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Wei Ni

Publications and source records attributed to Wei Ni.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

A Survey of Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network,Research Directions, and Open Challenges

The Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network (DePIN) represents a transformative paradigm that redefines the construction, operation, and governance of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure in the Web 3.0 era. DePIN integrates physical resources, such as networking equipment, storage, and computing power, with decentralized digital governance, forming a self-incentivized ecosystem that is collaboratively built, shared, and governed by the community. It provides a foundational framework for future communication networks, facilitating decentralized edge intelligence, efficient resource sharing, and trustworthy coordination among heterogeneous devices. Focusing on the feasibility of this emerging paradigm, this paper examines the technology landscape in the pre-DePIN era and gaps between existing methodologies and the forthcoming decentralized infrastructure for Web 3.0. It provides a systematic and comprehensive survey of the background, core characteristics, technical architecture, and applications of DePIN across various vertical domains. The paper analyzes the DePIN technology stack from six layers: physical infrastructure, blockchain, interaction, trust, incentive, and application, with special attention to their cross-layer feedback loops, implementation readiness, and deployment limitations. To further bridge conceptual analysis and practical deployment, we propose a DePIN feasibility assessment framework covering technical, governance, and economic dimensions. Moreover, we highlight promising research directions, providing insights and guidance for further exploration and deployment of DePIN.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2026

Effective Range and Optimal Frequency of Through-the-Earth Magnetic Induction Communication

Magnetic induction communication (MIC) is a promising technology for through-the-earth (TTE) communication. Previous studies on the MIC range have often overlooked the impact of eddy losses caused by underground materials. For TTE MIC, significant eddy losses complicate the analysis of the effective MIC range, which is vital for optimizing performance but has never been addressed in the literature. Accounting for the conductivity and permittivity of the underground medium, this paper derives the effective MIC range in TTE MIC, along with a closed-from expression that predicts the optimal carrier frequency to maximize this range. Finite element simulations validate the analysis, demonstrating that the optimal carrier frequency can significantly enhance the MIC range. It is also revealed that optimizing the antenna radius is effective in extending the MIC range for TTE and vehicle MIC applications.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2026

Update for Decisions, Not Freshness: Goal-Oriented Status Updating and Selective Offloading at the Network Edge

In an edge--cloud collaborative edge-computing environment, an edge node (EN) must decide whether each user task should be executed locally, forwarded to a remote service (or cloud) node (SN), or rejected. The EN observes its local state directly but receives the SN state only through an intermittently refreshed cache. Status updating and task control therefore form an asynchronous closed loop under partial observability. Freshness-driven schemes, including those based on Age of Information (AoI), do not directly value an update by its effect on subsequent task decisions. We propose CoSMO (Co-design of Semantic-state Management and Offloading), a cooperative event-driven reinforcement learning (RL) framework that coordinates semantic status management and selective offloading through realized task utility. CoSMO learns a compact representation of the heterogeneous SN service state. At the SN, a recurrent semi-Markov double deep Q-network (Double DQN) agent jointly selects send/no-send and the next decision interval. At the EN, a task-terminal off-policy value-learning agent makes hierarchical gate--route decisions from local observations and stale remote semantics. The agents maintain separate observations and value targets but share the same realized task-utility stream, without centralized execution. Across the evaluated workload families, CoSMO's reported relative improvement in on-time completion rate over the best-performing competing method averages 18.6%--21.2%. For capacity-aware decision accuracy across the three strict-overload points, the corresponding reported gains average 17.6%--$17.9%.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2026

Efficient Cross-View Localization in 6G Space-Air-Ground Integrated Network

Recently, visual localization has become an important supplement to improve localization reliability, and cross-view approaches can greatly enhance coverage and adaptability. Meanwhile, future 6G will enable a globally covered mobile communication system, with a space-air-ground integrated network (SAGIN) serving as key supporting architecture. Inspired by this, we explore an integration of cross-view localization (CVL) with 6G SAGIN, thereby enhancing its performance in latency, energy consumption, and privacy protection. First, we provide a comprehensive review of CVL and SAGIN, highlighting their capabilities, integration opportunities, and potential applications. Benefiting from the fast and extensive image collection and transmission capabilities of the 6G SAGIN architecture, CVL achieves higher localization accuracy and faster processing speed. Then, we propose a split-inference framework for implementing CVL, which fully leverages the distributed communication and computing resources of the 6G SAGIN architecture. Subsequently, we conduct joint optimization of communication, computation, and confidentiality within the proposed split-inference framework, aiming to provide a paradigm and a direction for making CVL efficient. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and provide solutions to the optimization problem. Finally, we discuss potential research directions for 6G SAGIN-enabled CVL.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2026

Enhancing Network Resilience via Graph-Based Anomaly Detection in Sovereign Functions

Sovereign network functions, e.g., routing protocols, are becoming increasingly complex and susceptible to failures arising from protocol configuration anomalies and anomalous configurations. This paper interprets the protocol configuration anomaly detection problem as detection of structural inconsistencies of connected nodes and edges in a bipartite graph that captures both physical network entities and logical protocol states. This graph structural inconsistency detector (GSID) model is proposed to solve the problem efficiently. To handle the heterogeneous nature of protocol configuration parameters, GSID employs an adaptive configuration encoder (ACE) that dynamically selects encoding strategies per parameter to preserve fine-grained numerical discrepancies. To expose the subtle inconsistencies of connected nodes and edges in the bipartite graph, GSID uses an inconsistency dynamic attention (IDA) mechanism that scores edges by drawing asymmetric attentions from both ends, rule compliance from one end and route connectivity from the other. It is demonstrated experimentally that GSID outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by threefold in F1 score and by 23.2% in accuracy. Ablation studies validate the effectiveness of both the ACE and IDA modules. Tests on unseen network scales and real-world network topologies show the superior adaptability of our GSID, compared to the baselines.

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