A near-field integrated sensing and communications (NF-ISAC) framework is proposed, where both a sensing target and multiple communication users are located within the near-field region. An extended multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm is proposed for the joint distance and angle estimation. The performance tradeoff between communication and sensing is characterized by the proposed two-stage algorithm. Numerical results reveal 1) the additional advantage of the NF-ISAC in terms of distance estimation compared to the conventional far-field ISAC, and 2) the tradeoff between the distance and angle estimation.
Digital twins have shown a great potential in supporting the development of wireless networks. They are virtual representations of 5G/6G systems enabling the design of machine learning and optimization-based techniques. Field data replication is one of the critical aspects of building a simulation-based twin, where the objective is to calibrate the simulation to match field performance measurements. Since wireless networks involve a variety of key performance indicators (KPIs), the replication process becomes a multi-objective optimization problem in which the purpose is to minimize the error between the simulated and field data KPIs. Unlike previous works, we focus on designing a data-driven search method to calibrate the simulator and achieve accurate and reliable reproduction of field performance. This work proposes a search-based algorithm based on mixedvariable particle swarm optimization (PSO) to find the optimal simulation parameters. Furthermore, we extend this solution to account for potential conflicts between the KPIs using {\alpha}-fairness concept to adjust the importance attributed to each KPI during the search. Experiments on field data showcase the effectiveness of our approach to (i) improve the accuracy of the replication, (ii) enhance the fairness between the different KPIs, and (iii) guarantee faster convergence compared to other methods.
Once-for-All (OFA) is a Neural Architecture Search (NAS) framework designed to address the problem of searching efficient architectures for devices with different resources constraints by decoupling the training and the searching stages. The computationally expensive process of training the OFA neural network is done only once, and then it is possible to perform multiple searches for subnetworks extracted from this trained network according to each deployment scenario. In this work we aim to give one step further in the search for efficiency by explicitly conceiving the search stage as a multi-objective optimization problem. A Pareto frontier is then populated with efficient, and already trained, neural architectures exhibiting distinct trade-offs among the conflicting objectives. This could be achieved by using any multi-objective evolutionary algorithm during the search stage, such as NSGA-II and SMS-EMOA. In other words, the neural network is trained once, the searching for subnetworks considering different hardware constraints is also done one single time, and then the user can choose a suitable neural network according to each deployment scenario. The conjugation of OFA and an explicit algorithm for multi-objective optimization opens the possibility of a posteriori decision-making in NAS, after sampling efficient subnetworks which are a very good approximation of the Pareto frontier, given that those subnetworks are already trained and ready to use. The source code and the final search algorithm will be released at //github.com/ito-rafael/once-for-all-2
Motion capture (MoCap) through tracking retroreflectors obtains high precision pose estimation, which is frequently used in robotics. Unlike MoCap, fiducial marker-based tracking methods do not require a static camera setup to perform relative localization. Popular pose-estimating systems based on fiducial markers have lower localization accuracy than MoCap. As a solution, we propose Mobile MoCap, a system that employs inexpensive near-infrared cameras for precise relative localization in dynamic environments. We present a retroreflector feature detector that performs 6-DoF (six degrees-of-freedom) tracking and operates with minimal camera exposure times to reduce motion blur. To evaluate different localization techniques in a mobile robot setup, we mount our Mobile MoCap system, as well as a standard RGB camera, onto a precision-controlled linear rail for the purposes of retroreflective and fiducial marker tracking, respectively. We benchmark the two systems against each other, varying distance, marker viewing angle, and relative velocities. Our stereo-based Mobile MoCap approach obtains higher position and orientation accuracy than the fiducial approach. The code for Mobile MoCap is implemented in ROS 2 and made publicly available at //github.com/RIVeR-Lab/mobile_mocap.
Joint radar-communications (JRC) has emerged as a promising technology for efficiently using the limited electromagnetic spectrum. In JRC applications such as secure military receivers, often the radar and communications signals are overlaid in the received signal. In these passive listening outposts, the signals and channels of both radar and communications are unknown to the receiver. The ill-posed problem of recovering all signal and channel parameters from the overlaid signal is terms as dual-blind deconvolution (DBD). In this work, we investigate a more challenging version of DBD with a multi-antenna receiver. We model the radar and communications channels with a few (sparse) continuous-valued parameters such as time delays, Doppler velocities, and directions-of-arrival (DoAs). To solve this highly ill-posed DBD, we propose to minimize the sum of multivariate atomic norms (SoMAN) that depends on the unknown parameters. To this end, we devise an exact semidefinite program using theories of positive hyperoctant trigonometric polynomials (PhTP). Our theoretical analyses show that the minimum number of samples and antennas required for perfect recovery is logarithmically dependent on the maximum of the number of radar targets and communications paths rather than their sum. We show that our approach is easily generalized to include several practical issues such as gain/phase errors and additive noise. Numerical experiments show the exact parameter recovery for different JRC
We consider high-dimensional MIMO transmissions in frequency division duplexing (FDD) systems. For precoding, the frequency selective channel has to be measured, quantized and fed back to the base station by the users. When the number of antennas is very high this typically leads to prohibitively high quantization complexity and large feedback. In 5G New Radio (NR), a modular quantization approach has been applied for this, where first a low-dimensional subspace is identified for the whole frequency selective channel, and then subband channels are linearly mapped to this subspace and quantized. We analyze how the components in such a modular scheme contribute to the overall quantization distortion. Based on this analysis we improve the technology components in the modular approach and propose an orthonormalized wideband precoding scheme and a sequential wideband precoding approach which provide considerable gains over the conventional method. We compare the performance of the developed quantization schemes to prior art by simulations in terms of the projection distortion, overall distortion and spectral efficiency, in a scenario with a realistic spatial channel model.
In this paper, we examine the internet of things system which is dedicated for smart cities, smart factory, and connected cars, etc. To support such systems in wide area with low power consumption, energy harvesting technology without wired charging infrastructure is one of the important issues for longevity of networks. In consideration of the fact that the position and amount of energy charged for each device might be unbalanced according to the distribution of nodes and energy sources, the problem of maximizing the minimum throughput among all nodes becomes a NP-hard challenging issue. To overcome this complexity, we propose a machine learning based relaying topology algorithm with a novel backward-pass rate assessment method to present proper learning direction and an iterative balancing time slot allocation algorithm which can utilize the node with sufficient energy as the relay. To validate the proposed scheme, we conducted simulations on the system model we established, thus confirm that the proposed scheme is stable and superior to conventional schemes.
As the demand for wireless connectivity continues to soar, the fifth generation and beyond wireless networks are exploring new ways to efficiently utilize the wireless spectrum and reduce hardware costs. One such approach is the integration of sensing and communications (ISAC) paradigms to jointly access the spectrum. Recent ISAC studies have focused on upper millimeter-wave and low terahertz bands to exploit ultrawide bandwidths. At these frequencies, hybrid beamformers that employ fewer radio-frequency chains are employed to offset expensive hardware but at the cost of lower multiplexing gains. Wideband hybrid beamforming also suffers from the beam-split effect arising from the subcarrier-independent (SI) analog beamformers. To overcome these limitations, this paper introduces a spatial path index modulation (SPIM) ISAC architecture, which transmits additional information bits via modulating the spatial paths between the base station and communications users. We design the SPIM-ISAC beamformers by first estimating both radar and communications parameters by developing beam-split-aware algorithms. Then, we propose to employ a family of hybrid beamforming techniques such as hybrid, SI, and subcarrier-dependent analog-only, and beam-split-aware beamformers. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed SPIM-ISAC approach exhibits significantly improved spectral efficiency performance in the presence of beam-split than that of even fully digital non-SPIM beamformers.
Security and privacy are important concerns in machine learning. End user devices often contain a wealth of data and this information is sensitive and should not be shared with servers or enterprises. As a result, federated learning was introduced to enable machine learning over large decentralized datasets while promising privacy by eliminating the need for data sharing. However, prior work has shown that shared gradients often contain private information and attackers can gain knowledge either through malicious modification of the architecture and parameters or by using optimization to approximate user data from the shared gradients. Despite this, most attacks have so far been limited in scale of number of clients, especially failing when client gradients are aggregated together using secure model aggregation. The attacks that still function are strongly limited in the number of clients attacked, amount of training samples they leak, or number of iterations they take to be trained. In this work, we introduce MANDRAKE, an attack that overcomes previous limitations to directly leak large amounts of client data even under secure aggregation across large numbers of clients. Furthermore, we break the anonymity of aggregation as the leaked data is identifiable and directly tied back to the clients they come from. We show that by sending clients customized convolutional parameters, the weight gradients of data points between clients will remain separate through aggregation. With an aggregation across many clients, prior work could only leak less than 1% of images. With the same number of non-zero parameters, and using only a single training iteration, MANDRAKE leaks 70-80% of data samples.
Communications systems to date are primarily designed with the goal of reliable transfer of digital sequences (bits). Next generation (NextG) communication systems are beginning to explore shifting this design paradigm to reliably executing a given task such as in task-oriented communications. In this paper, wireless signal classification is considered as the task for the NextG Radio Access Network (RAN), where edge devices collect wireless signals for spectrum awareness and communicate with the NextG base station (gNodeB) that needs to identify the signal label. Edge devices may not have sufficient processing power and may not be trusted to perform the signal classification task, whereas the transfer of signals to the gNodeB may not be feasible due to stringent delay, rate, and energy restrictions. Task-oriented communications is considered by jointly training the transmitter, receiver and classifier functionalities as an encoder-decoder pair for the edge device and the gNodeB. This approach improves the accuracy compared to the separated case of signal transfer followed by classification. Adversarial machine learning poses a major security threat to the use of deep learning for task-oriented communications. A major performance loss is shown when backdoor (Trojan) and adversarial (evasion) attacks target the training and test processes of task-oriented communications.
Image segmentation is still an open problem especially when intensities of the interested objects are overlapped due to the presence of intensity inhomogeneity (also known as bias field). To segment images with intensity inhomogeneities, a bias correction embedded level set model is proposed where Inhomogeneities are Estimated by Orthogonal Primary Functions (IEOPF). In the proposed model, the smoothly varying bias is estimated by a linear combination of a given set of orthogonal primary functions. An inhomogeneous intensity clustering energy is then defined and membership functions of the clusters described by the level set function are introduced to rewrite the energy as a data term of the proposed model. Similar to popular level set methods, a regularization term and an arc length term are also included to regularize and smooth the level set function, respectively. The proposed model is then extended to multichannel and multiphase patterns to segment colourful images and images with multiple objects, respectively. It has been extensively tested on both synthetic and real images that are widely used in the literature and public BrainWeb and IBSR datasets. Experimental results and comparison with state-of-the-art methods demonstrate that advantages of the proposed model in terms of bias correction and segmentation accuracy.