Due to flexibility, autonomy and low operational cost, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), as fixed aerial base stations, are increasingly being used as \textit{relays} to collect time-sensitive information (i.e., status updates) from IoT devices and deliver it to the nearby terrestrial base station (TBS), where the information gets processed. In order to ensure timely delivery of information to the TBS (from all IoT devices), optimal scheduling of time-sensitive information over two hop UAV-relayed IoT networks (i.e., IoT device to the UAV [hop 1], and UAV to the TBS [hop 2]) becomes a critical challenge. To address this, we propose scheduling policies for Age of Information (AoI) minimization in such two-hop UAV-relayed IoT networks. To this end, we present a low-complexity MAF-MAD scheduler, that employs Maximum AoI First (MAF) policy for sampling of IoT devices at UAV (hop 1) and Maximum AoI Difference (MAD) policy for updating sampled packets from UAV to the TBS (hop 2). We show that MAF-MAD is the optimal scheduler under ideal conditions, i.e., error-free channels and generate-at-will traffic generation at IoT devices. On the contrary, for realistic conditions, we propose a Deep-Q-Networks (DQN) based scheduler. Our simulation results show that DQN-based scheduler outperforms MAF-MAD scheduler and three other baseline schedulers, i.e., Maximal AoI First (MAF), Round Robin (RR) and Random, employed at both hops under general conditions when the network is small (with 10's of IoT devices). However, it does not scale well with network size whereas MAF-MAD outperforms all other schedulers under all considered scenarios for larger networks.
In real-time systems, schedulability tests are utilized to provide timing guarantees. However, for self-suspending task sets, current suspension-aware schedulability tests are limited to Task-Level Fixed-Priority~(TFP) scheduling or Earliest-Deadline-First~(EDF) with constrained-deadline task systems. In this work we provide a unifying schedulability test for the uniprocessor version of Global EDF-Like (GEL) schedulers and arbitrary-deadline task sets. A large body of existing scheduling algorithms can be considered as EDF-Like, such as EDF, First-In-First-Out~(FIFO), Earliest-Quasi-Deadline-First~(EQDF) and Suspension-Aware EDF~(SAEDF). Therefore, the unifying schedulability test is applicable to those algorithms. Moreover, the schedulability test can be applied to TFP scheduling as well. Our analysis is the first suspension-aware schedulability test applicable to arbitrary-deadline sporadic real-time task systems under Job-Level Fixed-Priority (JFP) scheduling, such as EDF. Moreover, it is the first unifying suspension-aware schedulability test framework that covers a wide range of scheduling algorithms. Through numerical simulations, we show that the schedulability test outperforms the state of the art for EDF under constrained-deadline scenarios. Moreover, we demonstrate the performance of different configurations under EQDF and SAEDF.
The breakthrough of blockchain technology has facilitated the emergence and deployment of a wide range of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) network-based applications. Yet, the full utilization of these applications is still limited due to the fact that each application is operating on an isolated blockchain. Thus, it is inevitable to orchestrate these blockchain fragments by introducing a cross-blockchain platform that governs the inter-communication and transfer of assets in the UAV networks context. In this paper, we provide an up-to-date survey of blockchain-based UAV networks applications. We also survey the literature on the state-of-the-art cross blockchain frameworks to highlight the latest advances in the field. Based on the outcomes of our survey, we introduce a spectrum of scenarios related to UAV networks that may leverage the potentials of the currently available cross-blockchain solutions. Finally, we identify open issues and potential challenges associated with the application of a cross-blockchain scheme for UAV networks that will hopefully guide future research directions.
This paper investigates the application of quantum computing technology to airline gate-scheduling quadratic assignment problems (QAP). We explore the quantum computing hardware architecture and software environment required for porting classical versions of these type of problems to quantum computers. We discuss the variational quantum eigensolver and the inclusion of space-efficient graph coloring to the Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO). These enhanced quantum computing algorithms are tested with an 8 gate and 24 flight test case using both the IBM quantum computing simulator and a 27 qubit superconducting transmon IBM quantum computing hardware platform.
We consider the consensus interdiction problem (CIP), in which the goal is to maximize the convergence time of consensus averaging dynamics subject to removing a limited number of network edges. We first show that CIP can be cast as an effective resistance interdiction problem (ERIP), in which the goal is to remove a limited number of network edges to maximize the effective resistance between a source node and a sink node. We show that ERIP is strongly NP-hard, even for bipartite graphs of diameter three with fixed source/sink edges, and establish the same hardness result for the CIP. We then show that both ERIP and CIP cannot be approximated up to a (nearly) polynomial factor assuming exponential time hypothesis. Subsequently, we devise a polynomial-time $mn$-approximation algorithm for the ERIP that only depends on the number of nodes $n$ and the number of edges $m$, but is independent of the size of edge resistances. Finally, using a quadratic program formulation for the CIP, we devise an iterative approximation algorithm to find a local optimal solution for the CIP.
We consider the problem of minimizing age of information in multihop wireless networks and propose three classes of policies to solve the problem - stationary randomized, age difference, and age debt. For the unicast setting with fixed routes between each source-destination pair, we first develop a procedure to find age optimal Stationary Randomized policies. These policies are easy to implement and allow us to derive closed-form expression for average AoI. Next, for the same unicast setting, we develop a class of heuristic policies, called Age Difference, based on the idea that if neighboring nodes try to reduce their age differential then all nodes will have fresher updates. This approach is useful in practice since it relies only on the local age differential between nodes to make scheduling decisions. Finally, we propose the class of policies called Age Debt, which can handle 1) non-linear AoI cost functions; 2) unicast, multicast and broadcast flows; and 3) no fixed routes specified per flow beforehand. Here, we convert AoI optimization problems into equivalent network stability problems and use Lyapunov drift to find scheduling and routing schemes that stabilize the network. We also provide numerical results comparing our proposed classes of policies with the best known scheduling and routing schemes available in the literature for a wide variety of network settings.
Providing reliable connectivity to cellular-connected UAVs can be very challenging; their performance highly depends on the nature of the surrounding environment, such as density and heights of the ground BSs. On the other hand, tall buildings might block undesired interference signals from ground BSs, thereby improving the connectivity between the UAVs and their serving BSs. To address the connectivity of UAVs in such environments, this paper proposes a RL algorithm to dynamically optimise the height of a UAV as it moves through the environment, with the goal of increasing the throughput that it experiences. The proposed solution is evaluated using experimentally-obtained measurements from two different locations in Dublin city centre, Ireland. In the first scenario, the UAV is connected to a macro-cell, while in the second scenario, the UAVs associates to different small cells in a two-tier mobile network. Results show that the proposed solution increases 6 to 41% in throughput, compared to baseline approaches.
The properties of flat minima in the empirical risk landscape of neural networks have been debated for some time. Increasing evidence suggests they possess better generalization capabilities with respect to sharp ones. First, we discuss Gaussian mixture classification models and show analytically that there exist Bayes optimal pointwise estimators which correspond to minimizers belonging to wide flat regions. These estimators can be found by applying maximum flatness algorithms either directly on the classifier (which is norm independent) or on the differentiable loss function used in learning. Next, we extend the analysis to the deep learning scenario by extensive numerical validations. Using two algorithms, Entropy-SGD and Replicated-SGD, that explicitly include in the optimization objective a non-local flatness measure known as local entropy, we consistently improve the generalization error for common architectures (e.g. ResNet, EfficientNet). An easy to compute flatness measure shows a clear correlation with test accuracy.
Allocating physical layer resources to users based on channel quality, buffer size, requirements and constraints represents one of the central optimization problems in the management of radio resources. The solution space grows combinatorially with the cardinality of each dimension making it hard to find optimal solutions using an exhaustive search or even classical optimization algorithms given the stringent time requirements. This problem is even more pronounced in MU-MIMO scheduling where the scheduler can assign multiple users to the same time-frequency physical resources. Traditional approaches thus resort to designing heuristics that trade optimality in favor of feasibility of execution. In this work we treat the MU-MIMO scheduling problem as a tree-structured combinatorial problem and, borrowing from the recent successes of AlphaGo Zero, we investigate the feasibility of searching for the best performing solutions using a combination of Monte Carlo Tree Search and Reinforcement Learning. To cater to the nature of the problem at hand, like the lack of an intrinsic ordering of the users as well as the importance of dependencies between combinations of users, we make fundamental modifications to the neural network architecture by introducing the self-attention mechanism. We then demonstrate that the resulting approach is not only feasible but vastly outperforms state-of-the-art heuristic-based scheduling approaches in the presence of measurement uncertainties and finite buffers.
We address the problem of anomaly detection in videos. The goal is to identify unusual behaviours automatically by learning exclusively from normal videos. Most existing approaches are usually data-hungry and have limited generalization abilities. They usually need to be trained on a large number of videos from a target scene to achieve good results in that scene. In this paper, we propose a novel few-shot scene-adaptive anomaly detection problem to address the limitations of previous approaches. Our goal is to learn to detect anomalies in a previously unseen scene with only a few frames. A reliable solution for this new problem will have huge potential in real-world applications since it is expensive to collect a massive amount of data for each target scene. We propose a meta-learning based approach for solving this new problem; extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
In this paper, an interference-aware path planning scheme for a network of cellular-connected unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is proposed. In particular, each UAV aims at achieving a tradeoff between maximizing energy efficiency and minimizing both wireless latency and the interference level caused on the ground network along its path. The problem is cast as a dynamic game among UAVs. To solve this game, a deep reinforcement learning algorithm, based on echo state network (ESN) cells, is proposed. The introduced deep ESN architecture is trained to allow each UAV to map each observation of the network state to an action, with the goal of minimizing a sequence of time-dependent utility functions. Each UAV uses ESN to learn its optimal path, transmission power level, and cell association vector at different locations along its path. The proposed algorithm is shown to reach a subgame perfect Nash equilibrium (SPNE) upon convergence. Moreover, an upper and lower bound for the altitude of the UAVs is derived thus reducing the computational complexity of the proposed algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves better wireless latency per UAV and rate per ground user (UE) while requiring a number of steps that is comparable to a heuristic baseline that considers moving via the shortest distance towards the corresponding destinations. The results also show that the optimal altitude of the UAVs varies based on the ground network density and the UE data rate requirements and plays a vital role in minimizing the interference level on the ground UEs as well as the wireless transmission delay of the UAV.