Direct-to-satellite (DtS) communication has gained importance recently to support globally connected Internet of things (IoT) networks. However, relatively long distances of densely deployed satellite networks around the Earth cause a high path loss. In addition, since high complexity operations such as beamforming, tracking and equalization have to be performed in IoT devices partially, both the hardware complexity and the need for high-capacity batteries of IoT devices increase. The reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have the potential to increase the energy-efficiency and to perform complex signal processing over the transmission environment instead of IoT devices. But, RISs need the information of the cascaded channel in order to change the phase of the incident signal. This study proposes graph attention networks (GATs) for the challenging channel estimation problem and examines the performance of DtS IoT networks for different RIS configurations under GAT channel estimation. It is shown that the proposed GAT both demonstrates a higher performance with increased robustness under changing conditions and has lower computational complexity compared to conventional deep learning methods. Moreover, bit error rate performance is investigated for RIS designs with discrete and non-uniform phase shifts under channel estimation based on the proposed method. One of the findings in this study is that the channel models of the operating environment and the performance of the channel estimation method must be considered during RIS design to exploit performance improvement as far as possible.
Federated learning (FL) aims to minimize the communication complexity of training a model over heterogeneous data distributed across many clients. A common approach is local methods, where clients take multiple optimization steps over local data before communicating with the server (e.g., FedAvg). Local methods can exploit similarity between clients' data. However, in existing analyses, this comes at the cost of slow convergence in terms of the dependence on the number of communication rounds R. On the other hand, global methods, where clients simply return a gradient vector in each round (e.g., SGD), converge faster in terms of R but fail to exploit the similarity between clients even when clients are homogeneous. We propose FedChain, an algorithmic framework that combines the strengths of local methods and global methods to achieve fast convergence in terms of R while leveraging the similarity between clients. Using FedChain, we instantiate algorithms that improve upon previously known rates in the general convex and PL settings, and are near-optimal (via an algorithm-independent lower bound that we show) for problems that satisfy strong convexity. Empirical results support this theoretical gain over existing methods.
Internet of things (IoT) connects all items to the Internet through information-sensing devices to exchange information for intelligent identification and management. Sybil attack is a famous and crippling attack in IoT. Most of the previous methods of detecting Sybil attacks in IoT mainly focus on static IoT while there are very rare methods applicable to mobile IoT. In this paper, a novel, lightweight, and distributive detection scheme based on edge computing is proposed for detecting Sybil attacks in mobile IoT. In the proposed scheme, a detection consists of two rounds. In each round, member nodes are required to send packets to edge nodes. Edge nodes calculate a possible interval of the received signal strength indication (RSSI) from the first round and check whether the RSSI from the second round is in the interval to detect Sybil attack. Extensive experimental studies are included to show that the presented approach outperforms many existing approaches in terms of true detection and false detection rates. Moreover, experimental results show that the fault tolerance design in the proposed approach greatly enhances the detection scheme.
Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) creates a platform to exploit the synergy between two powerful functionalities that have been developing separately. However, the interference management and resource allocation between sensing and communication have not been fully studied. In this paper, we consider the design of perceptive mobile networks (PMNs) by adding sensing capability to current cellular networks. To avoid the full-duplex operation, we propose the PMN with distributed target monitoring terminals (TMTs) where passive TMTs are deployed over wireless networks to locate the sensing target (ST). We jointly optimize the transmit and receive beamformers towards the communication user terminals (UEs) and the ST by alternating-optimization (AO) and prove its convergence. To reduce computation complexity and obtain physical insights, we further investigate the use of linear transceivers, including zero forcing and beam synthesis (B-syn). Our analysis revealed interesting physical insights regarding interference management and resource allocation between sensing and communication: 1) instead of forming dedicated sensing signals, it is more efficient to redesign the communication signals for both communication and sensing purposes and "leak" communication energy for sensing; 2) the amount of energy leakage from one UE to the ST depends on their relative locations.
In the upcoming 6G era, existing terrestrial networks have evolved toward space-air-ground integrated networks (SAGIN), providing ultra-high data rates, seamless network coverage, and ubiquitous intelligence for communications of applications and services. However, conventional communications in SAGIN still face data confidentiality issues. Fortunately, the concept of Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) over SAGIN is able to provide information-theoretic security for secure communications in SAGIN with quantum cryptography. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the quantum-secured SAGIN which is feasible to achieve proven secure communications using quantum mechanics to protect data channels between space, air, and ground nodes. Moreover, we propose a universal QKD service provisioning framework to minimize the cost of QKD services under the uncertainty and dynamics of communications in quantum-secured SAGIN. In this framework, fiber-based QKD services are deployed in passive optical networks with the advantages of low loss and high stability. Moreover, the widely covered and flexible satellite- and UAV-based QKD services are provisioned as a supplement during the real-time data transmission phase. Finally, to examine the effectiveness of the proposed concept and framework, a case study of quantum-secured SAGIN in the Metaverse is conducted where uncertain and dynamic factors of the secure communications in Metaverse applications are effectively resolved in the proposed framework.
Molecular communication has a key role to play in future medical applications, including detecting, analyzing, and addressing infectious disease outbreaks. Overcoming inter-symbol interference (ISI) is one of the key challenges in the design of molecular communication systems. In this paper, we propose to optimize the detection interval to minimize the impact of ISI while ensuring the accurate detection of the transmitted information symbol, which is suitable for the absorbing and passive receivers. For tractability, based on the signal-to-interference difference (SID) and signal-to-interference-and-noise amplitude ratio (SINAR), we propose a modified-SINAR (mSINAR) to measure the bit error rate (BER) performance for the molecular communication system with a variable detection interval. Besides, we derive the optimal detection interval in closed form. Using simulation results, we show that the BER performance of our proposed mSINAR scheme is superior to the competing schemes, and achieves similar performance to optimal intervals found by the exhaustive search.
The concept of federated learning (FL) was first proposed by Google in 2016. Thereafter, FL has been widely studied for the feasibility of application in various fields due to its potential to make full use of data without compromising the privacy. However, limited by the capacity of wireless data transmission, the employment of federated learning on mobile devices has been making slow progress in practical. The development and commercialization of the 5th generation (5G) mobile networks has shed some light on this. In this paper, we analyze the challenges of existing federated learning schemes for mobile devices and propose a novel cross-device federated learning framework, which utilizes the anonymous communication technology and ring signature to protect the privacy of participants while reducing the computation overhead of mobile devices participating in FL. In addition, our scheme implements a contribution-based incentive mechanism to encourage mobile users to participate in FL. We also give a case study of autonomous driving. Finally, we present the performance evaluation of the proposed scheme and discuss some open issues in federated learning.
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.
Multi-camera vehicle tracking is one of the most complicated tasks in Computer Vision as it involves distinct tasks including Vehicle Detection, Tracking, and Re-identification. Despite the challenges, multi-camera vehicle tracking has immense potential in transportation applications including speed, volume, origin-destination (O-D), and routing data generation. Several recent works have addressed the multi-camera tracking problem. However, most of the effort has gone towards improving accuracy on high-quality benchmark datasets while disregarding lower camera resolutions, compression artifacts and the overwhelming amount of computational power and time needed to carry out this task on its edge and thus making it prohibitive for large-scale and real-time deployment. Therefore, in this work we shed light on practical issues that should be addressed for the design of a multi-camera tracking system to provide actionable and timely insights. Moreover, we propose a real-time city-scale multi-camera vehicle tracking system that compares favorably to computationally intensive alternatives and handles real-world, low-resolution CCTV instead of idealized and curated video streams. To show its effectiveness, in addition to integration into the Regional Integrated Transportation Information System (RITIS), we participated in the 2021 NVIDIA AI City multi-camera tracking challenge and our method is ranked among the top five performers on the public leaderboard.
Deep graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved excellent results on various tasks on increasingly large graph datasets with millions of nodes and edges. However, memory complexity has become a major obstacle when training deep GNNs for practical applications due to the immense number of nodes, edges, and intermediate activations. To improve the scalability of GNNs, prior works propose smart graph sampling or partitioning strategies to train GNNs with a smaller set of nodes or sub-graphs. In this work, we study reversible connections, group convolutions, weight tying, and equilibrium models to advance the memory and parameter efficiency of GNNs. We find that reversible connections in combination with deep network architectures enable the training of overparameterized GNNs that significantly outperform existing methods on multiple datasets. Our models RevGNN-Deep (1001 layers with 80 channels each) and RevGNN-Wide (448 layers with 224 channels each) were both trained on a single commodity GPU and achieve an ROC-AUC of $87.74 \pm 0.13$ and $88.14 \pm 0.15$ on the ogbn-proteins dataset. To the best of our knowledge, RevGNN-Deep is the deepest GNN in the literature by one order of magnitude. Please visit our project website //www.deepgcns.org/arch/gnn1000 for more information.
High spectral dimensionality and the shortage of annotations make hyperspectral image (HSI) classification a challenging problem. Recent studies suggest that convolutional neural networks can learn discriminative spatial features, which play a paramount role in HSI interpretation. However, most of these methods ignore the distinctive spectral-spatial characteristic of hyperspectral data. In addition, a large amount of unlabeled data remains an unexploited gold mine for efficient data use. Therefore, we proposed an integration of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and probabilistic graphical models for HSI classification. Specifically, we used a spectral-spatial generator and a discriminator to identify land cover categories of hyperspectral cubes. Moreover, to take advantage of a large amount of unlabeled data, we adopted a conditional random field to refine the preliminary classification results generated by GANs. Experimental results obtained using two commonly studied datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework achieved encouraging classification accuracy using a small number of data for training.