34 research outputs found
Minimizing Age of Collection for Multiple Access in Wireless Industrial Internet of Things
This paper investigates the information freshness of Industrial Internet of
Things (IIoT) systems, where each IoT device makes a partial observation of a
common target and transmits the information update to a central receiver to
recover the complete observation. We consider the age of collection (AoC)
performance as a measure of information freshness. Unlike the conventional age
of information (AoI) metric, the instantaneous AoC decreases only when all
cooperative packets for a common observation are successfully received. Hence,
effectively allocating wireless time-frequency resources among IoT devices to
achieve a low average AoC at the central receiver is paramount. Three multiple
access schemes are considered in this paper: time-division multiple access
(TDMA) without retransmission, TDMA with retransmission, and frequency-division
multiple access (FDMA). First, our theoretical analysis indicates that TDMA
with retransmission outperforms the other two schemes in terms of average AoC.
Subsequently, we implement information update systems based on the three
schemes on software-defined radios. Experimental results demonstrate that
considering the medium access control (MAC) overhead in practice, FDMA achieves
a lower average AoC than TDMA with or without retransmission in the high
signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. In contrast, TDMA with retransmission
provides a stable and relatively low average AoC over a wide SNR range, which
is favorable for IIoT applications. Overall, we present a
theoretical-plus-experimental investigation of AoC in IIoT information update
systems
Low-Power Random Access for Timely Status Update: Packet-based or Connection-based?
This paper investigates low-power random access protocols for timely status
update systems with age of information (AoI) requirements. AoI characterizes
information freshness, formally defined as the time elapsed since the
generation of the last successfully received update. Considering an extensive
network, a fundamental problem is how to schedule massive transmitters to
access the wireless channel to achieve low network-wide AoI and high energy
efficiency. In conventional packet-based random access protocols, transmitters
contend for the channel by sending the whole data packet. When the packet
duration is long, the time and transmit power wasted due to packet collisions
is considerable. In contrast, connection-based random access protocols first
establish connections with the receiver before the data packet is transmitted.
Intuitively, from an information freshness perspective, there should be
conditions favoring either side. This paper presents a comparative study of the
average AoI of packet-based and connection-based random access protocols, given
an average transmit power budget. Specifically, we consider slotted Aloha (SA)
and frame slotted Aloha (FSA) as representatives of packet-based random access
and design a request-then-access (RTA) protocol to study the AoI of
connection-based random access. We derive closed-form average AoI and average
transmit power consumption formulas for different protocols. Our analyses
indicate that the use of packet-based or connection-based protocols depends
mainly on the payload size of update packets and the transmit power budget. In
particular, RTA saves power and reduces AoI significantly, especially when the
payload size is large. Overall, our investigation provides insights into the
practical design of random access protocols for low-power timely status update
systems
Semantic Communication-Empowered Physical-layer Network Coding
In a two-way relay channel (TWRC), physical-layer network coding (PNC)
doubles the system throughput by turning superimposed signals transmitted
simultaneously by different end nodes into useful network-coded information
(known as PNC decoding). Prior works indicated that the PNC decoding
performance is affected by the relative phase offset between the received
signals from different nodes. In particular, some "bad" relative phase offsets
could lead to huge performance degradation. Previous solutions to mitigate the
relative phase offset effect were limited to the conventional bit-oriented
communication paradigm, aiming at delivering a given information stream as
quickly and reliably as possible. In contrast, this paper puts forth the first
semantic communication-empowered PNC-enabled TWRC to address the relative phase
offset issue, referred to as SC-PNC. Despite the bad relative phase offsets,
SC-PNC directly extracts the semantic meaning of transmitted messages rather
than ensuring accurate bit stream transmission. We jointly design deep neural
network (DNN)-based transceivers at the end nodes and propose a semantic PNC
decoder at the relay. Taking image delivery as an example, experimental results
show that the SC-PNC TWRC achieves high and stable reconstruction quality for
images under different channel conditions and relative phase offsets, compared
with the conventional bit-oriented counterparts
Channel Cycle Time: A New Measure of Short-term Fairness
This paper puts forth a new metric, dubbed channel cycle time (CCT), to
measure the short-term fairness of communication networks. CCT characterizes
the average duration between two consecutive successful transmissions of a
user, during which all other users successfully accessed the channel at least
once. In contrast to existing short-term fairness measures, CCT provides more
comprehensive insight into the transient dynamics of communication networks,
with a particular focus on users' delays and jitter. To validate the efficacy
of our approach, we analytically characterize the CCTs for two classical
communication protocols: slotted Aloha and CSMA/CA. The analysis demonstrates
that CSMA/CA exhibits superior short-term fairness over slotted Aloha. Beyond
its role as a measurement metric, CCT has broader implications as a guiding
principle for the design of future communication networks by emphasizing
factors like fairness, delay, and jitter in short-term behaviors
Device Activity Detection in mMTC with Low-Resolution ADC: A New Protocol
This paper investigates the effect of low-resolution analog-to-digital
converters (ADCs) on device activity detection in massive machine-type
communications (mMTC). The low-resolution ADCs induce two challenges on the
device activity detection compared with the traditional setup with assumption
of infinite ADC resolution. First, the codebook design for signal quantization
by the low-resolution ADCs is particularly important since a good codebook
design can lead to small quantization error on the received signal, which in
turn has significant influence on the activity detector performance. To this
end, prior information about the received signal power is needed, which depends
on the number of active devices . This is sharply different from the
activity detection problem in traditional setups, in which the knowledge of
is not required by the BS as a prerequisite. Second, the covariance-based
approach achieves good activity detection performance in traditional setups
while it is not clear if it can still achieve good performance in this paper.
To solve the above challenges, we propose a communication protocol that
consists of an estimator for and a detector for active device identities:
1) For the estimator, the technical difficulty is that the design of the ADC
quantizer and the estimation of are closely intertwined and doing one needs
the information/execution from the other. We propose a progressive estimator
which iteratively performs the estimation of and the design of the ADC
quantizer; 2) For the activity detector, we propose a custom-designed
stochastic gradient descent algorithm to estimate the active device identities.
Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the communication protocol.Comment: Submitted to IEEE for possible publicatio
High expression of thymosin beta 10 predicts poor prognosis for hepatocellular carcinoma after hepatectomy
B cell antigen receptor signal strength and peripheral B cell development are regulated by a 9-O-acetyl sialic acid esterase
We show that the enzymatic acetylation and deacetylation of a cell surface carbohydrate controls B cell development, signaling, and immunological tolerance. Mice with a mutation in sialate:O-acetyl esterase, an enzyme that specifically removes acetyl moieties from the 9-OH position of Ξ±2β6-linked sialic acid, exhibit enhanced B cell receptor (BCR) activation, defects in peripheral B cell development, and spontaneously develop antichromatin autoantibodies and glomerular immune complex deposits. The 9-O-acetylation state of sialic acid regulates the function of CD22, a Siglec that functions in vivo as an inhibitor of BCR signaling. These results describe a novel catalytic regulator of B cell signaling and underscore the crucial role of inhibitory signaling in the maintenance of immunological tolerance in the B lineage