Due to the lack of wireless spectrum resources, people are focusing on the versatile wireless networks. Wireless localization and target sensing both rely on precise extraction of parameters such as signal amplitude, propagation delay and Doppler shift from the received signals. Due to the high multi-path resolution and strong penetration of UWB signals, both localization and sensing can be achieved through the same UWB waveform. Practical networks are often resource-constrained, in order to improve the accuracy of integrated networks, we need to optimize the allocation of resources in the networks. Considering the complexity of the multi-slot networks, this paper derives the Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) expressions for single-slot and dual-slot integrated sensing and localization (ISAL) networks respectively, and proposes two resource optimization schemes, namely step-by-step scheme and integrated scheme. The numerical results show that: (i) for the sensing-resource-deficient networks with relatively uniform node distribution, the energy allocated to each step in the step-by-step scheme satisfies the relationship: energy for clock offset < energy for radar localization < energy for target sensing. (ii) In the multi-slot ISAL networks, the system will allocate more energy to the time slots where the networks are relatively sensing-resource-deficient. (iii) The step-by-step scheme is more suitable for the sensing-resource-abundant networks, while the integrated scheme is more suitable for the sensing-resource-deficient networks.
Offloading is a popular way to overcome the resource and power constraints of networked embedded devices, which are increasingly found in industrial environments. It involves moving resource-intensive computational tasks to a more powerful device on the network, often in close proximity to enable wireless communication. However, many Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications have real-time constraints. Offloading such tasks over a wireless network with latency uncertainties poses new challenges. In this paper, we aim to better understand these challenges by proposing a system architecture and scheduler for real-time task offloading in wireless IIoT environments. Based on a prototype, we then evaluate different system configurations and discuss their trade-offs and implications. Our design showed to prevent deadline misses under high load and network uncertainties and was able to outperform a reference scheduler in terms of successful task throughput. Under heavy task load, where the reference scheduler had a success rate of 5%, our design achieved a success rate of 60%.
Nonlinear distortion stemming from low-cost power amplifiers may severely affect wireless communication performance through out-of-band (OOB) radiation and in-band distortion. The distortion is correlated between different transmit antennas in an antenna array, which results in a beamforming gain at the receiver side that grows with the number of antennas. In this paper, we investigate how the strength of the distortion is affected by the frequency selectivity of the channel. A closed-form expression for the received distortion power is derived as a function of the number of multipath components (MPCs) and the delay spread, which highlight their impact. The performed analysis, which is verified via numerical simulations, reveals that as the number of MPCs increases, distortion exhibits distinct characteristics for in-band and OOB frequencies. It is shown that the received in-band and OOB distortion power is inversely proportional to the number of MPCs, and it is reported that as the delay spread gets narrower, the in-band distortion power is beamformed towards the intended user, which yields higher received in-band distortion compared to the OOB distortion.
Optical wireless communication (OWC) offers several complementary advantages to radio-frequency wireless networks such as its massive available spectrum; hence, it is widely anticipated that OWC will assume a pivotal role in the forthcoming sixth generation wireless communication networks. Although significant progress has been achieved in OWC over the past decades, the outage induced by occasionally low received optical power continues to pose a key limiting factor for its deployment. In this work, we discuss the potential role of single-photon counting (SPC) receivers as a promising solution to overcome this limitation. We present an overview of the applications of SPC-based OWC systems in 6G networks, introduce their major performance-limiting factors, propose a performance enhancement framework to tackle these issues, and identify critical areas of open problems for future research.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have demonstrated a significant boost in prediction performance on graph data. At the same time, the predictions made by these models are often hard to interpret. In that regard, many efforts have been made to explain the prediction mechanisms of these models from perspectives such as GNNExplainer, XGNN and PGExplainer. Although such works present systematic frameworks to interpret GNNs, a holistic review for explainable GNNs is unavailable. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review of explainability techniques developed for GNNs. We focus on explainable graph neural networks and categorize them based on the use of explainable methods. We further provide the common performance metrics for GNNs explanations and point out several future research directions.
One principal approach for illuminating a black-box neural network is feature attribution, i.e. identifying the importance of input features for the network's prediction. The predictive information of features is recently proposed as a proxy for the measure of their importance. So far, the predictive information is only identified for latent features by placing an information bottleneck within the network. We propose a method to identify features with predictive information in the input domain. The method results in fine-grained identification of input features' information and is agnostic to network architecture. The core idea of our method is leveraging a bottleneck on the input that only lets input features associated with predictive latent features pass through. We compare our method with several feature attribution methods using mainstream feature attribution evaluation experiments. The code is publicly available.
Vast amount of data generated from networks of sensors, wearables, and the Internet of Things (IoT) devices underscores the need for advanced modeling techniques that leverage the spatio-temporal structure of decentralized data due to the need for edge computation and licensing (data access) issues. While federated learning (FL) has emerged as a framework for model training without requiring direct data sharing and exchange, effectively modeling the complex spatio-temporal dependencies to improve forecasting capabilities still remains an open problem. On the other hand, state-of-the-art spatio-temporal forecasting models assume unfettered access to the data, neglecting constraints on data sharing. To bridge this gap, we propose a federated spatio-temporal model -- Cross-Node Federated Graph Neural Network (CNFGNN) -- which explicitly encodes the underlying graph structure using graph neural network (GNN)-based architecture under the constraint of cross-node federated learning, which requires that data in a network of nodes is generated locally on each node and remains decentralized. CNFGNN operates by disentangling the temporal dynamics modeling on devices and spatial dynamics on the server, utilizing alternating optimization to reduce the communication cost, facilitating computations on the edge devices. Experiments on the traffic flow forecasting task show that CNFGNN achieves the best forecasting performance in both transductive and inductive learning settings with no extra computation cost on edge devices, while incurring modest communication cost.
Deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and Data Fusion techniques have gained popularity in public and government domains. This usually requires capturing and consolidating data from multiple sources. As datasets do not necessarily originate from identical sensors, fused data typically results in a complex data problem. Because military is investigating how heterogeneous IoT devices can aid processes and tasks, we investigate a multi-sensor approach. Moreover, we propose a signal to image encoding approach to transform information (signal) to integrate (fuse) data from IoT wearable devices to an image which is invertible and easier to visualize supporting decision making. Furthermore, we investigate the challenge of enabling an intelligent identification and detection operation and demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed Deep Learning and Anomaly Detection models that can support future application that utilizes hand gesture data from wearable devices.
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been extensively studied in the past few years. Arguably their most significant impact has been in the area of computer vision where great advances have been made in challenges such as plausible image generation, image-to-image translation, facial attribute manipulation and similar domains. Despite the significant successes achieved to date, applying GANs to real-world problems still poses significant challenges, three of which we focus on here. These are: (1) the generation of high quality images, (2) diversity of image generation, and (3) stable training. Focusing on the degree to which popular GAN technologies have made progress against these challenges, we provide a detailed review of the state of the art in GAN-related research in the published scientific literature. We further structure this review through a convenient taxonomy we have adopted based on variations in GAN architectures and loss functions. While several reviews for GANs have been presented to date, none have considered the status of this field based on their progress towards addressing practical challenges relevant to computer vision. Accordingly, we review and critically discuss the most popular architecture-variant, and loss-variant GANs, for tackling these challenges. Our objective is to provide an overview as well as a critical analysis of the status of GAN research in terms of relevant progress towards important computer vision application requirements. As we do this we also discuss the most compelling applications in computer vision in which GANs have demonstrated considerable success along with some suggestions for future research directions. Code related to GAN-variants studied in this work is summarized on //github.com/sheqi/GAN_Review.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are successful in many computer vision tasks. However, the most accurate DNNs require millions of parameters and operations, making them energy, computation and memory intensive. This impedes the deployment of large DNNs in low-power devices with limited compute resources. Recent research improves DNN models by reducing the memory requirement, energy consumption, and number of operations without significantly decreasing the accuracy. This paper surveys the progress of low-power deep learning and computer vision, specifically in regards to inference, and discusses the methods for compacting and accelerating DNN models. The techniques can be divided into four major categories: (1) parameter quantization and pruning, (2) compressed convolutional filters and matrix factorization, (3) network architecture search, and (4) knowledge distillation. We analyze the accuracy, advantages, disadvantages, and potential solutions to the problems with the techniques in each category. We also discuss new evaluation metrics as a guideline for future research.
Convolutional networks (ConvNets) have achieved great successes in various challenging vision tasks. However, the performance of ConvNets would degrade when encountering the domain shift. The domain adaptation is more significant while challenging in the field of biomedical image analysis, where cross-modality data have largely different distributions. Given that annotating the medical data is especially expensive, the supervised transfer learning approaches are not quite optimal. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised domain adaptation framework with adversarial learning for cross-modality biomedical image segmentations. Specifically, our model is based on a dilated fully convolutional network for pixel-wise prediction. Moreover, we build a plug-and-play domain adaptation module (DAM) to map the target input to features which are aligned with source domain feature space. A domain critic module (DCM) is set up for discriminating the feature space of both domains. We optimize the DAM and DCM via an adversarial loss without using any target domain label. Our proposed method is validated by adapting a ConvNet trained with MRI images to unpaired CT data for cardiac structures segmentations, and achieved very promising results.