Content delivery over multi-antenna wireless networks

The past few decades have witnessed unprecedented advances in information technology, which have significantly shaped the way we acquire and process information in our daily lives. Wireless communications has become the main means of access to data through mobile devices, resulting in a continuous exponential growth in wireless data traffic, mainly driven by the demand for high quality content. Various technologies have been proposed by researchers to tackle this growth in 5G and beyond, including the use of increasing number of antenna elements, integrated point-to-multipoint delivery and caching, which constitute the core of this thesis. In particular, we study non-orthogonal content delivery in multiuser multiple-input-single-output (MISO) systems. First, a joint beamforming strategy for simultaneous delivery of broadcast and unicast services is investigated, based on layered division multiplexing (LDM) as a means of superposition coding. The system performance in terms of minimum required power under prescribed quality-of-service (QoS) requirements is examined in comparison with time division multiplexing (TDM). It is demonstrated through simulations that the non-orthogonal delivery strategy based on LDM significantly outperforms the orthogonal strategy based on TDM in terms of system throughput and reliability. To facilitate efficient implementation of the LDM-based beamforming design, we further propose a dual decomposition-based distributed approach. Next, we study an efficient multicast beamforming design in cache-aided multiuser MISO systems, exploiting proactive content placement and coded delivery. It is observed that the complexity of this problem grows exponentially with the number of subfiles delivered to each user in each time slot, which itself grows exponentially with the number of users in the system. Therefore, we propose a low-complexity alternative through time-sharing that limits the number of subfiles that can be received by a user in each time slot. Moreover, a joint design of content delivery and multicast beamforming is proposed to further enhance the system performance, under the constraint on maximum number of subfiles each user can decode in each time slot. Finally, conclusions are drawn in Chapter 5, followed by an outlook for future works.Open Acces

Activity-aware Human Mobility Prediction with Hierarchical Graph Attention Recurrent Network

Human mobility prediction is a fundamental task essential for various applications, including urban planning, location-based services and intelligent transportation systems. Existing methods often ignore activity information crucial for reasoning human preferences and routines, or adopt a simplified representation of the dependencies between time, activities and locations. To address these issues, we present Hierarchical Graph Attention Recurrent Network (HGARN) for human mobility prediction. Specifically, we construct a hierarchical graph based on all users' history mobility records and employ a Hierarchical Graph Attention Module to capture complex time-activity-location dependencies. This way, HGARN can learn representations with rich human travel semantics to model user preferences at the global level. We also propose a model-agnostic history-enhanced confidence (MAHEC) label to focus our model on each user's individual-level preferences. Finally, we introduce a Temporal Module, which employs recurrent structures to jointly predict users' next activities (as an auxiliary task) and their associated locations. By leveraging the predicted future user activity features through a hierarchical and residual design, the accuracy of the location predictions can be further enhanced. For model evaluation, we test the performances of our HGARN against existing SOTAs in both the recurring and explorative settings. The recurring setting focuses on assessing models' capabilities to capture users' individual-level preferences, while the results in the explorative setting tend to reflect the power of different models to learn users' global-level preferences. Overall, our model outperforms other baselines significantly in all settings based on two real-world human mobility data benchmarks. Source codes of HGARN are available at https://github.com/YihongT/HGARN.Comment: 11 page

Self-Asymmetric Invertible Network for Compression-Aware Image Rescaling

High-resolution (HR) images are usually downscaled to low-resolution (LR) ones for better display and afterward upscaled back to the original size to recover details. Recent work in image rescaling formulates downscaling and upscaling as a unified task and learns a bijective mapping between HR and LR via invertible networks. However, in real-world applications (e.g., social media), most images are compressed for transmission. Lossy compression will lead to irreversible information loss on LR images, hence damaging the inverse upscaling procedure and degrading the reconstruction accuracy. In this paper, we propose the Self-Asymmetric Invertible Network (SAIN) for compression-aware image rescaling. To tackle the distribution shift, we first develop an end-to-end asymmetric framework with two separate bijective mappings for high-quality and compressed LR images, respectively. Then, based on empirical analysis of this framework, we model the distribution of the lost information (including downscaling and compression) using isotropic Gaussian mixtures and propose the Enhanced Invertible Block to derive high-quality/compressed LR images in one forward pass. Besides, we design a set of losses to regularize the learned LR images and enhance the invertibility. Extensive experiments demonstrate the consistent improvements of SAIN across various image rescaling datasets in terms of both quantitative and qualitative evaluation under standard image compression formats (i.e., JPEG and WebP).Comment: Accepted by AAAI 2023. Code is available at https://github.com/yang-jin-hai/SAI

Spectrum and energy efficient multi-antenna spectrum sensing for green UAV communication

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) communication is a promising technology that provides swift and flexible on-demand wireless connectivity for devices without infrastructure support. With recent developments in UAVs, spectrum and energy efficient green UAV communication has become crucial. To deal with this issue, Spectrum Sharing Policy (SSP) is introduced to support green UAV communication. Spectrum sensing in SSP must be carefully formulated to control interference to the primary users and ground communications. In this paper, we propose spectrum sensing for opportunistic spectrum access in green UAV communication to improve the spectrum utilization efficiency. Different from most existing works, we focus on the problem of spectrum sensing of randomly arriving primary signals in the presence of non-Gaussian noise/interference. We propose a novel and improved p-norm-based spectrum sensing scheme to improve the spectrum utilization efficiency in green UAV communication. Firstly, we construct the p-norm decision statistic based on the assumption that the random arrivals of signals follow a Poisson process. Then, we analyze and derive the approximate analytical expressions of the false-alarm and detection probabilities by utilizing the central limit theorem. Simulation results illustrate the validity and superiority of the proposed scheme when the primary signals are corrupted by additive non-Gaussian noise and arrive randomly during spectrum sensing in the green UAV communication

Modified Cramer-Rao bound for M-FSK signal parameter estimation in Cauchy and Gaussian noise

The Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) provides an efficient standard for evaluating the quality of standard parameter estimators. In this paper, a modified Cramer-Rao bounds (MCRB) for modulation parameter estimations of frequency-shift-keying (FSK) signals is proposed under the condition of the Gaussian and non-Gaussian additive interference. We extend the MCRB to the estimation of a vector of non-random parameters in the presence of nuisance parameters. Moreover, the MCRB is applied to the joint estimation of phase offset, frequency offsets, frequency deviation, and symbol period of FSK signal with two important special cases of alpha stable distributions, namely, the Cauchy and the Gaussian. The extensive simulation studies are conducted to contrast the MCRB for the modulation parameter vector in different noise environments

Blind parameter estimation of M-FSK signals in the presence of alpha-stable noise

Blind estimation of parameters for M-ary frequency-shift-keying (M-FSK) signals is great of importance in intelligent receivers. Many existing algorithms have assumed white Gaussian noise. However, their performance severely degrades when grossly corrupted data, i.e., outliers, exist. This paper solves this issue by developing a novel approach for parameter estimation of M-FSK signals in the presence of alpha-stable noise. Specifically, the proposed method exploits the generalized first- and second-order cyclostationarity of M-FSK signals with alpha-stable noise, which results in closed-form solutions for unknown parameters in both time and frequency domains. As a merit, it is computationally efficient and thus can be used for signal preprocessing, symbol timing estimation, signal and noise power estimation. Furthermore, substantial theoretical analysis on the performance of the proposed approach is provided. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed method is robust to alpha-stable noise and that it outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms in many challenging scenarios