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In the multiple unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)- assisted downlink communication, it is challenging for UAV base stations (UAV BSs) to realize trajectory design and resource assignment in unknown environments. The cooperation and competition between UAV BSs in the communication network leads to a Markov game problem. Multi-agent reinforcement learning is a significant solution for the above decision-making. However, there are still many common issues, such as the instability of the system and low utilization of historical data, that limit its application. In this paper, a novel graph-attention multi-agent trust region (GA-MATR) reinforcement learning framework is proposed to solve the multi-UAV assisted communication problem. Graph recurrent network is introduced to process and analyze complex topology of the communication network, so as to extract useful information and patterns from observational information. The attention mechanism provides additional weighting for conveyed information, so that the critic network can accurately evaluate the value of behavior for UAV BSs. This provides more reliable feedback signals and helps the actor network update the strategy more effectively. Ablation simulations indicate that the proposed approach attains improved convergence over the baselines. UAV BSs learn the optimal communication strategies to achieve their maximum cumulative rewards. Additionally, multi-agent trust region method with monotonic convergence provides an estimated Nash equilibrium for the multi-UAV assisted communication Markov game., Comment: 13 pages

As a new technology to reconfigure wireless communication environment by signal reflection controlled by software, intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has attracted lots of attention in recent years. Compared with conventional relay system, the relay system aided by IRS can effectively save the cost and energy consumption, and significantly enhance the system performance. However, the phase quantization error generated by IRS with discrete phase shifter may degrade the receiving performance of the receiver. To analyze the performance loss arising from IRS phase quantization error, in accordance with the law of large numbers and Rayleigh distribution, the closed-form expressions for the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) performance loss and achievable rate of the double IRS-aided amplify-and-forward (AF) relay network, which are associated with the number of phase shifter quantization bits, are derived in the Rayleigh channels. In addition, their approximate performance loss closed-form expressions are also derived based on the Taylor series expansion. Simulation results show that the performance losses of SNR and achievable rate decrease with the number of quantization bits increases gradually, and increase with the number $k$ of IRS phase shift elements. The SNR and achievable rate performance losses of the system are smaller than 0.06dB and 0.03bits/s/Hz when $k$ is equal to 4 and 3, respectively.

Due to the double fading effect caused by conventional passive intelligent reflecting surface (IRS), the signal via the reflection link is weak. To enhance the received signal, active elements with the ability to amplify the reflected signal are introduced to the passive IRS forming hybrid IRS. In this paper, we propose a hybrid IRS-aided amplify-and-forward (AF) relay wireless network, where an optimization problem is formulated, which is subject to the constraints of transmit power budgets at the source/AF relay/hybrid IRS and that of unit modulus for passive IRS elements. By alternately designing the beamforming matrix at AF relay and the reflecting coefficient matrices at IRS, signal-to-noise ratio can be maximized. To achieve high rate performance and extend the coverage range, a high-performance method based on semidefinite relaxation and fractional programming (HP-SDR-FP) algorithm is presented. Due to its extremely high complexity, a low-complexity method based on whitening filter, general power iterative and generalized Rayleigh-Ritz (WF-GPI-GRR) is proposed, which is different from HP-SDR-FP method. It is assumed that the amplifying coefficient of each active IRS element is equal, and the corresponding analytical solution of the amplifying coefficient can be obtained according to the transmit powers at AF relay and hybrid IRS. Simulation results show that the proposed two methods can greatly improve the rate performance compared to the existing networks, such as the passive IRS-aided AF relay and only AF relay network. In particular, a 50.0% rate gain over the existing networks is approximately achieved in the high power budget region of hybrid IRS. Moreover, it is verified that the proposed HP-SDR-FP method perform better than WF-GPI-GRR method in terms of rate performance.

Chest imaging plays an essential role in diagnosing and predicting patients with COVID-19 with evidence of worsening respiratory status. Many deep learning-based approaches for pneumonia recognition have been developed to enable computer-aided diagnosis. However, the long training and inference time makes them inflexible, and the lack of interpretability reduces their credibility in clinical medical practice. This paper aims to develop a pneumonia recognition framework with interpretability, which can understand the complex relationship between lung features and related diseases in chest X-ray (CXR) images to provide high-speed analytics support for medical practice. To reduce the computational complexity to accelerate the recognition process, a novel multi-level self-attention mechanism within Transformer has been proposed to accelerate convergence and emphasize the task-related feature regions. Moreover, a practical CXR image data augmentation has been adopted to address the scarcity of medical image data problems to boost the model's performance. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been demonstrated on the classic COVID-19 recognition task using the widespread pneumonia CXR image dataset. In addition, abundant ablation experiments validate the effectiveness and necessity of all of the components of the proposed method., Comment: Accepted by the IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatic, doi: 10.1109/JBHI.2023.3247949

Discrete phase shifters of intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) generates phase quantization error (QE) and degrades the receive performance at the receiver. To make an analysis of the performance loss caused by IRS with phase QE, based on the law of large numbers, the closed-form expressions of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) performance loss (PL), achievable rate (AR), and bit error rate (BER) are successively derived under line-of-sight (LoS) channels and Rayleigh channels. Moreover, based on the Taylor series expansion, the approximate simple closed form of PL of IRS with approximate QE is also given. The simulation results show that the performance losses of SNR and AR decrease as the number of quantization bits increase, while they gradually increase with the number of IRS phase shifter elements increase. Regardless of LoS channels or Rayleigh channels, when the number of quantization bits is larger than or equal to 3, the performance losses of SNR and AR are less than 0.23dB and 0.08bits/s/Hz, respectively, and the BER performance degradation is trivial. In particular, the performance loss difference between IRS with QE and IRS with approximate QE is negligible when the number of quantization bits is not less than 2.

Due to a high spatial angle resolution and low circuit cost of massive hybrid analog and digital (HAD) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), it is viewed as a valuable green communication technology for future wireless networks. Combining a massive HAD-MIMO with direction of arrival (DOA) will provide a high-precision even ultra-high-precision DOA measurement performance approaching the fully-digital (FD) MIMO. However, phase ambiguity is a challenge issue for a massive HAD-MIMO DOA estimation. In this paper, we review three aspects: detection, estimation, and Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) with low-resolution ADCs at receiver. First, a multi-layer-neural-network (MLNN) detector is proposed to infer the existence of passive emitters. Then, a two-layer HAD (TLHAD) MIMO structure is proposed to eliminate phase ambiguity using only one-snapshot. Simulation results show that the proposed MLNN detector is much better than both the existing generalized likelihood ratio test (GRLT) and the ratio of maximum eigen-value (Max-EV) to minimum eigen-value (R-MaxEV-MinEV) in terms of detection probability. Additionally, the proposed TLHAD structure can achieve the corresponding CRLB using single snapshot.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a promising solution to build a programmable wireless environment for future communication systems, in which the reflector elements steer the incident signal in fully customizable ways by passive beamforming. In this paper, an IRS-aided secure spatial modulation (SM) is proposed, where the IRS perform passive beamforming and information transfer simultaneously by adjusting the on-off states of the reflecting elements. We formulate an optimization problem to maximize the average secrecy rate (SR) by jointly optimizing the passive beamforming at IRS and the transmit power at transmitter under the consideration that the direct pathes channels from transmitter to receivers are obstructed by obstacles. As the expression of SR is complex, we derive a newly fitting expression (NASR) for the expression of traditional approximate SR (TASR), which has simpler closed-form and more convenient for subsequent optimization. Based on the above two fitting expressions, three beamforming methods, called maximizing NASR via successive convex approximation (Max-NASR-SCA), maximizing NASR via dual ascent (Max-NASR-DA) and maximizing TASR via semi-definite relaxation (Max-TASR-SDR) are proposed to improve the SR performance. Additionally, two transmit power design (TPD) methods are proposed based on the above two approximate SR expressions, called Max-NASR-TPD and Max-TASR-TPD. Simulation results show that the proposed Max-NASR-DA and Max-NASR-SCA IRS beamformers harvest substantial SR performance gains over Max-TASR-SDR. For TPD, the proposed Max-NASR-TPD performs better than Max-TASR-TPD. Particularly, the Max-NASR-TPD has a closed-form solution.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is of low-cost and energy-efficiency and will be a promising technology for the future wireless communications like sixth generation. To address the problem of conventional directional modulation (DM) that Alice only transmits single confidential bit stream (CBS) to Bob with multiple antennas in a line-of-sight channel, IRS is proposed to create friendly multipaths for DM such that two CBSs can be transmitted from Alice to Bob. This will significantly enhance the secrecy rate (SR) of DM. To maximize the SR (Max-SR), a general non-convex optimization problem is formulated with the unit-modulus constraint of IRS phase-shift matrix (PSM), and the general alternating iterative (GAI) algorithm is proposed to jointly obtain the transmit beamforming vectors (TBVs) and PSM by alternately optimizing one and fixing another. To reduce its high complexity, a low-complexity iterative algorithm for Max-SR is proposed by placing the constraint of null-space (NS) on the TBVs, called NS projection (NSP). Here, each CBS is transmitted separately in the NSs of other CBS and AN channels. Simulation results show that the SRs of the proposed GAI and NSP can approximately double that of IRS-based DM with single CBS for massive IRS in the high signal-to-noise ratio region.

Under the advocacy of the international community, more and more research topics have been built around the ocean. This paper proposed an implementation scheme of marine wireless sensor network monitoring system based on LoRa and MQTT. Different from the traditional network architecture, the system was constructed by combining with two network forms, and according to their respective characteristics, the overall design followed the transition from LoRa to MQTT. We first used LoRa to interconnect the sensor nodes with the gateway, and on this basis, the collected data was sent to the server visualization platform through MQTT, the backend management server would continuously refresh the monitoring page. At the same time, the client could use a browser-based web application to directly access and call data for global maritime information monitoring. In the future, we will further improve the system and optimize the algorithm, to achieve more dimensions and deeper exploration of the underwater world.

Register Transfer Level (RTL) design validation is a crucial stage in the hardware design process. We present a new approach to enhancing RTL design validation using available software techniques and tools. Our approach converts the source code of a RTL design into a C++ software program. Then a powerful symbolic execution engine is employed to execute the converted C++ program symbolically to generate test cases. To better generate efficient test cases, we limit the number of cycles to guide symbolic execution. Moreover, we add bit-level symbolic variable support into the symbolic execution engine. Generated test cases are further evaluated by simulating the RTL design to get accurate coverage. We have evaluated the approach on a floating point unit (FPU) design. The preliminary results show that our approach can deliver high-quality tests to achieve high coverage.