arXiv subjects

Justin P. Coon

Publications and source records attributed to Justin P. Coon.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

On the Probability of Network States with Gaussian Connectivity Functions

In this paper, we consider the connectivity of a random network of N mobile devices in three dimensions (3D), where the location of each device or node has a Gaussian distribution in each dimension. For each pair of nodes, the probability of connectivity is related to the nodes' separation by a Gaussian connectivity function. The fundamental analytical tool for studying such systems is the probability of a given network state, derived and expressed in terms of its graph Laplacian. Leveraging this result, we obtain results for the connectivity of small networks, the probability of a complete network (where all nodes are connected to all other nodes), and the probability of an isolated node, which gives an approximation to the connectivity probability of larger networks. The general results are then simplified for special cases and limiting scenarios.

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arXiv2026

Generating Causal Temporal Interaction Graphs for Counterfactual Validation of Temporal Link Prediction

Temporal link prediction (TLP) models are commonly evaluated based on predictive accuracy, yet such evaluations do not assess whether these models capture the causal mechanisms that govern temporal interactions. In this work, we propose a framework for counterfactual validation of TLP models by generating causal temporal interaction graphs (CTIGs) with known ground-truth causal structure. We first introduce a structural equation model for continuous-time event sequences that supports both excitatory and inhibitory effects, and then extend this mechanism to temporal interaction graphs. To compare causal models, we propose a distance metric based on cross-model predictive error, and empirically validate the hypothesis that predictors trained on one causal model degrade when evaluated on sufficiently distant models. Finally, we instantiate counterfactual evaluation under (i) controlled causal shifts between generating models and (ii) timestamp shuffling as a stochastic distortion with measurable causal distance. Our framework provides a foundation for causality-aware benchmarking.

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arXiv2026

On the Entropy of a Random Geometric Graph

In this paper, we study the entropy of a hard random geometric graph (RGG), a commonly used model for spatial networks, where the connectivity is governed by the distances between the nodes. Formally, given a connection range $r$, a hard RGG $G_m$ on $m$ vertices is formed by drawing $m$ random points from a spatial domain, and then connecting any two points with an edge when they are within a distance $r$ from each other. The two domains we consider are the $d$-dimensional unit cube $[0,1]^d$ and the $d$-dimensional unit torus $\mathbb{T}^d$. We derive upper bounds on the entropy $H(G_m)$ for both these domains and for all possible values of $r$. In a few cases, we obtain an exact asymptotic characterization of the entropy by proving a tight lower bound. Our main results are that $H(G_m) \sim dm \log_2m$ for $0 < r \leq 1/4$ in the case of $\mathbb{T}^d$ and that the entropy of a one-dimensional RGG on $[0,1]$ behaves like $m\log m$ for all $0<r<1$. As a consequence, we can infer that the asymptotic structural entropy of an RGG on $\mathbb{T}^d$, which is the entropy of an unlabelled RGG, is $\Omega((d-1)m \log_2m)$ for $0 < r \leq 1/4$. For the rest of the cases, we conjecture that the entropy behaves asymptotically as the leading order terms of our derived upper bounds.

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arXiv2025

Rate-Distortion-Perception Function of Bernoulli Vector Sources

In this paper, we consider the rate-distortion-perception (RDP) trade-off for the lossy compression of a Bernoulli vector source, which is a finite collection of independent binary random variables. The RDP function quantifies in a way the efficient compression of a source when we impose a distortion constraint that limits the dissimilarity between the source and the reconstruction and a perception constraint that restricts the distributional discrepancy of the source and the reconstruction. In this work, we obtain an exact characterization of the RDP function of a Bernoulli vector source with the Hamming distortion function and a single-letter perception function that measures the closeness of the distributions of the components of the source. The solution can be described by partitioning the set of distortion and perception levels $(D,P)$ into three regions, where in each region the optimal distortion and perception levels we allot to the components have a similar nature. Finally, we introduce the RDP function for graph sources and apply our result to the Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi graph model.

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arXiv2024

The Asymptotic Behaviour of Information Leakage Metrics

Information theoretic leakage metrics quantify the amount of information about a private random variable $X$ that is leaked through a correlated revealed variable $Y$. They can be used to evaluate the privacy of a system in which an adversary, from whom we want to keep $X$ private, is given access to $Y$. Global information theoretic leakage metrics quantify the overall amount of information leaked upon observing $Y$, whilst their pointwise counterparts define leakage as a function of the particular realisation $Y=y$ that the adversary sees, and thus can be viewed as random variables. We consider an adversary who observes a large number of independent identically distributed realisations of $Y$. We formalise the essential asymptotic behaviour of an information theoretic leakage metric, considering in turn what this means for pointwise and global metrics. With the resulting requirements in mind, we take an axiomatic approach to defining a set of pointwise leakage metrics, as well as a set of global leakage metrics that are constructed from them. The global set encompasses many known measures including mutual information, Sibson mutual information, Arimoto mutual information, maximal leakage, min entropy leakage, $f$-divergence metrics, and g-leakage. We prove that both sets follow the desired asymptotic behaviour. Finally, we derive composition theorems which quantify the rate of privacy degradation as an adversary is given access to a large number of independent observations of $Y$. It is found that, for both pointwise and global metrics, privacy degrades exponentially with increasing observations for the adversary, at a rate governed by the minimum Chernoff information between distinct conditional channel distributions. This extends the work of Wu et al. (2024), who have previously found this to be true for certain known metrics, including some that fall into our more general set.

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arXiv2024

RIS-Assisted Millimeter Wave Communications for Indoor Scenarios: Modeling and Coverage Analysis

Millimeter wave (mmWave) communications and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) are two critical technologies for next-generation networks, especially in dense indoor environments. However, existing analyses often oversimplify the indoor environment by neglecting some of the key characteristics, such as height variations, boundary effects, blockage effects, and user spatial distributions. In this paper, we develop an improved stochastic geometry-based model for RIS-assisted mmWave communications in indoor scenarios like conference centers, hospitals, and shopping malls. The proposed model incorporates the height factor for all the nodes in the network (e.g., transmitters, users, RISs, and obstacles) and captures the user clustering behavior in these scenarios. In addition, the boundary effect is also being considered for line-of-sight (LOS) probability calculation. Analytical expressions for distance distributions, LOS probabilities, and the coverage probability (CP) are derived. The CP is then validated through Monte Carlo simulations. Our results reveal deployment insights by approximating and simplifying the derived CP expressions, showing how transmitter density, obstacle density, RIS density, and user cluster radius impact network coverage. Notably, we show that RISs significantly improve coverage when transmitters or transmit power are limited but offer marginal benefits when transmitter density is high. These findings provide practical guidelines for the design and deployment of RIS-assisted indoor mmWave networks.

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arXiv2024

Online Algorithm for Node Feature Forecasting in Temporal Graphs

In this paper, we propose an online algorithm mspace for forecasting node features in temporal graphs, which captures spatial cross-correlation among different nodes as well as the temporal auto-correlation within a node. The algorithm can be used for both probabilistic and deterministic multi-step forecasting, making it applicable for estimation and generation tasks. Comparative evaluations against various baselines, including temporal graph neural network (TGNN) models and classical Kalman filters, demonstrate that mspace performs at par with the state-of-the-art and even surpasses them on some datasets. Importantly, mspace demonstrates consistent performance across datasets with varying training sizes, a notable advantage over TGNN models that require abundant training samples to effectively learn the spatiotemporal trends in the data. Therefore, employing mspace is advantageous in scenarios where the training sample availability is limited. Additionally, we establish theoretical bounds on multi-step forecasting error of mspace and show that it scales linearly with the number of forecast steps $q$ as $\mathcal{O}(q)$. For an asymptotically large number of nodes $n$, and timesteps $T$, the computational complexity of mspace grows linearly with both $n$, and $T$, i.e., $\mathcal{O}(nT)$, while its space complexity remains constant $\mathcal{O}(1)$. We compare the performance of various mspace variants against ten recent TGNN baselines and two classical baselines, ARIMA and the Kalman filter across ten real-world datasets. Additionally, we propose a technique to generate synthetic datasets to aid in evaluating node feature forecasting methods, with the potential to serve as a benchmark for future research. Lastly, we have investigate the interpretability of different mspace variants by analyzing model parameters alongside dataset characteristics to derive model and data-centric insights.

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arXiv2024

A Primer on Temporal Graph Learning

This document aims to familiarize readers with temporal graph learning (TGL) through a concept-first approach. We have systematically presented vital concepts essential for understanding the workings of a TGL framework. In addition to qualitative explanations, we have incorporated mathematical formulations where applicable, enhancing the clarity of the text. Since TGL involves temporal and spatial learning, we introduce relevant learning architectures ranging from recurrent and convolutional neural networks to transformers and graph neural networks. We also discuss classical time series forecasting methods to inspire interpretable learning solutions for TGL.

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arXiv2023

Graph Compression with Side Information at the Decoder

In this paper, we study the problem of graph compression with side information at the decoder. The focus is on the situation when an unlabelled graph (which is also referred to as a structure) is to be compressed or is available as side information. For correlated Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi weighted random graphs, we give a precise characterization of the smallest rate at which a labelled graph or its structure can be compressed with aid of a correlated labelled graph or its structure at the decoder. We approach this problem by using the entropy-spectrum framework and establish some convergence results for conditional distributions involving structures, which play a key role in the construction of an optimal encoding and decoding scheme. Our proof essentially uses the fact that, in the considered correlated Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi model, the structure retains most of the information about the labelled graph. Furthermore, we consider the case of unweighted graphs and present how the optimal decoding can be done using the notion of graph alignment.

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arXiv2023

On Random Tree Structures, Their Entropy, and Compression

Measuring the complexity of tree structures can be beneficial in areas that use tree data structures for storage, communication, and processing purposes. This complexity can then be used to compress tree data structures to their information-theoretic limit. Additionally, the lack of models for random generation of trees is very much felt in mathematical modeling of trees and graphs. In this paper, a number of existing tree generation models such as simply generated trees are discussed, and their information content is analysed by means of information theory and Shannon's entropy. Subsequently, a new model for generating trees based on practical appearances of trees is introduced, and an upper bound for its entropy is calculated. This model is based on selecting a random tree from possible spanning trees of graphs, which is what happens often in practice. Moving on to tree compression, we find approaches to universal tree compression of the discussed models. These approaches first transform a tree into a sequence of symbols, and then apply a dictionary-based compression method. Conditions for the universality of these method are then studied and analysed.

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arXiv2023

Optimal Mobility and Communication Strategy to Maximize the Value of Information in IoT Networks

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging next-generation technology in the fourth industrial revolution. In industrial IoT networks, sensing devices are largely deployed to monitor various types of physical processes. They are required to transmit the collected data in a timely manner to support real-time monitoring, control and automation. The timeliness of information is very important in such systems. Recently, an information-theoretic metric named the "value of information" (VoI) has been proposed to measure the usefulness of information. In this work, we consider an industrial IoT network with a set of heterogeneous sensing devices and an intelligent mobile entity. The concept of the value of information is applied to study a joint path planning and user scheduling optimisation problem. We aim to maximise the network-level VoI under mobility and communication constraints. We formulate this problem as a Markov decision process (MDP), and an efficient algorithm based on reinforcement learning is proposed to solve this problem. Through numerical results, we show that the proposed method is able to capture the usefulness of data from both time and space dimensions. By exploiting the correlation property of the data source, the proposed method is suitable for applications in resource-limited networks.

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arXiv2022

LEAST: a Low-Energy Adaptive Scalable Tree-based routing protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Routing is one of the critical and ongoing challenges in Wireless Sensor Networks. The main challenge has always been to have a routing protocol that reduces the communication overhead, hence saving the energy of the sensors in the network. Hierarchical routing protocols are known to be the most energy-efficient routing protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks. In this paper, a more generalized hierarchical routing protocol is introduced for Wireless Sensor Network, which is based on tree data structures. The clustering in the proposed protocol has the format of a general tree, which is constructed in an adaptive manner based on the distance of the sensors. Results show that the proposed tree-based protocol introduces a significant benefit in energy consumption and lifetime of the network over the existing hierarchical approaches.

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arXiv2022

Multi-User Frequency Assignment for Ultra-Reliable mmWave Two-Ray Channels

We consider a multi-user two-ray ground reflection scenario with unknown distances between transmitter and receivers. By using two frequencies per user in parallel, we can mitigate possible destructive interference and ensure ultra-reliability with only very limited knowledge at the transmitter. In this work, we consider the problem of assigning two frequencies to each receiver in a multi-user communication system such that the average minimum receive power is maximized. In order to solve this problem, we introduce a generalization of the quadratic multiple knapsack problem to include heterogeneous profits and develop an algorithm to solve it. Compared to random frequency assignment, we report a gain of around 6 dB in numerical simulations.

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arXiv2022

Performance Analysis of IOS-Assisted NOMA System with Channel Correlation and Phase Errors

In this paper, we investigate the performance of an intelligent omni-surface (IOS) assisted downlink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) network with phase quantization errors and channel estimation errors, where the channels related to the IOS are spatially correlated. First, upper bounds on the average achievable rates of the two users are derived. Then, channel hardening is shown to occur in the proposed system, based on which we derive approximations of the average achievable rates of the two users. The analytical results illustrate that the proposed upper bound and approximation on the average achievable rates are asymptotically equivalent in the number of elements. Furthermore, it is proved that the asymptotic equivalence also holds for the average achievable rates with correlated and uncorrelated channels. Additionally, we extend the analysis by evaluating the average achievable rates for IOS assisted orthogonal multiple access (OMA) and IOS assisted multi-user NOMA scenarios. Simulation results corroborate the theoretical analysis and demonstrate that: i) low-precision elements with only two-bit phase adjustment can achieve the performance close to the ideal continuous phase shifting scheme; ii) The average achievable rates with correlated channels and uncorrelated channels are asymptotically equivalent in the number of elements; iii) IOS-assisted NOMA does not always perform better than OMA due to the reconfigurability of IOS in different time slots.

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arXiv2022

Performance Analysis of RIS-Assisted Large-Scale Wireless Networks Using Stochastic Geometry

In this paper, we investigate the performance of a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) assisted large-scale network by characterizing the coverage probability and the average achievable rate using stochastic geometry. Considering the spatial correlation between transmitters (TXs) and RISs, their locations are jointly modelled by a Gauss-Poisson process (GPP). Two association strategies, i.e., nearest association and fixed association, are both discussed. For the RIS-aided transmission, the signal power distribution with a direct link is approximated by a gamma random variable using a moment matching method, and the Laplace transform of the aggregate interference power is derived in closed form. Based on these expressions, we analyze the channel hardening effect in the RIS-assisted transmission, the coverage probability, and the average achievable rate of the typical user. We derive the coverage probability expressions for the fixed association strategy and the nearest association strategy in an interference-limited scenario in closed form. Numerical results are provided to validate the analysis and illustrate the effectiveness of RIS-assisted transmission with passive beamforming in improving the system performance. Furthermore, it is also unveiled that the system performance is independent of the density of TXs with the nearest association strategy in the interference-limited scenario.

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arXiv2022

TreeExplorer: a coding algorithm for rooted trees with application to wireless and ad hoc routing

Routing tables in ad hoc and wireless routing protocols can be represented using rooted trees. The constant need for communication and storage of these trees in routing protocols demands an efficient rooted tree coding algorithm. This efficiency is defined in terms of the average code length, and the optimality of the algorithm is measured by comparing the average code length with the entropy of the source. In this work, TreeExplorer is introduced as an easy-to-implement and nearly optimal algorithm for coding rooted tree structures. This method utilizes the number of leaves of the tree as an indicator for choosing the best method of coding. We show how TreeExplorer can improve existing routing protocols for ad hoc and wireless systems, which normally entails a significant communication overhead.

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arXiv2022

An Efficient Frequency Diversity Scheme for Ultra-Reliable Communications in Two-Path Fading Channels

We consider a two-ray ground reflection scenario with unknown distance between transmitter and receiver. By utilizing two frequencies in parallel, we can mitigate possible destructive interference and ensure ultra-reliability with only very limited knowledge at the transmitter. In order to achieve this ultra-reliability, we optimize the frequency spacing such that the worst-case receive power is maximized. Additionally, we provide an algorithm to calculate the optimal frequency spacing. Besides the receive power, we also analyze the achievable rate and outage probability. It is shown that the frequency diversity scheme achieves a significant improvement in terms of reliability over using a single frequency. In particular, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach by a numerical simulation of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) flying above flat terrain.

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arXiv2022

Structural Complexity of One-Dimensional Random Geometric Graphs

We study the richness of the ensemble of graphical structures (i.e., unlabeled graphs) of the one-dimensional random geometric graph model defined by $n$ nodes randomly scattered in $[0,1]$ that connect if they are within the connection range $r\in[0,1]$. We provide bounds on the number of possible structures which give universal upper bounds on the structural entropy that hold for any $n$, $r$ and distribution of the node locations. For fixed $r$, the number of structures is $Θ(a^{2n})$ with $a=a(r)=2 \cos{\left(\fracπ{\lceil 1/r \rceil+2}\right)}$, and therefore the structural entropy is upper bounded by $2n\log_2 a(r) + O(1)$. For large $n$, we derive bounds on the structural entropy normalized by $n$, and evaluate them for independent and uniformly distributed node locations. When the connection range $r_n$ is $O(1/n)$, the obtained upper bound is given in terms of a function that increases with $n r_n$ and asymptotically attains $2$ bits per node. If the connection range is bounded away from zero and one, the upper and lower bounds decrease linearly with $r$, as $2(1-r)$ and $(1-r)\log_2 e$, respectively. When $r_n$ is vanishing but dominates $1/n$ (e.g., $r_n \propto \ln n / n$), the normalized entropy is between $\log_2 e \approx 1.44$ and $2$ bits per node. We also give a simple encoding scheme for random structures that requires $2$ bits per node. The upper bounds in this paper easily extend to the entropy of the labeled random graph model, since this is given by the structural entropy plus a term that accounts for all the permutations of node labels that are possible for a given structure, which is no larger than $\log_2(n!) = n \log_2 n - n + O(\log_2 n)$.

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