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Extremely large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (XL-MIMO) communication systems introduce a new communication paradigm called near-field communications, which identifies users’ location within the near-field (Fresnel’s region). In the near-field, beams can be steered in the angle and distance dimensions, resulting in an enormous codebook and a prolonged two-dimensional beam alignment (BA) process. To keep a low BA overhead while achieving low BA error, in this paper, we design a novel hierarchical codebook and a BA scheme for near-field XL-MIMO systems. Specifically, we first propose a novel spatial partition where the angle-offset effect is revealed and leveraged to improve the beam gain inside the coverage area. Based on the partition, we design distance-coarse and focusing beams. Distance-coarse beams are leveraged to construct the high level of the codebook for angle dimension alignment. In contrast, focusing beams construct the last level codebook for distance dimension alignment. Corresponding to the proposed codebook structure, our BA scheme is a tree search consisting of two stages: the angle aligning stage and the distance aligning stage. Next, we formulate the desired codebook design problem as difference convex optimization problems, where three beam design guidelines are considered to minimize the BA error rate raised by the near-field angle-offset effect. After that, the proposed optimization problem is solved by the constrained concave-convex procedure. Numerical simulations verify the angle offset effect and our designed near-field beam. Furthermore, we show that our BA scheme only utilizes one percent of overhead but achieves a lower BA error rate than exhaustive searching.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a promising new paradigm for enhancing wireless information transmission (WIT) and wireless power transfer (WPT) cost-effectively in the future. In this paper, we study an IRS-aided full-duplex (FD) wireless-powered communication network (WPCN), where a hybrid node (HN) operating in FD mode sends information signals to multiple devices in the downlink (DL), and meanwhile receives energy signals from a power station (PS) in the uplink (UL), both of which are assisted by an IRS. Our objective is to boost the weighted sum throughput by jointly optimizing the active transmit beamformer at the PS and HN, along with the passive reflection coefficients of the IRS. To deal with the formulated non-convex optimization problem with intricately coupled design variables, most of existing works employ the alternating optimization (AO) method, whose performance, however, is closely related to parameter initialization. In contrast, we develop two novel penalty-based algorithms for the single-device and multi-device cases, respectively. In particular, our proposed rank-one constraint reformulation method of matrix proves to be efficient, especially for the case where the objective function is a higher-order function of the IRS phase shifts. Numerical results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed design over benchmark schemes, and also unveil the necessity of the joint design of passive IRS beamforming and resource allocation for achieving better WPCN performance. Moreover, we draw useful insights into the fine-tuning of IRS deployment location in the studied WPCN.

Deep neural network-based learning methods have been considered promising techniques used in beam selection problems. However, existing research ignores the peculiar vulnerabilities of neural networks. The adversaries can use data poisoning to embed predefined triggers into a model during training time such that the neural network-based beam model may make an incorrect output decision of a test example when patched with the trigger. Data poisoning offers attackers the possibility to build backdoors. The goal of backdoors is often unethical, such as giving users a poor experience by manipulating infected models to output inappropriate beams. In this paper, first, we introduce a simple backdoor attack method by using data poisoning in a mmWave beam selection system. By numerical simulations, we verify that this poisoning attack is effective for neural networks with different structures. In addition, we explore the effect of poisoned data volume on the effect of backdoor attacks. The results show that the backdoor can be successfully implanted into the beam selection neural network. Besides, we fine-tune the trained model for a new wireless communication environment, and the results show that backdoors still exist even when the model is tuned with data from new scenarios. Then, we propose a machine unlearning solution to mitigate the backdoor of the trained beam selection model. The problem of eliminating backdoors is modeled as a minimax optimization problem. We propose a novel adversarial unlearning method along with label smoothing to solve the backdoor removal problem. We compared the proposed backdoor elimination method with the classical fine-tuning elimination method and the neural network pruning method through numerical simulations. The results show that the fine-tuning and the pruning methods cannot effectively remove the backdoor. The proposed machine unlearning method can make the trained model forget about the backdoor under the condition that the performance of the benign task (beam selection tasks when the trigger does not appear) is guaranteed to be slightly degraded. In summary, our work illustrates that data poisoning-based backdoor attacks may exist in wireless networks, and we propose a scheme to eliminate backdoors.