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Guofa Cai

Publications and source records attributed to Guofa Cai.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

JEPA-MSAC: A Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture for Multimodal Sensing-Assisted Communications

Future wireless systems increasingly require predictive and transferable representations that can support multiple physical-layer (PHY) tasks under dynamic environments. However, most existing supervised learning-based methods are designed for a single task, which leads to high adaptation cost. To address this issue, we propose a joint-embedding predictive architecture for multimodal sensing-assisted communications (JEPA-MSAC), a self-supervised multimodal predictive representation learning framework for wireless environments. The proposed framework first maps multimodal sensing and communication measurements into a unified token space, and then pretrains a shared backbone using temporal block-masked JEPA to learn a predictive latent space that captures environment dynamics and cross-modal dependencies. After pretraining, the backbone is frozen and reused as a general future-feature generator, on top of which lightweight task heads are trained for localization, beam prediction, and received signal strength indicator (RSSI) prediction. Extensive experiments show the latent state supports accurate multi-task prediction with low adaptation cost. Additionally, ablation studies reveal its scaling behavior and the impact of key pretraining setups.

eess.SP

Segment-Wise Flow Matching for Vision-Aided mmWave V2I Beam Prediction

This paper proposes a vision-conditioned flow matching (FM) framework for beam prediction in millimeter-wave vehicle-to-infrastructure links. Instead of modeling discrete beam-index sequences, the proposed method learns the temporal evolution of normalized beam receive power vectors through a continuous vector field governed by an ordinary differential equation, enabling smooth dynamics and efficient sampling. By imposing FM over beam-state transitions and jointly optimizing beam prediction and flow consistency, the proposed framework provides a unified model for future beam prediction. Experimental results show that the proposed FM-based model significantly improves beam prediction performance over baselines, approaches the performance of large language model-based methods, and reduces predictor-side inference latency by about $6.9\times$ on GPU and $2.8\times10^3\times$ on CPU, respectively.

eess.SP

Dual-Domain Deep Learning-Assisted NOMA-CSK Systems for Secure and Efficient Vehicular Communications

Ensuring secure and efficient multi-user (MU) transmission is critical for vehicular communication systems. Chaos-based modulation schemes have garnered considerable interest due to their benefits in physical layer security. However, most existing MU chaotic communication systems, particularly those based on non-coherent detection, suffer from low spectral efficiency due to reference signal transmission, and limited user connectivity under orthogonal multiple access (OMA). While non-orthogonal schemes, such as sparse code multiple access (SCMA)-based DCSK, have been explored, they face high computational complexity and inflexible scalability due to their fixed codebook designs. This paper proposes a deep learning-assisted power domain non-orthogonal multiple access chaos shift keying (DL-NOMA-CSK) system for vehicular communications. A deep neural network (DNN)-based demodulator is designed to learn intrinsic chaotic signal characteristics during offline training, thereby eliminating the need for chaotic synchronization or reference signal transmission. The demodulator employs a dual-domain feature extraction architecture that jointly processes the time-domain and frequency-domain information of chaotic signals, enhancing feature learning under dynamic channels. The DNN is integrated into the successive interference cancellation (SIC) framework to mitigate error propagation issues. Theoretical analysis and extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed system achieves superior performance in terms of spectral efficiency (SE), energy efficiency (EE), bit error rate (BER), security, and robustness, while maintaining lower computational complexity compared to traditional MU-DCSK and existing DL-aided schemes. These advantages validate its practical viability for secure vehicular communications.

cs.IT

Design of an M-ary Chaos Shift Keying System Using Combined Chaotic Systems

In traditional chaos shift keying (CSK) communication systems, implementing chaotic synchronization techniques is costly but practically unattainable in a noisy environment. This paper proposes a combined chaotic sequences-based $M$-ary CSK (CCS-$M$-CSK) system that eliminates the need for chaotic synchronization. At the transmitter, the chaotic sequence is constructed by combining two chaotic segments of different lengths, where each is generated from distinct chaotic systems and only one kind of chaotic segment modulates the information signal. At the receiver, a deep learning unit with binary classification is meticulously designed to recover information symbols. The symbol error rate (SER) performance of the proposed system is evaluated over additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and multipath Rayleigh fading channels. Specifically, the impact of varying misalignment lengths on the SER performance of the system is analyzed when the received sequence is misaligned. Furthermore, the proposed system demonstrates significant performance advantages over existing CSK-based systems in multipath Rayleigh fading channels. These features establish CCS-$M$-CSK as a promising candidate for various applications, including Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X).

eess.SP

Multimodal Radio and Vision Fusion for Robust Localization in Urban V2I Communications

Accurate localization is critical for vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication systems, especially in urban areas where GPS signals are often obstructed by tall buildings, leading to significant positioning errors, necessitating alternative or complementary techniques for reliable and precise positioning in applications like autonomous driving and smart city infrastructure. This paper proposes a multimodal contrastive learning regression based localization framework for V2I scenarios that combines channel state information (CSI) with visual information to achieve improved accuracy and reliability. The approach leverages the complementary strengths of wireless and visual data to overcome the limitations of traditional localization methods, offering a robust solution for V2I applications. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed CSI and vision fusion model significantly outperforms traditional methods and single modal models, achieving superior localization accuracy and precision in complex urban environments.

eess.SP

Design of A New Multiple-Chirp-Rate Index Modulation for LoRa Networks

We propose a multiple chirp rate index modulation (MCR-IM) system based on Zadoff-Chu (ZC) sequences that overcomes the problems of low transmission rate and large-scale access in classical LoRa networks. We demonstrate the extremely low cross-correlation of MCR-IM signals across different spread factors, showing that the proposed MCR-IM system also inherits the characteristics of ZC sequences modulation. Moreover, we derive an approximate closed-form expression for the bit-error rate (BER) of the proposed MCR-IM system over Nakagami-m fading channels. Simulation results confirm the accuracy of the derived closed-form expression and demonstrate that the MCR-IM system achieves higher levels of spectral efficiency (SE) compared to existing systems. In this context, assigning multiple chirp rates to each user results in a reduction in the number of parallel channels. To mitigate this issue, we propose a peak detection based successive interference cancellation (PD-SIC) algorithm to accommodate more users. Compared to orthogonal scatter chirp spreading spectrum system that names OrthoRa, the MCR-IM system with PD-SIC algorithm achieves lower BER levels. For a similar number of collision signals, the throughput of the MCR-IM system is enhanced by 16% to 21%. Owing to these advantages, the proposed MCR-IM is well suited for large-scale, high-rate LoRa network applications.

eess.SP

M2BeamLLM: Multimodal Sensing-empowered mmWave Beam Prediction with Large Language Models

This paper introduces a novel neural network framework called M2BeamLLM for beam prediction in millimeter-wave (mmWave) massive multi-input multi-output (mMIMO) communication systems. M2BeamLLM integrates multi-modal sensor data, including images, radar, LiDAR, and GPS, leveraging the powerful reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-2 for beam prediction. By combining sensing data encoding, multimodal alignment and fusion, and supervised fine-tuning (SFT), M2BeamLLM achieves significantly higher beam prediction accuracy and robustness, demonstrably outperforming traditional deep learning (DL) models in both standard and few-shot scenarios. Furthermore, its prediction performance consistently improves with increased diversity in sensing modalities. Our study provides an efficient and intelligent beam prediction solution for vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) mmWave communication systems.

cs.CL

BeamLLM: Vision-Empowered mmWave Beam Prediction with Large Language Models

In this paper, we propose BeamLLM, a vision-aided millimeter-wave (mmWave) beam prediction framework leveraging large language models (LLMs) to address the challenges of high training overhead and latency in mmWave communication systems. By combining computer vision (CV) with LLMs' cross-modal reasoning capabilities, the framework extracts user equipment (UE) positional features from RGB images and aligns visual-temporal features with LLMs' semantic space through reprogramming techniques. Evaluated on a realistic vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) scenario, the proposed method achieves 61.01% top-1 accuracy and 97.39% top-3 accuracy in standard prediction tasks, significantly outperforming traditional deep learning models. In few-shot prediction scenarios, the performance degradation is limited to 12.56% (top-1) and 5.55% (top-3) from time sample 1 to 10, demonstrating superior prediction capability.

cs.LG

On the Performance of LoRa Empowered Communication for Wireless Body Area Networks

To remotely monitor the physiological status of the human body, long range (LoRa) communication has been considered as an eminently suitable candidate for wireless body area networks (WBANs). Typically, a Rayleigh-lognormal fading channel is encountered by the LoRa links of the WBAN. In this context, we characterize the performance of the LoRa system in WBAN scenarios with an emphasis on the physical (PHY) layer and medium access control (MAC) layer in the face of Rayleigh-lognormal fading channels and the same spreading factor interference. Specifically, closed-form approximate bit error probability (BEP) expressions are derived for the LoRa system. The results show that increasing the SF and reducing the interference efficiently mitigate the shadowing effects. Moreover, in the quest for the most suitable MAC protocol for LoRa based WBANs, three MAC protocols are critically appraised, namely the pure ALOHA, slotted ALOHA, and carrier-sense multiple access. The coverage probability, energy efficiency, throughput, and system delay of the three MAC protocols are analyzed in Rayleigh-lognormal fading channel. Furthermore, the performance of the equal-interval-based and equal-area-based schemes is analyzed to guide the choice of the SF. Our simulation results confirm the accuracy of the mathematical analysis and provide some useful insights for the future design of LoRa based WBANs.

cs.IT

RIS-Enabled Anti-Interference in LoRa Systems

It has been proved that a long-range (LoRa) system can achieve long-distance and low-power. However, the performance of LoRa systems can be severely degraded by fading. In addition, LoRa technology typically adopts an ALOHA-based access mechanism, which inevitably produces interfering signals for the target user. To overcome the effects of fading and interference, we introduce a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) to LoRa systems. In this context, both non-coherent and coherent detections are considered and their bit error rate (BER) performance analyses are conducted. Moreover, we derive the closed-form BER expressions for the proposed system over Nakagami-m fading channels. Simulation results are used to verify the accuracy of our proposed analytical results. It is shown that the proposed system outperforms the RIS-free LoRa system, and the RIS-aided LoRa system adopting blind transmission. Furthermore, the impacts of the spreading factor (SF), the number of reflecting elements, and the Nakagami-m fading parameters are investigated. It is shown that increasing the number of reflecting elements can remarkably enhance the BER performance, which is an affective measure for the proposed system to balance the trade-off between data rate and coverage range. We further observe that the BER performance of the proposed system is more sensitive to the fading parameter m at high signal-to-noise ratios.

cs.IT

STAR-RIS Aided MISO SWIPT-NOMA System with Energy Buffer: Performance Analysis and Optimization

In this paper, we propose a simultaneous transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) and energy buffer aided multiple-input single-output (MISO) simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system, which consists of a STAR-RIS, an access point (AP), and reflection users and transmission users with energy buffers. In the proposed system, the multi-antenna AP can transmit information and energy to several single-antenna reflection and transmission users simultaneously by the NOMA fashion in the downlink, where the power transfer and information transmission states of the users are modeled using Markov chains. The reflection and transmission users harvest and store the energy in energy buffers as additional power supplies, which are partially utilized for uplink information transmission. The power outage probability, information outage probability, sum throughput, and joint outage probability closed-form expressions of the proposed system are derived over Nakagami-m fading channels, which are validated via simulations. Results demonstrate that the proposed system achieves better performance as compared to the proposed system with discrete phase shifts, the STAR-RIS aided MISO SWIPT-NOMA buffer-less, conventional RIS and energy buffer aided MISO SWIPT-NOMA, and STAR-RIS and energy buffer aided MISO SWIPT-time-division multiple access (TDMA) systems. Furthermore, a particle swarm optimization-based power allocation (PSO-PA) algorithm is designed to maximize the uplink sum throughput with a constraint on the uplink joint outage probability and Jain's fairness index (JFI). Simulation results illustrate that the proposed PSO-PA algorithm can achieve an improved sum throughput performance of the proposed system.

cs.IT

Performance Analysis and Resource Allocation of STAR-RIS Aided Wireless-Powered NOMA System

This paper proposes a simultaneous transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) aided wireless-powered non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system, which includes an access point (AP), a STAR-RIS, and two non-orthogonal users located at both sides of the STAR-RIS. In this system, the users first harvest the radio-frequency energy from the AP in the downlink, then adopt the harvested energy to transmit information to the AP in the uplink concurrently. Two policies are considered for the proposed system. The first one assumes that the time-switching protocol is used in the downlink while the energy-splitting protocol is adopted in the uplink, named TEP. The second one assumes that the energy-splitting protocol is utilized in both the downlink and uplink, named EEP. The outage probability, sum throughput, and average age of information (AoI) of the proposed system with TEP and EEP are investigated over Nakagami-m fading channels. In addition, we also analyze the outage probability, sum throughput, and average AoI of the STAR-RIS aided wireless-powered time-division-multiple-access (TDMA) system. Simulation and numerical results show that the proposed system with TEP and EEP outperforms baseline schemes, and significantly improves sum throughput performance but reduces outage probability and average AoI performance compared to the STAR-RIS aided wireless-powered TDMA system. Furthermore, to maximize the sum throughput and ensure a certain average AoI, we design a genetic-algorithm based time allocation and power allocation (GA-TAPA) algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed GA-TAPA method can significantly improve the sum throughput by adaptively adjusting system parameters.

cs.IT

Performance Analysis of a Two-Hop Relaying LoRa System

The conventional LoRa system is not able to sustain long-range communication over fading channels. To resolve the challenging issue, this paper investigates a two-hop opportunistic amplify-and-forward relaying LoRa system. Based on the best relay-selection protocol, the analytical and asymptotic bit error rate (BER), achievable diversity order, coverage probability, and throughput of the proposed system are derived over the Nakagamim fading channel. Simulative and numerical results show that although the proposed system reduces the throughput compared to the conventional LoRa system, it can significantly improve BER and coverage probability. Hence, the proposed system can be considered as a promising platform for low-power, long-range and highly reliable wireless-communication applications.

cs.IT

Outage-Limit-Approaching Protograph LDPC Codes for Slow-Fading Wireless Communications

Block-fading (BF) channel, also known as slow-fading channel, is a type of simple and practical channel model that can characterize the primary feature of a number of wireless-communication applications with low to moderate mobility. Although the BF channel has received significant research attention in the past twenty years, designing low-complexity outage-limit-approaching error-correction codes (ECCs) is still a challenging issue. For this reason, a novel family of protograph low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, called root-protograph (RP) LDPC codes, has been conceived recently. The RP codes can not only realize linear-complexity encoding and high-speed decoding with the help of a quasi-cyclic (QC) structure, but also achieve near-outage-limit performance in a variety of BF scenarios. In this article, we briefly review the design guidelines of such protograph codes with the aim of inspiring further research activities in this area.

cs.IT

A New Frequency-Bin-Index LoRa System for High-Data-Rate Transmission: Design and Performance Analysis

As an attempt to tackle the low-data-rate issue of the conventional LoRa systems, we propose two novel frequency-bin-index (FBI) LoRa schemes. In scheme I, the indices of starting frequency bins (SFBs) are utilized to carry the information bits. To facilitate the actual implementation, the SFBs of each LoRa signal are divided into several groups prior to the modulation process in the proposed FBI-LoRa system. To further improve the system flexibility, we formulate a generalized modulation scheme and propose scheme II by treating the SFB groups as an additional type of transmission entity. In scheme II, the combination of SFB indices and that of SFB group indices are both exploited to carry the information bits. We derive the theoretical expressions for bit-error-rate (BER) and throughput of the proposed FBI-LoRa system with two modulation schemes over additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and Rayleigh fading channels. Theoretical and simulation results show that the proposed FBI-LoRa schemes can significantly increases the transmission throughput compared with the existing LoRa systems at the expense of a slight loss in BER performance. Thanks to the appealing superiorities, the proposed FBI-LoRa system is a promising alternative for high-data-rate Internet of Things (IoT) applications.

eess.SP

Design and Performance Analysis of a New STBC-MIMO LoRa System

LoRa is a modulation technology for low power wide area networks (LPWAN) with enormous potential in 5G era. However, the performance of LoRa system deteriorates seriously in fading-channel environments. To tackle this problem, in this paper we introduce multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) configuration employing space-time block coding (STBC) schemes into the LoRa system to formulate an STBC-MIMO LoRa system. Then, we investigate the theoretical performance of the proposed system over Rayleigh fading channels. To this end, we derive the distribution of the decision metric for the demodulator in the proposed system. Based on the above distribution, we propose the closed-form approximated bit error rate (BER) expression of the proposed system when perfect and imperfect channel information states (CSIs) are considered. In addition, we analyze the diversity order of the proposed system. The result demonstrates that the diversity order of the system in the imperfect CSI scenario with fixed channel estimate error variance is zero. However, in the imperfect CSI scenario with a decreasing channel estimate error variance and the perfect CSI scenario, the system can achieve full diversity. Finally, experimental results verify the accuracy of the theoretical analysis and the excellent performance of the proposed system. Due to such superiority, the proposed STBC-MIMO LoRa system can be considered as a good scheme for LPWAN.

eess.SP

Design of Link-Selection Strategies for Buffer-Aided DCSK-SWIPT Relay System

Adaptive link selection for buffer-aided relaying can achieve significant performance gain compared with the conventional relaying with fixed transmission criterion. However, most of the existing link-selection strategies are designed based on perfect channel state information (CSI), which are very complex by requiring channel estimator. To solve this issue, in this paper, we investigate a buffer-aided differential chaos-shift-keying based simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (DCSK-SWIPT) relay system, where a decode-and-forward protocol is considered and the relay is equipped with a data buffer and an energy buffer. In particular, we propose two link-selection protocols for the proposed system based on harvested energy, data-buffer status and energy-shortage status, where the CSI is replaced by the harvested energy to avoid the channel estimation and the practical problem of the decoding cost at the relay is considered. Furthermore, the bit-error-rate (BER) and average-delay closed-form expressions of the proposed protocols are derived over multipath Rayleigh fading channels, which are validated via simulations. Finally, results demonstrate that both the proposed protocols not only provide better BER performance than the conventional DCSK system and DCSK-SWIPT relay system but also achieve better BER performance and lower average delay in comparison to the conventional signal-to-noise-ratio-based buffer-aided DCSK-SWIPT relay systems.

eess.SP

Design of an MISO-SWIPT-Aided Code-Index Modulated Multi-Carrier M-DCSK System for e-Health IoT

Code index modulated multi-carrier M-ary differential chaos shift keying (CIM-MC-M-DCSK) system not only inherits low-power and low-complexity advantages of the conventional DCSK system, but also significantly increases the transmission rate. This feature is of particular importance to Internet of Things (IoT) with trillions of low-cost devices. In particular, for e-health IoT applications, an efficient transmission scheme is designed to solve the challenge of the limited battery capacity for numerous user equipments served by one base station. In this paper, a new multiple-input-single-output simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (MISO-SWIPT) scheme for CIM-MC-M-DCSK system is proposed by utilizing orthogonal characteristic of chaotic signals with different initial values. The proposed system adopts power splitting mode, which is very promising for simultaneously providing energy and transmitting information of the user equipments without any external power supply. In particular, the new system can achieve desirable anti-multipath-fading capability without using channel estimator. Moreover, the analytical bit-error-rate expression of the proposed system is derived over multipath Rayleigh fading channels. Furthermore, the spectral efficiency and energy efficiency of the proposed system are analyzed. Simulation results not only validate the analytical expressions, but also demonstrate the superiority of the proposed system.

cs.NI