Optimizing Wirelessly Powered Crowd Sensing: Trading energy for data

To overcome the limited coverage in traditional wireless sensor networks, \emph{mobile crowd sensing} (MCS) has emerged as a new sensing paradigm. To achieve longer battery lives of user devices and incentive human involvement, this paper presents a novel approach that seamlessly integrates MCS with wireless power transfer, called \emph{wirelessly powered crowd sensing} (WPCS), for supporting crowd sensing with energy consumption and offering rewards as incentives. The optimization problem is formulated to simultaneously maximize the data utility and minimize the energy consumption for service operator, by jointly controlling wireless-power allocation at the \emph{access point} (AP) as well as sensing-data size, compression ratio, and sensor-transmission duration at \emph{mobile sensor} (MS). Given the fixed compression ratios, the optimal power allocation policy is shown to have a \emph{threshold}-based structure with respect to a defined \emph{crowd-sensing priority} function for each MS. Given fixed sensing-data utilities, the compression policy achieves the optimal compression ratio. Extensive simulations are also presented to verify the efficiency of the contributed mechanisms.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1711.0206

Co-Teaching for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation and Expansion

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) is known to trade a model's performance on a source domain for improving its performance on a target domain. To resolve the issue, Unsupervised Domain Expansion (UDE) has been proposed recently to adapt the model for the target domain as UDA does, and in the meantime maintain its performance on the source domain. For both UDA and UDE, a model tailored to a given domain, let it be the source or the target domain, is assumed to well handle samples from the given domain. We question the assumption by reporting the existence of cross-domain visual ambiguity: Due to the lack of a crystally clear boundary between the two domains, samples from one domain can be visually close to the other domain. We exploit this finding and accordingly propose in this paper Co-Teaching (CT) that consists of knowledge distillation based CT (kdCT) and mixup based CT (miCT). Specifically, kdCT transfers knowledge from a leader-teacher network and an assistant-teacher network to a student network, so the cross-domain visual ambiguity will be better handled by the student. Meanwhile, miCT further enhances the generalization ability of the student. Comprehensive experiments on two image-classification benchmarks and two driving-scene-segmentation benchmarks justify the viability of the proposed method

Hybrid Beamforming via the Kronecker Decomposition for the Millimeter-Wave Massive MIMO Systems

Despite its promising performance gain, the realization of mmWave massive MIMO still faces several practical challenges. In particular, implementing massive MIMO in the digital domain requires hundreds of RF chains matching the number of antennas. Furthermore, designing these components to operate at the mmWave frequencies is challenging and costly. These motivated the recent development of hybrid-beamforming where MIMO processing is divided for separate implementation in the analog and digital domains, called the analog and digital beamforming, respectively. Analog beamforming using a phase array introduces uni-modulus constraints on the beamforming coefficients, rendering the conventional MIMO techniques unsuitable and call for new designs. In this paper, we present a systematic design framework for hybrid beamforming for multi-cell multiuser massive MIMO systems over mmWave channels characterized by sparse propagation paths. The framework relies on the decomposition of analog beamforming vectors and path observation vectors into Kronecker products of factors being uni-modulus vectors. Exploiting properties of Kronecker mixed products, different factors of the analog beamformer are designed for either nulling interference paths or coherently combining data paths. Furthermore, a channel estimation scheme is designed for enabling the proposed hybrid beamforming. The scheme estimates the AoA of data and interference paths by analog beam scanning and data-path gains by analog beam steering. The performance of the channel estimation scheme is analyzed. In particular, the AoA spectrum resulting from beam scanning, which displays the magnitude distribution of paths over the AoA range, is derived in closed-form. It is shown that the inter-cell interference level diminishes inversely with the array size, the square root of pilot sequence length and the spatial separation between paths.Comment: Submitted to IEEE JSAC Special Issue on Millimeter Wave Communications for Future Mobile Networks, minor revisio

Over-the-Air Integrated Sensing, Communication, and Computation in IoT Networks

To facilitate the development of Internet of Things (IoT) services, tremendous IoT devices are deployed in the wireless network to collect and pass data to the server for further processing. Aiming at improving the data sensing and delivering efficiency, the integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) technique has been proposed to design dual-functional signals for both radar sensing and data communication. To accelerate the data processing, the function computation via signal transmission is enabled by over-the-air computation (AirComp), which is based on the analog-wave addition property in a multi-access channel. As a natural combination, the emerging technology namely over-the-air integrated sensing, communication, and computation (Air-ISCC) adopts both the promising performances of ISAC and AirComp to improve the spectrum efficiency and reduce latency by enabling simultaneous sensing, communication, and computation. In this article, we provide a promptly overview of Air-ISCC by introducing the fundamentals, discussing the advanced techniques, and identifying the applications

Renewable Powered Cellular Networks: Energy Field Modeling and Network Coverage

Powering radio access networks using renewables, such as wind and solar power, promises dramatic reduction in the network operation cost and the network carbon footprints. However, the spatial variation of the energy field can lead to fluctuations in power supplied to the network and thereby affects its coverage. This warrants research on quantifying the aforementioned negative effect and countermeasure techniques, motivating the current work. First, a novel energy field model is presented, in which fixed maximum energy intensity $\gamma$ occurs at Poisson distributed locations, called energy centers. The intensities fall off from the centers following an exponential decay function of squared distance and the energy intensity at an arbitrary location is given by the decayed intensity from the nearest energy center. The product between the energy center density and the exponential rate of the decay function, denoted as $\psi$, is shown to determine the energy field distribution. Next, the paper considers a cellular downlink network powered by harvesting energy from the energy field and analyzes its network coverage. For the case of harvesters deployed at the same sites as base stations (BSs), as $\gamma$ increases, the mobile outage probability is shown to scale as $(c \gamma^{-\pi\psi}+p)$, where $p$ is the outage probability corresponding to a flat energy field and $c$ a constant. Subsequently, a simple scheme is proposed for counteracting the energy randomness by spatial averaging. Specifically, distributed harvesters are deployed in clusters and the generated energy from the same cluster is aggregated and then redistributed to BSs. As the cluster size increases, the power supplied to each BS is shown to converge to a constant proportional to the number of harvesters per BS.Comment: double-column, 13 pages; to appear in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication

Towards Efficient and Effective Text-to-Video Retrieval with Coarse-to-Fine Visual Representation Learning

In recent years, text-to-video retrieval methods based on CLIP have experienced rapid development. The primary direction of evolution is to exploit the much wider gamut of visual and textual cues to achieve alignment. Concretely, those methods with impressive performance often design a heavy fusion block for sentence (words)-video (frames) interaction, regardless of the prohibitive computation complexity. Nevertheless, these approaches are not optimal in terms of feature utilization and retrieval efficiency. To address this issue, we adopt multi-granularity visual feature learning, ensuring the model's comprehensiveness in capturing visual content features spanning from abstract to detailed levels during the training phase. To better leverage the multi-granularity features, we devise a two-stage retrieval architecture in the retrieval phase. This solution ingeniously balances the coarse and fine granularity of retrieval content. Moreover, it also strikes a harmonious equilibrium between retrieval effectiveness and efficiency. Specifically, in training phase, we design a parameter-free text-gated interaction block (TIB) for fine-grained video representation learning and embed an extra Pearson Constraint to optimize cross-modal representation learning. In retrieval phase, we use coarse-grained video representations for fast recall of top-k candidates, which are then reranked by fine-grained video representations. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness. Notably, our method achieves comparable performance with the current state-of-the-art methods while being nearly 50 times faster