Joint Resource Estimation and Trajectory Optimization for eVTOL-involved CR network: A Monte Carlo Tree Search-based Approach

Electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft, pivotal to Advanced Air Mobility (AAM), are emerging as a transformative transportation paradigm with the potential to redefine urban and regional mobility. While these systems offer unprecedented efficiency in transporting people and goods, they rely heavily on computation capability, safety-critical operations such as real-time navigation, environmental sensing, and trajectory tracking--necessitating robust offboard computational support. A widely adopted solution involves offloading these tasks to terrestrial base stations (BSs) along the flight path. However, air-to-ground connectivity is often constrained by spectrum conflicts with terrestrial users, which poses a significant challenge to maintaining reliable task execution. Cognitive radio (CR) techniques offer promising capabilities for dynamic spectrum access, making them a natural fit for addressing this issue. Existing studies often overlook the time-varying nature of BS resources, such as spectrum availability and CPU cycles, which leads to inaccurate trajectory planning, suboptimal offloading success rates, excessive energy consumption, and operational delays. To address these challenges, we propose a trajectory optimization framework for eVTOL swarms that maximizes task offloading success probability while minimizing both energy consumption and resource competition (e.g., spectrum and CPU cycles) with primary terrestrial users. The proposed algorithm integrates a Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) model to dynamically estimate BS resource availability and a Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm to determine optimal offloading decisions, selecting both the BSs and access time windows that align with energy and temporal constraints.

The Dance of Atoms-De Novo Protein Design with Diffusion Model

The de novo design of proteins refers to creating proteins with specific structures and functions that do not naturally exist. In recent years, the accumulation of high-quality protein structure and sequence data and technological advancements have paved the way for the successful application of generative artificial intelligence (AI) models in protein design. These models have surpassed traditional approaches that rely on fragments and bioinformatics. They have significantly enhanced the success rate of de novo protein design, and reduced experimental costs, leading to breakthroughs in the field. Among various generative AI models, diffusion models have yielded the most promising results in protein design. In the past two to three years, more than ten protein design models based on diffusion models have emerged. Among them, the representative model, RFDiffusion, has demonstrated success rates in 25 protein design tasks that far exceed those of traditional methods, and other AI-based approaches like RFjoint and hallucination. This review will systematically examine the application of diffusion models in generating protein backbones and sequences. We will explore the strengths and limitations of different models, summarize successful cases of protein design using diffusion models, and discuss future development directions.

Coverage Analysis and Trajectory Optimization for Aerial Users with Dedicated Cellular Infrastructure

In this paper, we consider a novel cellular network for aerial users, which is composed of dedicated base stations (BSs), whose antennas are directed towards aerial users, and traditional terrestrial BSs (TBSs). Besides, the dedicated BSs are deployed on roadside furniture, such as lampposts and traffic lights, to achieve multiple features while occupying less space. Therefore, the locations of dedicated BSs and TBSs are modeled by a Poisson-line-Cox-process (PLCP) and Poisson point process (PPP), respectively. For the proposed network, we first compute the aerial coverage probability and show that the deployment of dedicated BSs improves the coverage probability in both high dense areas and rural areas. We then consider a cellular-connected UAV that has a flying mission and optimize its trajectory to maximize the minimal achievable signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) (Max-Min SINR). To obtain the Max-Min SINR and minimal time trajectory that satisfies the Max-Min SINR, we proposed two algorithms that are practical in large-scale networks. Finally, our results show that the optimal density of dedicated BSs which maximizes Max-Min SINR decreases with the increase of the road densities.

Stochastic Geometry-based Analysis of Multi-Purpose UAVs for Package and Data Delivery

Using drones for communications and transportation is drawing great attention in many practical scenarios, such as package delivery and providing additional wireless coverage. However, the increasing demand for UAVs from industry and academia will cause aerial traffic conflicts in the future. This, in turn, motivates the idea of this paper: multi-purpose UAVs, acting as aerial wireless data relays and means of aerial transportation simultaneously, to deliver packages and data at the same time. This paper aims to analyze the feasibility of using drones to collect and deliver data from the Internet of Things (IoT) devices to terrestrial base stations (TBSs) while delivering packages from warehouses to residential areas. We propose an algorithm to optimize the trajectory of UAVs to maximize the size of collected/delivered data while minimizing the total round trip time subject to the limited onboard battery of UAVs. Specifically, we use tools from stochastic geometry to model the locations of the IoT clusters and the TBSs and study the system performance with respect to energy efficiency, average size of collected/delivered data, and package delivery time. Our numerical results reveal that multi-functional UAVs have great potential to enhance the efficiency of both communication and transportation networks.