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As autonomous driving may be the most important application scenario of the next generation, the development of wireless access technologies enabling reliable and low-latency vehicle communication becomes crucial. To address this, 3GPP has developed Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) specifications based on 5G New Radio (NR) technology, where Mode 2 Side-Link (SL) communication resembles Mode 4 in LTE-V2X, allowing direct communication between vehicles. This supplements SL communication in LTE-V2X and represents the latest advancements in cellular V2X (C-V2X) with the improved performance of NR-V2X. However, in NR-V2X Mode 2, resource collisions still occur and thus degrade the age of information (AOI). Therefore, an interference cancellation method is employed to mitigate this impact by combining NR-V2X with Non-Orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technology. In NR-V2X, when vehicles select smaller resource reservation intervals (RRIs), higher-frequency transmissions use more energy to reduce AoI. Hence, it is important to jointly considerAoI and communication energy consumption based on NR-V2X communication. Then, we formulate such an optimization problem and employ the Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithm to compute the optimal transmission RRI and transmission power for each transmitting vehicle to reduce the energy consumption of each transmitting vehicle and the AoI of each receiving vehicle. Extensive simulations demonstrate the performance of our proposed algorithm.

In recent years, semantic communication has received significant attention from both academia and industry, driven by the growing demands for ultra-low latency and high-throughput capabilities in emerging intelligent services. Nonetheless, a comprehensive and effective theoretical framework for semantic communication has yet to be established. In particular, finding the fundamental limits of semantic communication, exploring the capabilities of semantic-aware networks, or utilizing theoretical guidance for deep learning in semantic communication are very important yet still unresolved issues. In general, the mathematical theory of semantic communication and the mathematical representation of semantics are referred to as semantic information theory. In this paper, we introduce the pertinent advancements in semantic information theory. Grounded in the foundational work of Claude Shannon, we present the latest developments in semantic entropy, semantic rate-distortion, and semantic channel capacity. Additionally, we analyze some open problems in semantic information measurement and semantic coding, providing a theoretical basis for the design of a semantic communication system. Furthermore, we carefully review several mathematical theories and tools and evaluate their applicability in the context of semantic communication. Finally, we shed light on the challenges encountered in both semantic communication and semantic information theory.

Multi-input multi-output and non-orthogonal multiple access (MIMO-NOMA) Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems can improve channel capacity and spectrum efficiency distinctly to support real-time applications. Age of information (AoI) plays a crucial role in real-time applications as it determines the timeliness of the extracted information. In MIMO-NOMA IoT systems, the base station (BS) determines the sample collection commands and allocates the transmit power for each IoT device. Each device determines whether to sample data according to the sample collection commands and adopts the allocated power to transmit the sampled data to the BS over the MIMO-NOMA channel. Afterwards, the BS employs the successive interference cancellation (SIC) technique to decode the signal of the data transmitted by each device. The sample collection commands and power allocation may affect the AoI and energy consumption of the system. Optimizing the sample collection commands and power allocation is essential for minimizing both AoI and energy consumption in MIMO-NOMA IoT systems. In this paper, we propose the optimal power allocation to achieve it based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Simulations have demonstrated that the optimal power allocation effectively achieves lower AoI and energy consumption compared to other algorithms. Overall, the reward is reduced by 6.44% and 11.78% compared the to GA algorithm and random algorithm, respectively.

As a promising distributed learning paradigm, federated learning (FL) faces the challenge of communication-computation bottlenecks in practical deployments. In this work, we mainly focus on the pruning, quantization, and coding of FL. By adopting a layer-wise operation, we propose an explicit and universal scheme: FedLP-Q (federated learning with layer-wise pruning-quantization). Pruning strategies for homogeneity/heterogeneity scenarios, the stochastic quantization rule, and the corresponding coding scheme were developed. Both theoretical and experimental evaluations suggest that FedLP-Q improves the system efficiency of communication and computation with controllable performance degradation. The key novelty of FedLP-Q is that it serves as a joint pruning-quantization FL framework with layer-wise processing and can easily be applied in practical FL systems.

In vehicular edge computing (VEC), some tasks can be processed either locally or on the mobile edge computing (MEC) server at a base station (BS) or a nearby vehicle. In fact, tasks are offloaded or not, based on the status of vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. In this paper, device-to-device (D2D)-based V2V communication and multiple-input multiple-output and nonorthogonal multiple access (MIMO-NOMA)-based V2I communication are considered. In actual communication scenarios, the channel conditions for MIMO-NOMA-based V2I communication are uncertain, and the task arrival is random, leading to a highly complex environment for VEC systems. To solve this problem, we propose a power allocation scheme based on decentralized deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Since the action space is continuous, we employ the deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) algorithm to obtain the optimal policy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed approach with DRL and DDPG outperforms existing greedy strategies in terms of power consumption and reward.

With the advancement of intelligent vision algorithms and devices, image reprocessing and secondary propagation are becoming increasingly prevalent. A large number of similar images are being produced rapidly and widely, resulting in the homogeneity and similarity of images. Moreover, it brings new challenges to compression systems, which need to exploit the potential of deep features and side information of images. However, traditional methods are incompetent for this issue. Soft compression is a novel data-driven image coding algorithm with superior performance. Compared with existing paradigms, it has distinctive characteristics: from hard to soft, from pixels to shapes, and from fixed to random. Soft compression may hold promise for human-centric/data-centric intelligent systems, making them efficient and reliable and finding potential in the metaverse and digital twins, etc. In this paper, we present a comprehensive and practical analysis of soft compression, revealing the functional role of each component in the system., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

This paper focuses on the ultimate limit theory of image compression. It proves that for an image source, there exists a coding method with shapes that can achieve the entropy rate under a certain condition where the shape-pixel ratio in the encoder/decoder is O(1/logt). Based on the new finding, an image coding framework with shapes is proposed and proved to be asymptotically optimal for stationary and ergodic processes. Moreover, the condition O(1/logt) of shape-pixel ratio in the encoder/decoder has been confirmed in the image database MNIST, which illustrates the soft compression with shape coding is a near-optimal scheme for lossless compression of images.

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.

Soft compression is a lossless image compression method that is committed to eliminating coding redundancy and spatial redundancy simultaneously. To do so, it adopts shapes to encode an image. In this paper, we propose a compressible indicator function with regard to images, which gives a threshold of the average number of bits required to represent a location and can be used for illustrating the working principle. We investigate and analyze soft compression for binary image, gray image and multi-component image with specific algorithms and compressible indicator value. In terms of compression ratio, the soft compression algorithm outperforms the popular classical standards PNG and JPEG2000 in lossless image compression. It is expected that the bandwidth and storage space needed when transmitting and storing the same kind of images (such as medical images) can be greatly reduced with applying soft compression.

This article investigates a relay-assisted wireless powered communication network (WPCN), where the access point (AP) inspires the auxiliary nodes to participate together in charging the sensor, and then the sensor uses its harvested energy to send status update packets to the AP. An incentive mechanism is designed to overcome the selfishness of the auxiliary node. In order to further improve the system performance, we establish a Stackelberg game to model the efficient cooperation between the AP-sensor pair and auxiliary node. Specifically, we formulate two utility functions for the AP-sensor pair and the auxiliary node, and then formulate two maximization problems respectively. As the former problem is non-convex, we transform it into a convex problem by introducing an extra slack variable, and then by using the Lagrangian method, we obtain the optimal solution with closed-form expressions. Numerical experiments show that the larger the transmit power of the AP, the smaller the age of information (AoI) of the AP-sensor pair and the less the influence of the location of the auxiliary node on AoI. In addition, when the distance between the AP and the sensor node exceeds a certain threshold, employing the relay can achieve better AoI performance than non-relaying systems.

In disease diagnosis, medical image plays an important part. Its lossless compression is pretty critical, which directly determines the requirement of local storage space and communication bandwidth of remote medical systems, so as to help the diagnosis and treatment of patients. There are two extraordinary properties related to medical images: lossless and similarity. How to take advantage of these two properties to reduce the information needed to represent an image is the key point of compression. In this paper, we employ the big data mining to set up the image codebook. That is, to find the basic components of images. We propose a soft compression algorithm for multi-component medical images, which can exactly reflect the fundamental structure of images. A general representation framework for image compression is also put forward and the results indicate that our developed soft compression algorithm can outperform the popular benchmarks PNG and JPEG2000 in terms of compression ratio.

This paper mainly focuses on the problem of lossy compression storage based on the data value that represents the subjective assessment of users when the storage size is still not enough after the conventional lossless data compression. To this end, we transform this problem to an optimization, which pursues the least importance-weighted reconstruction error in data reconstruction within limited total storage size, where the importance is adopted to characterize the data value from the viewpoint of users. Based on it, this paper puts forward an optimal allocation strategy in the storage of digital data by the exponential distortion measurement, which can make rational use of all the storage space. In fact, the theoretical results show that it is a kind of restrictive water-filling. It also characterizes the trade-off between the relative weighted reconstruction error and the available storage size. Consequently, if a relatively small part of total data value is allowed to lose, this strategy will improve the performance of data compression. Furthermore, this paper also presents that both the users' preferences and the special characteristics of data distribution can trigger the small-probability event scenarios where only a fraction of data can cover the vast majority of users' interests. Whether it is for one of the reasons above, the data with highly clustered message importance is beneficial to compression storage. In contrast, from the perspective of optimal storage space allocation based on data value, the data with a uniform information distribution is incompressible, which is consistent with that in the information theory.

Different probabilities of events attract different attention in many scenarios such as anomaly detection and security systems. To characterize the events' importance from a probabilistic perspective, the message importance measure (MIM) is proposed as a kind of semantics analysis tool. Similar to Shannon entropy, the MIM has its special function in information representation, in which the parameter of MIM plays a vital role. Actually, the parameter dominates the properties of MIM, based on which the MIM has three work regions where this measure can be used flexibly for different goals. When the parameter is positive but not large enough, the MIM not only provides a new viewpoint for information processing but also has some similarities with Shannon entropy in the information compression and transmission. In this regard, this paper first constructs a system model with message importance measure and proposes the message importance loss to enrich the information processing strategies. Moreover, the message importance loss capacity is proposed to measure the information importance harvest in a transmission. Furthermore, the message importance distortion function is discussed to give an upper bound of information compression based on the MIM. Additionally, the bitrate transmission constrained by the message importance loss is investigated to broaden the scope for Shannon information theory.

This paper focuses on the problem of finding a particular data recommendation strategy based on the user preference and a system expected revenue. To this end, we formulate this problem as an optimization by designing the recommendation mechanism as close to the user behavior as possible with a certain revenue constraint. In fact, the optimal recommendation distribution is the one that is the closest to the utility distribution in the sense of relative entropy and satisfies expected revenue. We show that the optimal recommendation distribution follows the same form as the message importance measure (MIM) if the target revenue is reasonable, i.e., neither too small nor too large. Therefore, the optimal recommendation distribution can be regarded as the normalized MIM, where the parameter, called importance coefficient, presents the concern of the system and switches the attention of the system over data sets with different occurring probability. By adjusting the importance coefficient, our MIM based framework of data recommendation can then be applied to systems with various system requirements and data distributions. Therefore, the obtained results illustrate the physical meaning of MIM from the data recommendation perspective and validate the rationality of MIM in one aspect.

Wireless powered communication technology has a great potential to power low-power wireless sensor networks and Internet of Things (IoT) for real-time applications in future 5G networks, where age of information (AoI) plays a very important performance metric. This paper studies the system average AoI of a wireless powered network, where a wireless-powered user harvests energy from a wireless power source (WPS) and then transmits data packets to its access point (AP) by using the harvested energy. The user generates data packets with some probability and adopts the first-come-first-served (FCFS) service policy. For such a system, by using the queuing theory and the probability models, we derive a closed-form expression of the system average AoI. We also formulate an optimization problem to minimize the AoI by optimizing the data packet generating probability, and find its solution by simple calculation and search. Simulation results demonstrate the correctness of our obtained analytical results. It also shows that, when the total distance of the two hops is fixed, the system average AoI increases linearly with the increment of the distance of the first hop, and a smaller data packet generating probability should be selected to match a bigger first-hop distance for achieving a smaller system average AoI. Moreover, a smaller data packet size also contributes to a smaller system average AoI.

Platooning strategy is an important component of autonomous driving technology. Autonomous vehicles in platoons are often equipped with a variety of on-board sensors to detect the surrounding environment. The abundant data collected by autonomous vehicles in platoons can be transmitted to the infrastructure through vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications using the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) mechanism and then uploaded to the cloud platform through the Internet. The cloud platform extracts useful information and then sends it back to the autonomous vehicles respectively. In this way, autonomous vehicles in platoons can detect emergency conditions and make a decision in time. The characteristics of platoons would cause a fair-access problem in the V2I communications, i.e., vehicles in the platoons moving on different lanes with different velocities would have different resident time within the infrastructure's coverage and thus successfully send different amounts of data to the infrastructure. In this case, the vehicles with different velocities will receive different amounts of useful information from the cloud. As a result, vehicles with a higher velocity are more likely to suffer from a traffic accident as compared to the vehicles with a lower velocity. Hence, this paper considers the fair-access problem and proposes a fair-access scheme to ensure that vehicles with different velocities successfully transmit the same amount of data by adaptively adjusting the minimum contention window of each vehicle according to its velocity. Moreover, the normalized throughput of the proposed scheme is derived. The validity of the fair-access scheme is demonstrated by simulation.

Multi-platooning is an important management strategy for autonomous driving technology. The backbone vehicles in a multi-platoon adopt the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) mechanism to transmit vehicles' kinematics information through inter-platoon communications, and then forward the information to the member vehicles through intra-platoon communications. In this case, each vehicle in a multi-platoon can acquire the kinematics information of other vehicles. The parameters of DCF, the hidden terminal problem and the number of neighbors may incur a long and unbalanced one-hop delay of inter-platoon communications, which would further prolong end-to-end delay of inter-platoon communications. In this case, some vehicles within a multi-platoon cannot acquire the emergency changes of other vehicles' kinematics within a limited time duration and take prompt action accordingly to keep a multi-platoon formation. Unlike other related works, this paper proposes a swarming approach to optimize the one-hop delay of inter-platoon communications in a multi-platoon scenario. Specifically, the minimum contention window size of each backbone vehicle is adjusted to enable the one-hop delay of each backbone vehicle to get close to the minimum average one-hop delay. The simulation results indicate that, the one-hop delay of the proposed approach is reduced by 12% as compared to the DCF mechanism with the IEEE standard contention window size. Moreover, the end-to-end delay, one-hop throughput, end-to-end throughput and transmission probability have been significantly improved.

This paper studies a simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT)-aware fog computing by using a simple model, where a sensor harvests energy and receives information from a hybrid access point (HAP) through power splitting (PS) receiver architecture. Two information processing modes, local computing and fog offloading modes are investigated. For such a system, two optimization problems are formulated to minimize the sensor's required power for the two modes under the information rate and energy harvesting constraints by jointly optimizing the time assignment and the transmit power, as well as the PS ratio. The closed-form and semi-closed-form solutions to the proposed optimization problems are derived based on convex optimization theory. Simulation results show that neither mode is always superior to the other one. It also shows that when the number of logic operations per bit associated with local computing is less than a certain value, the local computing mode is a better choice; otherwise, the fog offloading mode should be selected. In addition, the mode selection associated with the positions of the user for fixed HAP and fog server (FS) is also discussed.

Multi-robot formation control makes prerequisites for a team of robots to execute complex tasks cooperatively, which has been widely applied in both civilian and military scenarios. However, the limited precision of sensors and controllers may inevitably cause position errors in the finally achieved formation, which will affect the tasks undertaken. In this paper, the formation error is analyzed from the viewpoint of information theory. The desired position and the actually achieved position are viewed as two random variables. By calculating the mutual information between them, a lower bound of the formation error is derived. The results provide insights for the estimation of possible formation errors in the multi-robot system, which can assist designers to choose sensors and controllers with proper precision.

Information transfer that characterizes the information feature variation can have a crucial impact on big data analytics and processing. Actually, the measure for information transfer can reflect the system change from the statistics by using the variable distributions, similar to Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence and Renyi divergence. Furthermore, to some degree, small probability events may carry the most important part of the total message in an information transfer of big data. Therefore, it is significant to propose an information transfer measure with respect to the message importance from the viewpoint of small probability events. In this paper, we present the message importance transfer measure (MITM) and analyze its performance and applications in three aspects. First, we discuss the robustness of MITM by using it to measuring information distance. Then, we present a message importance transfer capacity by resorting to the MITM and give an upper bound for the information transfer process with disturbance. Finally, we apply the MITM to discuss the queue length selection, which is the fundamental problem of caching operation on mobile edge computing.