arXiv subjects

Ha H. Nguyen

Publications and source records attributed to Ha H. Nguyen.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

Improved Soft-k-Means Clustering Algorithm for Balancing Energy Consumption in Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy load balancing is an essential issue in designing wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Clustering techniques are utilized as energy-efficient methods to balance the network energy and prolong its lifetime. In this paper, we propose an improved soft-k-means (IS-k-means) clustering algorithm to balance the energy consumption of nodes in WSNs. First, we use the idea of ``clustering by fast search and find of density peaks'' (CFSFDP) and kernel density estimation (KDE) to improve the selection of the initial cluster centers of the soft k-means clustering algorithm. Then, we utilize the flexibility of the soft-k-means and reassign member nodes considering their membership probabilities at the boundary of clusters to balance the number of nodes per cluster. Furthermore, the concept of multi-cluster heads is employed to balance the energy consumption within clusters. {Extensive simulation results under different network scenarios demonstrate that for small-scale WSNs with single-hop transmission}, the proposed algorithm can postpone the first node death, the half of nodes death, and the last node death on average when compared to various clustering algorithms from the literature.

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arXiv2023

UAV Trajectory Planning for AoI-Minimal Data Collection in UAV-Aided IoT Networks by Transformer

Maintaining freshness of data collection in Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks has attracted increasing attention. By taking into account age-of-information (AoI), we investigate the trajectory planning problem of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that is used to aid a cluster-based IoT network. An optimization problem is formulated to minimize the total AoI of the collected data by the UAV from the ground IoT network. Since the total AoI of the IoT network depends on the flight time of the UAV and the data collection time at hovering points, we jointly optimize the selection of hovering points and the visiting order to these points. We exploit the state-of-the-art transformer and the weighted A*, which is a path search algorithm, to design a machine learning algorithm to solve the formulated problem. The whole UAV-IoT system is fed into the encoder network of the proposed algorithm, and the algorithm's decoder network outputs the visiting order to ground clusters. Then, the weighted A* is used to find the hovering point for each cluster in the ground IoT network. Simulation results show that the trained model by the proposed algorithm has a good generalization ability to generate solutions for IoT networks with different numbers of ground clusters, without the need to retrain the model. Furthermore, results show that our proposed algorithm can find better UAV trajectories with the minimum total AoI when compared to other algorithms.

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arXiv2023

Design and Detection of Unitary Constellations in Non-Coherent SIMO Systems for Short Packet Communications

This paper proposes a novel design of multi-symbol unitary constellation for non-coherent single-input multiple-output (SIMO) communications over block Rayleigh fading channels. To facilitate the design and the detection of large unitary constellations at reduced complexity, the proposed constellations are constructed as the Cartesian product of independent amplitude and phase-shift-keying (PSK) vectors, and hence, can be iteratively detected. The amplitude vector is detected by exhaustive search, whose complexity is sufficiently low in short packet transmission scenarios. To detect the PSK vector, we use the posterior probability as a reliability criterion in the sorted decision-feedback differential detection (sort-DFDD), which results in near-optimal error performance for PSK symbols with equal modulation orders. This detector is called posteriori-based-reliability-sort-DFDD (PR-sort-DFDD) and has polynomial complexity. We also propose an improved detector called improved-PR-sort-DFDD to detect a more generalized PSK structure, i.e., PSK symbols with unequal modulation orders. This detector also approaches the optimal error performance with polynomial complexity. Simulation results show the merits of our proposed multi-symbol unitary constellation when compared to competing low-complexity unitary constellations.

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arXiv2023

A Tutorial on Chirp Spread Spectrum for LoRaWAN: Basics and Key Advances

Chirps spread spectrum (CSS) modulation is the heart of long-range (LoRa) modulation used in the context of long-range wide area network (LoRaWAN) in internet of things (IoT) scenarios. Despite being a proprietary technology owned by Semtech Corp., LoRa modulation has drawn much attention from the research and industry communities in recent years. However, to the best of our knowledge, a comprehensive tutorial, investigating the CSS modulation in the LoRaWAN application, is missing in the literature. Therefore, in the first part of this paper, we provide a thorough analysis and tutorial of CSS modulation modified by LoRa specifications, discussing various aspects such as signal generation, detection, error performance, and spectral characteristics. Moreover, a summary of key recent advances in the context of CSS modulation applications in IoT networks is presented in the second part of this paper under four main categories of transceiver configuration and design, data rate improvement, interference modeling, and synchronization algorithms.

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arXiv2022

D2D-aided LoRaWAN LR-FHSS in Direct-to-Satellite IoT Networks

In this paper, we present a device-to-device (D2D) transmission scheme for aiding long-range frequency hopping spread spectrum (LR-FHSS) LoRaWAN protocol with application in direct-to-satellite IoT networks. We consider a practical ground-to-satellite fading model, i.e. shadowed-Rice channel, and derive the outage performance of the LR-FHSS network. With the help of network coding, D2D-aided LR-FHSS transmission scheme is proposed to improve the network capacity for which a closed-form outage probability expression is also derived. The obtained analytical expressions for both LR-FHSS and D2D-aided LR-FHSS outage probabilities are validated by computer simulations for different parts of the analysis capturing the effects of noise, fading, unslotted ALOHA-based time scheduling, the receiver's capture effect, IoT device distributions, and distance from node to satellite. The total outage probability for the D2D-aided LR-FHSS shows a considerable increase of 249.9% and 150.1% in network capacity at a typical outage of 10^-2 for DR6 and DR5, respectively, when compared to LR-FHSS. This is obtained at the cost of minimum of one and maximum of two additional transmissions per each IoT end device imposed by the D2D scheme in each time-slot.

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arXiv2022

Bit-Interleaved Coded Energy-Based Modulation with Iterative Decoding

This paper develops a low-complexity near-optimal non-coherent receiver for a multi-level energy-based coded modulation system. Inspired by the turbo processing principle, we incorporate the fundamentals of bit-interleaved coded modulation with iterative decoding (BICM-ID) into the proposed receiver design. The resulting system is called bit-interleaved coded energy-based modulation with iterative decoding (BICEM-ID) and its error performance is analytically studied. Specifically, we derive upper bounds on the average pairwise error probability (PEP) of the non-coherent BICEM-ID system in the feedback-free (FF) and error-free feedback (EFF) scenarios. It is revealed that the definition of the nearest neighbors, which is important in the performance analysis in the FF scenario, is very different from that in the coherent BICM-ID counterpart. The analysis also reveals how the mapping from coded bits to energy levels influences the diversity order and coding gain of the BICEM-ID systems. A design criterion for good mappings is then formulated and an algorithm is proposed to find a set of best mappings for BICEM-ID. Finally, simulation results corroborate the main analytical findings.

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arXiv2022

Multi-level Design for Multiple-Symbol Non-Coherent Unitary Constellations for Massive SIMO Systems

This paper investigates non-coherent detection of single-input multiple-output (SIMO) systems over block Rayleigh fading channels. Using the Kullback-Leibler divergence as the design criterion, we formulate a multiple-symbol constellation optimization problem, which turns out to have high computational complexity to construct and detect. We exploit the structure of the formulated problem and decouple it into a unitary constellation design and a multi-level design. The proposed multi-level design has low complexity in both construction and detection. Simulation results show that our multi-level design has better performance than traditional pilot-based schemes and other existing low-complexity multi-level designs.

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arXiv2021

RIS-Aided Cell-Free Massive MIMO Systems: Joint Design of Transmit Beamforming and Phase Shifts

This paper studies RIS-aided cell-free massive MIMO systems, where multiple RISs are deployed to assist the communication between multiple access points (APs) and multiple users, with either continuous or discrete phase shifts at the RISs. We formulate the max-min fairness problem that maximizes the minimum achievable rate among all users by jointly optimizing the transmit beamforming at active APs and the phase shifts at passive RISs, subject to power constraints at the APs. To address such a challenging problem, we first study the special single-user scenario and propose an algorithm that can transform the optimization problem into semidefinite program (SDP) or integer linear program (ILP) for the cases of continuous and discrete phase shifts, respectively. By solving the resulting SDP and ILP, we first obtain the optimal phase shifts, and then design the optimal transmit beamforming accordingly. To solve the optimization problem for the multi-user scenario and continuous phase shifts at RISs, we extend the single-user algorithm and propose an alternating optimization algorithm, which can first decompose the max-min fairness problem into two subproblems related to transmit beamforming and phase shifts, and then transform the two subproblems into second-order-cone program and SDP, respectively. For the multi-user scenario and discrete phase shifts, the max-min fairness problem is shown to be a mixed-integer non-linear program (MINLP). To tackle it, we design a ZF-based successive refinement algorithm, which can find a suboptimal transmit beamforming and phase shifts by means of alternating optimization. Numerical results show that compared with benchmark schemes of random phase shifts and without using RISs, the proposed algorithms can significantly increase the minimum achievable rate among all users, especially when the number of reflecting elements at each RIS is large.

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arXiv2021

Joint Cluster Head Selection and Trajectory Planning in UAV-Aided IoT Networks by Reinforcement Learning with Sequential Model

Employing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has attracted growing interests and emerged as the state-of-the-art technology for data collection in Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks. In this paper, with the objective of minimizing the total energy consumption of the UAV-IoT system, we formulate the problem of jointly designing the UAV's trajectory and selecting cluster heads in the IoT network as a constrained combinatorial optimization problem which is classified as NP-hard and challenging to solve. We propose a novel deep reinforcement learning (DRL) with a sequential model strategy that can effectively learn the policy represented by a sequence-to-sequence neural network for the UAV's trajectory design in an unsupervised manner. Through extensive simulations, the obtained results show that the proposed DRL method can find the UAV's trajectory that requires much less energy consumption when compared to other baseline algorithms and achieves close-to-optimal performance. In addition, simulation results show that the trained model by our proposed DRL algorithm has an excellent generalization ability to larger problem sizes without the need to retrain the model.

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arXiv2021

Concurrent Transmission and Multiuser Detection of LoRa Signals

This paper investigates a new model to improve the scalability of low-power long-range (LoRa) networks by allowing multiple end devices (EDs) to simultaneously communicate with multiple multi-antenna gateways on the same frequency band and using the same spreading factor. The maximum likelihood (ML) decision rule is first derived for non-coherent detection of information bits transmitted by multiple devices. To overcome the high complexity of the ML detection, we propose a sub-optimal two-stage detection algorithm to balance the computational complexity and error performance. In the first stage, we identify transmit chirps (without knowing which EDs transmit them). In the second stage, we determine the EDs that transmit the specific chirps identified from the first stage. To improve the detection performance in the second stage, we also optimize the transmit powers of EDs to minimize the similarity, measured by the Jaccard coefficient, between the received powers of any pair of EDs. As the power control optimization problem is non-convex, we use concepts from successive convex approximation to transform it to an approximate convex optimization problem that can be solved iteratively and guaranteed to reach a sub-optimal solution. Simulation results demonstrate and justify the tradeoff between transmit power penalties and network scalability of the proposed LoRa network model. In particular, by allowing concurrent transmission of 2 or 3 EDs, the uplink capacity of the proposed network can be doubled or tripled over that of a conventional LoRa network, albeit at the expense of additional 3.0 or 4.7 dB transmit power.

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arXiv2021

Angle Estimation for Terahertz Ultra-Massive MIMO-Based Space-to-Air Communications

This paper investigates terahertz ultra-massive (UM)-MIMO-based angle estimation for space-to-air communications, which can solve the performance degradation problem caused by the dual delay-beam squint effects of terahertz UM-MIMO channels. Specifically, we first design a grouping true-time delay unit module that can significantly mitigate the impact of delay-beam squint effects to establish the space-to-air THz link. Based on the subarray selection scheme, the UM hybrid array can be equivalently considered as a low-dimensional fully-digital array, and then the fine estimates of azimuth/elevation angles at both UAVs and satellite can be separately acquired using the proposed prior-aided iterative angle estimation algorithm. The simulation results that close to Cramér-Rao lower bounds verify the effectiveness of our solution.

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arXiv2021

UAV Trajectory Planning in Wireless Sensor Networks for Energy Consumption Minimization by Deep Reinforcement Learning

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as a promising candidate solution for data collection of large-scale wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this paper, we investigate a UAV-aided WSN, where cluster heads (CHs) receive data from their member nodes, and a UAV is dispatched to collect data from CHs along the planned trajectory. We aim to minimize the total energy consumption of the UAV-WSN system in a complete round of data collection. Toward this end, we formulate the energy consumption minimization problem as a constrained combinatorial optimization problem by jointly selecting CHs from nodes within clusters and planning the UAV's visiting order to the selected CHs. The formulated energy consumption minimization problem is NP-hard, and hence, hard to solve optimally. In order to tackle this challenge, we propose a novel deep reinforcement learning (DRL) technique, pointer network-A* (Ptr-A*), which can efficiently learn from experiences the UAV trajectory policy for minimizing the energy consumption. The UAV's start point and the WSN with a set of pre-determined clusters are fed into the Ptr-A*, and the Ptr-A* outputs a group of CHs and the visiting order to these CHs, i.e., the UAV's trajectory. The parameters of the Ptr-A* are trained on small-scale clusters problem instances for faster training by using the actor-critic algorithm in an unsupervised manner. At inference, three search strategies are also proposed to improve the quality of solutions. Simulation results show that the trained models based on 20-clusters and 40-clusters have a good generalization ability to solve the UAV's trajectory planning problem in WSNs with different numbers of clusters, without the need to retrain the models. Furthermore, the results show that our proposed DRL algorithm outperforms two baseline techniques.

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arXiv2021

Performance Improvement of LoRa Modulation with Signal Combining and Semi-Coherent Detection

In this paper, we investigate performance improvements of low-power long-range (LoRa) modulation when a gateway is equipped with multiple antennas. We derive the optimal decision rules for both coherent and non-coherent detections when combining signals received from multiple antennas. To provide insights on how signal combining can benefit LoRa systems, we present expressions of the symbol/bit error probabilities of both the coherent and non-coherent detections in AWGN and Rayleigh fading channels, respectively. Moreover, we also propose an iterative semi-coherent detection that does not require any overhead to estimate the channel-state-information (CSI) while its performance can approach that of the ideal coherent detection. Simulation and analytical results show very large power gains, or coverage extension, provided by the use of multiple antennas for all the detection schemes considered.

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arXiv2021

Frequency-Shift Chirp Spread Spectrum Communications with Index Modulation

This paper introduces a novel frequency-shift chirp spread spectrum (FSCSS) system with index modulation (IM). By using combinations of orthogonal chirp signals for message representation, the proposed FSCSS-IM system is very flexible to design and can achieve much higher data rates than the conventional FSCSS system under the same bandwidth. The paper presents optimal detection algorithms, both coherently and non-coherently, for the proposed FSCSS-IM system. Furthermore, a low-complexity non-coherent detection algorithm is also developed to reduce the computational complexity of the receiver, which is shown to achieve near-optimal performance. Results are presented to demonstrate that the proposed system, while enabling much higher data rates, enjoys similar bit-error performance as that of the conventional FSCSS system.

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arXiv2021

Design of Non-Coherent and Coherent Receivers for Chirp Spread Spectrum Systems

LoRaWAN is a prominent communication standard to enable reliable low-power, long-range communications for the Internet of Things (IoT). The modulation technique used in LoRaWAN, commonly known as LoRa modulation, is based on the principle of chirp spread spectrum (CSS). While extensive research has been conducted on improving various aspects of LoRa transmitter, the design of LoRa receivers that can operate under practical conditions of timing and frequency offsets is missing. To fill this gap, this paper develops and presents detailed designs of timing, frequency and phase synchronization circuits for both non-coherent and coherent detection of CSS signals. More importantly, the proposed receiver can be used to detect the recently proposed CSS-based modulation that embeds extra information bits in the starting phases of conventional CSS symbols. Such a transmission scheme, referred to as phase-shift keying CSS (PSK-CSS) helps to improve the transmission rates of the conventional CSS system. In particular, it is shown that the bit error rate performance of the PSK-CSS scheme achieved with the proposed practical coherent receiver has only 0.25 dB gaps as compared to the ideal co-coherent receiver.

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arXiv2021

Performance Analysis and Optimization of Bidirectional Overlay Cognitive Radio Networks with Hybrid-SWIPT

This paper considers a cooperative cognitive radio network with two primary users (PUs) and two secondary users (SUs) that enables two-way communications of primary and secondary systems in conjunction with non-linear energy harvesting based simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT). With the considered network, SUs are able to realize their communications over the licensed spectrum while extending relay assistance to the PUs. The overall bidirectional end-to-end transmission takes place in four phases, which include both energy harvesting (EH) and information transfer. A non-linear energy harvester with a hybrid SWIPT scheme is adopted in which both power-splitting and time-switching EH techniques are used. The SUs aid in relay cooperation by performing an amplify-and-forward operation, whereas selection combining technique is adopted at the PUs to extract the intended signal from multiple received signals broadcasted by the SUs. Accurate outage probability expressions for the primary and secondary links are derived under the Nakagami-$m$ fading environment. Further, the system behavior is analyzed with respect to achievable system throughput and energy efficiency. Since the performance of the considered system is strongly affected by the spectrum sharing factor and hybrid SWIPT parameters, particle swarm optimization is implemented to optimize the system parameters so as to maximize the system throughput and energy efficiency. Simulation results are provided to corroborate the performance analysis and give useful insights into the system behavior concerning various system/channel parameters.

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arXiv2020

Wireless Information and Power Transfer for IoT Applications in Overlay Cognitive Radio Networks

This paper proposes and investigates an overlay spectrum sharing system in conjunction with the simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) to enable communications for the Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Considered is a cooperative cognitive radio network, where two IoT devices (IoDs) exchange their information and also provide relay assistance to a pair of primary users (PUs). Different from most existing works, in this paper, both IoDs can harvest energy from the radio-frequency (RF) signals received from the PUs. By utilizing the harvested energy, they provide relay cooperation to PUs and realize their own communications. For harvesting energy, a time-switching (TS) based approach is adopted at both IoDs. With the proposed scheme, one round of bidirectional information exchange for both primary and IoT systems is performed in four phases, i.e., one energy harvesting (EH) phase and three information processing (IP) phases. Both IoDs rely on the decode-and-forward operation to facilitate relaying, whereas the PUs employ selection combining (SC) technique. For investigating the performance of the considered network, this paper first provides exact expressions of user outage probability (OP) for the primary and IoT systems under Nakagami-m fading. Then, by utilizing the expressions of user OP, the system throughput and energy efficiency are quantified together with the average end-to-end transmission time. Numerical and simulation results are provided to give useful insights into the system behavior and to highlight the impact of various system/channel parameters.

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arXiv2020

Performance of Wireless Powered Cognitive Radio Sensor Networks With Nonlinear Energy Harvester

This letter analyzes the performance of simultaneous wireless information-and-power transfer (SWIPT) in an overlay cognitive radio network (CRN) under Nakagami-$m$ fading. A pair of secondary users (SUs) is considered in which one SU facilitates relay cooperation for communications between two primary users (PUs). In return, SUs make use of primary users' signals for energy harvesting (EH) and realize their own communications. In such a network, end-to-end bidirectional communications between the two PUs and unidirectional information exchange between the SUs can be performed in three phases. A power splitting (PS) based approach is adopted for enabling SWIPT. The relaying SU applies an amplify-and-forward (AF) protocol to broadcast primary and secondary signals, whereas the PUs perform selection combining to access the active direct link. Accurate expressions of the outage probability (OP) and throughput are derived for the primary system by considering a nonlinear energy harvester at the relaying SU under Nakagami-m fading

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