arXiv subjects

Holger Boche

Publications and source records attributed to Holger Boche.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Exploiting Beamforming for Enforcing Semantic Secrecy in 5G NR mmWave Communications

We experimentally investigate the performance of semantically-secure physical layer security (PLS) in 5G new radio (NR) mmWave communications during the initial cell search procedure in the NR band n257 at 27 GHz. A gNB transmits PLS-encoded messages in the presence of an eavesdropper, who intercepts the communication by non-intrusively collecting channel readings in the form of IQ samples. For the message transmission, we use the physical broadcast channel (PBCH) within the synchronization signal block. We analyze different signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions by progressively reducing the transmit power of the subcarriers carrying the PBCH channel, while ensuring optimal conditions for over-the-air frequency and timing synchronization. We measure the secrecy performance of the communication in terms of upper and lower bounds for the distinguishing error rate (DER) metric for different SNR levels and beam angles when performing beamsteering in indoor scenarios, such as office environments and laboratory settings.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2025

Deterministic identification over channels with finite output: a dimensional perspective on superlinear rates

Following initial work by JaJa, Ahlswede and Cai, and inspired by a recent renewed surge in interest in deterministic identification (DI) via noisy channels, we consider the problem in its generality for memoryless channels with finite output, but arbitrary input alphabets. Such a channel is essentially given by its output distributions as a subset in the probability simplex. Our main findings are that the maximum length of messages thus identifiable scales superlinearly as $R\,n\log n$ with the block length $n$, and that the optimal rate $R$ is bounded in terms of the covering (aka Minkowski, or Kolmogorov, or entropy) dimension $d$ of a certain algebraic transformation of the output set: $\frac14 d \leq R \leq \frac12 d$. Remarkably, both the lower and upper Minkowski dimensions play a role in this result. Along the way, we present a "Hypothesis Testing Lemma" showing that it is sufficient to ensure pairwise reliable distinguishability of the output distributions to construct a DI code. Although we do not know the exact capacity formula, we can conclude that the DI capacity exhibits superactivation: there exist channels whose capacities individually are zero, but whose product has positive capacity. We also generalise these results to classical-quantum channels with finite-dimensional output quantum system, in particular to quantum channels on finite-dimensional quantum systems under the constraint that the identification code can only use tensor product inputs.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2025

Security and Privacy: Key Requirements for Molecular Communication in Medicine and Healthcare

Molecular communication (MC) is an emerging paradigm that enables data transmission through biochemical signals rather than traditional electromagnetic waves. This approach is particularly promising for environments where conventional wireless communication is impractical, such as within the human body. However, security and privacy pose significant challenges that must be addressed to ensure reliable communication. Moreover, MC is often event-triggered, making it logical to adopt goal-oriented communication strategies, similar to those used in message identification. This work explores secure identification strategies for MC, with a focus on the information-theoretic security of message identification over Poisson wiretap channels (DT-PWC).

cs.IT↗

arXiv2025

Sustainable AI: Mathematical Foundations of Spiking Neural Networks

Deep learning's success comes with growing energy demands, raising concerns about the long-term sustainability of the field. Spiking neural networks, inspired by biological neurons, offer a promising alternative with potential computational and energy-efficiency gains. This article examines the computational properties of spiking networks through the lens of learning theory, focusing on expressivity, training, and generalization, as well as energy-efficient implementations while comparing them to artificial neural networks. By categorizing spiking models based on time representation and information encoding, we highlight their strengths, challenges, and potential as an alternative computational paradigm.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2025

Computing Capacity-Cost Functions for Continuous Channels in Wasserstein Space

This paper investigates the problem of computing capacity-cost (C-C) functions for continuous channels. Motivated by the Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD) proximal reformulation of the classical Blahut-Arimoto (BA) algorithm, the Wasserstein distance is introduced to the proximal term for the continuous case, resulting in an iterative algorithm related to the Wasserstein gradient descent. Practical implementation involves moving particles along the negative gradient direction of the objective function's first variation in the Wasserstein space and approximating integrals by the importance sampling (IS) technique. Such formulation is also applied to the rate-distortion (R-D) function for continuous source spaces and thus provides a unified computation framework for both problems.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2025

R-MTLLMF: Resilient Multi-Task Large Language Model Fusion at the Wireless Edge

Multi-task large language models (MTLLMs) are important for many applications at the wireless edge, where users demand specialized models to handle multiple tasks efficiently. However, training MTLLMs is complex and exhaustive, particularly when tasks are subject to change. Recently, the concept of model fusion via task vectors has emerged as an efficient approach for combining fine-tuning parameters to produce an MTLLM. In this paper, the problem of enabling edge users to collaboratively craft such MTLMs via tasks vectors is studied, under the assumption of worst-case adversarial attacks. To this end, first the influence of adversarial noise to multi-task model fusion is investigated and a relationship between the so-called weight disentanglement error and the mean squared error (MSE) is derived. Using hypothesis testing, it is directly shown that the MSE increases interference between task vectors, thereby rendering model fusion ineffective. Then, a novel resilient MTLLM fusion (R-MTLLMF) is proposed, which leverages insights about the LLM architecture and fine-tuning process to safeguard task vector aggregation under adversarial noise by realigning the MTLLM. The proposed R-MTLLMF is then compared for both worst-case and ideal transmission scenarios to study the impact of the wireless channel. Extensive model fusion experiments with vision LLMs demonstrate R-MTLLMF's effectiveness, achieving close-to-baseline performance across eight different tasks in ideal noise scenarios and significantly outperforming unprotected model fusion in worst-case scenarios. The results further advocate for additional physical layer protection for a holistic approach to resilience, from both a wireless and LLM perspective.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2025

A Simultaneous Decoding Approach to Joint State and Message Communications

The capacity-distortion (C-D) trade-offs for joint state and message communications (JSMC) over single- and multi-user channels are investigated, where the transmitters have access to generalized state information and feedback while the receivers jointly decode the messages and estimate the channel state. A coding scheme is proposed based on backward simultaneous decoding of messages and compressed state descriptions without the need for the Wyner-Ziv random binning technique. For the point-to-point channel, the proposed scheme results in the optimal C-D function. For the state-dependent discrete memoryless degraded broadcast channel (SD-DMDBC), the successive refinement method is adopted for designing multi-stage state descriptions. With the simultaneous decoding approach, the derived achievable region is shown to be larger than the region obtained by the sequential decoding approach that is utilized in existing works. As for the state-dependent discrete memoryless multiple access channel (SD-DMMAC), in addition to the proposed method, Willem's coding strategy is applied to enable partial collaboration between transmitters through the feedback links. Moreover, the state descriptions are shown to enhance both communication and state estimation performance. Examples are provided for the derived results to verify the analysis, either numerically or analytically. With particular focus, simple but representative integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) systems are also considered, and their fundamental performance limits are studied.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2025

Integrated Sensing and Communication with Distributed Rate-Limited Helpers

This paper studies integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems with two rate-limited helpers who observe the channel state sequence and the feedback sequence, respectively. Depending on the timing of compressing and using the state information, our proposed coding scheme gives an inner bound of the capacity-compression-distortion tradeoff region. The tradeoff is realized by sending part of the state information at the beginning of the transmission to facilitate the communication and compressing the remaining part together with the feedback signal. The inner bound becomes tight bounds in several special cases.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2025

Deterministic Identification Codes for Fading Channels

Many communication applications incorporate event-triggered behavior, where the conventional Shannon capacity may not effectively gauge performance. Consequently, we advocate for the concept of identification capacity as a more suitable metric for assessing these systems. We consider deterministic identification codes for the Gaussian AWGN, the slow fading, and the fast fading channels with power constraints. We prove lower bounds on capacities for the slow and the fast fading channels with side information for a wide range of fading distributions. Additionally, we present the code construction with efficient encoding which achieves the lower bound on capacity both for the slow and the fast fading channels. At last, we prove the same lower bound on the capacity of the fast fading channel without side information, i.e., the same lower bound holds even when the receiver does not know the fading coefficients. As a result we show that compared with Shannon's message transmission paradigm we achieved completely different capacity scaling for deterministic identification codes for all relevant fading channels.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2025

Galaxy Codes: Advancing Achievability for Deterministic Identification via Gaussian Channels

Deterministic identification offers an efficient solution for scenarios where decoding entire messages is unnecessary. It is commonly used in alarm systems and control systems. A key advantage of this approach is that the capacity for deterministic identification in Gaussian channels with power constraints grows superexponentially, unlike Shannon's transmission capacity. This allows for a significantly higher number of messages to be transmitted using this event-driven method. So far, only upper and lower bounds for deterministic identification capacity have been established. Our work introduces a novel construction: galaxy codes for deterministic identification. Using these codes, we demonstrate an improvement in the achievability bound of 1/4 to 3/8, representing a previously unknown advance that opens new possibilities for efficient communication.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2025

Iterative Optimization of Multidimensional Functions on Turing Machines under Performance Guarantees

This paper studies the effective convergence of iterative methods for solving convex minimization problems using block Gauss--Seidel algorithms. It investigates whether it is always possible to algorithmically terminate the iteration in such a way that the outcome of the iterative algorithm satisfies any predefined error bound. It is shown that the answer is generally negative. Specifically, it is shown that even if a computable continuous function which is convex in each variable possesses computable minimizers, a block Gauss--Seidel iterative method might not be able to effectively compute any of these minimizers. This means that it is impossible to algorithmically terminate the iteration such that a given performance guarantee is satisfied. The paper discusses two reasons for this behavior. First, it might happen that certain steps in the Gauss--Seidel iteration cannot be effectively implemented on a digital computer. Second, all computable minimizers of the problem may not be reachable by the Gauss--Seidel method. Simple and concrete examples for both behaviors are provided.

math.OC↗

arXiv2025

Joint Identification and Sensing for Discrete Memoryless Channels

In the identification (ID) scheme proposed by Ahlswede and Dueck, the receiver's goal is simply to verify whether a specific message of interest was sent. Unlike Shannon's transmission codes, which aim for message decoding, ID codes for a Discrete Memoryless Channel (DMC) are far more efficient: their size grows doubly exponentially with the blocklength when randomized encoding is used. This indicates that, when the receiver's objective does not require decoding, the ID paradigm is significantly more efficient than traditional Shannon transmission in terms of both energy consumption and hardware complexity. Further benefits of ID schemes can be realized by leveraging additional resources such as feedback. In this work, we address the problem of joint ID and channel state estimation over a DMC with independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) state sequences. State estimation functions as the sensing mechanism of the model. Specifically, the sender transmits an ID message over the DMC while simultaneously estimating the channel state through strictly causal observations of the channel output. Importantly, the random channel state is unknown to both the sender and the receiver. For this system model, we present a complete characterization of the ID capacity-distortion function.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2025

Characterization of the Arithmetic Complexity of the Secrecy Capacity of Fast-Fading Gaussian Channels

This paper studies the computability of the secrecy capacity of fast-fading wiretap channels from an algorithmic perspective, examining whether it can be computed algorithmically or not. To address this question, the concept of Turing machines is used, which establishes fundamental performance limits of digital computers. It is shown that certain computable continuous fading probability distribution functions yield secrecy capacities that are non-computable numbers. Additionally, we assess the secrecy capacity's classification within the arithmetical hierarchy, revealing the absence of computable achievability and converse bounds.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2024

The Multiple-Access Channel with Entangled Transmitters

Communication over a classical multiple-access channel (MAC) with entanglement resources is considered, whereby two transmitters share entanglement resources a priori before communication begins. Leditzky et al. (2020) presented an example of a classical MAC, defined in terms of a pseudo telepathy game, such that the sum rate with entangled transmitters is strictly higher than the best achievable sum rate without such resources. Here, we establish inner and outer bounds on the capacity region for the general MAC with entangled transmitters, and show that the previous result can be obtained as a special case. It has long been known that the capacity region of the classical MAC under a message-average error criterion can be strictly larger than with a maximal error criterion (Dueck, 1978). We observe that given entanglement resources, the regions coincide. Furthermore, we address the combined setting of entanglement resources and conferencing, where the transmitters can also communicate with each other over rate-limited links. Using superdense coding, entanglement can double the conferencing rate.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Deep-Unrolling Multidimensional Harmonic Retrieval Algorithms on Neuromorphic Hardware

This paper explores the potential of conversion-based neuromorphic algorithms for highly accurate and energy-efficient single-snapshot multidimensional harmonic retrieval (MHR). By casting the MHR problem as a sparse recovery problem, we devise the currently proposed, deep-unrolling-based Structured Learned Iterative Shrinkage and Thresholding (S-LISTA) algorithm to solve it efficiently using complex-valued convolutional neural networks with complex-valued activations, which are trained using a supervised regression objective. Afterward, a novel method for converting the complex-valued convolutional layers and activations into spiking neural networks (SNNs) is developed. At the heart of this method lies the recently proposed Few Spikes (FS) conversion, which is extended by modifying the neuron model's parameters and internal dynamics to account for the inherent coupling between real and imaginary parts in complex-valued computations. Finally, the converted SNNs are mapped onto the SpiNNaker2 neuromorphic board, and a comparison in terms of estimation accuracy and power efficiency between the original CNNs deployed on an NVIDIA Jetson Xavier and the SNNs is being conducted. The measurement results show that the converted SNNs achieve almost five-fold power efficiency at moderate performance loss compared to the original CNNs.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2024

Existential Unforgeability in Quantum Authentication From Quantum Physical Unclonable Functions Based on Random von Neumann Measurement

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) leverage inherent, non-clonable physical randomness to generate unique input-output pairs, serving as secure fingerprints for cryptographic protocols like authentication. Quantum PUFs (QPUFs) extend this concept by using quantum states as input-output pairs, offering advantages over classical PUFs, such as challenge reusability via public channels and eliminating the need for trusted parties due to the no-cloning theorem. Recent work introduced a generalized mathematical framework for QPUFs. It was shown that random unitary QPUFs cannot achieve existential unforgeability against Quantum Polynomial Time (QPT) adversaries. Security was possible only with additional uniform randomness. To avoid the cost of external randomness, we propose a novel measurement-based scheme. Here, the randomness naturally arises from quantum measurements. Additionally, we introduce a second model where the QPUF functions as a nonunitary quantum channel, which guarantees existential unforgeability. These are the first models in the literature to demonstrate a high level of provable security. Finally, we show that the Quantum Phase Estimation (QPE) protocol, applied to a Haar random unitary, serves as an approximate implementation of the second type of QPUF by approximating a von Neumann measurement on the unitary's eigenbasis.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Entanglement-assisted Quantum Error Correcting Code Saturating The Classical Singleton Bound

We introduce a construction for entanglement-assisted quantum error-correcting codes (EAQECCs) that saturates the classical Singleton bound with less shared entanglement than any known method for code rates below $ \frac{k}{n} = \frac{1}{3} $. For higher rates, our EAQECC also meets the Singleton bound, although with increased entanglement requirements. Additionally, we demonstrate that any classical $[n,k,d]_q$ code can be transformed into an EAQECC with parameters $[[n,k,d;2k]]_q$ using $2k$ pre-shared maximally entangled pairs. The complexity of our encoding protocol for $k$-qudits with $q$ levels is $\mathcal{O}(k \log_{\frac{q}{q-1}}(k))$, excluding the complexity of encoding and decoding the classical MDS code. While this complexity remains linear in $k$ for systems of reasonable size, it increases significantly for larger-levelled systems, highlighting the need for further research into complexity reduction.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Minimal Trellises for non-Degenerate and Degenerate Decoding of Quantum Stabilizer Codes

This paper presents a comprehensive guide to designing minimal trellises for both non-degenerate and degenerate decoding of quantum stabilizer codes. For non-degenerate decoding, various strategies are explored, leveraging insights from classical rectangular codes to minimize the complexity associated with the non-degenerate maximum likelihood error estimation using the Viterbi algorithm. Additionally, novel techniques for constructing minimal multi-goal trellises for degenerate decoding are introduced, including a merging algorithm, a Shannon-product approach, and the BCJR-Wolf method. The study establishes essential properties of multi-goal trellises and provides bounds on the decoding complexity using the sum-product Viterbi decoding algorithm. These advancements decrease the decoding complexity by a factor $\mathcal{O}(n)$, where $n$ is the code length. Finally, the paper applies these results to CSS codes and demonstrates a reduction in complexity by independently applying degenerate decoding to $X$ and $Z$ errors.

cs.IT↗