arXiv subjects

Ming Ding

Publications and source records attributed to Ming Ding.

At least 181 records · Page 10Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

DroneCells: Improving 5G Spectral Efficiency using Drone-mounted Flying Base Stations

We study a cellular networking scenario, called DroneCells, where miniaturized base stations (BSs) are mounted on flying drones to serve mobile users. We propose that the drones never stop, and move continuously within the cell in a way that reduces the distance between the BS and the serving users, thus potentially improving the spectral efficiency of the network. By considering the practical mobility constraints of commercial drones, we design drone mobility algorithms to improve the spectral efficiency of DroneCells. As the optimal problem is NP-hard, we propose a range of practically realizable heuristics with varying complexity and performance. Simulations show that, using the existing consumer drones, the proposed algorithms can readily improve spectral efficiency by 34\% and the 5-percentile packet throughput by 50\% compared to the scenario, where drones hover over fixed locations. More significant gains can be expected with more agile drones in the future. A surprising outcome is that the drones need to fly only at minimal speeds to achieve these gains, avoiding any negative effect on drone battery lifetime. We further demonstrate that the optimal solution provides only modest improvements over the best heuristic algorithm, which employs Game Theory to make mobility decisions for drone BSs.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2020

Sequential and Incremental Precoder Design for Joint Transmission Network MIMO Systems with Imperfect Backhaul

In this paper, we propose a sequential and incremental precoder design for downlink joint transmission (JT) network MIMO systems with imperfect backhaul links. The objective of our design is to minimize the maximum of the sub-stream mean square errors (MSE), which dominates the average bit error rate (BER) performance of the system. In the proposed scheme,we first optimize the precoder at the serving base station (BS), and then sequentially optimize the precoders of non-serving BSs in the JT set according to the descending order of their probabilities of participating in JT. The BS-wise sequential optimization process can improve the system performance when some BSs have to temporarily quit the JT operations because of poor instant backhaul conditions. Besides, the precoder of an additional BS is derived in an incremental way, i.e., the sequentially optimized precoders of previous BSs are fixed, thus the additional precoder plays an incremental part in the multi-BS JT operations. An iterative algorithm is designed to jointly optimize the sub-stream precoder and sub-stream power allocation for each additional BS in the proposed sequential and incremental optimization scheme. Simulations show that, under the practical backhaul link conditions, our scheme significantly outperforms the autonomous global precoding (AGP) scheme in terms of BER performance.

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arXiv2020

Leakage-Based Robust Beamforming for Multi-Antenna Broadcast System with Per-Antenna Power Constraints and Quantized CDI

In this paper, we investigate the robust beamforming schemes for a multi-user multiple-input-single-output (MU-MISO) system with per-antenna power constraints and quantized channel direction information (CDI) feedback. Our design objective is to maximize the expectation of the weighted sum-rate performance by means of controlling the interference leakage and properly allocating the power among user equipments (UEs).First, we prove the optimality of the non-robust zero-forcing (ZF) beamforming scheme in the sense of generating the minimum amount of average inter-UE interference under quantized CDI. Then we derive closed-form expressions of the cumulative density function (CDF) of the interference leakage power for the non-robust ZF beamforming scheme, based on which we adjust the leakage thresholds and propose two robust beamforming schemes under per-antenna power constraints with an iterative process to update the per-UE power allocations using the geometric programming (GP). Simulation results show the superiority of the proposed robust beamforming schemes compared with the existing schemes in terms of the average weighted sum-rate performance.

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arXiv2020

MMSE Based Greedy Antenna Selection Scheme for AF MIMO Relay Systems

We propose a greedy minimum mean squared error (MMSE)-based antenna selection algorithm for amplify-and-forward (AF) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relay systems. Assuming equal-power allocation across the multi-stream data, we derive a closed form expression for the mean squared error (MSE) resulted from adding each additional antenna pair. Based on this result, we iteratively select the antenna-pairs at the relay nodes to minimize the MSE. Simulation results show that our algorithm greatly outperforms the existing schemes.

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arXiv2020

On Safeguarding Privacy and Security in the Framework of Federated Learning

Motivated by the advancing computational capacity of wireless end-user equipment (UE), as well as the increasing concerns about sharing private data, a new machine learning (ML) paradigm has emerged, namely federated learning (FL). Specifically, FL allows a decoupling of data provision at UEs and ML model aggregation at a central unit. By training model locally, FL is capable of avoiding data leakage from the UEs, thereby preserving privacy and security to some extend. However, even if raw data are not disclosed from UEs, individual's private information can still be extracted by some recently discovered attacks in the FL architecture. In this work, we analyze the privacy and security issues in FL, and raise several challenges on preserving privacy and security when designing FL systems. In addition, we provide extensive simulation results to illustrate the discussed issues and possible solutions.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2020

Enhancing Cellular Communications for UAVs via Intelligent Reflective Surface

Intelligent reflective surfaces (IRSs) capable of reconfiguring their electromagnetic absorption and reflection properties in real-time are offering unprecedented opportunities to enhance wireless communication experience in challenging environments. In this paper, we analyze the potential of IRS in enhancing cellular communications for UAVs, which currently suffers from poor signal strength due to the down-tilt of base station antennas optimized to serve ground users. We consider deployment of IRS on building walls, which can be remotely configured by cellular base stations to coherently direct the reflected radio waves towards specific UAVs in order to increase their received signal strengths. Using the recently released 3GPP ground-to-air channel models, we analyze the signal gains at UAVs due to the IRS deployments as a function of UAV height as well as various IRS parameters including size, altitude, and distance from base station. Our analysis suggests that even with a small IRS, we can achieve significant signal gain for UAVs flying above the cellular base station. We also find that the maximum gain can be achieved by optimizing the location of IRS including its altitude and distance to BS.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2020

Skin-MIMO: Vibration-based MIMO Communication over Human Skin

We explore the feasibility of Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) communication through vibrations over human skin. Using off-the-shelf motors and piezo transducers as vibration transmitters and receivers, respectively, we build a 2x2 MIMO testbed to collect and analyze vibration signals from real subjects. Our analysis reveals that there exist multiple independent vibration channels between a pair of transmitter and receiver, confirming the feasibility of MIMO. Unfortunately, the slow ramping of mechanical motors and rapidly changing skin channels make it impractical for conventional channel sounding based channel state information (CSI) acquisition, which is critical for achieving MIMO capacity gains. To solve this problem, we propose Skin-MIMO, a deep learning based CSI acquisition technique to accurately predict CSI entirely based on inertial sensor (accelerometer and gyroscope) measurements at the transmitter, thus obviating the need for channel sounding. Based on experimental vibration data, we show that Skin-MIMO can improve MIMO capacity by a factor of 2.3 compared to Single-Input-Single-Output (SISO) or open-loop MIMO, which do not have access to CSI. A surprising finding is that gyroscope, which measures the angular velocity, is found to be superior in predicting skin vibrations than accelerometer, which measures linear acceleration and used widely in previous research for vibration communications over solid objects.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2020

Spectrum Intelligent Radio: Technology, Development, and Future Trends

The advent of Industry 4.0 with massive connectivity places significant strains on the current spectrum resources, and challenges the industry and regulators to respond promptly with new disruptive spectrum management strategies. The current radio development, with certain elements of intelligence, is nowhere near showing an agile response to the complex radio environments. Following the line of intelligence, we propose to classify spectrum intelligent radio into three streams: classical signal processing, machine learning (ML), and contextual adaptation. We focus on the ML approach, and propose a new intelligent radio architecture with three hierarchical forms: perception, understanding, and reasoning. The proposed perception method achieves fully blind multi-level spectrum sensing. The understanding method accurately predicts the primary users' coverage across a large area, and the reasoning method performs a near-optimal idle channel selection. Opportunities, challenges, and future visions are also discussed for the realization of a fully intelligent radio.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2019

Blockchain as a Service for Multi-Access Edge Computing: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach

Recently, blockchain has gained momentum in the academic community thanks to its decentralization, immutability, transparency and security. As an emerging paradigm, Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) has been widely used to provide computation and storage resources to mobile user equipments (UE) at the edge of the network for improving the performance of mobile applications. In this paper, we propose a novel blockchain-based MEC architecture where UEs can offload their computation tasks to the MEC servers. In particular, a blockchain network is deployed and hosted on the MEC platform as Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) that supports smart contract-based resource trading and transaction mining services for mobile task offloading. To enhance the performance of the blockchain-empowered MEC system, we propose a joint scheme of computation offloading and blockchain mining. Accordingly, an optimization problem is formulated to maximize edge service revenue and blockchain mining reward while minimizing the service computation latency with respect to constraints of user service demands and hash power resource. We then propose a novel Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) approach using a double deep Q-network (DQN) algorithm to solve the proposed problem. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms the other baseline methods in terms of better system utility with computational efficiency. Experiment results also verify that the trading contract design is efficient with low operation cost, showing the feasibility of the proposed scheme.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2019

Blockchain for 5G and Beyond Networks: A State of the Art Survey

The fifth generation (5G) wireless networks are on the way to be deployed around the world. The 5G technologies target to support diverse vertical applications by connecting heterogeneous devices and machines with drastic improvements in terms of high quality of service, increased network capacity and enhanced system throughput. Despite all these advantages that 5G will bring about, there are still major challenges to be addressed, including decentralization, transparency, risks of data interoperability, network privacy and security vulnerabilities. Blockchain can offer innovative solutions to effectively solve the challenges in 5G networks. Driven by the dramatically increased capacities of the 5G networks and the recent breakthroughs in the blockchain technology, blockchain-based 5G services are expected to witness a rapid development and bring substantial benefits to future society. In this paper, we provide a state-of-art survey on the integration of blockchain with 5G networks and beyond. Our key focus is on the discussions on the potential of blockchain for enabling key 5G technologies, including cloud/edge computing, Software Defined Networks, Network Function Virtualization, Network Slicing, and D2D communications. We then explore the opportunities of blockchain to important 5G services, ranging from spectrum management, network virtualization, resource management to interference management, federated learning, privacy and security provision. The recent advances in the applications of blockchain in 5G Internet of Things are also surveyed in various domains, i.e. smart healthcare, smart city, smart transportation, smart grid and UAVs. The main findings derived from the survey are then summarized, and possible research challenges with open issues are also identified. Lastly, we complete this survey by shedding new light on future directions of research on this newly emerging area.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2019

Acyclic quantum cluster algebras via Hall algebras of morphisms

Let $A$ be the path algebra of a finite acyclic quiver $Q$ over a finite field. We realize the quantum cluster algebra with principal coefficients associated to $Q$ as a sub-quotient of a certain Hall algebra involving the category of morphisms between projective $A$-modules.

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arXiv2019

Federated Learning with Differential Privacy: Algorithms and Performance Analysis

In this paper, to effectively prevent information leakage, we propose a novel framework based on the concept of differential privacy (DP), in which artificial noises are added to the parameters at the clients side before aggregating, namely, noising before model aggregation FL (NbAFL). First, we prove that the NbAFL can satisfy DP under distinct protection levels by properly adapting different variances of artificial noises. Then we develop a theoretical convergence bound of the loss function of the trained FL model in the NbAFL. Specifically, the theoretical bound reveals the following three key properties: 1) There is a tradeoff between the convergence performance and privacy protection levels, i.e., a better convergence performance leads to a lower protection level; 2) Given a fixed privacy protection level, increasing the number $N$ of overall clients participating in FL can improve the convergence performance; 3) There is an optimal number of maximum aggregation times (communication rounds) in terms of convergence performance for a given protection level. Furthermore, we propose a $K$-random scheduling strategy, where $K$ ($1<K<N$) clients are randomly selected from the $N$ overall clients to participate in each aggregation. We also develop the corresponding convergence bound of the loss function in this case and the $K$-random scheduling strategy can also retain the above three properties. Moreover, we find that there is an optimal $K$ that achieves the best convergence performance at a fixed privacy level. Evaluations demonstrate that our theoretical results are consistent with simulations, thereby facilitating the designs on various privacy-preserving FL algorithms with different tradeoff requirements on convergence performance and privacy levels.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Privacy Preserving Location Data Publishing: A Machine Learning Approach

Publishing datasets plays an essential role in open data research and promoting transparency of government agencies. However, such data publication might reveal users' private information. One of the most sensitive sources of data is spatiotemporal trajectory datasets. Unfortunately, merely removing unique identifiers cannot preserve the privacy of users. Adversaries may know parts of the trajectories or be able to link the published dataset to other sources for the purpose of user identification. Therefore, it is crucial to apply privacy preserving techniques before the publication of spatiotemporal trajectory datasets. In this paper, we propose a robust framework for the anonymization of spatiotemporal trajectory datasets termed as machine learning based anonymization (MLA). By introducing a new formulation of the problem, we are able to apply machine learning algorithms for clustering the trajectories and propose to use $k$-means algorithm for this purpose. A variation of $k$-means algorithm is also proposed to preserve the privacy in overly sensitive datasets. Moreover, we improve the alignment process by considering multiple sequence alignment as part of the MLA. The framework and all the proposed algorithms are applied to TDrive and Geolife location datasets. The experimental results indicate a significantly higher utility of datasets by anonymization based on MLA framework.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

On the Importance of Location Privacy for Users of Location Based Applications

Do people care about their location privacy while using location-based service apps? This paper aims to answer this question and several other hypotheses through a survey, and review the privacy preservation techniques. Our results indicate that privacy is indeed an influential factor in the selection of location-based apps by users.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2019

Extended Kalman Filter Beam Tracking for Millimeter Wave Vehicular Communications

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication is a promising technology to meet the ever-growing data traffic of vehicular communications. Unfortunately, more frequent channel estimations are required in this spectrum due to the narrow beams employed to compensate for the high path loss. Hence, the development of highly efficient beam tracking algorithms is essential to enable the technology, particularly for fast-changing environments in vehicular communications. In this paper, we propose an innovative scheme for beam tracking based on the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF), improving the mean square error performance by 49% in vehicular settings. We propose to use the position, velocity, and channel coefficient as state variables of the EKF algorithm and show that such an approach results in improved beam tracking with low computational complexity by taking the kinematic characteristics of the system into account. We also explicitly derive the closed-from expressions for the Jacobian matrix of the EKF algorithm.

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arXiv2019

Uplink NOMA for Cellular-Connected UAV: Impact of UAV Trajectories and Altitude

This paper considers an emerging cellular-connected unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) architecture for surveillance or monitoring applications. We consider a scenario where a cellular-connected aerial user equipment (AUE) periodically transmits in uplink, with a given data rate requirement, while moving along a given trajectory. For efficient spectrum usage, we enable the concurrent uplink transmission of the AUE and a terrestrial user equipment (TUE) by employing power-domain aerial-terrestrial non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), while accounting for the AUE's known trajectory. To characterize the system performance, we develop an analytical framework to compute the rate coverage probability, i.e., the probability that the achievable data rate of both the AUE and TUE exceeds the respective target rates. We use our analytical results to numerically determine the minimum height that the AUE needs to fly, at each transmission point along a given trajectory, in order to satisfy a certain quality of service (QoS) constraint for various AUE target data rates and different built-up environments. Specifically, the results show that the minimum height of the AUE depends on its distance from the BS as the AUE moves along the given trajectory. Our results highlight the importance of modeling AUE trajectory in cellular-connected UAV systems.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2019

Dynamic Content Update for Wireless Edge Caching via Deep Reinforcement Learning

This letter studies a basic wireless caching network where a source server is connected to a cache-enabled base station (BS) that serves multiple requesting users. A critical problem is how to improve cache hit rate under dynamic content popularity. To solve this problem, the primary contribution of this work is to develop a novel dynamic content update strategy with the aid of deep reinforcement learning. Considering that the BS is unaware of content popularities, the proposed strategy dynamically updates the BS cache according to the time-varying requests and the BS cached contents. Towards this end, we model the problem of cache update as a Markov decision process and put forth an efficient algorithm that builds upon the long short-term memory network and external memory to enhance the decision making ability of the BS. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve not only a higher average reward than deep Q-network, but also a higher cache hit rate than the existing replacement policies such as the least recently used, first-in first-out, and deep Q-network based algorithms.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2019

Fast Channel Estimation and Beam Tracking for Millimeter Wave Vehicular Communications

Millimeter wave (mmWave) has been claimed to be the only viable solution for high-bandwidth vehicular communications. However, frequent channel estimation and beamforming required to provide a satisfactory quality of service limits mmWave for vehicular communications. In this paper, we propose a novel channel estimation and beam tracking framework for mmWave communications in a vehicular network setting. For channel estimation, we propose an algorithm termed robust adaptive multi-feedback (RAF) that achieves comparable estimation performance as existing channel estimation algorithms, with a significantly smaller number of feedback bits. We derive upper and lower bounds on the probability of estimation error (PEE) of the RAF algorithm, given a number of channel estimations, whose accuracy is verified through Monte Carlo simulations. For beam tracking, we propose a new practical model for mmWave vehicular communications. In contrast to the prior works, the model is based on position, velocity, and channel coefficient, which allows a significant improvement of the tracking performance. Focused on the new beam tracking model, we re-derive the equations for Jacobian matrices, reducing the complexity for vehicular communications. An extensive number of simulations is conducted to show the superiority of our proposed channel estimation method and beam tracking algorithm in comparison with the existing algorithms and models. Our simulations suggest that the RAF algorithm can achieve the desired PEE, while on average, reducing the feedback overhead by 75.5% and the total channel estimation time by 14%. The beam tracking algorithm is also shown to significantly improve beam tracking performance, allowing more room for data transmission.

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