Sensing-assisted Accurate and Fast Beam Management for Cellular-connected mmWave UAV Network

Beam management, including initial access (IA) and beam tracking, is essential to the millimeter-wave Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) network. However, conventional communication-only and feedback-based schemes suffer a high delay and low accuracy of beam alignment since they only enable the receiver to passively hear the information of the transmitter from the radio domain. This paper presents a novel sensing-assisted beam management approach, the first solution that fully utilizes the information from the visual domain to improve communication performance. We employ both integrated sensing and communication and computer vision techniques and design an extended Kalman filtering method for beam tracking and prediction. Besides, we also propose a novel dual identity association solution to distinguish multiple UAVs in dynamic environments. Real-world experiments and numerical results show that the proposed solution outperforms the conventional methods in IA delay, association accuracy, tracking error, and communication performance.

Discrete Army Ant Search Optimizer-Based Target Coverage Enhancement in Directional Sensor Networks

Coverage of interest points is one of the most critical issues in directional sensor networks. However, considering the remote or inhospitable environment and the limitation of the perspective of directional sensors, it is easy to form perception blind after random deployment. The intension of our research is to deal with the bound-constrained optimization problem of maximizing the coverage of target points. A coverage enhancement strategy based on a discrete army ant search optimizer (DAASO) is proposed to solve the above problem, which is inspired by the biological habits of army ants. A set of experiments are conducted using different sensor parameters. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of the DAASO in coverage effect when compared to the existing methods.

Coverage Enhancement Strategy in WMSNs Based on a Novel Swarm Intelligence Algorithm: Army Ant Search Optimizer

As one of the most crucial scenarios of the Internet of Things (IoT), wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs) pay more attention to the information-intensive data (e.g., audio, video, image) for remote environments. The area coverage reflects the perception of WMSNs to the surrounding environment, where a good coverage effect can ensure effective data collection. Given the harsh and complex physical environment of WMSNs, which easily form the sensing overlapping regions and coverage holes by random deployment. The intention of our research is to deal with the optimization problem of maximizing the coverage rate in WMSNs. By proving the NP-hard of the coverage enhancement of WMSNs, inspired by the predation behavior of army ants, this article proposes a novel swarm intelligence (SI) technology army ant search optimizer (AASO) to solve the above problem, which is implemented by five operators: army ant and prey initialization, recruited by prey, attack prey, update prey, and build ant bridge. The simulation results demonstrate that the optimizer shows good performance in terms of exploration and exploitation on benchmark suites when compared to other representative SI algorithms. More importantly, coverage enhancement AASO-based in WMSNs has better merits in terms of coverage effect when compared to existing approaches.