arXiv subjects

Pingyi Fan

Publications and source records attributed to Pingyi Fan.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

EXK-SC: A Semantic Communication Model Based on Information Framework Expansion and Knowledge Collision

Semantic communication is not focused on improving the accuracy of transmitted symbols, but is concerned with expressing the expected meaning that the symbol sequence exactly carries. However, the measurement of semantic messages and their corresponding codebook generation are still open issues. Expansion, which integrates simple things into a complex system and even generates intelligence, is truly consistent with the evolution of the human language system. We apply this idea to the semantic communication system, quantifying semantic transmission by symbol sequences and investigating the semantic information system in a similar way as Shannon's method for digital communication systems. This work is the first to discuss semantic expansion and knowledge collision in the semantic information framework. Some important theoretical results are presented, including the relationship between semantic expansion and the transmission information rate. We believe such a semantic information framework may provide a new paradigm for semantic communications, and semantic expansion and knowledge collision will be the cornerstone of semantic information theory.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

How Far Are Wireless Networks from Being Truly Deterministic?

With the rapid development of Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology and machine-type communications, various emerging applications appear in industrial productions and our daily lives. Among these, applications like industrial sensing and controlling, remote surgery, and automatic driving require an extremely low latency and a very small jitter. Delivering information deterministically has become one of the the biggest challenges for modern wire-line and wireless communications. In this paper, we present a review of currently available wire-line deterministic networks and discuss the main challenges to build wireless deterministic networks. We also discuss and propose several potential techniques enabling wireless networks to provide deterministic communications. By elaborating the coding/modulation schemes of the physical layer and managing the channel-access/packet-scheduling at the media access control (MAC) layer, it is believed that wireless deterministic communications can be realized in the near future.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

Mobility-Aware Cooperative Caching in Vehicular Edge Computing Based on Asynchronous Federated and Deep Reinforcement Learning

The vehicular edge computing (VEC) can cache contents in different RSUs at the network edge to support the real-time vehicular applications. In VEC, owing to the high-mobility characteristics of vehicles, it is necessary to cache the user data in advance and learn the most popular and interesting contents for vehicular users. Since user data usually contains privacy information, users are reluctant to share their data with others. To solve this problem, traditional federated learning (FL) needs to update the global model synchronously through aggregating all users' local models to protect users' privacy. However, vehicles may frequently drive out of the coverage area of the VEC before they achieve their local model trainings and thus the local models cannot be uploaded as expected, which would reduce the accuracy of the global model. In addition, the caching capacity of the local RSU is limited and the popular contents are diverse, thus the size of the predicted popular contents usually exceeds the cache capacity of the local RSU. Hence, the VEC should cache the predicted popular contents in different RSUs while considering the content transmission delay. In this paper, we consider the mobility of vehicles and propose a cooperative Caching scheme in the VEC based on Asynchronous Federated and deep Reinforcement learning (CAFR). We first consider the mobility of vehicles and propose an asynchronous FL algorithm to obtain an accurate global model, and then propose an algorithm to predict the popular contents based on the global model. In addition, we consider the mobility of vehicles and propose a deep reinforcement learning algorithm to obtain the optimal cooperative caching location for the predicted popular contents in order to optimize the content transmission delay. Extensive experimental results have demonstrated that the CAFR scheme outperforms other baseline caching schemes.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2022

From MIM-Based GAN to Anomaly Detection:Event Probability Influence on Generative Adversarial Networks

In order to introduce deep learning technologies into anomaly detection, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are considered as important roles in the algorithm design and realistic applications. In terms of GANs, event probability reflected in the objective function, has an impact on the event generation which plays a crucial part in GAN-based anomaly detection. The information metric, e.g. Kullback-Leibler divergence in the original GAN, makes the objective function have different sensitivity on different event probability, which provides an opportunity to refine GAN-based anomaly detection by influencing data generation. In this paper, we introduce the exponential information metric into the GAN, referred to as MIM-based GAN, whose superior characteristics on data generation are discussed in theory. Furthermore, we propose an anomaly detection method with MIM-based GAN, as well as explain its principle for the unsupervised learning case from the viewpoint of probability event generation. Since this method is promising to detect anomalies in Internet of Things (IoT), such as environmental, medical and biochemical outliers, we make use of several datasets from the online ODDS repository to evaluate its performance and compare it with other methods.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Decentralized Power Allocation for MIMO-NOMA Vehicular Edge Computing Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning

Vehicular edge computing (VEC) is envisioned as a promising approach to process the explosive computation tasks of vehicular user (VU). In the VEC system, each VU allocates power to process partial tasks through offloading and the remaining tasks through local execution. During the offloading, each VU adopts the multi-input multi-out and non-orthogonal multiple access (MIMO-NOMA) channel to improve the channel spectrum efficiency and capacity. However, the channel condition is uncertain due to the channel interference among VUs caused by the MIMO-NOMA channel and the time-varying path-loss caused by the mobility of each VU. In addition, the task arrival of each VU is stochastic in the real world. The stochastic task arrival and uncertain channel condition affect greatly on the power consumption and latency of tasks for each VU. It is critical to design an optimal power allocation scheme considering the stochastic task arrival and channel variation to optimize the long-term reward including the power consumption and latency in the MIMO-NOMA VEC. Different from the traditional centralized deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based scheme, this paper constructs a decentralized DRL framework to formulate the power allocation optimization problem, where the local observations are selected as the state. The deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) algorithm is adopted to learn the optimal power allocation scheme based on the decentralized DRL framework. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed power allocation scheme outperforms the existing schemes.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2021

How global observation works in Federated Learning: Integrating vertical training into Horizontal Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) has recently emerged as a transformative paradigm that jointly train a model with distributed data sets in IoT while avoiding the need for central data collection. Due to the limited observation range, such data sets can only reflect local information, which limits the quality of trained models. In practice, the global information and local observations would require a joint consideration for learning to make a reasonable policy. However, in horizontal FL, the central agency only acts as a model aggregator without utilizing its global observation to further improve the model. This could significantly degrade the performance in some missions such as traffic flow prediction in network systems, where the global information may enhance the accuracy. Meanwhile, the global feature may not be directly transmitted to agents for data security. How to utilize the global observation residing in the central agency while protecting its safety thus rises up as an important problem in FL. In this paper, we develop a vertical-horizontal federated learning (VHFL) process, where the global feature is shared with the agents in a procedure similar to that of vertical FL without any extra communication rounds. By considering the delay and packet loss, we will analyze VHFL convergence and validate its performance by experiments. It is shown that the proposed VHFL could enhance the accuracy compared with horizontal FL while still protecting the security of global data.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Velocity-adaptive Access Scheme for MEC-assisted Platooning Networks: Access Fairness Via Data Freshness

Platooning strategy is an important part of autonomous driving technology. Due to the limited resource of autonomous vehicles in platoons, mobile edge computing (MEC) is usually used to assist vehicles in platoons to obtain useful information, increasing its safety. Specifically, vehicles usually adopt the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) mechanism to transmit large amount of data to the base station (BS) through vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications, where the useful information can be extracted by the edge server connected to the BS and then sent back to the vehicles to make correct decisions in time. However, vehicles may be moving on different lanes with different velocities, which incurs the unfair access due to the characteristics of platoons, i.e., vehicles on different lanes transmit different amount of data to the BS when they pass through the coverage of the BS, which also results in the different amount of useful information received by various vehicles. Moreover, age of information (AoI) is an important performance metric to measure the freshness of the data. Large average age of data implies not receiving the useful information in time. It is necessary to design an access scheme to jointly optimize the fairness and data freshness. In this paper, we formulate a joint optimization problem in the MEC-assisted V2I networks and present a multi-objective optimization scheme to solve the problem through adjusting the minimum contention window under the IEEE 802.11 DCF mode according to the velocities of vehicles. The effectiveness of the scheme has been demonstrated by simulation.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2021

Federated Multi-Agent Actor-Critic Learning for Age Sensitive Mobile Edge Computing

As an emerging technique, mobile edge computing (MEC) introduces a new processing scheme for various distributed communication-computing systems such as industrial Internet of Things (IoT), vehicular communication, smart city, etc. In this work, we mainly focus on the timeliness of the MEC systems where the freshness of the data and computation tasks is significant. Firstly, we formulate a kind of age-sensitive MEC models and define the average age of information (AoI) minimization problems of interests. Then, a novel policy based multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (RL) framework, called heterogeneous multi-agent actor critic (H-MAAC), is proposed as a paradigm for joint collaboration in the investigated MEC systems, where edge devices and center controller learn the interactive strategies through their own observations. To improves the system performance, we develop the corresponding online algorithm by introducing an edge federated learning mode into the multi-agent cooperation whose advantages on learning convergence can be guaranteed theoretically. To the best of our knowledge, it's the first joint MEC collaboration algorithm that combines the edge federated mode with the multi-agent actor-critic reinforcement learning. Furthermore, we evaluate the proposed approach and compare it with classical RL based methods. As a result, the proposed framework not only outperforms the baseline on average system age, but also promotes the stability of training process. Besides, the simulation results provide some innovative perspectives for the system design under the edge federated collaboration.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2021

Convergence Analysis and System Design for Federated Learning over Wireless Networks

Federated learning (FL) has recently emerged as an important and promising learning scheme in IoT, enabling devices to jointly learn a model without sharing their raw data sets. However, as the training data in FL is not collected and stored centrally, FL training requires frequent model exchange, which is largely affected by the wireless communication network. Therein, limited bandwidth and random package loss restrict interactions in training. Meanwhile, the insufficient message synchronization among distributed clients could also affect FL convergence. In this paper, we analyze the convergence rate of FL training considering the joint impact of communication network and training settings. Further by considering the training costs in terms of time and power, the optimal scheduling problems for communication networks are formulated. The developed theoretical results can be used to assist the system parameter selections and explain the principle of how the wireless communication system could influence the distributed training process and network scheduling.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

MIM-Based GAN: Information Metric to Amplify Small Probability Events Importance in Generative Adversarial Networks

In terms of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), the information metric to discriminate the generative data from the real data, lies in the key point of generation efficiency, which plays an important role in GAN-based applications, especially in anomaly detection. As for the original GAN, there exist drawbacks for its hidden information measure based on KL divergence on rare events generation and training performance for adversarial networks. Therefore, it is significant to investigate the metrics used in GANs to improve the generation ability as well as bring gains in the training process. In this paper, we adopt the exponential form, referred from the information measure, i.e. MIM, to replace the logarithm form of the original GAN. This approach is called MIM-based GAN, has better performance on networks training and rare events generation. Specifically, we first discuss the characteristics of training process in this approach. Moreover, we also analyze its advantages on generating rare events in theory. In addition, we do simulations on the datasets of MNIST and ODDS to see that the MIM-based GAN achieves state-of-the-art performance on anomaly detection compared with some classical GANs.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

New-Type Hoeffding's Inequalities and Application in Tail Bounds

It is well known that Hoeffding's inequality has a lot of applications in the signal and information processing fields. How to improve Hoeffding's inequality and find the refinements of its applications have always attracted much attentions. An improvement of Hoeffding inequality was recently given by Hertz \cite{r1}. Eventhough such an improvement is not so big, it still can be used to update many known results with original Hoeffding's inequality, especially for Hoeffding-Azuma inequality for martingales. However, the results in original Hoeffding's inequality and its refinement one by Hertz only considered the first order moment of random variables. In this paper, we present a new type of Hoeffding's inequalities, where the high order moments of random variables are taken into account. It can get some considerable improvements in the tail bounds evaluation compared with the known results. It is expected that the developed new type Hoeffding's inequalities could get more interesting applications in some related fields that use Hoeffding's results.

math.ST↗

arXiv2020

Soft Compression for Lossless Image Coding

Soft compression is a lossless image compression method, which is committed to eliminating coding redundancy and spatial redundancy at the same time by adopting locations and shapes of codebook to encode an image from the perspective of information theory and statistical distribution. In this paper, we propose a new concept, compressible indicator function with regard to image, which gives a threshold about the average number of bits required to represent a location and can be used for revealing the performance of soft compression. We investigate and analyze soft compression for binary image, gray image and multi-component image by using specific algorithms and compressible indicator value. It is expected that the bandwidth and storage space needed when transmitting and storing the same kind of images can be greatly reduced by applying soft compression.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2020

Delay Sensitive Task Offloading in the 802.11p Based Vehicular Fog Computing Systems

Vehicular fog computing (VFC) is envisioned as a promising solution to process the explosive tasks in autonomous vehicular networks. In the VFC system, task offloading is the key technique to process the computation-intensive tasks efficiently. In the task offloading, the task is transmitted to the VFC system according to the 802.11p standard and processed by the computation resources in the VFC system. The delay of task offloading, consisting of the transmission delay and computing delay, is extremely critical especially for some delay-sensitive applications. Furthermore, the long-term reward of the system (i.e., jointly considers the transmission delay, computing delay, available resources, and diversity of vehicles and tasks) becomes a significantly important issue for providers. Thus, in this article, we propose an optimal task offloading scheme to maximize the long-term reward of the system where 802.11p is employed as the transmission protocol for the communications between vehicles. Specifically, a task offloading problem based on a semi-Markov decision process (SMDP) is formulated. To solve this problem, we utilize an iterative algorithm based on the Bellman equation to approach the desired solution. The performance of the proposed scheme has been demonstrated by extensive numerical results.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2020

Time-dependent Performance Analysis of the 802.11p-based Platooning Communications Under Disturbance

Platooning is a critical technology to realize autonomous driving. Each vehicle in platoons adopts the IEEE 802.11p standard to exchange information through communications to maintain the string stability of platoons. However, one vehicle in platoons inevitably suffers from a disturbance resulting from the leader vehicle acceleration/deceleration, wind gust and uncertainties in a platoon control system, i.e., aerodynamics drag and rolling resistance moment etc. Disturbances acting on one vehicle may inevitably affect the following vehicles and cause that the spacing error is propagated or even amplified downstream along the platoon, i.e., platoon string instability. In this case, the connectivity among vehicles is dynamic, resulting in the performance of 802.11p in terms of packet delay and packet delivery ratio being time-varying. The effect of the string instability would be further deteriorated once the time-varying performance of 802.11p cannot satisfy the basic communication requirement. Unlike the existing works which only analyze the steady performance of 802.11p in vehicular networks, we will focus on the impact of disturbance and construct models to analyze the time-dependent performance of 802.11p-based platooning communications. The effectiveness of the models is validated through simulation results. Moreover, the time-dependent performance of 802.11p is analyzed through numerical results and it is validated that 802.11p is able to satisfy the communication requirement under disturbance.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2020

A Swarming Approach to Optimize the One-hop Delay in Smart Driving Inter-platoon Communications

In this paper, we propose a swarming approach and optimize the one-hop delay for interplatoon communications through adjusting the minimum contention window size of each backbone vehicle in two steps. In the first step, we first set a small enough average one-hop delay as the initial optimization goal and then propose a swarming approach to find a minimum average one-hop delay for inter-platoon communications through adjusting the minimum contention window of each backbone vehicle iteratively. In the second step, we first set the minimum average one-hop delay found in the first step as the initial optimization goal and then adopt the swarming approach again to get the one-hop delay of each backbone vehicle balance to the minimum average one-hop delay. The optimal minimum contention window sizes that get the one-hop delay of each backbone vehicle balance to the minimum average one-hop delay are obtained after the second step. The simulation results indicate that the one-hop delay is optimized and the other performance metrics including end-to-end delay, one-hop throughput and transmission probability are presented by using the optimal minimum contention window sizes.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2020

An Importance Aware Weighted Coding Theorem Using Message Importance Measure

There are numerous scenarios in source coding where not only the code length but the importance of each value should also be taken into account. Different from the traditional coding theorems, by adding the importance weights for the length of the codes, we define the average cost of the weighted codeword length as an importance-aware measure of the codes. This novel information theoretical measure generalizes the average codeword length by assigning importance weights for each symbol according to users' concerns through focusing on user's selections. With such definitions, coding theorems of the bounds are derived and the outcomes are shown to be extensions of traditional coding theorems.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2020

Intelligent networking with Mobile Edge Computing: Vision and Challenges for Dynamic Network Scheduling

Mobile edge computing (MEC) has been considered as a promising technique for internet of things (IoT). By deploying edge servers at the proximity of devices, it is expected to provide services and process data at a relatively low delay by intelligent networking. However, the vast edge servers may face great challenges in terms of cooperation and resource allocation. Furthermore, intelligent networking requires online implementation in distributed mode. In such kinds of systems, the network scheduling can not follow any previously known rule due to complicated application environment. Then statistical learning rises up as a promising technique for network scheduling, where edges dynamically learn environmental elements with cooperations. It is expected such learning based methods may relieve deficiency of model limitations, which enhance their practical use in dynamic network scheduling. In this paper, we investigate the vision and challenges of the intelligent IoT networking with mobile edge computing. From the systematic viewpoint, some major research opportunities are enumerated with respect to statistical learning.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2020

Age-optimal Service and Decision Scheduling in Internet of Things

We consider an Internet of Things (IoT) system in which a sensor observes a phenomena of interest with exponentially distributed intervals and delivers the updates to a monitor with the First-come-First-served (FCFS) policy. At the monitor, the received updates are used to make decisions with deterministic or random intervals. For this system, we investigate the freshness of the updates at these decision epochs using the age upon decisions (AuD) metric. Theoretical results show that 1) when the decisions are made with exponentially distributed intervals, the average AuD of the system is smaller if the service time (e.g., transmission time) is uniformly distributed than when it is exponentially distributed, and would be the smallest if it is deterministic; 2)when the decisions are made periodically, the average AuD of the system is larger than, and decreases with decision rate to, the average AuD of the corresponding system with Poisson decision intervals; 3)the probability of missing to use a received update for any decisions is decreasing with the decision rate, and is the smallest if the service time is deterministic. For IoT monitoring systems, therefore, it is suggested to use deterministic monitoring schemes, deterministic transmitting schemes, and Poisson decision schemes, so that the received updates are as fresh as possible at the time they are used to make decisions.

cs.IT↗