Search

This paper provides a comprehensive performance comparison between a current robust military waveform; namely, MIL-STD-188-110D, Waveform 0, and a filter bank multicarrier spread-spectrum (FBMC-SS) waveform proposed for communications through ionospheric/skywave HF channels. Waveform 0 is effectively a direct sequence spread spectrum waveform that uses Walsh multi-codes to enhance the information transmission rate. It may thus be referred to as Walsh-DSSS. FBMC-SS, on the other hand, makes use of filter banks to provide excellent performance when the received signal is subject to partial band interference. Successful application of FBMC-SS for communications across skywave HF channels has been previously demonstrated, both theoretically and through experimental work. However, very little has been done to contrast FBMC-SS against Walsh-DSSS. The goal of this paper is to first add new features to FBMC-SS to bring it on par with Walsh-DSSS. These features include: (i), introduction of multi-codes that achieve a comparable (or better) data rate to Walsh-DSSS; and (ii), addition of a scrambling step applied to the multi-codes to make the receiver detection robust against widely spread multipaths. With this established, in the second part of the paper, we examine the performance of the developed FBMC-SS against Walsh-DSSS when both are applied for communications across skywave HF channels. The two waveforms are compared both through a theoretical study and through experimental works across several skywave channels ranging from hundreds to thousands of kilometers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this technical report, we focus on reproducing the results reported in the paper “MemXCT: Memory-Centric X-ray CT Reconstruction with Massive Parallelization” [1]. MemXCT is a scalable approach to X-ray Computed Tomography reconstruction which removes redundant computation. We reproduced the single CPU/GPU performance as well as strong scaling experiments. We set up our configurations on Microsoft Azure CycleCloud and have two clusters. One cluster has 4 nodes with 60 CPUs on each node and the other cluster has 4 nodes with 4 NVIDIA V100 GPUs on each node. Both clusters come with InfiniBand. The original author conducted his experiments on Theta and Blue Waters supercomputers. We were able to reproduce part of the results in the original paper, however, failed to produce similar performance on other experiments. This report was submitted as part of the reproducibility challenge in SC20 Student Cluster Competition. Digital artifacts from these experiments are available at: 10.5281/zenodo.5598108. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This report analyzes the reproducibility of the paper “MemXCT: Memory-Centric X-ray CT Reconstruction with Massive Parallelization” by Hidayetoğlu et al. in the cloud as part of the SC20 Virtual Student Cluster Competition (VSCC). To reproduce the results from the original work, the ETH Zürich SC20 VSCC team performed a series of CT reconstructions and performed a scaling study using three provided sinograms. All experimental runs were performed during the SC20 VSCC on an HPC cluster hosted in the Microsoft Azure CycleCloud. In this paper, we describe discrepancies in results as a factor of the differences in experiment environments and insufficient parameter tuning. We successfully reproduce the single device performance and partially reproduce the strong scaling behavior. Digital artifacts from these experiments are available at: 10.5281/zenodo.5598108. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently video streaming in heterogeneous network environments is affected by limited network bandwidth availability and consequent low and variable user Quality of Experience (QoE) levels. In particular, for the case of live video streaming, a very high number of end-clients request content at the same time, generating huge concurrent traffic, and putting pressure on the existing network infrastructure. An approach which helps address this issue is deployment of emerging edge computing technologies to smooth the live streaming traffic and improve QoE by adapting client bitrates and caching content at the edge server. In this context, this paper proposes a novel QoE-aware Adaptive Video bitrate Aggregation scheme for HTTP live streaming based on smart edge computing (QAVA). As an intelligent proxy server, a “smart edge” which deploys QAVA aggregates all the traffic requested by clients for the same live streaming service and adapts their bitrates based on network conditions, client states and video characteristics. The adaptation is performed based on a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)-based algorithm, which is also proposed. The QAVA DRL algorithm is trained and modeled based on a real client experience dataset. The experimental evaluation results presented in this paper show how QAVA outperforms other state-of-the-art adaptive bitrate algorithms in terms of average QoE and QoE fairness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports the development of a broadband highly reflective and structurally flat large-area 2-D subwavelength grating (SWG) reflector, based on a tensioned single-layer silicon metamaterial membrane. Rigorous coupled-wave analysis is adopted to design the metamaterial reflector, resulting in a wavelength range of 600 nm (1.9- $2.5~\mu \text{m}$) with >99% reflectivity, which represents the largest reported fractional bandwidth $\Delta \lambda /\lambda _{\mathrm {c}}$ of 27%. Effects of design parameter deviations on the SWG reflector reflectivity are studied, showing that the reflector design has good fabrication tolerances. A freestanding 2-mm dimension 2-D SWG reflector has been fabricated with high precision, and optical measurements indicate polarization-independent average reflectivity of 99% over the wavelength range of 1.91- $2.49~\mu \text{m}$ , which agrees well with the modeled result. This paper also, for the first time, examines the surface flatness characteristics of a suspended single-layer 2-D SWG reflector. With a tensile stress of 10 ± 5 MPa in the silicon grating membrane, the freestanding reflector achieves nanometer-scale surface flatness, which provides a significant advantage over multilayer DBRs requiring stress-balancing. Furthermore, a hyperspectral Fabry-Perot shortwave infrared filter based on a top suspended 2-D SWG reflector and a bottom 4-pair Si/SiO2 distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) has been experimentally demonstrated for the first time. The filter is measured to have a peak transmission of 80% with a narrow full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) of about 4 nm. This spectral resolution is one order of magnitude higher than that of other reported MEMS/DBR-based Fabry-Perot filters and is well-suited to highly demanding hyperspectral shortwave infrared imaging applications. [2022-0060] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the great demand of throughput and reliability for multimedia applications in Fifth Generation (5G) networks, many broadcasting systems adopt the Millimeter Wave (mmWave) technology to address the lack of the spectrum resources. As one of 5G-PPP projects, Internet of Radio Light (IoRL) project adopts 40GHz mmWave band to support a high-speed and stable Ultra-High-Definition (UHD) television broadcasting service in the indoor environment. Because of the high frequency property, mmWave bands usually suffers from the high path loss and the penetration loss. Thus, in order to overcome these issues, directional antennas are employed to provide additional power gain while increasing transmission distance. However, the mmWave with directional antennas brings additional problems, such as limited transmission angle and more multipath effects. Therefore, in this paper, for better understanding of impact factors on the signal quality and transmission coverage of the directional 40GHz mmWave band in the indoor environment, a measurement campaign is introduced in detail and the channel characteristics are measured and analysed in varying cases. The mainly concerned characteristics are path loss, shadow fading, average Power Delay Profile (PDP), Root-Mean-Square (RMS) delay spread, arrival rate and coherence bandwidth. All Measured characteristic values are summarised in three tables at the end of this paper. Besides of these, as a reference of channel analysis and a metric of signal quality and effective coverage, Error Vector Magnitude (EVM) of received signal in each case is measured and discussed. Moreover, a simulation is performed based on a statistical channel model to validate the measured results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The online retail market shows a sharp increase in traffic during holiday sales. The ability to distinguish customers who will likely purchase is critical for provisioning traffic and for providing cost-effective promotions. This paper uniquely studies the browsing and purchasing behaviors of online shoppers during a yearly sale event in China, the world’s largest online marketplace. Based on 31 million action logs gathered from wide residential areas, we characterize the steps leading to purchases and determine their precursors. We investigate the effect of time (e.g., date, time of date), environment (e.g., platform, viewed category), and action (e.g., session time, clicks, sequence) on purchases. Action cues from shopping behaviors can be used for early detection. While most shoppers start with strong intentions to purchase, yet the moment of ordering comes rather impulsively within 30 seconds to several minutes of browsing. The predictive accuracy reaches as a high AUC of 0.924. The findings in this paper provide an understanding of traffic during mega sale events that can help online shops plan and provide a better user experience for upcoming shopping festivals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the non-uniform geographic distribution and time-varying characteristics of the ground traffic request, how to make full use of the limited beam resources to serve users flexibly and efficiently is a brand-new challenge for beam hopping satellite systems. The conventional greedy-based beam hopping methods do not consider the long-term reward, which is difficult to deal with the time-varying traffic demand. Meanwhile, the heuristic algorithms such as genetic algorithm have a slow convergence time, which can not achieve real-time scheduling. Furthermore, existing methods based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) only make decisions on beam patterns, lack of the freedom of bandwidth. This paper proposes a dynamic beam pattern and bandwidth allocation scheme based on DRL, which flexibly uses three degrees of freedom of time, space and frequency. Considering that the joint allocation of bandwidth and beam pattern will lead to an explosion of action space, a cooperative multi-agents deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) framework is presented in this paper, where each agent is only responsible for the illumination allocation or bandwidth allocation of one beam. The agents can learn to collaborate by sharing the same reward to achieve the common goal, which refers to maximize the throughput and minimize the delay fairness between cells. Simulation results demonstrate that the offline trained MADRL model can achieve real-time beam pattern and bandwidth allocation to match the non-uniform and time-varying traffic request. Furthermore, when the traffic demand increases, our model has a good generalization ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider the update bandwidth in distributed storage systems (DSSs). The update bandwidth, which measures the transmission efficiency of the update process in DSSs, is defined as the average amount of data symbols transferred in the network when the data symbols stored in a node are updated. This paper contains the following contributions. First, we establish the closed-form expression of the minimum update bandwidth attainable by irregular array codes. Second, after defining a class of irregular array codes, called Minimum Update Bandwidth (MUB) codes, which achieve the minimum update bandwidth of irregular array codes, we determine the smallest code redundancy attainable by MUB codes. Third, the code parameters, with which the minimum code redundancy of irregular array codes and the smallest code redundancy of MUB codes can be equal, are identified, which allows us to define MR-MUB codes as a class of irregular array codes that simultaneously achieve the minimum code redundancy and the minimum update bandwidth. Fourth, we introduce explicit code constructions of MR-MUB codes and MUB codes with the smallest code redundancy. Fifth, we establish a lower bound of the update complexity of MR-MUB codes, which can be used to prove that the minimum update complexity of irregular array codes may not be achieved by MR-MUB codes. Last, we construct a class of $(n = k + 2, k)$ vertical maximum-distance separable (MDS) array codes that can achieve all of the minimum code redundancy, the minimum update bandwidth and the optimal repair bandwidth of irregular array codes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The CUDA core of NVIDIA GPUs had been one of the most efficient computation units for parallel computing. However, recent rapid developments in deep neural networks demand an even higher level of computational performance. To meet this requirement, NVIDIA has introduced the Tensor core in recent generations. However, their impressive enhancements in computational performance have newly brought high pressure on the memory hierarchy. In this paper, first we identify the required memory bandwidth in the memory hierarchy as the computational performance increases in actual GPU hardware. Through a comparison of the CUDA core and the Tensor core in V100, we find that the tremendous performance increase of the Tensor core requires much higher memory bandwidth than that in the CUDA core. Moreover, we thoroughly investigate memory bandwidth requirement over Tensor core generations of V100, RTX TITAN, and A100. Lastly, we analyze a hypothetical next-generation Tensor core introduced by NVIDIA through a GPU simulation, through which we propose an inter-warp multicasting microarchitecture that reduces redundant shared memory (SMEM) traffic during the GEMM process. Our evaluation shows that inter-warp multicasting reduces the SMEM bandwidth pressure by 33% and improves the performance by 19% on average in all layers of ResNet-152 and BERT-Large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present FLiMS, a highly-efficient and simple parallel algorithm for merging two sorted lists residing in banked and/or wide memory. On FPGAs, its implementation uses fewer hardware resources than the state-of-the-art alternatives, due to the reduced number of comparators and elimination of redundant logic found on prior attempts. In combination with the distributed nature of the selector stage, a higher performance is achieved for the same amount of parallelism or higher. This is useful in many applications such as in parallel merge trees to achieve high-throughput sorting, where the resource utilisation of the merger is critical for building large trees and internalising the workload for fast computation. Also presented are efficient variations of FLiMS for optimizing throughput for skewed datasets, achieving stable sorting or using fewer dequeue signals. Additionally, FLiMS is shown to perform well as conventional software on modern CPUs supporting single-instruction multiple-data (SIMD) instructions, surpassing the performance of some standard libraries for sorting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) has been selected as a baseline waveform for long-term evolution (LTE) and fifth-generation new radio (5G NR). Fast-convolution (FC)-based frequency-domain signal processing has been recently considered as an effective tool for transmitter and receiver side subband filtering of OFDM-based waveforms. However, for the original continuous FC-based model, the filtering can, in general, be configured in time-direction only with the granularity of half subframe, corresponding to 7, 14, or 28 symbols with 15kHz, 30kHz, or 60kHz subcarrier spacing, respectively. In this paper, we present a symbol-synchronous FC-processing scheme flexibly allowing filter re-configuration with the time resolution equal to one OFDM symbol while supporting tight carrier-wise filtering for 5G NR in mixed-numerology scenarios with adjustable subcarrier spacings, center frequencies, and subband bandwidths, as well as providing co-existence with LTE. Proposed approach segments each stream of time-domain OFDM symbols into overlapping processing blocks of fixed size. Symbol synchronous processing is achieved by dynamically adjusting the overlap between the processing blocks while aligning the payload part of the processing blocks with the boundaries of the OFDM symbols. The proposed scheme is demonstrated to support the envisioned use cases of 5G NR and provide a flexible starting point for sixth generation (6G) development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Benefiting from the rapid progress of wireless communication and artificial intelligence, multi-agent collaboration opens up new opportunities for various fields. To facilitate multi-agent acting as a group, effective communication plays a crucial role. Recently, many efforts based on multi-agent reinforcement learning have been made to enable effective multi-agent communication under limited bandwidth or noisy channel. However, current methods do not explore wireless resource allocation strategy explicitly. Moreover, due to ignoring task-relevant significance of information, traditional wireless resource allocation schemes may fail to guarantee the transmission efficiency and reliability for multi-agent communication. To this end, in this paper, we propose a task-oriented communication principle for multi-agent communication. We model the task-oriented channel allocation problem as a decentralized partially observable Markov decision process and propose a multi-agent reinforcement learning framework as a solution. Specifically, we design a novel variational information bottleneck to extract task-relevant information from local observation. Furthermore, a task-oriented channel allocation mechanism is developed to choose the allocation pattern with maximum expected gain. Finally, a double attention mechanism is developed to motivate the efficient utilization of task-relevant information. Experimental results show that our method can improve the effectiveness and efficiency of multi-agent communication, enhancing collaboration performance compared to baselines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile edge computing is popular for providing services with low latency and high privacy. It becomes more powerful by leveraging the widely deployed Small cell Base Stations (SBS) with zooming cells for energy-efficient service placement. However, the literature ignores the joint optimization of SBS power control and service placement. The Quality of Services (QoS) guarantee is also challenging, taking into account the component dependency and parallelization in multi-component services and the resource slicing for separated service deployment. Moreover, prior works assume the same amount of allocated resources of links on a placed path for service edge allocation, leading to the ossification of resource allocation and inevitable resource fragments. Towards the above challenges, this paper addresses the energy-efficient and flexible service placement in cell zooming enabled Mobile Edge Cloud (MEC) networks. The delay of multi-component services is constructed depending on the allocated resource slice. Besides, the joint optimization of service placement and SBS power control is formulated and transformed into a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP). More importantly, the equivalent bandwidth for an edge allocation is defined and analyzed to obtain flexible edge placement with minimum resource cost. Leveraging the results of MILP, an Energy-efficient Service placement algorithm based on equivalent Bandwidth in Cell zooming enabled MEC networks (ESBC) is proposed to improve the probability of successful service placement with QoS guarantee by optimizing the delay distribution among components and edges and reducing resource fragments. Finally, simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The application of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) to multi-layer multicast video streaming is envisioned to address the explosively growing demand for capacity which is dominated mostly by multimedia content. In this paper, a joint power allocation and subgrouping scheme is developed to enhance the performance of NOMA-based multi-layer multicast systems. An optimization problem is formulated to maximize the overall sum multicast rate whilst satisfying the maximum transmission power and proportional rate constraints. Due to the complexity of the optimization problem, we first derive two power allocation techniques for the 2-layer case considering arbitrary subgrouping which are based on the iterative implementation and closed-form analysis, respectively. We then generalize the low-complexity closed-form solution for the general multi-layer case. This scheme successively allocates power to each layer stream while assuring that the minimum target rate and proportionality are guaranteed, particularly for the transmission rate of the high-priority base layer stream. A sub-optimal joint power allocation and subgrouping scheme is also designed by incorporating the power allocation scheme into the proposed iterative subgrouping techniques. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the power allocation and subgrouping schemes in enhancing the sum multicast rate performance. In addition, the proposed power allocation scheme ensures substantially higher rates for the base layer stream, which is crucial in robust delivery of standard quality video to all users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commercial clouds now heavily use CPUs in DL (deep learning) because there are large numbers of CPUs which would otherwise sit idle during off-peak periods. Following the trend, CPU vendors have not only released high-performance many-core CPUs but also developed efficient math kernel libraries. However, current DL platforms cannot scale well to a large number of CPU cores, making many-core CPUs inefficient in DL computation. We analyze the memory access patterns of various layers and identify the root cause of the low scalability, i.e., the per-layer barriers that are implicitly imposed by current platforms which assign one single instance (i.e., one batch of input data) to a CPU. The barriers cause severe memory bandwidth contention and CPU starvation in the access-intensive layers (like activation and BN). This paper presents a novel approach called ParaX, which boosts the performance of DL on multi-NUMA (non-uniform memory access) many-core CPUs by effectively alleviating bandwidth contention and CPU starvation. Our key idea is to assign one instance to each CPU core instead of to the entire CPU, so as to remove the per-layer barriers on the executions of the many cores. ParaX designs an ultralight scheduling policy which sufficiently overlaps the access-intensive layers with the compute-intensive ones to avoid contention, and proposes a NUMA-aware gradient server mechanism for training which leverages shared memory to substantially reduce the overhead of per-iteration parameter synchronization. We have implemented ParaX on MXNet. Extensive evaluation on a two-NUMA Intel 8280 CPU shows that ParaX significantly improves the training/inference throughput for all tested models (for image recognition and natural language processing) by $1.73\times \sim 2.93{\times}$ 1. 73 × ∼ 2. 93 × . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a novel optimization model for multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) working simultaneously as relays to help two set of ground users; namely relay users and device-to-device (D2D) users. The relay users are assumed out communication rages from each other and use the UAV link to for their data transmission. While the D2D users are assumed to be nearby users and use the UAV for managing the resources without being involved in the transmission. The goal of the paper is to operate the UAVs in an energy-efficient manner to support the different set of users by i) optimizing the available bandwidth and power allocations of the D2D links, and ii) acting as relays when needed to maintain the communication links between relay users. We formulate an optimization problem that maximizes the throughput-energy utility while respecting the resource availability including the UAVs’ energy consumption, UAV-user association, and trajectory constraints. Due to the non-convexity of the problem, we propose to solve it in three steps using Taylor series approximation. Firstly, we optimize the transmit power of the UAVs and users. Then, we optimize the bandwidth allocation for a given transmit power values. Finally, an efficient heuristic algorithm based on a recursive shrink-and-realign process is proposed to optimize the UAVs’ trajectories. The performance of the proposed method shows advantages in terms of average throughput compared to the fixed power and bandwidth solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an overview of the decoder-side motion vector refinement (DMVR) algorithm in the Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard. The proposed DMVR algorithm aims to increase the prediction accuracy of the blocks coded in merge mode using the bilateral matching-based refinement method. Compared with previous decoder-side motion vector derivation approaches, the proposed method significantly increases the coding efficiency without signaling additional side information. Furthermore, the hardware implementation considerations of the DMVR design are particularly focused in this study. This paper details and analyzes the novel features of DMVR contributing to the increase in coding efficiency and the reduction in computational complexity and implementation difficulty. Experimental results based on the VVC test model version 8.0 demonstrate that average Bjøntegaard Delta rate savings of 0.80 % and 2.81 % are achieved for the “tool-off” and “tool-on” test configurations, respectively. Moreover, 4 % additional decoding time and negligible additional external memory bandwidth requirements of DMVR based on the common test conditions for VVC are reported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A method to provide bandwidth compressed time-mapped spectrogram analysis based on temporal Talbot effect and temporal magnification is proposed and numerically demonstrated in this paper. The signal under test (SUT) is firstly sampled by a periodic pulse train, then passes through a dispersive medium under the Talbot condition and the spectrogram of the SUT is mapped to the time domain, so-called time-mapped spectrogram (TM-SP). Subsequently, a temporal magnification technique is implemented to stretch the time axis and compress the spectrum bandwidth, so that the effect of detection bandwidth on the frequency resolution is alleviated. Though the TM-SP cannot be acquired in a continuous way, the SUT is analyzed with ultrahigh frame rate in the temporal aperture. Additionally, a method to improve acquisition frame rate is proposed. The proposed bandwidth compressed TM-SP analysis is compared with the dispersion-based Fourier transform, and the related tradeoffs are provided in detail. The bandwidth compressed TM-SP analysis with a frequency resolution of 0.1 GHz, a measurable frequency range of 4.85 GHz, an analysis period of 0.1 ns, and an observation period of 4 ns is achieved by simulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In-package DRAM cache provides a higher bandwidth than conventional memory systems. Adapting the cache management to the run-time characteristics of each application seems a promising approach improving bandwidth efficiency and performance. Regrettably, fine-grained cache block monitoring and adaptation often becomes impractical due to its significant bandwidth, performance and hardware overheads. This paper proposes a novel mechanism for monitoring cache blocks using two parameters that are adjustable at run time. We propose two low-cost counter-based mechanisms to realize the block monitors in DRAM. Moreover, we propose a novel scheduling mechanism that opportunistically transfers the counter information to the DRAM stack when the data movement overhead reaches its minimum. Our simulation results on a set of data intensive parallel applications indicate that the proposed mechanisms achieve averages of 31%, 24% performance improvements over the state-of-the-art DRAM cache architectures. System energy savings over the same baselines are 29%, 18% on average. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current multi-core processors implement sophisticated hardware prefetchers, that can be configured by application (PID), to improve the system performance. When running multiple applications, each application can present different prefetch requirements, hence different configurations can be used. Setting the optimal prefetch configuration for each application is a complex task since it does not only depend on the application characteristics but also on the interference at the shared memory resources (e.g., memory bandwidth). In his paper, we propose DeepP, a deep learning approach for the IBM POWER8 that identifies at run-time the best prefetch configuration for each application in a workload. To this end, the neural network predicts the performance of each application under the studied prefetch configurations by using a set of performance events. The prediction accuracy of the network is improved thanks to a dynamic training methodology that allows learning the impact of dynamic changes of the prefetch configuration on performance. At run-time, the devised network infers the best prefetch configuration for each application and adjusts it dynamically. Experimental results show that the proposed approach improves performance, on average, by 5.8%, 6.7%, and 15.8% compared to the default prefetch configuration across different 6-, 8-, and 10-application workloads, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Voltage regulation and proper load-sharing are two main control objectives of DC microgrids which the consensus-based secondary control can be regarded as a feasible approach to achieve them. Using this approach, in addition to the stable voltage regulation, the load is shared according to the nominal potential of the distributed generation units. Nevertheless, the conventional consensus-based secondary control uses the time-triggered communication paradigm that leads to a high communication burden due to transmitting and receiving unnecessary data. In this paper, to prevent excessive data-exchanging, the mentioned approach is upgraded with a novel event-triggered scheme. The system stability analysis under the suggested event-triggered secondary controller is assessed using the Lyapunov theorem. Furthermore, the Zeno-freeness feature of the proposed solution is mathematically proved after assessing uniformly ultimately bounded stability and extracting the current per-unit and voltage derivatives dynamic as the consensus algorithm’s external inputs. The proposed approach is applied to a DC microgrid, and its performance is validated under different scenarios using Simulink/MATLAB environment. Moreover, the experimental tests prove the merits of the suggested method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-numerology transmission is a promising multiple access scheme for flexible communication systems, which can simultaneously support users with different service requirements. To this end, both inter- and intra-numerology interference (inter-NI and intra-NI) should be suppressed, which is not straightforward. This paper proposes a novel zero-forcing (ZF) precoding design, which perfectly eliminates all the interference, for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with multi-numerology. First of all, we express the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of the multi-numerology system with spectrum sharing. From the SINR representation, we identify the channels that precoders must nullify to suppress inter-NI. After that, we propose a ZF precoder suppressing both inter-NI and intra-NI perfectly. The lower bound of ergodic achievable rate with perfect channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) is analyzed. Based on the lower bound of ergodic achievable rate, we present the feasible rate region. Also, we propose two power allocation schemes: user fairness and the ergodic sum rate maximization. The simulation results demonstrate the advantage of the proposed precoding design and verify our analysis results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Omnidirectional video is becoming increasingly popular among viewers, but its delivery requires considerable amount of network bandwidth. Today’s streaming services are transmitting the full spatial angle of omnidirectional videos, although most of the transmitted content is not utilized. Due to both limited bandwidth availability and its dynamic fluctuations, adaptive delivery solutions play a key role in supporting high user quality streaming of omnidirectional videos. This paper describes research which extends the MPEG-DASH Spatial Relationship Description by adding scalable video encoding to spatial tiling. It proposes a novel tile-layering based gaze adaptation algorithm for omnidirectional video delivery and employs it in conjunction with multiple tiling schemes. The benefits of the proposed algorithm with diverse tiling schemes are evaluated objectively in terms of bandwidth savings and adaptation latency. The results show a reduction of network bandwidth requirements to about 30% of the original bandwidth value with a low processing latency of 70.87ms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Erasure coding becomes increasingly popular in distributed storage systems (DSSes) for providing high reliability with low storage overhead. However, traditional random data placement induces massive cross-rack traffic and severely imbalanced load during failure recovery, which degrades the recovery performance significantly. In addition, various erasure codes coexisting in a DSS exacerbates the above problems. In this paper, we propose PDL, a PBD-based Data Layout, to optimize failure recovery performance in DSSes. PDL is constructed based on Pairwise Balanced Design, a combinatorial design scheme with uniform mathematical properties, and thus presents a uniform data layout for mixed erasure codes. Then we propose rPDL, a failure recovery scheme based on PDL. rPDL reduces cross-rack traffic effectively and provides nearly balanced cross-rack traffic distribution by uniformly choosing replacement nodes and retrieving determined available blocks to recover the lost blocks. We implemented PDL and rPDL in Hadoop 3.1.1. Compared with the existing data layout and recovery scheme in HDFS, experimental results show that rPDL achieves much higher recovery throughput, $6.27\times$ 6. 27 × on average for single-node failures, $5.14\times$ 5. 14 × for multi-node failures and $1.48\times$ 1. 48 × for single-rack failures, respectively. It also reduces degraded read latency by an average of 62.83 percent, and provides better support to front-end applications in case of component failures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online fountain codes (OFCs) have many advantages, such as low overhead, online feedback and optimal encoding, due to the feedback of the instantaneous decoding state. This paper analyzes the characteristics of underwater acoustic networks (UANs) as well as the issues of existing OFCs applied in UANs. Aiming at these issues, two optimization objectives of OFCs are put forward for UANs. In addition, a recursive OFC with limited feedback (ROFC-LF) is presented for UANs. The ROFC-LF reduces the consumption of bandwidth and energy caused by the transmission of useless coding packets. Through limited feedback, the problem of low channel utilization in UANs with half-duplex communication is solved. Furthermore, a data transmission mechanism based on the ROFC-LF for UANs is presented. The theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed transmission mechanism based on the ROFC-LF scheme outperforms the existing OFC schemes in terms of overhead, computational complexity, coding efficiency and energy consumption. Consequently, the ROFC-LF is suitable for UANs with constrained resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile services are becoming more diverse, making them have different demands on communications, computing, and caching (3C) resources in mobile systems. Unlike the traditional work that considers only one type of service, this paper designs a unified framework to characterize the different kinds of services, and jointly optimizes the 3C resources of the base station (BS) and mobile devices to provide differentiated quality of service (QoS) for diverse services. In the proposed framework, we model the task required by the mobile device to be generated at the BS, the mobile device, or both of them, which means the requested tasks are served through different paths, consuming different bandwidth, computing and caching resources. Since diverse services have different QoS, we formulate a multi-objective programming (MOP) to optimize the allocation of the 3C resources for minimizing the total delay while maximizing the number of executed tasks requested by the mobile devices. We transform the MOP problem as a multi-objective Markov decision process (MO-MDP) and design a multi-objective proximal policy optimization (MO-PPO) algorithm to solve the MO-MDP. The proposed MO-PPO first trains two sub-policies separately for the two objectives, and then combines them to search for Pareto dominating solutions. By alternately perform the separate training and the combination, we can finally obtain a set of Pareto optimal solutions and the corresponding Pareto front. Simulation results show that the proposed MO-PPO outperforms traditional methods in finding a higher-quality set of Pareto optimal solutions and can more appropriately allocate 3C resources to different types of services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The terahertz (THz) waves with enormous bandwidth can be used along with the existing sub-6GHz and millimeter wave (mmWave) bands to achieve the ever evolving ecosystem of applications that need to be supported by the modern wireless networks. This paper investigates a user-centric dynamic base station (BS) clustering design for a hybrid network where THz, mmWave, and sub-6GHz BSs coexist. Invoking the proposed clustering model, the BS cooperation within each band is made possible by considering long term channel variations and all the surrounding BSs within a cluster with tunable size. A typical user is associated with the best BS cluster, from either a sub-6GHz, mmWave or THz tier based on the maximum signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) criterion or the maximum rate criterion. Using tools from stochastic geometry, we assess the performance of the proposed user-centric hybrid system in terms of SINR and rate coverage performances, while accounting for: band specific propagation models, directional beamfroming, and BSs random locations. The accuracy of the analytical results is validated with Monte-Carlo simulations. The obtained results recognize a clear coverage/rate trade-off where a high fraction of THz BSs improves the rate significantly but may degrade the coverage performance. Thus, with carefully planned networks, enabling user-centric BS cooperation for hybrid wireless systems can achieve ultra-high rates while maintaining sufficient coverage in sixth-generation (6G) networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the deep integration between the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and wireless communication, UAV-based air-to-ground (AG) propagation channels need more detailed descriptions and accurate models. In this paper, we aim to conduct cluster-based characterization and modeling for AG channels. To our best knowledge, this is the first study that concentrates on the clustering and tracking of multipath components (MPCs) for time-varying AG channels. Based on measurement data at 6.5 GHz with a bandwidth of 500 MHz, we first estimate potential MPCs utilizing the space-alternating generalized expectation-maximization (SAGE) algorithm. Then, we cluster the extracted MPCs by employing K-Power-Means (KPM) algorithm under multipath component distance (MCD) measure. For characterizing time-variant clusters, we exploit a clustering-based tracking (CBT) method, which efficiently quantifies the survival lengths of clusters. Ultimately, we establish a cluster-based channel model, and validations illustrate the accuracy of the proposed model. This work not only promotes a better understanding of AG propagation channels but also provides a general cluster-based AG channel model with certain extensibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) combined with orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) technique can dramatically increase the achievable rate of visible light communication (VLC) systems. The channel in a VLC system with light-emitting diode (LED) luminaires is generally low-pass, which highly limits the achievable rate of practical VLC systems. This aspect has largely been ignored in the analysis for MIMO-OFDM VLC systems. As wide parts of the bandwidth at higher frequencies are severely attenuated, the choice of the power loading on every frequency bin has a large impact on the achieved bit rate. Thus, in this paper, we propose a two-dimensional water-filling (2D-WF) power allocation algorithm that operates both in frequency and space domains to efficiently improve the rate achieved by MIMO-OFDM VLC systems over low-pass VLC channels. The achievable rates and optimal bandwidths of a MIMO-OFDM VLC system are derived analytically using the proposed 2D-WF power allocation algorithm and five conventional power allocation strategies, including uniform (UF) power allocation, pre-emphasis (PE) power allocation, beamforming (BF) power allocation, and two kinds of one-dimensional water-filling (1D-WF) power allocation. Our simulation results show that the achievable rate of a MIMO-OFDM VLC system in a typical indoor environment can be significantly degraded by the low-pass effect. The proposed 2D-WF power allocation outperforms all other schemes in terms of achievable bit rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Covariance matrix tapers have a long history in signal processing and related fields. Examples of applications include autoregressive models (promoting a banded structure) or beamforming (widening the spectral null width associated with an interferer). In this paper, the focus is on high-dimensional setting where the dimension $p$ is high, while the data aspect ratio $n/p$ is low. We propose an estimator called Tabasco (TApered or BAnded Shrinkage COvariance matrix) that shrinks the tapered sample covariance matrix towards a scaled identity matrix. We derive optimal and estimated (data adaptive) regularization parameters that are designed to minimize the mean squared error (MSE) between the proposed shrinkage estimator and the true covariance matrix. These parameters are derived under the general assumption that the data is sampled from an unspecified elliptically symmetric distribution with finite 4th order moments (both real- and complex-valued cases are addressed). Simulation studies show that the proposed Tabasco outperforms all competing tapering covariance matrix estimators in diverse setups. An application to space-time adaptive processing (STAP) also illustrates the benefit of the proposed estimator in a practical signal processing setup. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While not designed with communication applications in mind, power lines have been attractive targets for providing ancillary communication services for decades. Unfortunately, loads and switchgear can easily interfere with reliable communication in both direct and subtle ways. Power line communication (PLC) is therefore often relegated to non-critical control tasks like home lighting or appliance control, where communication difficulties or failure simply result in a walk to the light switch. For control applications that require low data rates, unexploited opportunities exist for increasing the reliability of PLC within governing regulatory rules. Reliable, low-bandwidth PLC facilitates new, inexpensive opportunities for demand-side management of the loads in a building or facility. This paper presents approaches for tailoring PLC for reliable low-bandwidth communication, and presents experimental demonstrations in a 24-floor high-rise building with challenging channel conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a novel multilayer masking technology for fabricating airborne capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducers (CMUTs) with multi-depth fluidic trenches, in which a plurality of masking layers for different etch depths are selectively patterned prior to the real etching to keep a planar wafer surface. The multi-depth fluidic trenches are utilized to effectively control the squeeze film within the CMUT gap and tune the fractional bandwidth (FBW) of CMUT. As such, the FBW can be changed over a wide range by only adjusting the trench height. With further lowering the gap height, the FBW can be extremely widened up to 168%. The receive sensitivity has also been significantly improved through the process of local oxidation of silicon to reduce the parasitic capacitance. The proposed multilayer masking technology enables the fabrication of airborne CMUTs with different FBWs and sensitivities on the same wafer and further combine these devices into arrays for high-resolution imaging and photoacoustic or thermoacoustic applications. These devices also provide a low minimum detectable pressure (MDP), as low as 1.37 mPa in the FBW of 13.5% for the $8.5~\mu \text{m}$ deep fluidic trenches and 1.52 mPa in the 17.2% FBW for the $16.2~\mu \text{m}$ trenches. Furthermore, the multilayer masking technology demonstrates the capability of building microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) with multi-depth micro/nanostructures. [2021-0090] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The coexistence of multiple types of users in vehicular networks results in diversified service requirements and multiscale content differences, which poses new challenges to reliable content transmission. This paper proposes a hierarchical coded caching framework coupled with coded caching, vehicle-to-everything communications, and non-orthogonal multiple access techniques. We quantify the user request hit ratio under different communication modes and study the hit ratio maximization problem under the constraint of limited communication and caching resources. We propose a two-layer matching based optimization algorithm, including a user association layer in distributed content sharing and a user grouping layer in centralized content requesting. Simulation results verify that the proposed scheme can achieve a balance between hit ratio and transmission time, and meet the requirements of the content sharing scenario with multiscale content files and scalable user density. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

5G is a key tool for the cloud-based wireless production of audio-visual contents. By providing higher throughput and lower latency than previous mobile network technologies, as well as flexible allocation of network resources, it enables that some content production pipelines, which are currently implemented using wired connectivity, are provided on top of a 5G network. This brings down production costs, reduces environmental impact and increases operational efficiency. In particular, live immersive production services, such as free-viewpoint video (FVV), can be provided in a much more efficient way. In this paper, we address the challenge of producing and streaming FVV services in real time through 5G networks. We have adapted a state-of-the-art FVV system to integrate it within a 5G architecture, using three key technological enablers: mmWave radio access network to support the uplink traffic requirements from FVV cameras, multi-access edge computing to run video processing algorithms with minimum latency, and end-to-end slicing to guarantee a sufficient quality of service (QoS) within the production pipeline. We have built a field trial over the production network of a telecommunication operator, including a mmWave pilot deployment, edge cloud processing, and remote content production, involving three different locations across Spain. We have measured the key performance indicators at the relevant parts of our trial deployment, showing that, with existing 5G technology, it is possible to achieve live FVV production, although with some limitations. We have also analyzed such limitations, obtaining some insights on how the next generation of 5G networks can overcome them to achieve higher quality of experience (QoE). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

LTE-based 5G terrestrial broadcasting, standardized in 3GPP Release 16, allows broadcasters to reach cellular devices. In this paper, toward the development of a future terrestrial broadcast system in Release 18 or later called 5G-Advanced, a specification for New Radio (NR) based 5G terrestrial broadcasting is presented for a 6 MHz-channel raster, which is used in current digital terrestrial television broadcasting. The transmission performance is evaluated in physical layer simulations. In particular, the spectral efficiency is evaluated and compared with a second-generation DTTB system at a required carrier-to-noise ratio (CNR) of 20 dB in a fixed-reception scenario with a rooftop receiving antenna. The evaluation in an additive white Gaussian noise channel indicates that the spectral efficiency of NR-based 5G terrestrial broadcasting can be improved by 0.83 (bps/Hz) by enhancing the code length of low density parity check code, the carrier modulation scheme, guard band ratio, and cyclic prefix ratio from what available so far in Release 16. Furthermore, when frequency interleaving is incorporated, the spectral efficiency is increased by 0.75 (bps/Hz) in a short echo channel with a desired-to-undesired signal power ratio of 0 dB. The introduction of time interleaving increases spectral efficiency by 0.97 (bps/Hz) in an impulsive interference channel with a carrier-to-interference signal power ratio of −20 dB. For each interleaving, the increase in spectral efficiency tends to be higher as the required CNR increases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, high-frequency resonance (HFR) incidents have occurred in several MMC-HVDC projects. The resonance frequency highly depends on system conditions, making mitigation methods designed for specific scenarios ineffective once the grid condition changes. To address the issue, this paper proposes a novel HFR mitigation method based on adaptive notch filters (ANFs). The embedding positions of ANFs in the MMC control are optimally determined through impedance-based analysis. With the HFR frequency estimated by the interpolated discrete Fourier transform, the parameters of ANFs are adaptively tuned. The ANFs improve the damping performance of the captured HFR mode without affecting the dynamic characteristics at other frequencies. As a result, the HFR under varying grid conditions can be mitigated effectively. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified through electromagnetic transient (EMT) simulations of an actual MMC-HVDC system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider a distributed joint sensing and communication (DJSC) system in which each radar sensor as a JSC node is equipped with a sensing function and a communication function. Deploying multiple JSC nodes may require a large amount of bandwidth. Therefore, we investigate the bandwidth allocation problem for the DJSC system. In particular, we aim to optimize the bandwidth allocation to the sensing function and the communication function of the JSC nodes. To improve the allocation efficiency while benefiting the spatial diversity advantage of the DJSC systems, the objective is to maximize the sum of sensing performances, i.e., estimation rates, communication performances, i.e., communication data rates, and fairness of all the users. The optimization problem is non-convex and difficult to be solved. For this, we propose a fully polynomial time approximation algorithm, and we prove that the approximation algorithm can guarantee a near-optimal solution with an accuracy bound of $\epsilon$. Furthermore, we propose to use a heuristic algorithm with lower complexity. The simulation results show that both the proposed algorithms are able to achieve the solutions close to the optimum in a computationally efficient fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efficient transmission control is a challenging issue in vehicular networks due to the highly dynamic and unpredictable link status. In this paper, we propose a cybertwin-driven learning-based transmission scheduling mechanism for software-defined vehicular networks, which can adaptively select/adjust transmission control methods, i.e., loss-based, delay-based and hybrid ones, to suit to the time-varying network environment. In particular, we first analyze the dynamic network characteristics of three realistic vehicular network scenarios in terms of network throughput, round-trip time (RTT) and RTT jitter. Furthermore, we propose a novel transmission scheduling model and formulate the SDVN transmission scheduling issue as a linear programming problem. To obtain the optimized scheduling policies and guarantee the effectiveness of transmission control, we further propose a Cybertwin-driven and Deep Reinforcement Learning based transmission control solution (TcpCDRL). Specifically, TcpCDRL is featured with: (i) using deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to adaptively adjust transmission control policy, (ii) using cybertwin-driven transmission controlling to improve the policy-making effectiveness and timeliness. Simulation results show that the proposed TcpCDRL approach outperforms the single well-known transmission control approach (i.e., TcpWestwood, TcpBic, TcpVeno and TcpVegas) in terms of network throughput and RTT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet of Things (IoT) technology provisions unprecedented opportunities to evolve the interconnection among human beings. However, the latency brought by unstable wireless networks and computation failures caused by limited resources on IoT devices prevents users from experiencing high efficiency and seamless user experience. To address these shortcomings, the integrated Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) with remote clouds is a promising platform to enable delay-sensitive service provisioning for IoT applications, where edge-clouds (cloudlets) are co-located with wireless access points in the proximity of IoT devices. Thus, computation-intensive and sensing data from IoT devices can be offloaded to the MEC network immediately for processing, and the service response latency can be significantly reduced. In this paper, we first formulate two novel optimization problems for delay-sensitive IoT applications, i.e., the total utility maximization problems under both static and dynamic offloading task request settings, with the aim to maximize the accumulative user satisfaction on the use of the services provided by the MEC, and show the NP-hardness of the defined problems. We then devise efficient approximation and online algorithms with provable performance guarantees for the problems in a special case where the bandwidth capacity constraint is negligible. We also develop efficient heuristic algorithms for the problems with the bandwidth capacity constraint. We finally evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms through experimental simulations. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms are promising in reducing service delays and enhancing user satisfaction, and the proposed algorithms outperform their counterparts by at least 10.8 percent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]