing network conditions, in particular in wireless and mobile networks. In the present work, our goal is to design an efficient system that supports a high number of unicast streaming sessions in a dense wireless access network. We address this goal by jointly considering the two problems of wireless transmission scheduling and video quality adaptation, using techniques inspired by the robustness and simplicity of Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controllers. We show that the control-theoretic approach allows to efficiently utilize available wireless resources, providing high Quality of Experience (QoE) to a large number of users.

Dilip Bethanabhotla, Giuseppe Caire, Michael J. Neely

We consider extensions and improvements on our previous work on dynamic adaptive video streaming in a multi-cell multiuser ``small cell'' wireless network. Previously, we treated the case of single-antenna base stations and, starting from a network utility maximization (NUM) formulation, we devised a ``push'' scheduling policy, where users place requests to sequential video chunks to possibly different base stations with adaptive video quality, and base stations schedule their downlink transmissions in order to stabilize their transmission queues. In this paper we consider a ``pull'' strategy, where every user maintains a request queue, such that users keep track of the video chunks that are effectively delivered. The pull scheme allows to download the chunks in the playback order without skipping or missing them. In addition, motivated by the recent/forthcoming progress in small cell networks (e.g., in wave-2 of the recent IEEE 802.11ac standard), we extend our dynamic streaming approach to the case of base stations capable of multiuser MIMO downlink, i.e., serving multiple users on the same time-frequency slot by spatial multiplexing. By exploiting the ``channel hardening'' effect of high dimensional MIMO channels, we devise a low complexity user selection scheme to solve the underlying max-weighted rate scheduling, which can be easily implemented and runs independently at each base station. Through simulations, we show MIMO gains in terms of video streaming QoE metrics like the pre-buffering and re-buffering times.