In Collaborative Intelligence (CI), the Artificial Intelligence (AI) model is divided between the edge and the cloud, with intermediate features being sent from the edge to the cloud for inference. Several deep learning-based Semantic Communication (SC) models have been proposed to reduce feature transmission overhead and mitigate channel noise interference. Previous research has demonstrated that Spiking Neural Network (SNN)-based SC models exhibit greater robustness on digital channels compared to Deep Neural Network (DNN)-based SC models. However, the existing SNN-based SC models require fixed time steps, resulting in fixed transmission bandwidths that cannot be adaptively adjusted based on channel conditions. To address this issue, this paper introduces a novel SC model called SNN-SC-HARQ, which combines the SNN-based SC model with the Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ) mechanism. SNN-SC-HARQ comprises an SNN-based SC model that supports the transmission of features at varying bandwidths, along with a policy model that determines the appropriate bandwidth. Experimental results show that SNN-SC-HARQ can dynamically adjust the bandwidth according to the channel conditions without performance loss.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as aerial relays are practically appealing for assisting Internet of Things (IoT) network. In this work, we aim to utilize the UAV swarm to assist the secure communication between the micro base station (MBS) equipped with the planar array antenna (PAA) and the IoT terminal devices by collaborative beamforming (CB), so as to counteract the effects of collusive eavesdropping attacks in time-domain. Specifically, we formulate a UAV swarm-enabled secure relay multi-objective optimization problem (US2RMOP) for simultaneously maximizing the achievable sum rate of associated IoT terminal devices, minimizing the achievable sum rate of the eavesdropper and minimizing the energy consumption of UAV swarm, by jointly optimizing the excitation current weights of both MBS and UAV swarm, the selection of the UAV receiver, the position of UAVs and user association order of IoT terminal devices. Furthermore, the formulated US2RMOP is proved to be a non-convex, NP-hard and large-scale optimization problem. Therefore, we propose an improved multi-objective grasshopper algorithm (IMOGOA) with some specific designs to address the problem. Simulation results exhibit the effectiveness of the proposed UAV swarm-enabled collaborative secure relay strategy and demonstrate the superiority of IMOGOA.
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) network is a promising technology for assisting Internet-of-Things (IoT), where a UAV can use its limited service coverage to harvest and disseminate data from IoT devices with low transmission abilities. The existing UAV-assisted data harvesting and dissemination schemes largely require UAVs to frequently fly between the IoTs and access points, resulting in extra energy and time costs. To reduce both energy and time costs, a key way is to enhance the transmission performance of IoT and UAVs. In this work, we introduce collaborative beamforming into IoTs and UAVs simultaneously to achieve energy and time-efficient data harvesting and dissemination from multiple IoT clusters to remote base stations (BSs). Except for reducing these costs, another non-ignorable threat lies in the existence of the potential eavesdroppers, whereas the handling of eavesdroppers often increases the energy and time costs, resulting in a conflict with the minimization of the costs. Moreover, the importance of these goals may vary relatively in different applications. Thus, we formulate a multi-objective optimization problem (MOP) to simultaneously minimize the mission completion time, signal strength towards the eavesdropper, and total energy cost of the UAVs. We prove that the formulated MOP is an NP-hard, mixed-variable optimization, and large-scale optimization problem. Thus, we propose a swarm intelligence-based algorithm to find a set of candidate solutions with different trade-offs which can meet various requirements in a low computational complexity. We also show that swarm intelligence methods need to enhance solution initialization, solution update, and algorithm parameter update phases when dealing with mixed-variable optimization and large-scale problems. Simulation results demonstrate the proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art swarm intelligence algorithms.
Distributed deep learning (DDL) is a promising research area, which aims to increase the efficiency of training deep learning tasks with large size of datasets and models. As the computation capability of DDL nodes continues to increase, the network connection between nodes is becoming a major bottleneck. Various methods of gradient compression and improved model synchronization have been proposed to address this bottleneck in Parameter-Server-based DDL. However, these two types of methods can result in accuracy loss due to discarded gradients and have limited enhancement on the throughput of model synchronization, respectively. To address these challenges, we propose a new model synchronization method named Overlapped Synchronization Parallel (OSP), which achieves efficient communication with a 2-stage synchronization approach and uses Local-Gradient-based Parameter correction (LGP) to avoid accuracy loss caused by stale parameters. The prototype of OSP has been implemented using PyTorch and evaluated on commonly used deep learning models and datasets with a 9-node testbed. Evaluation results show that OSP can achieve up to 50\% improvement in throughput without accuracy loss compared to popular synchronization models.
Downsampling and feature extraction are essential procedures for 3D point cloud understanding. Existing methods are limited by the inconsistent point densities of different parts in the point cloud. In this work, we analyze the limitation of the downsampling stage and propose the pre-abstraction group-wise window-normalization module. In particular, the window-normalization method is leveraged to unify the point densities in different parts. Furthermore, the group-wise strategy is proposed to obtain multi-type features, including texture and spatial information. We also propose the pre-abstraction module to balance local and global features. Extensive experiments show that our module performs better on several tasks. In segmentation tasks on S3DIS (Area 5), the proposed module performs better on small object recognition, and the results have more precise boundaries than others. The recognition of the sofa and the column is improved from 69.2% to 84.4% and from 42.7% to 48.7%, respectively. The benchmarks are improved from 71.7%/77.6%/91.9% (mIoU/mAcc/OA) to 72.2%/78.2%/91.4%. The accuracies of 6-fold cross-validation on S3DIS are 77.6%/85.8%/91.7%. It outperforms the best model PointNeXt-XL (74.9%/83.0%/90.3%) by 2.7% on mIoU and achieves state-of-the-art performance. The code and models are available at https://github.com/DBDXSS/Window-Normalization.git.
This letter proposes an analytical framework to evaluate the coverage performance of a cellular-connected unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) network in which UAV user equipments (UAV-UEs) are equipped with directional antennas and move according to a three-dimensional (3D) mobility model. The ground base stations (GBSs) equipped with practical down-tilted antennas are distributed according to a Poisson point process (PPP). With tools from stochastic geometry, we derive the handover probability and coverage probability of a random UAV-UE under the strongest average received signal strength (RSS) association strategy. The proposed analytical framework allows to investigate the effect of UAV-UE antenna beamwidth, mobility speed, cell association, and vertical motions on both the handover probability and coverage probability. We conclude that the optimal UAV-UE antenna beamwidth decreases with the GBS density, and the omnidirectional antenna model is preferred in the sparse network scenario. What's more, the superiority of the strongest average RSS association over the nearest association diminishes with the increment of GBS density.
Nowadays, deep learning-based joint source-channel coding (JSCC) is getting attention, and it shows excellent performance compared with separate source and channel coding (SSCC). However, most JSCC works are only designed, trained, and tested on additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels to transmit analog signals. In current communication systems, digital signals are considered more. Hence, it is necessary to design an end-to-end JSCC framework for digital signal transmission. In this paper, we propose a digital JSCC framework (S-JSCC) based on spiking neural network (SNN) to tackle this problem. The SNN is used to compress the feature of the deep model, and the compressed results are transmitted over digital channels such as binary symmetric channel (BSC) and binary erasure channel (BEC). Since the outputs of SNN are binary spikes, the framework can be applied directly to digital channels without extra quantization. Moreover, we propose a new spiking neuron and regularization method to improve the performance and robustness of the system. The experimental results show that under digital channels, the proposed S-JSCC framework performs better than the state-of-the-art convolution neural network (CNN)-based JSCC framework, which needs extra quantization.
Collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has been widely used in many practical applications, where each agent makes a decision based on its own observation. Most mainstream methods treat each local observation as an entirety when modeling the decentralized local utility functions. However, they ignore the fact that local observation information can be further divided into several entities, and only part of the entities is helpful to model inference. Moreover, the importance of different entities may change over time. To improve the performance of decentralized policies, the attention mechanism is used to capture features of local information. Nevertheless, existing attention models rely on dense fully connected graphs and cannot better perceive important states. To this end, we propose a sparse state based MARL (S2RL) framework, which utilizes a sparse attention mechanism to discard irrelevant information in local observations. The local utility functions are estimated through the self-attention and sparse attention mechanisms separately, then are combined into a standard joint value function and auxiliary joint value function in the central critic. We design the S2RL framework as a plug-and-play module, making it general enough to be applied to various methods. Extensive experiments on StarCraft II show that S2RL can significantly improve the performance of many state-of-the-art methods.
Deep learning-based joint source-channel coding (JSCC) has shown excellent performance in image and feature transmission. However, the output values of the JSCC encoder are continuous, which makes the constellation of modulation complex and dense. It is hard and expensive to design radio frequency chains for transmitting such full-resolution constellation points. In this paper, two methods of mapping the full-resolution constellation to finite constellation are proposed for real system implementation. The constellation mapping results of the proposed methods correspond to regular constellation and irregular constellation, respectively. We apply the methods to existing deep JSCC models and evaluate them on AWGN channels with different signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). Experimental results show that the proposed methods outperform the traditional uniform quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) constellation mapping method by only adding a few additional parameters.