Feng Shu

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.

Kang Wei, Jun Li, Chuan Ma et al.

Federated learning (FL) enables distributed clients to collaboratively train a machine learning model without sharing raw data with each other. However, it suffers the leakage of private information from uploading models. In addition, as the model size grows, the training latency increases due to limited transmission bandwidth and the model performance degrades while using differential privacy (DP) protection. In this paper, we propose a gradient sparsification empowered FL framework over wireless channels, in order to improve training efficiency without sacrificing convergence performance. Specifically, we first design a random sparsification algorithm to retain a fraction of the gradient elements in each client's local training, thereby mitigating the performance degradation induced by DP and and reducing the number of transmission parameters over wireless channels. Then, we analyze the convergence bound of the proposed algorithm, by modeling a non-convex FL problem. Next, we formulate a time-sequential stochastic optimization problem for minimizing the developed convergence bound, under the constraints of transmit power, the average transmitting delay, as well as the client's DP requirement. Utilizing the Lyapunov drift-plus-penalty framework, we develop an analytical solution to the optimization problem. Extensive experiments have been implemented on three real life datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm. We show that our proposed algorithms can fully exploit the interworking between communication and computation to outperform the baselines, i.e., random scheduling, round robin and delay-minimization algorithms.

Shunfeng Chu, Jun Li, Kang Wei et al.

Hierarchical Federated Learning (HFL) is a distributed machine learning paradigm tailored for multi-tiered computation architectures, which supports massive access of devices' models simultaneously. To enable efficient HFL, it is crucial to design suitable incentive mechanisms to ensure that devices actively participate in local training. However, there are few studies on incentive mechanism design for HFL. In this paper, we design two-level incentive mechanisms for the HFL with a two-tiered computing structure to encourage the participation of entities in each tier in the HFL training. In the lower-level game, we propose a coalition formation game to joint optimize the edge association and bandwidth allocation problem, and obtain efficient coalition partitions by the proposed preference rule, which can be proven to be stable by exact potential game. In the upper-level game, we design the Stackelberg game algorithm, which not only determines the optimal number of edge aggregations for edge servers to maximize their utility, but also optimize the unit reward provided for the edge aggregation performance to ensure the interests of cloud servers. Furthermore, numerical results indicate that the proposed algorithms can achieve better performance than the benchmark schemes.

Ke Yang, Rongen Dong, Wei Gao et al.

Active intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a revolutionary technique for the future 6G networks. The conventional far-field single-IRS-aided directional modulation(DM) networks have only one (no direct path) or two (existing direct path) degrees of freedom (DoFs). This means that there are only one or two streams transmitted simultaneously from base station to user and will seriously limit its rate gain achieved by IRS. How to create multiple DoFs more than two for DM? In this paper, single large-scale IRS is divided to multiple small IRSs and a novel multi-IRS-aided multi-stream DM network is proposed to achieve a point-to-point multi-stream transmission by creating $K$ ($\geq3$) DoFs, where multiple small IRSs are placed distributively via multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The null-space projection, zero-forcing (ZF) and phase alignment are adopted to design the transmit beamforming vector, receive beamforming vector and phase shift matrix (PSM), respectively, called NSP-ZF-PA. Here, $K$ PSMs and their corresponding beamforming vectors are independently optimized. The weighted minimum mean-square error (WMMSE) algorithm is involved in alternating iteration for the optimization variables by introducing the power constraint on IRS, named WMMSE-PC, where the majorization-minimization (MM) algorithm is used to solve the total PSM. To achieve a lower computational complexity, a maximum trace method, called Max-TR-SVD, is proposed by optimize the PSM of all IRSs. Numerical simulation results has shown that the proposed NSP-ZF-PA performs much better than Max-TR-SVD in terms of rate. In particular, the rate of NSP-ZF-PA with sixteen small IRSs is about five times that of NSP-ZF-PA with combining all small IRSs as a single large IRS. Thus, a dramatic rate enhancement may be achieved by multiple distributed IRSs.

Jiatong Bai, Minghao Chen, Wankai Tang et al.

Most existing DOA estimation methods assume ideal source incident angles with minimal noise. Moreover, directly using pre-estimated angles to calculate weighted coefficients can lead to performance loss. Thus, a green multi-modal (MM) fusion DOA framework is proposed to realize a more practical, low-cost and high time-efficiency DOA estimation for a H$^2$AD array. Firstly, two more efficient clustering methods, global maximum cos\_similarity clustering (GMaxCS) and global minimum distance clustering (GMinD), are presented to infer more precise true solutions from the candidate solution sets. Based on this, an iteration weighted fusion (IWF)-based method is introduced to iteratively update weighted fusion coefficients and the clustering center of the true solution classes by using the estimated values. Particularly, the coarse DOA calculated by fully digital (FD) subarray, serves as the initial cluster center. The above process yields two methods called MM-IWF-GMaxCS and MM-IWF-GMinD. To further provide a higher-accuracy DOA estimation, a fusion network (fusionNet) is proposed to aggregate the inferred two-part true angles and thus generates two effective approaches called MM-fusionNet-GMaxCS and MM-fusionNet-GMinD. The simulation outcomes show the proposed four approaches can achieve the ideal DOA performance and the CRLB. Meanwhile, proposed MM-fusionNet-GMaxCS and MM-fusionNet-GMinD exhibit superior DOA performance compared to MM-IWF-GMaxCS and MM-IWF-GMinD, especially in extremely-low SNR range.

Jiatong Bai, Feng Shu, Qinghe Zheng et al.

Due to its excellent performance in rate and resolution, fully-digital (FD) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna arrays has been widely applied in data transmission and direction of arrival (DOA) measurements, etc. But it confronts with two main challenges: high computational complexity and circuit cost. The two problems may be addressed well by hybrid analog-digital (HAD) structure. But there exists the problem of phase ambiguity for HAD, which leads to its low-efficiency or high-latency. Does exist there such a MIMO structure of owning low-cost, low-complexity and high time efficiency at the same time. To satisfy the three properties, a novel heterogeneous hybrid MIMO receiver structure of integrating FD and heterogeneous HAD ($\rm{H}^2$AD-FD) is proposed and corresponding multi-modal (MD)-learning framework is developed. The framework includes three major stages: 1) generate the candidate sets via root multiple signal classification (Root-MUSIC) or deep learning (DL); 2) infer the class of true solutions from candidate sets using machine learning (ML) methods; 3) fuse the two-part true solutions to achieve a better DOA estimation. The above process form two methods named MD-Root-MUSIC and MDDL. To improve DOA estimation accuracy and reduce the clustering complexity, a co-learning-aided MD framework is proposed to form two enhanced methods named CoMDDL and CoMD-RootMUSIC. Moreover, the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) for the proposed $\rm{H}^2$AD-FD structure is also derived. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed four methods could approach the CRLB for signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) > 0 dB and the proposed CoMDDL and MDDL perform better than CoMD-RootMUSIC and MD-RootMUSIC, particularly in the extremely low SNR region.

Bingyan Xie, Yongpeng Wu, Feng Shu et al.

This paper focuses on a typical uplink transmission scenario over multiple-input multiple-output multiple access channel (MIMO-MAC) and thus propose a multi-user learnable CSI fusion semantic communication (MU-LCFSC) framework. It incorporates CSI as the side information into both the semantic encoders and decoders to generate a proper feature mask map in order to produce a more robust attention weight distribution. Especially for the decoding end, a cooperative successive interference cancellation procedure is conducted along with a cooperative mask ratio generator, which flexibly controls the mask elements of feature mask maps. Numerical results verify the superiority of proposed MU-LCFSC compared to DeepJSCC-NOMA over 3 dB in terms of PSNR.

Bin Deng, Jiatong Bai, Feilong Zhao et al.

As a green MIMO structure, the heterogeneous hybrid analog-digital H2AD MIMO architecture has been shown to own a great potential to replace the massive or extremely large-scale fully-digital MIMO in the future wireless networks to address the three challenging problems faced by the latter: high energy consumption, high circuit cost, and high complexity. However, how to intelligently sense the number and direction of multi-emitters via such a structure is still an open hard problem. To address this, we propose a two-stage sensing framework that jointly estimates the number and direction values of multiple targets. Specifically, three target number sensing methods are designed: an improved eigen-domain clustering (EDC) framework, an enhanced deep neural network (DNN) based on five key statistical features, and an improved one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D-CNN) utilizing full eigenvalues. Subsequently, a low-complexity and high-accuracy DOA estimation is achieved via the introduced online micro-clustering (OMC-DOA) method. Furthermore, we derive the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) for the H2AD under multiple-source conditions as a theoretical performance benchmark. Simulation results show that the developed three methods achieve 100\% number of targets sensing at moderate-to-high SNRs, while the improved 1D-CNN exhibits superior under extremely-low SNR conditions. The introduced OMC-DOA outperforms existing clustering and fusion-based DOA methods in multi-source environments.

Feng Shu, Jiatong Bai, Di Wu et al.

As a green MIMO structure, massive H$^2$AD is viewed as a potential technology for the future 6G wireless network. For such a structure, it is a challenging task to design a low-complexity and high-performance fusion of target direction values sensed by different sub-array groups with fewer use of prior knowledge. To address this issue, a lightweight Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB)-ratio-weight fusion (WF) method is proposed, which approximates inverse CRLB of each subarray using antenna number reciprocals to eliminate real-time CRLB computation. This reduces complexity and prior knowledge dependence while preserving fusion performance. Moreover, a multi-branch deep neural network (MBDNN) is constructed to further enhance direction-of-arrival (DOA) sensing by leveraging candidate angles from multiple subarrays. The subarray-specific branch networks are integrated with a shared regression module to effectively eliminate pseudo-solutions and fuse true angles. Simulation results show that the proposed CRLB-ratio-WF method achieves DOA sensing performance comparable to CRLB-based methods, while significantly reducing the reliance on prior knowledge. More notably, the proposed MBDNN has superior performance in low-SNR ranges. At SNR $= -15$ dB, it achieves an order-of-magnitude improvement in estimation accuracy compared to CRLB-ratio-WF method.

Na Yan, Kezhi Wang, Cunhua Pan et al.

To jointly overcome the communication bottleneck and privacy leakage of wireless federated learning (FL), this paper studies a differentially private over-the-air federated averaging (DP-OTA-FedAvg) system with a limited sum power budget. With DP-OTA-FedAvg, the gradients are aligned by an alignment coefficient and aggregated over the air, and channel noise is employed to protect privacy. We aim to improve the learning performance by jointly designing the device scheduling, alignment coefficient, and the number of aggregation rounds of federated averaging (FedAvg) subject to sum power and privacy constraints. We first present the privacy analysis based on differential privacy (DP) to quantify the impact of the alignment coefficient on privacy preservation in each communication round. Furthermore, to study how the device scheduling, alignment coefficient, and the number of the global aggregation affect the learning process, we conduct the convergence analysis of DP-OTA-FedAvg in the cases of convex and non-convex loss functions. Based on these analytical results, we formulate an optimization problem to minimize the optimality gap of the DP-OTA-FedAvg subject to limited sum power and privacy budgets. The problem is solved by decoupling it into two sub-problems. Given the number of communication rounds, we conclude the relationship between the number of scheduled devices and the alignment coefficient, which offers a set of potential optimal solution pairs of device scheduling and the alignment coefficient. Thanks to the reduced search space, the optimal solution can be efficiently obtained. The effectiveness of the proposed policy is validated through simulations.

Weiping Shi, Xinyi Jiang, Jinsong Hu et al.

The broadcast nature of wireless communication systems makes wireless transmission extremely susceptible to eavesdropping and even malicious interference. Physical layer security technology can effectively protect the private information sent by the transmitter from being listened to by illegal eavesdroppers, thus ensuring the privacy and security of communication between the transmitter and legitimate users. The development of mobile communication presents new challenges to physical layer security research. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the physical layer security research on various promising mobile technologies, including directional modulation (DM), spatial modulation (SM), covert communication, intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided communication, and so on. Finally, future trends and the unresolved technical challenges are summarized in physical layer security for mobile communications.

Jun Li, Zhichao Xing, Weibin Zhang et al.

Vehicle tracking has become one of the key applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in the fields of rescue, surveillance, traffic monitoring, etc. However, the increased tracking accuracy requires more energy consumption. In this letter, a decentralized vehicle tracking strategy is conceived for improving both tracking accuracy and energy saving, which is based on adjusting the intersection area between the fixed sensing area and the dynamic activation area. Then, two deep reinforcement learning (DRL) aided solutions are proposed relying on the dynamic selection of the activation area radius. Finally, simulation results show the superiority of our DRL aided design.

Tingzhen Xu, Linlin Sun, Shihao Yan et al.

In this work, for the first time, we tackle channel estimation design with pilots in the context of covert wireless communication. Specifically, we consider Rayleigh fading for the communication channel from a transmitter to a receiver and additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) for the detection channel from the transmitter to a warden. Before transmitting information signals, the transmitter has to send pilots to enable channel estimation at the receiver. Using a lower bound on the detection error probability, we first prove that transmitting pilot and information signals with equal power can minimize the detection performance at the warden, which is confirmed by the minimum detection error probability achieved by the optimal detector based on likelihood ratio test. This motivates us to consider the equal transmit power in the channel estimation and then optimize channel use allocation between pilot and information signals in covert wireless communication. Our analysis shows that the optimal number of the channel uses allocated to pilots increases as the covertness constraint becomes tighter. In addition, our examination shows that the optimal percentage of all the available channel uses allocated to channel estimation decreases as the total number of channel uses increases.

Linqing Gui, Feifei Bao, Xiaobo Zhou et al.

In this paper, wireless power transfer and cooperative jamming (CJ) are combined to enhance physical security in public transportation networks. First, a new secure system model with both fixed and mobile jammers is proposed to guarantee secrecy in the worst-case scenario. All jammers are endowed with energy harvesting (EH) capability. Following this, two CJ based schemes, namely B-CJ-SRM and B-CJ-TPM, are proposed, where SRM and TPM are short for secrecy rate maximization and transmit power minimization, respectively. They respectively maximize the secrecy rate (SR) with transmit power constraint and minimize the transmit power of the BS with SR constraint, by optimizing beamforming vector and artificial noise covariance matrix. To further reduce the complexity of our proposed optimal schemes, their low-complexity (LC) versions, called LC-B-CJ-SRM and LC-B-CJ-TPM are developed. Simulation results show that our proposed schemes, B-CJ-SRM and B-CJ-TPM, achieve significant SR performance improvement over existing zero-forcing and QoSD methods. Additionally, the SR performance of the proposed LC schemes are close to those of their original versions.

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.

Feng Shu, Zhengwang Wang, Riqing Chen et al.

In this paper, a secure spatial modulation (SM) system with artificial noise (AN)-aided is investigated. To achieve higher secrecy rate (SR) in such a system, two high-performance schemes of transmit antenna selection (TAS), leakage-based and maximum secrecy rate (Max-SR), are proposed and a generalized Euclidean distance-optimized antenna selection (EDAS) method is designed. From simulation results and analysis, the four TAS schemes have an decreasing order: Max-SR, leakage-based, generalized EDAS, and random (conventional), in terms of SR performance. However, the proposed Max-SR method requires the exhaustive search to achieve the optimal SR performance, thus its complexity is extremely high as the number of antennas tends to medium and large scale. The proposed leakage-based method approaches the Max-SR method with much lower complexity. Thus, it achieves a good balance between complexity and SR performance. In terms of bit error rate (BER), their performances are in an increasing order: random, leakage-based, Max-SR, and generalized EDAS.

Feng Shu, Siming Wan, Shihao Yan et al.

In this work, an adaptive and robust null-space projection (AR-NSP) scheme is proposed for secure transmission with artificial noise (AN)-aided directional modulation (DM) in wireless networks. The proposed scheme is carried out in three steps. Firstly, the directions of arrival (DOAs) of the signals from the desired user and eavesdropper are estimated by the Root Multiple Signal Classificaiton (Root-MUSIC) algorithm and the related signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) are estimated based on the ratio of the corresponding eigenvalue to the minimum eigenvalue of the covariance matrix of the received signals. In the second step, the value intervals of DOA estimation errors are predicted based on the DOA and SNR estimations. Finally, a robust NSP beamforming DM system is designed according to the afore-obtained estimations and predictions. Our examination shows that the proposed scheme can significantly outperform the conventional non-adaptive robust scheme and non-robust NSP scheme in terms of achieving a much lower bit error rate (BER) at the desired user and a much higher secrecy rate (SR). In addition, the BER and SR performance gains achieved by the proposed scheme relative to other schemes increase with the value range of DOA estimation error.