Design of APSK Constellations Approaching the Communication-Sensing Pareto Boundary for ISAC

We propose a semi-analytical amplitude phase shift keying (APSK) signaling framework for integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), focusing on i.i.d. uniform discrete input distributions for practicality and analytical tractability. First, we establish APSK design criteria in which communication performance is measured by the gap to capacity and linked to the minimum Euclidean distance, while sensing performance is characterized by the symbol-energy variance. Based on these criteria, we propose a family of APSK constellations whose key parameters follow explicit scaling laws. Then we prove that this design achieves a constant gap to capacity independent of the signal-to-noise ratio. Building upon this foundation, we further construct a parametric APSK family that bridges the communication-optimal and sensing-optimal designs, with the communication and sensing (C&S) tradeoff controlled by the number of rings and energy allocation among rings. Simulation results show that the proposed APSK achieves C&S performance very close to the Pareto boundary achieved with time-independent, circularly symmetric, and otherwise unconstrained continuous input distributions.

Hyperbolic Frequency Multicarrier Modulation for Wideband Linear Time-Varying Channels

Numerous multicarrier modulation schemes have been proposed recently to enhance the performance in narrowband doubly dispersive channels for emerging high-mobility applications. However, the ultra-reliable modulation framework in wideband linear time-varying (LTV) channels remains an open problem, where the time dilations and contractions brought by the high mobility cannot be ignored for the baseband signal to obtain the constant Doppler shift across the whole transmission band. To solve this problem, we propose the hyperbolic frequency multicarrier (HFMC) waveform in this paper based on the inspiration from affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM) modulation, where the delay and Doppler shift are absorbed into a 1D shift in the affine domain to provide a compact characterization of doubly dispersive discrete-time channels. By adopting the passband representation of wideband LTV channels and hyperbolic frequency modulated (HFM) signals, we reveal that the Doppler scaling factor brought by the relative mobility can be absorbed into an equivalent delay. The basic principle of HFMC modulation is established by investigating the approximate orthogonality among HFMC subcarriers, which are generated from a basic HFM signal by utilizing uniformly spaced equivalent delay. The spectrum of HFMC subcarriers is also analyzed to evaluate the system capacity, where the overlapping nature in the frequency domain can be observed. The input-output characterization in wideband LTV channels is then executed to confirm the 1D integration of time delay and Doppler scaling factor for each path, which demonstrates the ability to exploit potential multipath diversity. The parameter optimization based on the input-output relation and spectrum analysis is finally developed to balance the efficiency and reliability.

Recent Advances in Spatially Coupled Codes: Overview and Outlook

The concept of spatial coupling is among the most significant breakthroughs in coding theory over the past decade. The excellent waterfall and error floor performance of spatially coupled codes has positioned them as promising coding candidates for future communication and data storage systems. This article presents an overview of recent advances in spatially coupled codes. In particular, we first review several representative examples of recently proposed spatially coupled codes and highlight their unique features that make them appealing for different applications. Next, we discuss the useful properties of spatially coupled codes and how to design good spatially coupled codes. The article concludes with some future research directions and open problems.

Semi-Supervised Goal-Oriented Semantic Communication Framework for Foreground Classification

Wireless goal-oriented semantic communication (GSC) has emerged as a promising paradigm by directly optimizing task performance. However, existing GSC frameworks typically operate on entire images and rely on labeled data for classification tasks, which can limit their compression efficiency and increase the risk of overfitting. This paper proposes a novel semi-supervised wireless GSC framework for the unlabeled image foreground classification task. In our proposed framework, a foreground-aware masked autoencoder (MAE) is developed to prioritize semantically important foreground objects, thereby reducing transmission overhead. To enable accurate reconstruction and classification under a limited data size, we further propose a semi-supervised autoencoder (SSAE) that decodes the semantic latent tensor and refines image details by leveraging three complementary information sources, followed by fine-tuning a pre-trained image classification model. The entire pipeline, from foreground masking to classification, is trained in a semi-supervised manner to significantly reduce the need for manual labeling. Simulation results validate that the proposed GSC framework achieves over 90% image classification accuracy while reducing the original image data size by 95%, and demonstrate its strong potential for practical tasks in resource-constrained wireless scenarios.

Low-complexity Frequency Domain Equalization for filtered-AFDM over General Physical Channels

Affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM) has emerged as a promising waveform for high-mobility communications. However, its equalization remains a practical challenge under general physical channels with off-grid delay and Doppler effects. In this paper, we investigate frequency domain equalization for AFDM by considering a practical filtered-AFDM waveform. We analyze the input-output relations of filtered-AFDM across various domains and show that off-grid effects lead to severe inter-symbol interference in the DAFT domain, limiting the effectiveness of DAFT domain equalization. Motivated by the compactness of the frequency domain channel matrix in wideband systems, we propose a low-complexity two-stage frequency domain equalization scheme. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves performance close to full-block LMMSE equalization with significantly reduced computational complexity, and offers clear advantages over time domain equalization in wideband scenarios.

Goal-Oriented Framework for Optical Flow-based Multi-User Multi-Task Video Transmission

Efficient multi-user multi-task video transmission is an important research topic within the realm of current wireless communication systems. To reduce the transmission burden and save communication resources, we propose a goal-oriented semantic communication framework for optical flow-based multi-user multi-task video transmission (OF-GSC). At the transmitter, we design a semantic encoder that consists of a motion extractor and a patch-level optical flow-based semantic representation extractor to effectively identify and select important semantic representations. At the receiver, we design a transformer-based semantic decoder for high-quality video reconstruction and video classification tasks. To minimize the communication time, we develop a deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG)-based bandwidth allocation algorithm for multi-user transmission. For video reconstruction tasks, our OF-GSC framework achieves a significant improvement in the received video quality, as evidenced by a 13.47% increase in the structural similarity index measure (SSIM) score in comparison to DeepJSCC. For video classification tasks, OF-GSC achieves a Top-1 accuracy slightly surpassing the performance of VideoMAE with only 25% required data under the same mask ratio of 0.3. For bandwidth allocation optimization, our DDPG-based algorithm reduces the maximum transmission time by 25.97% compared with the baseline equal-bandwidth allocation scheme.

Doppler Shift Keying Modulation for Uplink Multiple Access over Doubly-Dispersive Channels

The delay-Doppler (DD) domain modulation has been regarded as one of the most competitive candidates to support wireless communications for emerging high-mobility applications in the sixth-generation mobile networks. Unfortunately, most of the existing designs for DD domain modulation suffer from high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) and unbearable detection complexity under uplink transmission since large time duration and bandwidth are required to guarantee high DD resolutions. To address these issues, the Doppler shift keying (DSK) modulation based on the orthogonal delay Doppler division multiplexing modulator is proposed in this paper, where the input-output characterization in the DD domain is fully exploited. The principle of the DSK transceiver is first established with the one-hot mapper and low-complexity iterative successive interference cancellation-maximum ratio combining detector for point-to-point scenarios. The proposed scheme is then generalized to the zero auto-correlation sequence-based implementation, which benefits the extension of multi-user (MU) uplink DSK frameworks. For uplink DSK transmission, Zadoff-Chu (ZC) sequences are adopted as the basis sequences. We optimize the assignment of ZC roots to different user equipments (UEs) by minimizing the maximum inter-user interference. This optimization process, which analyzes the root allocation, directly assigns a specific ZC sequence to each UE. The PAPR and bit error rate performance of the proposed DSK modulation with the low-complexity detector is finally verified by extensive simulation results under doubly-dispersive channels, which demonstrates the superiority of DSK modulation especially for uplink multiple access over doubly dispersive channels.

A Novel One-tap Equalizer for Zero-Padded AFDM System over Doubly Selective Channels

Recently, affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM) has gained traction as a robust solution for doubly selective channels. In this paper, we present a novel low-complexity one-tap equalizer for zero-padded AFDM (ZP-AFDM) systems. We first select the AFDM parameters, $c_1$ and $c_2$, such that $c_1$ has a relatively high value, and $c_2$ depends on $c_1$, which simplifies the affine domain input-output relation (IOR). This selection also demonstrates that a phase term that varies slowly along the affine domain is experienced by all affine domain symbols and this variation is significantly slower compared to that experienced by the time domain symbols over doubly selective channels. To simplify the equalization, we then introduce zero padding to the transmitted affine domain symbols and reconstruction operation on the received affine domain symbols. By doing so, we convert the effective affine domain IOR of our ZP-AFDM system to be characterized using approximately circular convolution. Next, we transform the resulting affine domain symbols into a new domain called the frequency-of-affine (FoA) domain. We propose our one-tap equalizer in this FoA domain to efficiently recover the transmitted symbols. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed one-tap equalizer, particularly when $c_1$ is high, without compromising performance robustness.

Guaranteed Image Classification via Goal-oriented Joint Semantic Source and Channel Coding

To enable critical applications such as remote diagnostics, image classification must be guaranteed under bandwidth constraints and unreliable wireless channels through joint source and channel coding (JSCC) design. However, most existing JSCC methods focus on minimizing image distortion, implicitly assuming that all image regions contribute equally to classification performance, thereby overlooking their varying importance for the task. In this paper, we propose a goal-oriented joint semantic source and channel coding (G-JSSCC) framework that applies \emph{various} levels of source coding compression and channel coding protection across image regions based on their semantic importance. Specifically, we design a semantic information extraction method that identifies and ranks various image regions based on their contributions to classification, where the contribution is measured by the shapely value from explainable artificial intelligence (AI). Based on that, we design a semantic source coding and a semantic channel coding method, which allocates higher-quality compression and stronger error protection to image regions of great semantic importance. In addition, we define a new metric, termed coding efficiency, to evaluate the effectiveness of the source and channel coding in the classification task. Simulations show that our proposed G-JSSCC framework improves classification probability by 2.70 times, reduces transmission cost by 38%, and enhances coding efficiency by 5.91 times, compared to the benchmark scheme using uniform compression and an idealized channel code to uniformly protect the whole image.

A Novel ISAC Waveform Based on Orthogonal Delay-Doppler Division Multiplexing with FMCW

In this work, we propose the orthogonal delay-Doppler (DD) division multiplexing (ODDM) modulation with frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) (ODDM-FMCW) waveform to enable integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) with a low peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR). We first propose a square-root-Nyquist-filtered FMCW (SRN-FMCW) waveform to address limitations of conventional linear FMCW waveforms in ISAC systems. To better integrate with ODDM, we generate SRN-FMCW by embedding symbols in the DD domain, referred to as a DD-SRN-FMCW frame. A DD chirp compression receiver is designed to obtain the channel response efficiently. Next, we construct the proposed ODDM-FMCW waveform for ISAC by superimposing a DD-SRN-FMCW frame onto an ODDM data frame. A comprehensive performance analysis of the ODDM-FMCW waveform is presented, covering peak-to-average power ratio, spectrum, ambiguity function, and Cramer-Rao bound for delay and Doppler estimation. Numerical results show that the proposed ODDM-FMCW waveform delivers excellent ISAC performance in terms of root mean square error for sensing and bit error rate for communications.