arXiv subjects

J. Nicholas Laneman

Publications and source records attributed to J. Nicholas Laneman.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

SpecMind: Enabling Spectrum Intelligence via Multi-Agent Hybrid Retrieval-Augmented Generation

The exponential growth of wireless devices is driving unprecedented spectrum demand, pushing spectrum management toward more fine-grained decisions across space, time, and device constraints. As a result, spectrum policymakers and engineers must process large volumes of data that come from diverse sources and take many different forms, such as text and tables. These data sources are often disaggregated and require significant time and effort to integrate, search, and interpret. Furthermore, most of this information is formatted for human understanding and is not readily accessible to automated systems. To address this challenge, we propose SpecMind, a novel Multi-Agent Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system for spectrum intelligence that performs reasoning over heterogeneous data sources. This system enables autonomous agents to coordinate specialized sub-agents that retrieve and synthesize knowledge across policy proceedings, legal regulations, and license databases. We develop SpecBench, a question and answer (Q&A) dataset based on real-world license records and policy proceedings, addressing the lack of evaluation resources for RAG systems in the spectrum domain. Experimental results demonstrate that SpecMind outperforms traditional, general-purpose RAG systems across spectrum-related tasks, achieving over 80% win rate against strong baselines. The agent-based design enables more accurate retrieval, better contextual reasoning, and improved task completion across diverse query types.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Spatially Distributed Task-Oriented Compression for Multi-Emitter Localization and Characterization with Spectral Overlap

Radio frequency spectrum awareness requires the ability to detect, localize, and characterize emitters in dense and contested wireless environments. In this work, we propose a task-oriented distributed compression framework for joint multi-emitter localization and characterization using spatially distributed receivers. Each receiver observes a short window of complex IQ samples, converts the observation to a time--frequency representation, and encodes it into a compact latent vector. A central fusion decoder combines the receiver latents to estimate an unordered set of active emitters, including their locations, center-frequency offsets, occupied bandwidths, and waveform families. A permutation-invariant training objective is used to handle the arbitrary ordering of emitters and predictions. Experiments on synthetic multi-emitter scenes with spectral overlap show that even extremely compact receiver-side representations can preserve useful information for emitter counting and waveform-family estimation. However, accurate localization and spectral-parameter regression require larger latent dimensions. Increasing the receiver latent dimension from $d_{\mathrm{rx}}=1$ to $d_{\mathrm{rx}}=16$ provides the largest improvement, while further increasing to $d_{\mathrm{rx}}=64$ gives smaller gains. These results demonstrate the potential of learned task-oriented compression for communication-efficient distributed spectrum awareness.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2021

Training-Based Equivalence Relations in Large-Scale Quantized Communication Systems

We show that a quantized large-scale system with unknown parameters and training signals can be analyzed by examining an equivalent system with known parameters by modifying the signal power and noise variance in a prescribed manner. Applications to training in wireless communications and signal processing are shown. In wireless communications, we show that the optimal number of training signals can be significantly smaller than the number of transmitting elements. Similar conclusions can be drawn when considering the symbol error rate in signal processing applications, as long as the number of receiving elements is large enough. We show that a linear analysis of training in a quantized system can be accurate when the thermal noise is high or the system is operating near its saturation rate.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2019

Training for Channel Estimation in Nonlinear Multi-Antenna Transceivers

Recent efforts to obtain high data rates in wireless systems have focused on what can be achieved in systems that have nonlinear or coarsely quantized transceiver architectures. Estimating the channel in such a system is challenging because the nonlinearities distort the channel estimation process. It is therefore of interest to determine how much training is needed to estimate the channel sufficiently well so that the channel estimate can be used during data communication. We provide a way to determine how much training is needed by deriving a lower bound on the achievable rate in a training-based scheme that can be computed and analyzed even when the number of antennas is very large. This lower bound can be tight, especially at high SNR. One conclusion is that the optimal number of training symbols may paradoxically be smaller than the number of transmitters for systems with coarsely-quantized transceivers. We show how the training time can be strongly dependent on the number of receivers, and give an example where doubling the number of receivers reduces the training time by about 37 percent.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2019

Anywhere Decoding: Low-Overhead Uplink Interference Management for Wireless Networks

Inter-cell interference (ICI) is one of the major performance-limiting factors in the context of modern cellular systems. To tackle ICI, coordinated multi-point (CoMP) schemes have been proposed as a key technology for next-generation mobile communication systems. Although CoMP schemes offer promising theoretical gains, their performance could degrade significantly because of practical issues such as limited backhaul. To address this issue, we explore a novel uplink interference management scheme called anywhere decoding, which requires exchanging just a few bits of information per coding interval among the base stations (BSs). In spite of the low overhead of anywhere decoding, we observe considerable gains in the outage probability performance of cell-edge users, compared to no cooperation between BSs. Additionally, asymptotic results of the outage probability for high-SNR regimes demonstrate that anywhere decoding schemes achieve full spatial diversity through multiple decoding opportunities, and they are within 1.5 dB of full cooperation.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2018

Capacity of Multiple One-Bit Transceivers in a Rayleigh Environment

We analyze the channel capacity of a system with a large number of one-bit transceivers in a classical Rayleigh environment with perfect channel information at the receiver. With $M$ transmitters and $N=αM$ receivers, we derive an expression of the capacity per transmitter $\mathcal{C}$, where $\mathcal{C}\leq\min(1,α)$, as a function of $α$ and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) $ρ$, when $M\to\infty$. We show that our expression is a good approximation for small $M$, and provide simple approximations of $\mathcal{C}$ for various ranges of $α$ and SNR $ρ$. We conclude that at high SNR, $\mathcal{C}$ reaches its upper limit of one only if the ratio $α>1.24$. Expressions for determining when $\mathcal{C}$ "saturates" as a function of $α$ and $ρ$ are given.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2018

Beamforming with Multiple One-Bit Wireless Transceivers

Classical beamforming techniques rely on highly linear transmitters and receivers to allow phase-coherent combining at the transmitter and receiver. The transmitter uses beamforming to steer signal power towards the receiver, and the receiver uses beamforming to gather and coherently combine the signals from multiple receiver antennas. When the transmitters and receivers are instead constrained for power and cost reasons to be non-linear one-bit devices, the potential advantages and performance metrics associated with beamforming are not as well understood. We define beamforming at the transmitter as a codebook design problem to maximize the minimum distance between codewords. We define beamforming at the receiver as the maximum likelihood detector of the transmitted codeword. We show that beamforming with one-bit transceivers is a constellation design problem, and that we can come within a few dB SNR of the capacity attained by linear transceivers.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2017

Beamforming Codebook Compensation for Beam Squint with Channel Capacity Constraint

Analog beamforming with phased arrays is a promising technique for 5G wireless communication in millimeter wave bands. A beam focuses on a small range of angles of arrival or departure and corresponds to a set of fixed phase shifts across frequency due to practical hardware constraints. In switched beamforming, a discrete codebook consisting of multiple beams is used to cover a larger angle range. However, for sufficiently large bandwidth, the gain provided by the phased array is frequency dependent even if the radiation pattern of the antenna elements is frequency independent, an effect called beam squint. This paper shows that the beam squint reduces channel capacity of a uniform linear array (ULA). The beamforming codebook is designed to compensate for the beam squint by imposing a channel capacity constraint. For example, our codebook design algorithm can improve the channel capacity by 17.8% for a ULA with 64 antennas operating at bandwidth of 2.5 GHz and carrier frequency of 73 GHz. Analysis and numerical examples suggest that a denser codebook is required to compensate for the beam squint compared to the case without beam squint. Furthermore, the effect of beam squint is shown to increase as bandwidth increases, and the beam squint limits the bandwidth given the number of antennas in the array.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2017

Wideband Distributed Spectrum Sharing with Multichannel Immediate Multiple Access

This paper describes a radio architecture for distributed spectrum sharing of multiple channels among secondary users (SUs) in a wide band of frequencies and a localized area. A novel Multichannel Immediate Multiple Access (MIMA) physical layer is developed such that each SU can monitor all the channels simultaneously for incoming signals and achieve fast rendezvous within the multiple channels. The spectrum utilized by an SU pair can be changed dynamically based upon spectrum sensing at the transmitter and tracking synchronization and control messages at the receiver. Although information about the number of active SUs can be used to improve the spectrum sharing efficiency, the improvement is small relative to the cost of obtaining such information. Therefore, the architecture adopts Multichannel Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) for medium access control regardless of the number of active SUs. A prototype implementation of the architecture has been developed using an advanced software defined radio (SDR) platform. System tests demonstrate that the spectrum sharing efficiency of the prototype is close to an upper bound if the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is sufficiently high. Among other practical issues, imaged interference caused by hardware IQ imbalance limits system performance. In the prototype, the MIMA is based on an LTE waveform. Therefore, the spectrum sharing radio can be potentially applied to the 3.5 GHz radar band for Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS).

cs.IT↗

arXiv2016

Beampattern-Based Tracking for Millimeter Wave Communication Systems

We present a tracking algorithm to maintain the communication link between a base station (BS) and a mobile station (MS) in a millimeter wave (mmWave) communication system, where antenna arrays are used for beamforming in both the BS and MS. Downlink transmission is considered, and the tracking is performed at the MS as it moves relative to the BS. Specifically, we consider the case that the MS rotates quickly due to hand movement. The algorithm estimates the angle of arrival (AoA) by using variations in the radiation pattern of the beam as a function of this angle. Numerical results show that the algorithm achieves accurate beam alignment when the MS rotates in a wide range of angular speeds. For example, the algorithm can support angular speeds up to 800 degrees per second when tracking updates are available every 10 ms.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2016

RadioHound: A Pervasive Sensing Network for Sub-6 GHz Dynamic Spectrum Monitoring

We design a custom spectrum sensing network, called RadioHound, capable of tuning from 25 MHz to 6 GHz, which covers nearly all widely-deployed wireless activity. We describe the system hardware and network infrastructure in detail with a view towards driving the cost, size, and power usage of the sensors as low as possible. The system estimates the spatial variation of radio-frequency power from an unknown random number of sources. System performance is measured by computing the mean square error against a simulated radio-frequency environment. We find that the system performance depends heavily on the deployment density of the sensors. Consequently, we derive an expression for the sensor density as a function of environmental characteristics and confidence in measurement quality.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2016

Effect of Wideband Beam Squint on Codebook Design in Phased-Array Wireless Systems

Analog beamforming with phased arrays is a promising technique for 5G wireless communication at millimeter wave frequencies. Using a discrete codebook consisting of multiple analog beams, each beam focuses on a certain range of angles of arrival or departure and corresponds to a set of fixed phase shifts across frequency due to practical hardware considerations. However, for sufficiently large bandwidth, the gain provided by the phased array is actually frequency dependent, which is an effect called beam squint, and this effect occurs even if the radiation pattern of the antenna elements is frequency independent. This paper examines the nature of beam squint for a uniform linear array (ULA) and analyzes its impact on codebook design as a function of the number of antennas and system bandwidth normalized by the carrier frequency. The criterion for codebook design is to guarantee that each beam's minimum gain for a range of angles and for all frequencies in the wideband system exceeds a target threshold, for example 3 dB below the array's maximum gain. Analysis and numerical examples suggest that a denser codebook is required to compensate for beam squint. For example, 54% more beams are needed compared to a codebook design that ignores beam squint for a ULA with 32 antennas operating at a carrier frequency of 73 GHz and bandwidth of 2.5 GHz. Furthermore, beam squint with this design criterion limits the bandwidth or the number of antennas of the array if the other one is fixed.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2013

A Finite-Blocklength Perspective on Gaussian Multi-Access Channels

Motivated by the growing application of wireless multi-access networks with stringent delay constraints, we investigate the Gaussian multiple access channel (MAC) in the finite blocklength regime. Building upon information spectrum concepts, we develop several non-asymptotic inner bounds on channel coding rates over the Gaussian MAC with a given finite blocklength, positive average error probability, and maximal power constraints. Employing Central Limit Theorem (CLT) approximations, we also obtain achievable second-order coding rates for the Gaussian MAC based on an explicit expression for its dispersion matrix. We observe that, unlike the pentagon shape of the asymptotic capacity region, the second-order region has a curved shape with no sharp corners. A main emphasis of the paper is to provide a new perspective on the procedure of handling input cost constraints for tight achievability proofs. Contrary to the complicated achievability techniques in the literature, we show that with a proper choice of input distribution, tight bounds can be achieved via the standard random coding argument and a modified typicality decoding. In particular, we prove that codebooks generated randomly according to independent uniform distributions on the respective "power shells" perform far better than both independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) Gaussian inputs and TDMA with power control. Interestingly, analogous to an error exponent result of Gallager, the resulting achievable region lies roughly halfway between that of the i.i.d. Gaussian inputs and that of a hypothetical "sum-power shell" input. However, dealing with such a non-i.i.d. input requires additional analysis such as a new change of measure technique and application of a Berry-Esseen CLT for functions of random variables.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2013

Strong Secrecy from Channel Resolvability

We analyze physical-layer security based on the premise that the coding mechanism for secrecy over noisy channels is tied to the notion of channel resolvability. Instead of considering capacity-based constructions, which associate to each message a sub-code that operates just below the capacity of the eavesdropper's channel, we consider channel-resolvability-based constructions, which associate to each message a sub-code that operates just above the resolvability of the eavesdropper's channel. Building upon the work of Csiszar and Hayashi, we provide further evidence that channel resolvability is a powerful and versatile coding mechanism for secrecy by developing results that hold for strong secrecy metrics and arbitrary channels. Specifically, we show that at least for symmetric wiretap channels, random capacity-based constructions fail to achieve the strong secrecy capacity while channel-resolvability-based constructions achieve it. We then leverage channel resolvability to establish the secrecy-capacity region of arbitrary broadcast channels with confidential messages and a cost constraint for strong secrecy metrics. Finally, we specialize our results to study the secrecy capacity of wireless channels with perfect channel state information, mixed channels and compound channels with receiver Channel State Information (CSI), as well as the secret-key capacity of source models for secret-key agreement. By tying secrecy to channel resolvability, we obtain achievable rates for strong secrecy metrics with simple proofs.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2009

Cooperative Relaying with State Available Non-Causally at the Relay

We consider a three-terminal state-dependent relay channel with the channel state noncausally available at only the relay. Such a model may be useful for designing cooperative wireless networks with some terminals equipped with cognition capabilities, i.e., the relay in our setup. In the discrete memoryless (DM) case, we establish lower and upper bounds on channel capacity. The lower bound is obtained by a coding scheme at the relay that uses a combination of codeword splitting, Gel'fand-Pinsker binning, and decode-and-forward relaying. The upper bound improves upon that obtained by assuming that the channel state is available at the source, the relay, and the destination. For the Gaussian case, we also derive lower and upper bounds on the capacity. The lower bound is obtained by a coding scheme at the relay that uses a combination of codeword splitting, generalized dirty paper coding, and decode-and-forward relaying; the upper bound is also better than that obtained by assuming that the channel state is available at the source, the relay, and the destination. In the case of degraded Gaussian channels, the lower bound meets with the upper bound for some special cases, and, so, the capacity is obtained for these cases. Furthermore, in the Gaussian case, we also extend the results to the case in which the relay operates in a half-duplex mode.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2009

Multiaccess Channels with State Known to One Encoder: Another Case of Degraded Message Sets

We consider a two-user state-dependent multiaccess channel in which only one of the encoders is informed, non-causally, of the channel states. Two independent messages are transmitted: a common message transmitted by both the informed and uninformed encoders, and an individual message transmitted by only the uninformed encoder. We derive inner and outer bounds on the capacity region of this model in the discrete memoryless case as well as the Gaussian case. Further, we show that the bounds for the Gaussian case are tight in some special cases.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2008

Cooperative Relaying with State Available at the Relay

We consider a state-dependent full-duplex relay channel with the state of the channel non-causally available at only the relay. In the framework of cooperative wireless networks, some specific terminals can be equipped with cognition capabilities, i.e, the relay in our model. In the discrete memoryless (DM) case, we derive lower and upper bounds on channel capacity. The lower bound is obtained by a coding scheme at the relay that consists in a combination of codeword splitting, Gel'fand-Pinsker binning, and a decode-and-forward scheme. The upper bound is better than that obtained by assuming that the channel state is available at the source and the destination as well. For the Gaussian case, we also derive lower and upper bounds on channel capacity. The lower bound is obtained by a coding scheme which is based on a combination of codeword splitting and Generalized dirty paper coding. The upper bound is also better than that obtained by assuming that the channel state is available at the source, the relay, and the destination. The two bounds meet, and so give the capacity, in some special cases for the degraded Gaussian case.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2008

Multihop Diversity in Wideband OFDM Systems: The Impact of Spatial Reuse and Frequency Selectivity

The goal of this paper is to establish which practical routing schemes for wireless networks are most suitable for wideband systems in the power-limited regime, which is, for example, a practically relevant mode of operation for the analysis of ultrawideband (UWB) mesh networks. For this purpose, we study the tradeoff between energy efficiency and spectral efficiency (known as the power-bandwidth tradeoff) in a wideband linear multihop network in which transmissions employ orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation and are affected by quasi-static, frequency-selective fading. Considering open-loop (fixed-rate) and closed-loop (rate-adaptive) multihop relaying techniques, we characterize the impact of routing with spatial reuse on the statistical properties of the end-to-end conditional mutual information (conditioned on the specific values of the channel fading parameters and therefore treated as a random variable) and on the energy and spectral efficiency measures of the wideband regime. Our analysis particularly deals with the convergence of these end-to-end performance measures in the case of large number of hops, i.e., the phenomenon first observed in \cite{Oyman06b} and named as ``multihop diversity''. Our results demonstrate the realizability of the multihop diversity advantages in the case of routing with spatial reuse for wideband OFDM systems under wireless channel effects such as path-loss and quasi-static frequency-selective multipath fading.

cs.IT↗