Fundamental Models and Signal Processing for Movable Antenna-Enhanced Wireless Communications and Sensing

Movable antenna (MA) has been recognized as a promising technology for performance enhancement in wireless communication and sensing systems by exploiting the spatial degrees of freedom (DoFs) in flexible antenna movement. However, the integration of MAs into next-generation wireless networks still faces design challenges due to the paradigm shift from conventional fixed-position antennas (FPAs) to MAs, which motivates this paper to provide a comprehensive overview of the models, scenarios, and signal processing techniques for MA-enhanced wireless networks. First, we introduce several efficient methods to realize flexible antenna movement. Next, channel models based on field response and spatial correlation are presented to characterize the channel variations with respect to MA movement. Then, we discuss the advantages and challenges of applying MAs to typical application scenarios of wireless communications and sensing. Moreover, we show the signal processing techniques for MA-enhanced communication and sensing systems, including channel acquisition and antenna position optimization. Finally, we highlight promising research directions to inspire future investigations.

My First Five Years of Faculty Career at the University of Delaware

In this short article, I would like to briefly summarize my research in the first 5 years in my university academia life in USA. I think that my research results obtained in these 5 years are the best in my career, at least which I like the most by myself. I wish that my experience in my junior academia career could be of some help to young researchers.

Multi-modal Uncertainty Robust Tree Cover Segmentation For High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images

Recent advances in semantic segmentation of multi-modal remote sensing images have significantly improved the accuracy of tree cover mapping, supporting applications in urban planning, forest monitoring, and ecological assessment. Integrating data from multiple modalities-such as optical imagery, light detection and ranging (LiDAR), and synthetic aperture radar (SAR)-has shown superior performance over single-modality methods. However, these data are often acquired days or even months apart, during which various changes may occur, such as vegetation disturbances (e.g., logging, and wildfires) and variations in imaging quality. Such temporal misalignments introduce cross-modal uncertainty, especially in high-resolution imagery, which can severely degrade segmentation accuracy. To address this challenge, we propose MURTreeFormer, a novel multi-modal segmentation framework that mitigates and leverages aleatoric uncertainty for robust tree cover mapping. MURTreeFormer treats one modality as primary and others as auxiliary, explicitly modeling patch-level uncertainty in the auxiliary modalities via a probabilistic latent representation. Uncertain patches are identified and reconstructed from the primary modality's distribution through a VAE-based resampling mechanism, producing enhanced auxiliary features for fusion. In the decoder, a gradient magnitude attention (GMA) module and a lightweight refinement head (RH) are further integrated to guide attention toward tree-like structures and to preserve fine-grained spatial details. Extensive experiments on multi-modal datasets from Shanghai and Zurich demonstrate that MURTreeFormer significantly improves segmentation performance and effectively reduces the impact of temporally induced aleatoric uncertainty.

QoE Optimization for Semantic Self-Correcting Video Transmission in Multi-UAV Networks

Real-time unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) video streaming is essential for time-sensitive applications, including remote surveillance, emergency response, and environmental monitoring. However, it faces challenges such as limited bandwidth, latency fluctuations, and high packet loss. To address these issues, we propose a novel semantic self-correcting video transmission framework with ultra-fine bitrate granularity (SSCV-G). In SSCV-G, video frames are encoded into a compact semantic codebook space, and the transmitter adaptively sends a subset of semantic indices based on bandwidth availability, enabling fine-grained bitrate control for improved bandwidth efficiency. At the receiver, a spatio-temporal vision transformer (ST-ViT) performs multi-frame joint decoding to reconstruct dropped semantic indices by modeling intra- and inter-frame dependencies. To further improve performance under dynamic network conditions, we integrate a multi-user proximal policy optimization (MUPPO) reinforcement learning scheme that jointly optimizes communication resource allocation and semantic bitrate selection to maximize user Quality of Experience (QoE). Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed SSCV-G significantly outperforms state-of-the-art video codecs in coding efficiency, bandwidth adaptability, and packet loss robustness. Moreover, the proposed MUPPO-based QoE optimization consistently surpasses existing benchmarks.

EnvCDiff: Joint Refinement of Environmental Information and Channel Fingerprints via Conditional Generative Diffusion Model

The paradigm shift from environment-unaware communication to intelligent environment-aware communication is expected to facilitate the acquisition of channel state information for future wireless communications. Channel Fingerprint (CF), as an emerging enabling technology for environment-aware communication, provides channel-related knowledge for potential locations within the target communication area. However, due to the limited availability of practical devices for sensing environmental information and measuring channel-related knowledge, most of the acquired environmental information and CF are coarse-grained, insufficient to guide the design of wireless transmissions. To address this, this paper proposes a deep conditional generative learning approach, namely a customized conditional generative diffusion model (CDiff). The proposed CDiff simultaneously refines environmental information and CF, reconstructing a fine-grained CF that incorporates environmental information, referred to as EnvCF, from its coarse-grained counterpart. Experimental results show that the proposed approach significantly improves the performance of EnvCF construction compared to the baselines.

Channel Fingerprint Construction for Massive MIMO: A Deep Conditional Generative Approach

Accurate channel state information (CSI) acquisition for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems is essential for future mobile communication networks. Channel fingerprint (CF), also referred to as channel knowledge map, is a key enabler for intelligent environment-aware communication and can facilitate CSI acquisition. However, due to the cost limitations of practical sensing nodes and test vehicles, the resulting CF is typically coarse-grained, making it insufficient for wireless transceiver design. In this work, we introduce the concept of CF twins and design a conditional generative diffusion model (CGDM) with strong implicit prior learning capabilities as the computational core of the CF twin to establish the connection between coarse- and fine-grained CFs. Specifically, we employ a variational inference technique to derive the evidence lower bound (ELBO) for the log-marginal distribution of the observed fine-grained CF conditioned on the coarse-grained CF, enabling the CGDM to learn the complicated distribution of the target data. During the denoising neural network optimization, the coarse-grained CF is introduced as side information to accurately guide the conditioned generation of the CGDM. To make the proposed CGDM lightweight, we further leverage the additivity of network layers and introduce a one-shot pruning approach along with a multi-objective knowledge distillation technique. Experimental results show that the proposed approach exhibits significant improvement in reconstruction performance compared to the baselines. Additionally, zero-shot testing on reconstruction tasks with different magnification factors further demonstrates the scalability and generalization ability of the proposed approach.

Near-Field Channel Estimation for XL-MIMO: A Deep Generative Model Guided by Side Information

This paper investigates the near-field (NF) channel estimation (CE) for extremely large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (XL-MIMO) systems. Considering the pronounced NF effects in XL-MIMO communications, we first establish a joint angle-distance (AD) domain-based spherical-wavefront physical channel model that captures the inherent sparsity of XL-MIMO channels. Leveraging the channel's sparsity in the joint AD domain, the CE is approached as a task of reconstructing sparse signals. Anchored in this framework, we first propose a compressed sensing algorithm to acquire a preliminary channel estimate. Harnessing the powerful implicit prior learning capability of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), we further propose a GenAI-based approach to refine the estimated channel. Specifically, we introduce the preliminary estimated channel as side information, and derive the evidence lower bound (ELBO) of the log-marginal distribution of the target NF channel conditioned on the preliminary estimated channel, which serves as the optimization objective for the proposed generative diffusion model (GDM). Additionally, we introduce a more generalized version of the GDM, the non-Markovian GDM (NM-GDM), to accelerate the sampling process, achieving an approximately tenfold enhancement in sampling efficiency. Experimental results indicate that the proposed approach is capable of offering substantial performance gain in CE compared to existing benchmark schemes within NF XL-MIMO systems. Furthermore, our approach exhibits enhanced generalization capabilities in both the NF or far-field (FF) regions.

Massive MIMO-OFDM Channel Acquisition with Time-Frequency Phase-Shifted Pilots

In this paper, we propose a channel acquisition approach with time-frequency phase-shifted pilots (TFPSPs) for massive multi-input multi-output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) systems. We first present a triple-beam (TB) based channel tensor model, allowing for the representation of the space-frequency-time (SFT) domain channel as the product of beam matrices and the TB domain channel tensor. By leveraging the specific characteristics of TB domain channels, we develop TFPSPs, where distinct pilot signals are simultaneously transmitted in the frequency and time domains. Then, we present the optimal TFPSP design and provide the corresponding pilot scheduling algorithm. Further, we propose a tensor-based information geometry approach (IGA) to estimate the TB domain channel tensors. Leveraging the specific structure of beam matrices and the properties of TFPSPs, we propose a low-complexity implementation of the tensor-based IGA. We validate the efficiency of our proposed channel acquisition approach through extensive simulations. Simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of our approach. The proposed approach can effectively suppress inter-UT interference with low complexity and limited pilot overhead, thereby enhancing channel estimation performance. Particularly in scenarios with a large number of UTs, the channel acquisition method outperforms existing approaches by reducing the normalized mean square error (NMSE) by more than 8 dB.

Statistical CSI Acquisition for Multi-frequency Massive MIMO Systems

Multi-frequency massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) communication is a promising strategy for both 5G and future 6G systems, ensuring reliable transmission while enhancing frequency resource utilization. Statistical channel state information (CSI) has been widely adopted in multi-frequency massive MIMO transmissions to reduce overhead and improve transmission performance. In this paper, we propose efficient and accurate methods for obtaining statistical CSI in multi-frequency massive MIMO systems. First, we introduce a multi-frequency massive MIMO channel model and analyze the mapping relationship between two types of statistical CSI, namely the angular power spectrum (APS) and the spatial covariance matrix, along with their correlation across different frequency bands. Next, we propose an autoregressive (AR) method to predict the spatial covariance matrix of any frequency band based on that of another frequency band. Furthermore, we emphasize that channels across different frequency bands share similar APS characteristics. Leveraging the maximum entropy (ME) criterion, we develop a low-complexity algorithm for high-resolution APS estimation. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the AR-based covariance prediction method and demonstrate the high-resolution estimation capability of the ME-based approach. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-frequency cooperative transmission by applying the proposed methods to obtain statistical CSI from low-frequency bands and utilizing it for high-frequency channel transmission. This approach significantly enhances high-frequency transmission performance while effectively reducing system overhead.

Prime Integer Matrices

This paper introduces prime integer matrices and its properties. It provides a simple way to construct families of pairwise co-prime integer matrices, that may have applications in multidimensional co-prime sensing and multidimensional Chinese remainder theorem.