Thanks to the availability of large bandwidth and high-gain directional antennas at the millimeter-wave (mmWave) bands, mmWave communications have been considered as one of the primary solutions to meet the high data rates needs in vehicular networks. Unicast in mmWave vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications has been well-studied, but much less attention has been paid to V2V broadcast which is required by many V2V applications such as active safety. To fill the gap, this paper systematically investigates mmWave V2V broadcast by considering the unique properties of mmWave signal propagation in V2V environments as well as the impacts of directional antennas and interference. Based on widely-accepted, high-fidelity system models, we mathematically analyze the receiver-side signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) and broadcast coverage, and we study the impacts of blockage, inter-vehicle distance, vehicle density and beam pattern. Through comprehensive numerical analysis, we find out that, instead of a single unique optimal beamwidth, there exists an optimal range of beamwidth, in which the beamwidths have similar performance and can maximize the coverage. We also find out that the selection of carrier sensing range plays an important role as it highly influences the performance of the whole vehicular networks. Our analysis provides unique insight into mmWave V2V broadcast, and it sheds light on designing effective V2V broadcast protocols.
The approximate uniform sampling of graph realizations with a given degree sequence is an everyday task in several social science, computer science, engineering etc. projects. One approach is using Markov chains. The best available current result about the well-studied switch Markov chain is that it is rapidly mixing on P-stable degree sequences (see DOI:10.1016/j.ejc.2021.103421). The switch Markov chain does not change any degree sequence. However, there are cases where degree intervals are specified rather than a single degree sequence. (A natural scenario where this problem arises is in hypothesis testing on social networks that are only partially observed.) Rechner, Strowick, and M\"uller-Hannemann introduced in 2018 the notion of degree interval Markov chain which uses three (separately well-studied) local operations (switch, hinge-flip and toggle), and employing on degree sequence realizations where any two sequences under scrutiny have very small coordinate-wise distance. Recently Amanatidis and Kleer published a beautiful paper (arXiv:2110.09068), showing that the degree interval Markov chain is rapidly mixing if the sequences are coming from a system of very thin intervals which are centered not far from a regular degree sequence. In this paper we extend substantially their result, showing that the degree interval Markov chain is rapidly mixing if the intervals are centred at P-stable degree sequences.
In this paper we generalize Dillon's switching method to characterize the exact $c$-differential uniformity of functions constructed via this method. More precisely, we modify some PcN/APcN and other functions with known $c$-differential uniformity in a controllable number of coordinates to render more such functions. We present several applications of the method in constructing PcN and APcN functions with respect to all $c\neq 1$. As a byproduct, we generalize some result of [Y. Wu, N. Li, X. Zeng, {\em New PcN and APcN functions over finite fields}, Designs Codes Crypt. 89 (2021), 2637--2651]. Computational results rendering functions with low differential uniformity, as well as, other good cryptographic properties are sprinkled throughout the paper.
Covariance estimation for matrix-valued data has received an increasing interest in applications. Unlike previous works that rely heavily on matrix normal distribution assumption and the requirement of fixed matrix size, we propose a class of distribution-free regularized covariance estimation methods for high-dimensional matrix data under a separability condition and a bandable covariance structure. Under these conditions, the original covariance matrix is decomposed into a Kronecker product of two bandable small covariance matrices representing the variability over row and column directions. We formulate a unified framework for estimating bandable covariance, and introduce an efficient algorithm based on rank one unconstrained Kronecker product approximation. The convergence rates of the proposed estimators are established, and the derived minimax lower bound shows our proposed estimator is rate-optimal under certain divergence regimes of matrix size. We further introduce a class of robust covariance estimators and provide theoretical guarantees to deal with heavy-tailed data. We demonstrate the superior finite-sample performance of our methods using simulations and real applications from a gridded temperature anomalies dataset and a S&P 500 stock data analysis.
Bluetooth technology has enabled short-range wireless communication for billions of devices. Bluetooth Low-Energy (BLE) variant aims at improving power consumption on battery-constrained devices. BLE-enabled devices broadcast information (e.g., as beacons) to nearby devices via advertisements. Unfortunately, such functionality can become a double-edged sword at the hands of attackers. In this paper, we primarily show how an attacker can exploit BLE advertisements to exfiltrate information from BLE-enable devices. In particular, our attack establishes a communication medium between two devices without requiring any prior authentication or pairing. We develop a proof-of-concept attack framework on the Android ecosystem and assess its performance via a thorough set of experiments. Our results indicate that such an exfiltration attack is indeed possible though with a low data rate. Nevertheless, we also demonstrate potential use cases and enhancements to our attack that can further its severeness. Finally, we discuss possible countermeasures to prevent such an attack.
In large scale dynamic wireless networks, the amount of overhead caused by channel estimation (CE) is becoming one of the main performance bottlenecks. This is due to the large number users whose channels should be estimated, the user mobility, and the rapid channel change caused by the usage of the high-frequency spectrum (e.g. millimeter wave). In this work, we propose a new hybrid channel estimation/prediction (CEP) scheme to reduce overhead in time-division duplex (TDD) wireless cell-free massive multiple-input-multiple-output (mMIMO) systems. The scheme proposes sending a pilot signal from each user only once in a given number (window) of coherence intervals (CIs). Then minimum mean-square error (MMSE) estimation is used to estimate the channel of this CI, while a deep neural network (DNN) is used to predict the channels of the remaining CIs in the window. The DNN exploits the temporal correlation between the consecutive CIs and the received pilot signals to improve the channel prediction accuracy. By doing so, CE overhead is reduced by at least 50 percent at the expense of negligible CE error for practical user mobility settings. Consequently, the proposed CEP scheme improves the spectral efficiency compared to the conventional MMSE CE approach, especially when the number of users is large, which is demonstrated numerically.
The fact that the millimeter-wave (mmWave) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel has sparse support in the spatial domain has motivated recent compressed sensing (CS)-based mmWave channel estimation methods, where the angles of arrivals (AoAs) and angles of departures (AoDs) are quantized using angle dictionary matrices. However, the existing CS-based methods usually obtain the estimation result through one-stage channel sounding that have two limitations: (i) the requirement of large-dimensional dictionary and (ii) unresolvable quantization error. These two drawbacks are irreconcilable; improvement of the one implies deterioration of the other. To address these challenges, we propose, in this paper, a two-stage method to estimate the AoAs and AoDs of mmWave channels. In the proposed method, the channel estimation task is divided into two stages, Stage I and Stage II. Specifically, in Stage I, the AoAs are estimated by solving a multiple measurement vectors (MMV) problem. In Stage II, based on the estimated AoAs, the receive sounders are designed to estimate AoDs. The dimension of the angle dictionary in each stage can be reduced, which in turn reduces the computational complexity substantially. We then analyze the successful recovery probability (SRP) of the proposed method, revealing the superiority of the proposed framework over the existing one-stage CS-based methods. We further enhance the reconstruction performance by performing resource allocation between the two stages. We also overcome the unresolvable quantization error issue present in the prior techniques by applying the atomic norm minimization method to each stage of the proposed two-stage approach. The simulation results illustrate the substantially improved performance with low complexity of the proposed two-stage method.
With the rapid growth of new technological paradigms such as the Internet of Things (IoT), it opens new doors for many applications in the modern era for the betterment of human life. One of the recent applications of the IoT is the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) which helps to see unprecedented growth of connected vehicles on the roads. The IoV is gaining attention due to enhancing traffic safety and providing low route information. One of the most important and major requirements of the IoV is preserving security and privacy under strict latency. Moreover, vehicles are required to be authenticated frequently and fast considering limited bandwidth, high mobility, and density of the vehicles. To address the security vulnerabilities and data integrity, an ultralight authentication scheme has been proposed in this article. Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) and XOR function are used to authenticate both server and vehicle in two message flow which makes the proposed scheme ultralight, and less computation is required. The proposed Easy-Sec can authenticate vehicles maintaining low latency and resisting known security threats. Furthermore, the proposed Easy-Sec needs low overhead so that it does not increase the burden of the IoV network. Computational ( around 4 ms) and Communication (32 bytes) overhead shows the feasibility, efficiency, and also security features are depicted using formal analysis, Burrows, Abadi, and Needham (BAN) logic, and informal analysis to show the robustness of the proposed mechanisms against security threats.
Sparse decision tree optimization has been one of the most fundamental problems in AI since its inception and is a challenge at the core of interpretable machine learning. Sparse decision tree optimization is computationally hard, and despite steady effort since the 1960's, breakthroughs have only been made on the problem within the past few years, primarily on the problem of finding optimal sparse decision trees. However, current state-of-the-art algorithms often require impractical amounts of computation time and memory to find optimal or near-optimal trees for some real-world datasets, particularly those having several continuous-valued features. Given that the search spaces of these decision tree optimization problems are massive, can we practically hope to find a sparse decision tree that competes in accuracy with a black box machine learning model? We address this problem via smart guessing strategies that can be applied to any optimal branch-and-bound-based decision tree algorithm. We show that by using these guesses, we can reduce the run time by multiple orders of magnitude, while providing bounds on how far the resulting trees can deviate from the black box's accuracy and expressive power. Our approach enables guesses about how to bin continuous features, the size of the tree, and lower bounds on the error for the optimal decision tree. Our experiments show that in many cases we can rapidly construct sparse decision trees that match the accuracy of black box models. To summarize: when you are having trouble optimizing, just guess.
We present a pipelined multiplier with reduced activities and minimized interconnect based on online digit-serial arithmetic. The working precision has been truncated such that $p<n$ bits are used to compute $n$ bits product, resulting in significant savings in area and power. The digit slices follow variable precision according to input, increasing upto $p$ and then decreases according to the error profile. Pipelining has been done to achieve high throughput and low latency which is desirable for compute intensive inner products. Synthesis results of the proposed designs have been presented and compared with the non-pipelined online multiplier, pipelined online multiplier with full working precision and conventional serial-parallel and array multipliers. For $8, 16, 24$ and $32$ bit precision, the proposed low power pipelined design show upto $38\%$ and $44\%$ reduction in power and area respectively compared to the pipelined online multiplier without working precision truncation.
In this paper, we propose the joint learning attention and recurrent neural network (RNN) models for multi-label classification. While approaches based on the use of either model exist (e.g., for the task of image captioning), training such existing network architectures typically require pre-defined label sequences. For multi-label classification, it would be desirable to have a robust inference process, so that the prediction error would not propagate and thus affect the performance. Our proposed model uniquely integrates attention and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) models, which not only addresses the above problem but also allows one to identify visual objects of interests with varying sizes without the prior knowledge of particular label ordering. More importantly, label co-occurrence information can be jointly exploited by our LSTM model. Finally, by advancing the technique of beam search, prediction of multiple labels can be efficiently achieved by our proposed network model.