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This paper presents an algorithm to optimize the base position of a mobile manipulator to meet the requirements of local painting tasks. Considering the physical limits and singularity of the manipulator, the feasible base positions are first discretely calculated with the given poses of the end effector by inverse kinematics. Then, the joint-level performance criteria are proposed with respect to the requirements of the painting process. The weight coefficients are also determined by the critic method to balance the contribution of every criterion. Thus, the globally near-optimal base position is selected by sorting all feasible positions according to the evaluation criteria. The experimental results show that the planning result is well executed and has an acceptable computation time, thus demonstrating that the algorithm is both practical and effective compared with previous methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In intelligent transportation systems (ITSs), the communication between the base station (BS) and the vehicles can form a virtual multiple-input multiple-out put (VMIMO) vehicle communication system. This paper addresses the issue of channel estimation in a virtual MIMO system that simultaneously adopt a smart antenna (SA). First, based on quaternion theory, a novel algorithm named quaternion noncircular MUSIC (QNC-MUSIC) is proposed, and direction of arrival (DOA) estimation is achieved for circular and noncircular signals. Then, a dimension reduction procedure is performed for the parameter search by employing the partial derivative of the spectrum function with respect to the noncircular phase; thus, a novel dimensional reduction noncircular MUSIC (DRNC-MUSIC) algorithm with a low computational complexity is proposed for DOA and polarization estimation of circular signals and noncircular signals. Finally, numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the parameter estimation performance of the proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Small cells are introduced to cellular systems to enhance coverage and improve capacity. Densely deploying small cells can not only offload the traffic of macrocells but also provide an energy- and cost-efficient way to meet the sharp increase in traffic demands in mobile networks. However, such a cell deployment paradigm also leads to heterogeneous network (HetNet) infrastructure and raises new challenges for cell planning. In this paper, we study the cell planning issue in the HetNet. Our optimization task is to select a subset of candidate sites to deploy macro or small cells to minimize the total cost of ownership (TCO) or the energy consumption of the cellular system while satisfying practical constraints. We introduce approximation algorithms to cope with two different cell-planning cases, which are both NP-hard. First, we discuss the macrocell-only case. Our proposed algorithm achieves an approximation ratio of O(\log R) in this scenario, where R is the maximum achievable capacity of macrocells. Then, we introduce an O(\log \widetildeR)-approximation algorithm to the small-cell scenario, where \widetildeR is the maximum achievable capacity of a macrocell with small cells overlaid on it. Numerical results indicate that the HetNet can significantly reduce the TCO and the energy consumption of the cellular system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, a novel scheme is proposed to optimize the effectiveness of the device-to-device (D2D) enabled vehicular communications (D2D-V), which are underlaid in cellular networks, where the uplink channel allocated to one cellular user (CU) is reused by the multiple D2D-V links. To develop a well-functioning D2D-V system, the sum rate of all D2D-V links is necessary to be maximized, and also the reliability of the co-channel CU to infrastructure has to be guaranteed with the CU interference constraint. Unlike the traditional statical D2D systems, the D2D-V system suffers with high mobility and channel uncertainty. Therefore, the CU interference constraint is formulated as a probabilistic function by the Bernstein approximation, the constraint attempts to address the mobile channel fluctuations. Besides, the tractable approximate constraint is reformulated as two separable structure, this reformulated constraint attempts to determine the near-optimal solutions more efficiently. Since the objective function with a logarithmic form is nonconvex, successive convex approximation is applied to transform the nonconvex problem into the convex problem. The dual decomposition is used to determine the near-optimal solutions. After the problem is reformulated, a distributed robust power control algorithm is proposed to perform the chance-constrained optimization. Numerical simulations are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme. The simulation results show the impacts of system performance when applying the proposed scheme in vehicular environments with high mobility. The proposed optimization schemes are further verified by comparing with the existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How to stimulate the devices to participate is a key problem in the device-to-device (D2D) communications, especially when there are multiple base stations in practice. On one hand, the base station needs to lower the price to compete with other base stations for attracting more devices. On the other hand, the base station needs to increase the price to obtain more benefit. In this paper, we propose an optimal multiprincipal multiagent contract design to tackle such a challenge. Specifically, we formulate the multiprincipal contract design problem as a game theoretic optimization problem, where the objective of each principle (base station) through contract design is to maximize its overall utility obtaining from the trade with agents (devices) subject to the individual rationality and incentive compatibility constraints. By solving the game theoretic optimization problems, we can obtain the equilibrium contract where the contracts of different principals reach an equilibrium and any deviation from a single principal will lead to the degradation of its own utility. Moreover, under the equilibrium, both the individual rationality and incentive compatibility constraints are satisfied, i.e., all agents will choose the corresponding contract according to their types to reach the optimal nonnegative utilities. Simulation results show that compared with the monoprincipal contract design, both the utilities of devices and the social welfare can be improved with the multiprincipal contract design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is a promising scheme for the fifth generation (5G) of mobile communication systems. In this scheme, transmission to multiple users is performed on the same subchannel using superposition coding and successive interference cancellation. In this paper, we focus on a multi-cell network with two users’ data traffic models, namely elastic and streaming. We exploit the NOMA scheme in order to maximize the download elastic traffic rate at cells, without degrading the download streaming traffic rates. Since elastic traffic rates at different cells are interactive, we maximize the total elastic traffic rates assuming either perfect or partial channel state information available at each base station subject to a target rate for streaming users. Because of the interference due to NOMA as well as the interference among different cells, subchannel assignment and power allocation affect the system performance significantly. For this reason, we propose an iterative algorithm to jointly solve the subchannel assignment and the power allocation problem via the Hungarian algorithm and successive convex approximation, respectively. Finally, our simulation results show the efficiency of the proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In opportunistic mobile networks (OppNets), a large amount of energy is consumed by idle listening, instead of infrequent data exchange. This makes energy saving a challenging and fundamental problem in OppNets since nodes are typically battery powered. Asynchronous duty-cycle operation is a promising approach for energy saving in OppNets; however, if its working schedule is not effectively designed, it may also cause significant network performance degradation. Therefore, it is pressing to design an energy-efficient working schedule for duty-cycle OppNets. In this paper, we first analyze the contact process in duty-cycle OppNets and then propose an adaptive working schedule for duty-cycle OppNets. The proposed adaptive working schedule uses the past recorded contact histories to predict future contact information to adaptively configure the working schedule of each node in the network. Finally, extensive real trace-driven simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of our proposed adaptive working schedule. Extensive real trace-driven simulation results demonstrate that our proposed adaptive working schedule is superior to the random working schedule and the periodical working schedule algorithms in terms of the number of effect contacts, delivery ratio, and delivery delay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deploying femtocells underlaying macrocells is a promising way to improve the capacity and enhance the coverage of cellular systems. However, such a two-tier network also gives rise to a cross-tier and intratier interference issue that should be properly addressed to acquire the potential performance gain. In this paper, we study the resource-allocation (RA) problem in a two-tier orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) access-based heterogeneous cellular network, where the femtocells that employ a closed access strategy are equipped with a cognitive radio (CR) function to identify radio environment so that they can share subchannels with the macrocells without generating excessive interference to the macrocell users (MUs), which fall into the coverage of the femtocells. We formulate an optimization task to maximize the sum throughput of the femtocell users (FUs) under the consideration of imperfect spectrum sensing and channel uncertainty while controlling the interference to the MUs below their bearable thresholds in the sense of probability. We introduce a conservative convex approximation to the formulated problem and develop a fast algorithm to solve it by exploiting its structure. Simulation results show that our proposal can improve the throughput of the FUs with almost no changes in the infrastructure of the cellular network. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Spectral efficiency improvement is essential for mobile systems development in the light of growing demand for high data transmission rate. The Time-domain synchronous OFDM transmission system increases bandwidth utilization by time-domain channel estimation without any support from frequency-domain pilot signals. Channel identification methods use a training sequence, added at the beginning of every OFDM symbol. Sparse nature of the channel impulse response, which manifests itself during wireless broadband transmission, enables one to implement compressed sensing techniques for channel identification. Channel sparsity reduces the number of measurement samples required in channel reconstruction procedure, but they should be taken from the inter-block interference (IBI) free part of the received training sequence. If maximum delay spread of the channel is comparable with the length of the training sequence, the number of measurements within the IBI-free region may be insufficient for accurate channel identification. This paper discusses a new iterative approach to sparse channels estimation, which uses the measurements from outside the IBI-free region. The proposed solution is examined for simulated transmission over randomly generated doubly-selective channels when compared with the conventional CS technique and perfect channel state information condition. The experiments reveal an enhancement of the transmission quality in terms of SER for slow-time selective channels when both delays and gains of the channel impulse response are estimated with the orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm. Further improvement, also for transmission over moderate varying channels, is observed when the path delays are found in advance. A suitable frame structure is proposed to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The introduction of fourth-generation wireless technologies has fueled the rapid development of cellular networks, significantly increasing the energy consumption and the expenditures of mobile network operators (MNOs). In addition, network underutilization during low-traffic periods (e.g., night zone) has motivated a new business model, namely, infrastructure sharing, which allows the MNOs to have their traffic served by other MNOs in the same geographic area, thus enabling them to switch off part of their network. In this paper, we propose a novel infrastructure-sharing algorithm for multioperator environments, which enables the deactivation of underutilized base stations during low-traffic periods. Motivated by the conflicting interests of the MNOs and the necessity for effective solutions, we introduce a game-theoretic framework that enables the MNOs to individually estimate the switching-off probabilities that reduce their expected financial cost. Our approach reaches dominant strategy equilibrium, which is the strategy that minimizes the cost of each player. Finally, we provide extensive analytical and experimental results to estimate the potential energy and cost savings that can be achieved in multioperator environments, incentivizing the MNOs to apply the proposed scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current anonymity techniques for mobile opportunistic networks typically use obfuscation algorithms to hide node's identity behind other nodes. These algorithms are not well suited to sparse and disconnection prone networks with large number of malicious nodes and new opportunistic, adaptive. So, new, opportunistic, adaptive fully localized mechanisms are needed for improving user anonymity. This paper proposes reputation aware localized adaptive obfuscation for mobile opportunistic networks that comprises of two complementary techniques: opportunistic collaborative testing of nodes' obfuscation behaviour (OCOT) and multidimensional adaptive anonymisation (AA). OCOT-AA is driven by both explicit and implicit reputation building, complex graph connectivity analytics and obfuscation history analyses. We show that OCOT-AA is very efficient in terms of achieving high levels of node identity obfuscation and managing low delays for answering queries between sources and destinations while enabling fast detection and avoidance of malicious nodes typically within the fraction of time within the experiment duration. We perform extensive experiments to compare OCOT-AA with several other competitive and benchmark protocols and show that it outperforms them across a range of metrics over a one month real-life GPS trace. To demonstrate our proposal more clearly, we propose new metrics that include best effort biggest length and diversity of the obfuscation paths, the actual percentage of truly anonymised sources' IDs at the destinations and communication quality of service between source and destination. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we focus on the incentive mechanism design for a vehicle-based, nondeterministic crowdsensing system. In this crowdsensing system, vehicles move along their trajectories and perform corresponding sensing tasks with different probabilities. Each task may be performed by multiple vehicles jointly so as to ensure a high probability of success. Designing an incentive mechanism for such a crowdsensing system is challenging since it contains a non-trivial set cover problem. To solve this problem, we propose a truthful, reverse-auction-based incentive mechanism that includes an approximation algorithm to select winning bids with a nearly minimum social cost and a payment algorithm to determine payments for all participants. Moreover, we extend the problem to a more complex case in which the Quality of sensing Data (QoD) of each vehicle is taken into consideration. For this problem, we propose a QoD-aware incentive mechanism, which consists of a QoD-aware winning-bid selection algorithm and a QoD-aware payment determination algorithm. We prove that the proposed incentive mechanisms have truthfulness, individual rationality, and computational efficiency. Moreover, we analyze the approximation ratios of the winning-bid selection algorithms. The simulations, based on a real vehicle trace, also demonstrate the significant performances of our incentive mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Device-free localization of objects not equipped with RF radios is playing a critical role in many applications. This paper presents LIFS, a Low human-effort, device-free localization system with fine-grained subcarrier information, which can localize a target accurately without offline training. The basic idea is simple: channel state information (CSI) is sensitive to a target’s location and thus the target can be localized by modelling the CSI measurements of multiple wireless links. However, due to rich multipath indoors, CSI can not be easily modelled. To deal with this challenge, our key observation is that even in a rich multipath environment, not all subcarriers are affected equally by multipath reflections. Our CSI pre-processing scheme tries to identify the subcarriers not affected by multipath. Thus, CSI on the “clean” subcarriers can still be utilized for accurate localization. Without the need of knowing the majority transceivers’ locations, LiFS achieves a median accuracy of 0.5 m and 1.1 m in line-of-sight (LoS) and non-line-of-sight (NLoS) scenarios, respectively, outperforming the state-of-the-art systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Object detection plays an important role in intelligent transportation systems and intelligent vehicles. Although the topic of object detection has been studied for decades, it is still challenging to accurately detect objects under complex scenarios. The contributing factors for challenges include diversified object and background appearance, motion blur, adverse weather conditions, and complex interactions among objects. In this paper, we propose a new convolutional neural network (CNN) model for traffic object detection, by using multi-scale local and global feature representation (MFR). The proposed model consists of two components: a region proposal network that generates candidate object regions and an object detection network that incorporates multi-scale features and global information, namely MFR-CNN. These two components are jointly optimized. Once the system is trained, it can detect real-world traffic objects accurately, especially small objects and heavily occluded objects. We evaluate the proposed method on four benchmark datasets, achieving consistent improvements over the state of the art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rising user expectations are changing the way mobile operators manage their networks. In this paper, a self-tuning algorithm for adjusting parameters in a multiservice packet scheduler of a Long-Term Evolution base station is proposed to optimize the overall system Quality of Experience (QoE) based on network performance statistics. For this purpose, the algorithm iteratively changes service priority parameters to reprioritize services so as to make the most of available resources. The proposed algorithm ensures that the best overall system QoE is always reached by analyzing optimality conditions, unlike previous works, which only guarantee a minimum user satisfaction level or aim to balance QoE among services. Method assessment is carried out with a dynamic system-level simulator in a realistic service scenario. Simulation results show that the overall network QoE can be improved up to $35\%$ by tuning service priority parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Automated and coordinated vehicles' driving (platooning) is very challenging due to the multibody control complexity and the presence of unreliable time-varying wireless intervehicular communication (IVC). We propose a novel controller for vehicle platooning based on consensus and analytically demonstrate its stability and dynamic properties. Traditional approaches assume the logical control topology as a constraint fixed a priori, and the control law is designed consequently; our approach makes the control topology a design parameter that can be exploited to reconfigure the controller, depending on the needs and characteristics of the scenario. Furthermore, the controller automatically compensates outdated information caused by network losses and delays. The controller is implemented in Plexe, which is a state-of-the-art IVC and mobility simulator that includes basic building blocks for platooning. Analysis and simulations show the controller robustness and performance in several scenarios, including realistic propagation conditions with interference caused by other vehicles. We compare our approach against a controller taken from the literature, which is generally considered among the most performing ones. Finally, we test the proposed controller by implementing the real dynamics (engine, transmission, braking systems, etc.) of heterogeneous vehicles in Plexe and verifying that platoons remain stable and safe, regardless of real-life impairments that cannot be modeled in the analytic solution. The results show the ability of the proposed approach to maintain a stable string of realistic vehicles with different control-communication topologies, even in the presence of strong interference, delays, and fading conditions, providing higher comfort and safety for platoon drivers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Elastic partitioning of computations between mobile devices and cloud is an important and challenging research topic for mobile cloud computing. Existing works focus on the single-user computation partitioning, which aims to optimize the application completion time for one particular single user. These works assume that the cloud always has enough resources to execute the computations immediately when they are offloaded to the cloud. However, this assumption does not hold for large scale mobile cloud applications. In these applications, due to the competition for cloud resources among a large number of users, the offloaded computations may be executed with certain scheduling delay on the cloud. Single user partitioning that does not take into account the scheduling delay on the cloud may yield significant performance degradation. In this paper, we study, for the first time, multi-user computation partitioning problem (MCPP), which considers the partitioning of multiple users’ computations together with the scheduling of offloaded computations on the cloud resources. Instead of pursuing the minimum application completion time for every single user, we aim to achieve minimum average completion time for all the users, based on the number of provisioned resources on the cloud. We show that MCPP is different from and more difficult than the classical job scheduling problems. We design an offline heuristic algorithm, namely SearchAdjust, to solve MCPP. We demonstrate through benchmarks that SearchAdjust outperforms both the single user partitioning approaches and classical job scheduling approaches by 10 percent on average in terms of application delay. Based on SearchAdjust, we also design an online algorithm for MCPP that can be easily deployed in practical systems. We validate the effectiveness of our online algorithm using real world load traces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crowdsensing offers an efficient way to meet the demand in large-scale sensing applications. In crowdsensing, optimal task allocation is challenging since sensing tasks with different requirements of quality of sensing are typically associated with specific locations, and mobile users have time constraints. We show that the allocation problem is NP-hard. We then focus on approximation algorithms and devise an efficient local-ratio-based algorithm (LRBA). Our analysis shows that the approximation ratio of the aggregate rewards obtained by optimal allocation to those by LRBA is 5. This reveals that LRBA is efficient, since a lower (but not tight) bound on the approximation ratio is 4. We extend the results to the general scenario where mobile users are heterogeneous. A distributed version of LRBA, namely DLRBA, is designed, which can be iteratively executed at each mobile user without the need for the platform to collect all the information of mobile users. We prove that both centralized and distributed versions can output the same solution. Extensive simulation results are provided to demonstrate the advantages of our proposed algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Mobile crowdsensing has shown elegant capacity in data collection and has given rise to numerous applications. In the sense of coverage quality, marginal works have considered the efficient (less cost) and effective (considerable coverage) design for mobile crowdsensing networks. We investigate the optimal quality-aware coverage in mobile crowdsensing networks. The difference between ours and the conventional coverage problem is that we only select a subset of mobile users so that the coverage quality is maximized with constrained budget. To address this new problem, which is proved to be NP-hard, we first prove that the set function of coverage quality is nondecreasing submodular. By leveraging the favorable property in submodular optimization, we then propose an (\text1-(\text1/e)) approximation algorithm with O(n^k+2) time complexity, where $k$ is an integer that is greater than or equal to 3. Finally, we conduct extensive simulations for the proposed scheme, and the results demonstrate that ours outperforms the random selection scheme and one of the state of the art in terms of total coverage quality by, at most, 2.4× and 1.5× and by, on average, 1.4× and 1.3×, respectively. Additionally, ours achieves a near-optimal solution, compared with the brute-force search results. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Polyphase sequences with low aperiodic autocorrelation levels, assessed in terms of the integrated sidelobe level (ISL), can be applied in many engineering fields, such as radars, sonars, and code-division multiple access communication systems. In practice, a polyphase sequence that is optimal in some sense (for example, minimum ISL) could be significantly distorted, thus reducing the detection performance of the radar system. Hence in this article, we focus on designing ISL minimization-based polyphase sequences with spectral distortion taken into consideration, where we first derive an expression for the ISL under spectral distortion, i.e., distorted ISL (DISL), and then we propose an iterative algorithm based on majorization-minimization framework to solve the DISL minimization problem. The proposed algorithm is proved to be nonincreasing and is guaranteed to converge to a stationary point. A variety of design results utilizing the proposed algorithm in different scenarios are presented and compared with those by other methods or some known sequences. The proposed algorithm is proved to be effective to design polyphase sequences with low DISL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To enhance the backscatter-links with double fading effect in non-orthogonal multiple access assisted backscatter communication (NOMABC), a new reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) enhanced NOMABC (RIS-NOMABC) system is proposed. A joint optimization problem over power reflection coefficients at the backscatter devices (BDs) and phase shifts at the RIS is formulated. To solve this non-convex problem, a low complexity algorithm is proposed by invoking the alternative optimization, successive convex approximation and manifold optimization algorithms. Numerical results corroborate that the proposed RIS-NOMABC system outperforms the conventional NOMABC system without RIS, and demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An adaptive estimation algorithm based on the Lorentzian norm is proposed for echo cancellation in vehicle hands-free communication systems and video teleconferencing systems, namely the affine-projection Lorentzian (APL) algorithm. By minimizing the Lorentzian norm of the a posteriori error vector with a suitable constraint on the weight vector and providing a dynamic Lorentzian-norm-controlling parameter, the proposed APL algorithm achieves robustness against impulsive disturbances and speeds up convergence for colored input signals. The computational complexity of the APL algorithm is analyzed and a fast recursive filtering method is employed to reduce its complexity. The stability analysis, based on energy-conservation arguments, shows that the APL algorithm converges. Furthermore, its tracking behavior is also investigated and a step size optimizing the tracking performance is derived. Simulation results agree well with the theoretical analysis. Simulation results for channel estimation and in-car echo cancellation scenarios demonstrate that the APL algorithm achieves better performance compared to the maximum-correntropy-criterion, affine-projection-generalized-maximum-correntropy, affine-projection-sign, affine-projection-like M-estimate, and Lorentzian adaptive filtering algorithms in various impulsive interference environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first crowdsourced visualization experiment conducted exclusively on mobile phones, we compare approaches to visualizing ranges over time on small displays. People routinely consume such data via a mobile phone, from temperatures in weather forecasting apps to sleep and blood pressure readings in personal health apps. However, we lack guidance on how to effectively visualize ranges on small displays in the context of different value retrieval and comparison tasks, or with respect to different data characteristics such as periodicity, seasonality, or the cardinality of ranges. Central to our experiment is a comparison between two ways to lay out ranges: a more conventional linear layout strikes a balance between quantitative and chronological scale resolution, while a less conventional radial layout emphasizes the cyclicality of time and may prioritize discrimination between values at its periphery. With results from 87 crowd workers, we found that while participants completed tasks more quickly with linear layouts than with radial ones, there were few differences in terms of error rate between layout conditions. We also found that participants performed similarly with both layouts in tasks that involved comparing superimposed observed and average ranges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider a mobile cloud computing system with multiple users, a remote cloud server, and a computing access point (CAP). The CAP serves both as the network access gateway and a computation service provider to the mobile users. It can either process the received tasks from mobile users or offload them to the cloud. We jointly optimize the offloading decisions of all users, together with the allocation of computation and communication resources, to minimize the overall cost of energy consumption, computation, and maximum delay among users. The joint optimization problem is formulated as a mixed-integer program. We show that the problem can be reformulated and transformed into a non-convex quadratically constrained quadratic program, which is NP-hard in general. We then propose an efficient solution to this problem by semidefinite relaxation and a novel randomization mapping method. Furthermore, when there is a strict delay constraint for processing each user's task, we further propose a three-step algorithm to guarantee the feasibility and local optimality of the obtained solution. Our numerical results show that the proposed solutions give nearly optimal performance under a wide range of parameter settings, and the addition of a CAP can significantly reduce the cost of multi-user task offloading compared with conventional mobile cloud computing where only the remote cloud server is available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital videos often contain visual distortions that are introduced by the camera’s hardware or processing software during the capture process. These distortions often detract from a viewer’s quality of experience. Understanding how human observers perceive the visual quality of digital videos is of great importance to camera designers. Thus, the development of automatic objective methods that accurately quantify the impact of visual distortions on perception has greatly accelerated. Video quality algorithm design and verification require realistic databases of distorted videos and human judgments of them. However, most current publicly available video quality databases have been created under highly controlled conditions using graded, simulated, and post-capture distortions (such as jitter and compression artifacts) on high-quality videos. The commercial plethora of hand-held mobile video capture devices produces videos often afflicted by a variety of complex distortions generated during the capturing process. These in-capture distortions are not well-modeled by the synthetic, post-capture distortions found in existing VQA databases. Toward overcoming this limitation, we designed and created a new database that we call the LIVE-Qualcomm mobile in-capture video quality database, comprising a total of 208 videos, which model six common in-capture distortions. We also conducted a subjective quality assessment study using this database, in which each video was assessed by 39 unique subjects. Furthermore, we evaluated several top-performing no-reference IQA and VQA algorithms on the new database and studied how real-world in-capture distortions challenge both human viewers as well as automatic perceptual quality prediction models. The new database is freely available at: http://live.ece.utexas.edu/research/incaptureDatabase/index.html. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies have shown that traffic safety and efficiency can be substantially improved by vehicle platooning, in which vehicles periodically broadcast their kinetic status to neighbors, known as beacon message dissemination. As a networked control system, vehicle platoon has attracted significant attention from both the control and networking areas. However, few studies consider the practical traffic scenario with both platoons and individual vehicles, and the proposed beaconing schemes lack the deep understanding of relationship between the beaconing performance and the requirements of the control mechanism. To address these challenging issues, we propose a joint control–communication design to achieve reliable vehicle platooning in a more realistic traffic scenario, wherein the traffic consists of both platoons and individual vehicles, and both periodic beacon messages and event-based safety messages shall be delivered together. Specifically, we first develop a comprehensive control-theoretical analysis to understand how the vehicular communication can affect features of platoon driving; based on the understanding, we then propose and analyze an adaptive platoon-based message dissemination scheme; finally, we conduct extensive numerical experiments to validate the effectiveness of the protocol and to confirm the accuracy of the our theoretical analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Spectrum sensing based dynamic spectrum sharing is one of the key innovative techniques in future 5G communications. When realistic mobile scenarios are concerned, the location of primary user (PU) is of great significance to reliable spectrum detections and cognitive network enhancements. Given the dynamic disappearance of its emission signals, the passive locations tracking of PU, nevertheless, remains dramatically different from existing positioning problems. In this investigation, a new joint estimation paradigm, namely deep sensing, is proposed for such challenging spectrum and location awareness applications. A major advantage of this new sensing scheme is that the mutual interruption between the two unknown quantities is fully considered and, therefore, the PU's emission state is identified by estimating its moving positions jointly. Taking both PU's unknown states and its evolving positions into account, a unified mathematical model is formulated relying on a dynamic state-space approach. To implement the new sensing framework, a random finite set (RFS) based Bernoulli filtering algorithm is then suggested to recursively estimate unknown PU states accompanying its time-varying locations. Meanwhile, the sequential importance sampling is used to approximate intractable posterior densities numerically. Furthermore, an adaptive horizon expanding mechanism is specially designed to avoid the mis-tracking aroused by the intermittent disappearance of PU. Experimental simulations demonstrate that, even with mobile PUs, spectrum sensing can be realized effectively by tracking its locations incessantly. The location information, as an extra gift, may be utilized by cognitive performance optimizations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]