arXiv subjects

Qinyu Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Qinyu Zhang.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Integrating Sensing and Communications in 6G? Not Until It Is Secure to Do So

Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) is emerging as a cornerstone technology for forthcoming 6G systems, significantly improving spectrum and energy efficiency. However, the commercial viability of ISAC hinges on addressing critical challenges surrounding security, privacy, and trustworthiness. These challenges necessitate an end-to-end framework to safeguards both communication data and sensing information, particularly in ultra-low-latency and highly connected environments. Conventional solutions, such as encryption and key management, often fall short when confronted with ISAC's dual-functional nature. In this context, the physical layer plays a pivotal role: this article reviews emerging physical-layer strategies, including artificial noise (AN) injection, cooperative jamming, and constructive interference (CI), which enhance security by mitigating eavesdropping risks and safeguarding both communication data and sensing information. We further highlight the unique privacy issues that ISAC introduces to cellular networks and outline future research directions aimed at ensuring robust security and privacy for efficient ISAC deployment in 6G.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2025

Joint Transmission and Control in a Goal-oriented NOMA Network

Goal-oriented communication shifts the focus from merely delivering timely information to maximizing decision-making effectiveness by prioritizing the transmission of high-value information. In this context, we introduce the Goal-oriented Tensor (GoT), a novel closed-loop metric designed to directly quantify the ultimate utility in Goal-oriented systems, capturing how effectively the transmitted information meets the underlying application's objectives. Leveraging the GoT, we model a Goal-oriented Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) network comprising multiple transmission-control loops. Operating under a pull-based framework, we formulate the joint optimization of transmission and control as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP), which we solve by deriving the belief state and training a Double-Dueling Deep Q-Network (D3QN). This framework enables adaptive decision-making for power allocation and control actions. Simulation results reveal a fundamental trade-off between transmission efficiency and control fidelity. Additionally, the superior utility of NOMA over Orthogonal Multiple Access (OMA) in multi-loop remote control scenarios is demonstrated.

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arXiv2025

Confidence Based Asynchronous Integrated Communication and Localization Networks Using Pulsed UWB Signals

In recent years, UWB has garnered widespread attention in academia and industry due to its low power consumption, wide bandwidth, and high time resolution characteristics. This paper introduces the design of an asynchronous IR-UWB integrated communication and localization (ICL) downlink network, which employs unified waveforms to enable simultaneous data transmission and localization. A differential sequential detection strategy has been proposed for data demodulation. To address errors caused by symbol misalignment, a novel symbol confidence metric model is introduced to ensure reliable pulse detection and time-of-arrival (TOA) estimation. Additionally, an asynchronous start-of-frame delimiter (SFD) detection model has been constructed to guide parameter optimization for practical applications. Furthermore, the clock drift estimation has been improved by leveraging the confidence metric within a modified weighted least squares (MWLS) framework. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed system achieves reliable clock drift estimation, communication, and self-localization simultaneously. The operational range of the confidence metric required for these outcomes is also quantified, providing valuable insights for parameter design and system implementation. Finally, the agent localization accuracy can be achieved within 10 cm at over 90\% confidence, with commercial UWB devices according to practical measurements.

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arXiv2025

Multi-Satellite Beam Hopping and Power Allocation Using Deep Reinforcement Learning

In non-geostationary orbit (NGSO) satellite communication systems, effectively utilizing beam hopping (BH) technology is crucial for addressing uneven traffic demands. However, optimizing beam scheduling and resource allocation in multi-NGSO BH scenarios remains a significant challenge. This paper proposes a multi-NGSO BH algorithm based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to optimize beam illumination patterns and power allocation. By leveraging three degrees of freedom (i.e., time, space, and power), the algorithm aims to optimize the long-term throughput and the long-term cumulative average delay (LTCAD). The solution is based on proximal policy optimization (PPO) with a hybrid action space combining discrete and continuous actions. Using two policy networks with a shared base layer, the proposed algorithm jointly optimizes beam scheduling and power allocation. One network selects beam illumination patterns in the discrete action space, while the other manages power allocation in the continuous space. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm significantly reduces LTCAD while maintaining high throughput in time-varying traffic scenarios. Compared to the four benchmark methods, it improves network throughput by up to $8.9\%$ and reduces LTCAD by up to $69.2\%$

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arXiv2024

Energy-Efficient SLAM via Joint Design of Sensing, Communication, and Exploration Speed

To support future spatial machine intelligence applications, lifelong simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) has drawn significant attentions. SLAM is usually realized based on various types of mobile robots performing simultaneous and continuous sensing and communication. This paper focuses on analyzing the energy efficiency of robot operation for lifelong SLAM by jointly considering sensing, communication and mechanical factors. The system model is built based on a robot equipped with a 2D light detection and ranging (LiDAR) and an odometry. The cloud point raw data as well as the odometry data are wirelessly transmitted to data center where real-time map reconstruction is realized based on an unsupervised deep learning based method. The sensing duration, transmit power, transmit duration and exploration speed are jointly optimized to minimize the energy consumption. Simulations and experiments demonstrate the performance of our proposed method.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Joint Age and Coverage-Optimal Satellite Constellation Relaying in Cislunar Communications with Hybrid Orbits

With the ever-increasing lunar missions, a growing interest develops in designing data relay satellite constellations for cislunar communications, which is challenged by the constrained visibility and huge distance between the earth and moon in pursuit of establishing real-time communication links. In this work, therefore, we propose an age and coverage optimal relay satellite constellation for cislunar communication by considering the self-rotation of the earth as well as the orbital motion of the moon, which consists of hybrid Earth-Moon Libration 1/2 (EML1/L2) points Halo orbits, ordinary lunar orbits, and Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) satellites. In particular, by minimizing both the number of satellites and the average per-device Age of Information (AoI) while maximizing the coverage ratio of specific lunar surface regions, a multi-objective optimization problem is formulated and solved by using a well-designed Nondominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II (NSGA-II). The simulation results demonstrate that our proposed hybrid constellation significantly outperforms traditional Walker Star and Delta constellations in terms of both AoI and the coverage of communication.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2024

Semantics-Empowered Space-Air-Ground-Sea Integrated Network: New Paradigm, Frameworks, and Challenges

In the coming sixth generation (6G) communication era, to provide seamless and ubiquitous connections, the space-air-ground-sea integrated network (SAGSIN) is envisioned to address the challenges of communication coverage in areas with difficult conditions, such as the forest, desert, and sea. Considering the fundamental limitations of the SAGSIN including large-scale scenarios, highly dynamic channels, and limited device capabilities, traditional communications based on Shannon information theory cannot satisfy the communication demands. Moreover, bit-level reconstruction is usually redundant for many human-to-machine or machine-to-machine applications in the SAGSIN. Therefore, it is imperative to consider high-level communications towards semantics exchange, called semantic communications. In this survey, according to the interpretations of the term "semantics", including "significance", "meaning", and "effectiveness-related information", we review state-of-the-art works on semantic communications from three perspectives, which are 1) significance representation and protection, 2) meaning similarity measurement and meaning enhancement, and 3) ultimate effectiveness and effectiveness yielding. Sequentially, three types of semantic communication systems can be correspondingly introduced, namely the significance-oriented, meaning-oriented, and effectiveness/task-oriented semantic communication systems. Implementation of the above three types of systems in the SAGSIN necessitates a new perception-communication-computing-actuation-integrated paradigm (PCCAIP), where all the available perception, computing, and actuation techniques jointly facilitates significance-oriented sampling & transmission, semantic extraction & reconstruction, and task decision. Finally, we point out some future challenges on semantic communications in the SAGSIN. ...

cs.IT↗

arXiv2024

Integrating Sensing, Communication, and Power Transfer: From Theory to Practice

To support the development of internet-of-things applications, an enormous population of low-power devices are expected to be incorporated in wireless networks performing sensing and communication tasks. As a key technology for improving the data collection efficiency, integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) enables simultaneous data transmission and radar sensing by reusing the same radio signals. In addition to information carriers, wireless signals can also serve as energy delivers, which enables simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT). To improve the energy and spectrum efficiency, the advantages of ISAC and SWIPT are expected to be exploited, leading to the emerging technology of integrating sensing, communication, and power transfer (ISCPT). In this article, a timely overview of ISCPT is provided with the description of the fundamentals, the characterization of the theoretical boundary, the discussion on the key technologies, and the demonstration of the implementation platform.

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arXiv2024

Automatic Radio Map Adaptation for Robust Localization with Dynamic Adversarial Learning

Wireless fingerprint-based localization has become one of the most promising technologies for ubiquitous location-aware computing and intelligent location-based services. However, due to RF vulnerability to environmental dynamics over time, continuous radio map updates are time-consuming and infeasible, resulting in severe accuracy degradation. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach of robust localization with dynamic adversarial learning, known as DadLoc which realizes automatic radio map adaptation by incorporating multiple robust factors underlying RF fingerprints to learn the evolving feature representation with the complicated environmental dynamics. DadLoc performs a finer-grained distribution adaptation with the developed dynamic adversarial adaptation network and quantifies the contributions of both global and local distribution adaptation in a dynamics-adaptive manner. Furthermore, we adopt the strategy of prediction uncertainty suppression to conduct source-supervised training, target-unsupervised training, and source-target dynamic adversarial adaptation which can trade off the environment adaptability and the location discriminability of the learned deep representation for safe and effective feature transfer across different environments. With extensive experimental results, the satisfactory accuracy over other comparative schemes demonstrates that the proposed DanLoc can facilitate fingerprint-based localization for wide deployments.

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arXiv2024

Secure ISAC MIMO Systems: Exploiting Interference With Bayesian Cramér-Rao Bound Optimization

In this paper, we present a signaling design for secure integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems comprising a dual-functional multi-input multi-output (MIMO) base station (BS) that simultaneously communicates with multiple users while detecting targets present in their vicinity, which are regarded as potential eavesdroppers. In particular, assuming that the distribution of each parameter to be estimated is known \textit{a priori}, we focus on optimizing the targets' sensing performance. To this end, we derive and minimize the Bayesian Cramér-Rao bound (BCRB), while ensuring certain communication quality of service (QoS) by exploiting constructive interference (CI). The latter scheme enforces that the received signals at the eavesdropping targets fall into the destructive region of the signal constellation, to deteriorate their decoding probability, thus enhancing the ISAC's system physical-layer security (PLS) capability. To tackle the nonconvexity of the formulated problem, a tailored successive convex approximation method is proposed for its efficient solution. Our extensive numerical results verify the effectiveness of the proposed secure ISAC design showing that the proposed algorithm outperforms block-level precoding techniques.

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arXiv2023

6G Network AI Architecture for Everyone-Centric Customized Services

Mobile communication standards were developed for enhancing transmission and network performance by using more radio resources and improving spectrum and energy efficiency. How to effectively address diverse user requirements and guarantee everyone's Quality of Experience (QoE) remains an open problem. The Sixth Generation (6G) mobile systems will solve this problem by utilizing heterogenous network resources and pervasive intelligence to support everyone-centric customized services anywhere and anytime. In this article, we first coin the concept of Service Requirement Zone (SRZ) on the user side to characterize and visualize the integrated service requirements and preferences of specific tasks of individual users. On the system side, we further introduce the concept of User Satisfaction Ratio (USR) to evaluate the system's overall service ability of satisfying a variety of tasks with different SRZs. Then, we propose a network Artificial Intelligence (AI) architecture with integrated network resources and pervasive AI capabilities for supporting customized services with guaranteed QoEs. Finally, extensive simulations show that the proposed network AI architecture can consistently offer a higher USR performance than the cloud AI and edge AI architectures with respect to different task scheduling algorithms, random service requirements, and dynamic network conditions.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2023

A Tightly Coupled Bi-Level Coordination Framework for CAVs at Road Intersections

Since the traffic administration at road intersections determines the capacity bottleneck of modern transportation systems, intelligent cooperative coordination for connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) has shown to be an effective solution. In this paper, we try to formulate a Bi-Level CAV intersection coordination framework, where coordinators from High and Low levels are tightly coupled. In the High-Level coordinator where vehicles from multiple roads are involved, we take various metrics including throughput, safety, fairness and comfort into consideration. Motivated by the time consuming space-time resource allocation framework in [1], we try to give a low complexity solution by transforming the complicated original problem into a sequential linear programming one. Based on the "feasible tunnels" (FT) generated from the High-Level coordinator, we then propose a rapid gradient-based trajectory optimization strategy in the Low-Level planner, to effectively avoid collisions beyond High-level considerations, such as the pedestrian or bicycles. Simulation results and laboratory experiments show that our proposed method outperforms existing strategies. Moreover, the most impressive advantage is that the proposed strategy can plan vehicle trajectory in milliseconds, which is promising in realworld deployments. A detailed description include the coordination framework and experiment demo could be found at the supplement materials, or online at https://youtu.be/MuhjhKfNIOg.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2023

A Computationally Efficient Bi-level Coordination Framework for CAVs at Unsignalized Intersections

In this paper, we investigate cooperative vehicle coordination for connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) at unsignalized intersections. To support high traffic throughput while reducing computational complexity, we present a novel collision region model and decompose the optimal coordination problem into two sub-problems: \textit{centralized} priority scheduling and \textit{distributed} trajectory planning. Then, we propose a bi-level coordination framework which includes: (i) a Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS)-based high-level priority scheduler aims to find high-quality passing orders to maximize traffic throughput, and (ii) a priority-based low-level trajectory planner that generates optimal collision-free control inputs. Simulation results demonstrate that our bi-level strategy achieves near-optimal coordination performance, comparable to state-of-the-art centralized strategies, and significantly outperform the traffic signal control systems in terms of traffic throughput. Moreover, our approach exhibits good scalability, with computational complexity scaling linearly with the number of vehicles. Video demonstrations can be found online at \url{https://youtu.be/WYAKFMNnQfs}.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2023

Evaluate PAC codes via Efficient Estimation on Weight Distribution

In this letter, we introduce an efficient method for estimating weight distributions of polar codes and polarization-adjusted convolutional (PAC) codes. Based on a recursive algorithm of computing the weight enumerating functions of polar cosets, this method focuses on two key objectives: accurately determining the number of low-weight codewords and quickly approximating the distribution of high-weight codewords. Simulation results demonstrate that this hybrid method maintains competitively low complexity while effectively achieving the objectives.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2023

Visually-augmented pretrained language models for NLP tasks without images

Although pre-trained language models~(PLMs) have shown impressive performance by text-only self-supervised training, they are found lack of visual semantics or commonsense. Existing solutions often rely on explicit images for visual knowledge augmentation (requiring time-consuming retrieval or generation), and they also conduct the augmentation for the whole input text, without considering whether it is actually needed in specific inputs or tasks. To address these issues, we propose a novel \textbf{V}isually-\textbf{A}ugmented fine-tuning approach that can be generally applied to various PLMs or NLP tasks, \textbf{W}ithout using any retrieved or generated \textbf{I}mages, namely \textbf{VAWI}. Experimental results show that our approach can consistently improve the performance of BERT, RoBERTa, BART, and T5 at different scales, and outperform several competitive baselines on ten tasks. Our codes and data are publicly available at~\url{https://github.com/RUCAIBox/VAWI}.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Real-time Cooperative Vehicle Coordination at Unsignalized Road Intersections

Cooperative coordination at unsignalized road intersections, which aims to improve the driving safety and traffic throughput for connected and automated vehicles, has attracted increasing interests in recent years. However, most existing investigations either suffer from computational complexity or cannot harness the full potential of the road infrastructure. To this end, we first present a dedicated intersection coordination framework, where the involved vehicles hand over their control authorities and follow instructions from a centralized coordinator. Then a unified cooperative trajectory optimization problem will be formulated to maximize the traffic throughput while ensuring the driving safety and long-term stability of the coordination system. To address the key computational challenges in the real-world deployment, we reformulate this non-convex sequential decision problem into a model-free Markov Decision Process (MDP) and tackle it by devising a Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (TD3)-based strategy in the deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework. Simulation and practical experiments show that the proposed strategy could achieve near-optimal performance in sub-static coordination scenarios and significantly improve the traffic throughput in the realistic continuous traffic flow. The most remarkable advantage is that our strategy could reduce the time complexity of computation to milliseconds, and is shown scalable when the road lanes increase.

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arXiv2022

New Upper Bounds on the Error Probability under ML Decoding for Spinal Codes and the Joint Transmission-Decoding System Design

Spinal codes are a type of capacity-achieving rateless codes that have been proved to approach the Shannon capacity over the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel and the binary symmetric channel (BSC). In this paper, we aim to analyze the bounds on the error probability of Spinal codes and design a joint transmission-decoding system. First, in the finite block-length regime, we derive new upper bounds on the Maximum Likelihood (ML) decoding error probability for Spinal codes over both the AWGN channel and the BSC. Then, based on the derived bounds, we formulate a rate maximization problem. As the solution exhibits an incremental-tail-transmission pattern, we propose an improved transmission scheme, referred to as the thresholded incremental tail transmission (TITT) scheme. Moreover, we also develop a dynamic TITT-matching decoding algorithm, called the bubble decoding with memory (BD-M) algorithm, to reduce the decoding time complexity. The TITT scheme at the transmitter and the BD-M algorithm at the receiver jointly constitute a dynamic transmission-decoding system for Spinal code, improving its rate performance and decoding throughput. Theoretical analysis and simulation results are provided to verify the superiority of the derived bounds and the proposed joint transmission-decoding system design.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

Age of Information with Hybrid-ARQ: A Unified Explicit Result

Delivering timely status updates in a timeliness-critical communication system is of paramount importance to assist accurate and efficient decision making. Therefore, the topic of analyzing Age of Information has aroused new research interest. This paper contributes to new results in this area by systematically analyzing the AoI of two types of Hybrid Automatic Repeat reQuest (HARQ) techniques that have been newly standardized in the Release-16 5G New Radio (NR) specifications, namely reactive HARQ and proactive HARQ. Under a code-based status update system with non-trivial coding delay, transmission delay, propagation delay, decoding delay, and feedback delay, we derive unified closed-form average AoI and average Peak AoI expressions for reactive HARQ and proactive HARQ, respectively. Based on the obtained explicit expressions, we formulate an AoI minimization problem to investigate the age-optimal codeblock assignment strategy in the finite block-length (FBL) regime. Through case studies and analytical results, we provide comparative insights between reactive HARQ and proactive HARQ from a perspective of freshness of information. The numerical results and optimization solutions show that proactive HARQ draws its strength from both age performance and system robustness, thus enabling the potential to provide new system advancement of a freshness-critical status update system.

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