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Real-time vital sign monitoring is gaining immense significance not only in the medical field but also in personal health management. Facing the needs of different application scenarios of the smart and healthy city in the future, the low-cost, large-scale, scalable, and distributed vital sign monitoring system is of great significance. In this work, a seamlessly integrated contact and contactless vital sign monitoring system, which can simultaneously implement respiration and heartbeat monitoring, is proposed. In contact vital sign monitoring, the chest wall movement due to respiration and heartbeat is translated into changes in the optical output intensity of a fiber Bragg grating (FBG). The FBG is also an important part of radar signal generation for contactless vital sign monitoring, in which the chest wall movement is translated into phase changes of the radar de-chirped signal. By analyzing the intensity of the FBG output and phase of the radar de-chirped signal, real-time respiration and heartbeat monitoring are realized. In addition, due to the distributed structure of the system and its good integration with the wavelength-division multiplexing optical network, it can be massively scaled by employing more wavelengths. A proof-of-concept experiment is carried out. Contact and contactless respiration and heartbeat monitoring of three people are simultaneously realized. During a monitoring time of 60 s, the maximum absolute measurement errors of respiration and heartbeat rates are 1.6 respirations per minute and 2.3 beats per minute, respectively. The measurement error does not have an obvious change even when the monitoring time is decreased to 5 s., Comment: 14 pages,9 figures

Integration of radar, wireless communications, and spectrum sensing is being investigated for 6G with an increased spectral efficiency. Microwave photonics (MWP), a technique that combines microwave engineering and photonic technology to take advantage of the wide bandwidth offered by photonics for microwave signal generation and processing is considered an effective solution for the implementation of the integration. In this paper, an MWP-assisted joint radar, wireless communications, and spectrum sensing (JRCSS) system that enables precise perception of the surrounding physical and electromagnetic environments while maintaining high-speed data communication is proposed and demonstrated. Communication signals and frequency-sweep signals are merged in the optical domain to achieve high-speed radar ranging and imaging, high-data-rate wireless communications, and wideband spectrum sensing. In an experimental demonstration, a JRCSS system supporting radar ranging with a measurement error within $\pm$ 4 cm, two-dimensional imaging with a resolution of 25 $\times$ 24.7 mm, wireless communications with a data rate of 2 Gbaud, and spectrum sensing with a frequency measurement error within $\pm$ 10 MHz in a 6-GHz bandwidth, is demonstrated., Comment: 18 pages, 10 figures

Deep learning plays an important role in modern agriculture, especially in plant pathology using leaf images where convolutional neural networks (CNN) are attracting a lot of attention. While numerous reviews have explored the applications of deep learning within this research domain, there remains a notable absence of an empirical study to offer insightful comparisons due to the employment of varied datasets in the evaluation. Furthermore, a majority of these approaches tend to address the problem as a singular prediction task, overlooking the multifaceted nature of predicting various aspects of plant species and disease types. Lastly, there is an evident need for a more profound consideration of the semantic relationships that underlie plant species and disease types. In this paper, we start our study by surveying current deep learning approaches for plant identification and disease classification. We categorise the approaches into multi-model, multi-label, multi-output, and multi-task, in which different backbone CNNs can be employed. Furthermore, based on the survey of existing approaches in plant pathology and the study of available approaches in machine learning, we propose a new model named Generalised Stacking Multi-output CNN (GSMo-CNN). To investigate the effectiveness of different backbone CNNs and learning approaches, we conduct an intensive experiment on three benchmark datasets Plant Village, Plant Leaves, and PlantDoc. The experimental results demonstrate that InceptionV3 can be a good choice for a backbone CNN as its performance is better than AlexNet, VGG16, ResNet101, EfficientNet, MobileNet, and a custom CNN developed by us. Interestingly, empirical results support the hypothesis that using a single model can be comparable or better than using two models. Finally, we show that the proposed GSMo-CNN achieves state-of-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets., Comment: Jianping and Son are joint first authors (equal contribution)

The growing demand for sustainable development brings a series of information technologies to help agriculture production. Especially, the emergence of machine learning applications, a branch of artificial intelligence, has shown multiple breakthroughs which can enhance and revolutionize plant pathology approaches. In recent years, machine learning has been adopted for leaf disease classification in both academic research and industrial applications. Therefore, it is enormously beneficial for researchers, engineers, managers, and entrepreneurs to have a comprehensive view about the recent development of machine learning technologies and applications for leaf disease detection. This study will provide a survey in different aspects of the topic including data, techniques, and applications. The paper will start with publicly available datasets. After that, we summarize common machine learning techniques, including traditional (shallow) learning, deep learning, and augmented learning. Finally, we discuss related applications. This paper would provide useful resources for future study and application of machine learning for smart agriculture in general and leaf disease classification in particular.

The synthetic dimension opens new horizons in quantum physics and topological photonics by enabling new dimensions for field and particle manipulations. The most appealing property of the photonic synthetic dimension is its ability to emulate high-dimensional optical behavior in a unitary physical system. Here we show that the photonic synthetic dimension can transform technical problems in photonic systems between dimensionalities, providing unexpected solutions to technical problems that are otherwise challenging. Specifically, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a photonic Galton board (PGB) in the temporal synthetic dimension, in which the temporal high-speed challenge is converted into a spatial fiber-optic length matching problem, leading to the experimental generation of tera-sample-per-second arbitrary waveforms. Limited by the speed of the measurement equipment, waveforms with sampling rates of up to 341.53 GSa/s are recorded. Our proposed PGB operating in the temporal synthetic dimension breaks the speed limit in a physical system, bringing arbitrary waveform generation into the terahertz regime. The concept of dimension conversion offers possible solutions to various physical dimension-related problems, such as super-resolution imaging, high-resolution spectroscopy, time measurement, etc.

This letter considers a multi-access mobile edge computing (MEC) network consisting of multiple users, multiple base stations, and a malicious eavesdropper. Specifically, the users adopt the partial offloading strategy by partitioning the computation task into several parts. One is executed locally and the others are securely offloaded to multiple MEC servers integrated into the base stations by leveraging the physical layer security to combat the eavesdropping. We jointly optimize power allocation, task partition, subcarrier allocation, and computation resource to maximize the secrecy offloading rate of the users, subject to communication and computation resource constraints. Numerical results demonstrate that our proposed scheme can respectively improve the secrecy offloading rate 1.11%--1.39% and 15.05%--17.35% (versus the increase of tasks' latency requirements), and 1.30%--1.75% and 6.08%--9.22% (versus the increase of the maximum transmit power) compared with the two benchmarks. Moreover, it further emphasizes the necessity of conducting computation offloading over multiple MEC servers., Comment: Double-column, 5 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication at the IEEE Communications Letter

This letter studies a cellular-connected unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) scenario, in which a UAV user communicates with ground base stations (GBSs) in cellular uplink by sharing the spectrum with ground users (GUs). To deal with the severe air-to-ground (A2G) co-channel interference, we consider an adaptive interference cancellation (IC) approach, in which each GBS can decode the GU's messages by adaptively switching between the modes of IC (i.e., precanceling the UAV's resultant interference) and treating interference as noise (TIN). By designing the GBSs' decoding modes, jointly with the wireless resource allocation and the UAV's trajectory control, we maximize the UAV's data-rate throughput over a finite mission period, while ensuring the minimum data-rate requirements at individual GUs. We propose an efficient algorithm to solve the throughput maximization problem by using the techniques of alternating optimization and successive convex approximation (SCA). Numerical results show that our proposed design significantly improves the UAV's throughput as compared to the benchmark schemes without the adaptive IC and/or trajectory optimization., Comment: Technical Report

Different from public 4G/5G networks that are dominated by downlink traffic, emerging 5G non-public networks (NPNs) need to support significant uplink traffic to enable emerging applications such as industrial Internet of things (IIoT). The uplink-and-downlink spectrum sharing is becoming a viable solution to enhance the uplink throughput of NPNs, which allows the NPNs to perform the uplink transmission over the time-frequency resources configured for downlink transmission in coexisting public networks. To deal with the severe interference from the downlink public base station (BS) transmitter to the coexisting uplink non-public BS receiver, we propose an adaptive asymmetric successive interference cancellation (SIC) approach, in which the non-public BS receiver is enabled to have the capability of decoding the downlink signals transmitted from the public BS and successively cancelling them for interference mitigation. In particular, this paper studies a basic uplink-and-downlink spectrum sharing scenario when an uplink non-public BS and a downlink public BS coexist in the same area, each communicating with multiple users via orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA). Under this setup, we aim to maximize the common uplink throughput of all non-public users, under the condition that the downlink throughput of each public user is above a certain threshold. The decision variables include the subcarrier allocation and user scheduling for both non-public (uplink) and public (downlink) BSs, the decoding mode of the non-public BS over each subcarrier (i.e., with or without SIC), as well as the rate and power control over subcarriers. Numerical results show that the proposed adaptive asymmetric SIC design significantly improves the common uplink throughput as compared to benchmark schemes without such design., Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, submitted to IEEE ICC 2021

This paper studies an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled wireless sensor network, in which one UAV flies in the sky to collect the data transmitted from a set of ground nodes (GNs) via distributed beamforming. We consider two scenarios with delay-tolerant and delay-sensitive applications, in which the GNs send the common/shared messages to the UAV via adaptive- and fixed-rate transmissions, respectively. For the two scenarios, we aim to maximize the average data-rate throughput and minimize the transmission outage probability, respectively, by jointly optimizing the UAV's trajectory design and the GNs' transmit power allocation over time, subject to the UAV's flight speed constraints and the GNs' individual average power constraints. However, the two formulated problems are both non-convex and thus generally difficult to be optimally solved. To tackle this issue, we first consider the relaxed problems in the ideal case with the UAV's flight speed constraints ignored, for which the well-structured optimal solutions are obtained to reveal the fundamental performance upper bounds. It is shown that for the two approximate problems, the optimal trajectory solutions have the same multi-location-hovering structure, but with different optimal power allocation strategies. Next, for the general problems with the UAV's flight speed constraints considered, we propose efficient algorithms to obtain high-quality solutions by using the techniques from convex optimization and approximation. Finally, numerical results show that our proposed designs significantly outperform other benchmark schemes, in terms of the achieved data-rate throughput and outage probability under the two scenarios. It is also observed that when the mission period becomes sufficiently long, our proposed designs approach the performance upper bounds when the UAV's flight speed constraints are ignored., Comment: Double-column, 15 pages, 8 figures, 4 tables. Accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. It overlaps with the former version (arXiv:2004.11332)

This paper studies an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled wireless sensor network, in which one UAV flies in the sky to collect the data transmitted from a set of sensors via distributed beamforming. We consider the delay-sensitive application scenario, in which the sensors transmit the common/shared messages by using fixed data rates and adaptive transmit powers. Under this setup, we jointly optimize the UAV's trajectory design and the sensors' transmit power allocation, in order to minimize the transmission outage probability, subject to the UAV's flight speed constraints and the sensors' individual average power constraints. However, the formulated outage probability minimization problem is non-convex and thus difficult to be optimally solved in general. To tackle this issue, we first consider the special problem in the ideal case with the UAV's flight speed constraints ignored, for which the well-structured optimal solution is obtained to reveal the fundamental performance upper bound. Next, for the general problem with the UAV's flight speed constraints considered, we propose an efficient algorithm to solve it sub-optimally by using the techniques of convex optimization and approximation. Finally, numerical results show that our proposed design achieves significantly reduced outage probability than other benchmark schemes., Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, ICC 2020 workshop

This paper studies a secrecy unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication system with coordinated multi-point (CoMP) reception, in which one UAV sends confidential messages to a set of cooperative ground receivers (GRs), in the presence of several suspicious eavesdroppers. In particular, we consider two types of eavesdroppers that are non-colluding and colluding, respectively. Under this setup, we exploit the UAV's maneuver in three dimensional (3D) space together with transmit power adaptation for optimizing the secrecy communication performance. First, we consider the quasi-stationary UAV scenario, where we jointly optimize the UAV's 3D placement and transmit power control to maximize the secrecy rate. Under both non-colluding and colluding eavesdroppers, we obtain the optimal solutions to the joint 3D placement and transmit power control problems in well structures. Next, we consider the mobile UAV scenario, where we jointly optimize the UAV's 3D trajectory and transmit power allocation to maximize the average secrecy rate during the whole communication period. To deal with the difficult joint 3D trajectory and transmit power allocation problems, we present alternating-optimization-based approaches to obtain high-quality solutions. Finally, we provide numerical results to validate the performance of our proposed designs. It is shown that due to the consideration of CoMP reception, our proposed design with 3D maneuver significantly outperforms the conventional design with two dimensional (2D) (horizontal) maneuver only, by exploiting the additional degrees of freedom in altitudes. It is also shown that the non-colluding and colluding eavesdroppers lead to distinct 3D UAV maneuver behaviors., Comment: Single-column, 31 pages, 10 figures, submitted to IEEE Journal for possible publication. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1905.11147

Implementation of a parity-time (PT) symmetric microwave photonic system in the optical wavelength space with spatial singularity is proposed. In the proposed PT-symmetric microwave photonic system, the gain and loss modes are confined in a single spatial resonator, which is different from a conventional PT-symmetric system in which the two modes are localized in two physically separated resonators to form one-dimensional spatial potential symmetry as required by the simplest one-dimensional parity transformation. We show that PT-symmetry can be implemented between subspaces in non-spatial parameter spaces, in which the gain and loss modes can perfectly overlay spatially but are distinguishable in the designated parameter space. The resultant spatial singularity enables the possibility in implementing PT-symmetric systems with increased structural simplicity, integration density and long-term stability. To prove the concept, a PT-symmetric optoelectronic oscillator (OEO) in the optical wavelength space is implemented. The OEO has a single-loop architecture, with the gain and loss microwave modes carried by two optical wavelengths to form two mutually coupled wavelength-space resonators (WSRs). PT-symmetry is achieved by controlling the wavelength spacing and the power contrast. The operation of PT symmetry in the OEO is verified by the generation of a 10-GHz microwave signal with a low phase noise of 129.3 dBc/Hz at 10-kHz offset frequency and a high sidemode suppression ratio (SMSR) of 66.22 dB. Compared with a conventional spatial PT-symmetric system, one in the wavelength space features a much simpler configuration, better stability and greater resilience to environmental interferences., Comment: 27 pages, 9 figures. Reported in Piers in June, 2019 in Rome; CIOP in August, 2019, in Xi'an and in MWP in October, 2019, in Ottawa

This paper studies a secrecy unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication system with coordinated multi-point (CoMP) reception, in which one UAV sends confidential messages to a set of distributed ground nodes (GNs) that can cooperate in signal detection, in the presence of several colluding suspicious eavesdroppers. Different from prior works considering the two-dimensional (2D) horizontal trajectory design in the non-CoMP scenario, this paper additionally exploits the UAV's vertical trajectory (or altitude) control for further improving the secrecy communication performance with CoMP. In particular, we jointly optimize the three dimensional (3D) trajectory and transmit power allocation of the UAV to maximize the average secrecy rate at GNs over a particular flight period, subject to the UAV's maximum flight speed and maximum transmit power constraints. To solve the non-convex optimization problem, we propose an alternating-optimization-based approach, which optimizes the transmit power allocation and trajectory design in an alternating manner, by convex optimization and successive convex approximation (SCA), respectively. Numerical results show that in the scenario with CoMP reception, our proposed 3D trajectory optimization significantly outperforms the conventional 2D horizontal trajectory design, by exploiting the additional degree of freedom in vertical trajectory., Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, submitted to IEEE Conference for possible publication

Microwave photonics (MWP) studies the interaction between microwave and optical waves for the generation, transmission and processing of microwave signals (i.e., three key domains), taking advantages of broad bandwidth and low loss offered by modern photonics. Integrated MWP using photonic integrated circuits (PICs) can reach a compact, reliable and green implementation. Most PICs, however, are recently developed to perform one or more functions restricted inside a single domain. In this paper, as highly desired, a multifunctional PIC is proposed to cover the three key domains. The PIC is fabricated on InP platform by monolithically integrating four laser diodes and two modulators. Using the multifunctional PIC, seven fundamental functions across microwave signal generation, transmission and processing are demonstrated experimentally. Outdoor field trials for electromagnetic environment surveillance along an in-service high-speed railway are also performed. The success to such a PIC marks a key step forward for practical and massive MWP implementations., Comment: 17 pages

This paper considers the secrecy transmission in a large-scale unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled wireless network, in which a set of UAVs in the sky transmit confidential information to their respective legitimate receivers on the ground, in the presence of another set of randomly distributed suspicious ground eavesdroppers. We assume that the horizontal locations of legitimate receivers and eavesdroppers are distributed as two independent homogeneous Possion point processes (PPPs), and each of the UAVs is positioned exactly above its corresponding legitimate receiver for efficient secrecy communication. Furthermore, we consider an elevation-angle-dependent line-of-sight (LoS)/non-LoS (NLoS) path-loss model for air-to-ground (A2G) wireless channels and employ the wiretap code for secrecy transmission. Under such setups, we first characterize the secrecy communication performance (in terms of the connection probability, secrecy outage probability, and secrecy transmission capacity) in mathematically tractable forms, and accordingly optimize the system configurations (i.e., the wiretap code rates and UAV positioning altitude) to maximize the secrecy transmission capacity, subject to a maximum secrecy outage probability constraint. Next, we propose to use the secrecy guard zone technique for further secrecy protection, and analyze the correspondingly achieved secrecy communication performance. Finally, we present numerical results to validate the theoretical analysis. It is shown that the employment of secrecy guard zone significantly improves the secrecy transmission capacity of this network, and the desirable guard zone radius generally decreases monotonically as the UAVs' and/or the eavesdroppers' densities increase., Comment: 16 pages, 11 figures. Accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Communications. It overlaps with the former version (arXiv:1902.00836)

This paper presents a new cooperative jamming approach to secure the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication by leveraging jamming from other nearby UAVs to defend against the eavesdropping. In particular, we consider a two-UAV scenario when one UAV transmitter delivers the confidential information to a ground node (GN), and the other UAV jammer cooperatively sends artificial noise (AN) to confuse the ground eavesdropper for protecting the confidentiality of the data transmission. By exploiting the fully-controllable mobility, the two UAVs can adaptively adjust their locations over time (a.k.a. trajectories) to facilitate the secure communication and cooperative jamming. We assume that the two UAVs perfectly know the GN's location and partially know the eavesdropper's location {\emph{a-priori}}. Under this setup, we maximize the average secrecy rate from the UAV transmitter to the GN over one particular time period, by optimizing the UAVs' trajectories, jointly with their communicating/jamming power allocations. Although the formulated problem is non-convex, we propose an efficient solution by applying the techniques of alternating optimization and successive convex approximation (SCA)., Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, accepted for publication at the IEEE Communications Letter

Recent advances in photonic integration have propelled microwave photonic technologies to new heights. The ability to interface hybrid material platforms to enhance light-matter interactions has led to the developments of ultra-small and high-bandwidth electro-optic modulators, frequency synthesizers with the lowest noise, and chip signal processors with orders-of-magnitude enhanced spectral resolution. On the other hand, the maturity of high-volume semiconductor processing has finally enabled the complete integration of light sources, modulators, and detectors in a single microwave photonic processor chip and has ushered the creation of a complex signal processor with multi-functionality and reconfigurability similar to their electronic counterparts. Here we review these recent advances and discuss the impact of these new frontiers for short and long term applications in communications and information processing. We also take a look at the future perspectives in the intersection of integrated microwave photonics with other fields including quantum and neuromorphic photonics., Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures

This letter considers a mobile edge computing (MEC) system with one access point (AP) serving multiple users over a multicarrier channel, in the presence of a malicious eavesdropper. In this system, each user can execute the respective computation tasks by partitioning them into two parts, which are computed locally and offloaded to AP, respectively. We exploit the physical-layer security to secure the multiuser computation offloading from being overheard by the eavesdropper. Under this setup, we minimize the weighted sum-energy consumption for these users, subject to the newly imposed secrecy offloading rate constraints and the computation latency constraints, by jointly optimizing their computation and communication resource allocations. We propose an efficient algorithm to solve this problem., Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures. Submitted for possible publication

This paper studies the design and secrecy performance of linear multihop networks, in the presence of randomly distributed eavesdroppers in a large-scale two-dimensional space. Depending on whether there is feedback from the receiver to the transmitter, we study two transmission schemes: on-off transmission (OFT) and non-on-off transmission (NOFT). In the OFT scheme, transmission is suspended if the instantaneous received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) falls below a given threshold, whereas there is no suspension of transmission in the NOFT scheme. We investigate the optimal design of the linear multiple network in terms of the optimal rate parameters of the wiretap code as well as the optimal number of hops. These design parameters are highly interrelated since more hops reduces the distance of per-hop communication which completely changes the optimal design of the wiretap coding rates. Despite the analytical difficulty, we are able to characterize the optimal designs and the resulting secure transmission throughput in mathematically tractable forms in the high SNR regime. Our numerical results demonstrate that our analytical results obtained in the high SNR regime are accurate at practical SNR values. Hence, these results provide useful guidelines for designing linear multihop networks with targeted physical layer security performance., Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures, Accepted for publication at the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications

In this paper, we study the secure transmission in multihop wireless networks with randomize-and-forward (RaF) relaying, in the presence of randomly distributed eavesdroppers. By considering adaptive encoder with on-off transmission (OFT) scheme, we investigate the optimal design of the wiretap code and routing strategies to maximize the secrecy rate while satisfying the secrecy outage probability (SOP) constraint. We derive the exact expressions for the optimal rate parameters of the wiretap code. Then the secure routing problem is solved by revising the classical Bellman-Ford algorithm. Simulation results are conducted to verify our analysis., Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, 1 table, Accepted for publication at the IEEE Communications Letter

We report a fully integrated microwave photonic passband filter on a silicon photonic chip. The on-chip integrated microwave photonic filter (IMPF) consists of a high-speed phase modulator (PM), a thermally tunable high-Q micro-disk resonator (MDR), and a high-speed photodetector (PD). The bandpass filtering function of the IMPF is implemented based on phase modulation and phase-modulation to intensity-modulation conversion, to translate the spectral response of an optical filter, which is the MDR in the IMPF, to the spectral response of a microwave filter. By injecting a CW light from a laser diode (LD) to the PM, a passband IMPF with a broad tuning range is demonstrated. Thanks to the ultra-narrow notch of the MDR, a passband IMPF with a 3-dB bandwidth of 2.3 GHz is realized. By thermally tuning the MDR, the center frequency of the IMPF is tuned from 7 to 25 GHz, achieving a tuning range of 18 GHz at a power consumption of 1.58 mW. This successful implementation of an IMPF marks a significant step forward in full integration of microwave photonic systems on a single chip and opens up avenues toward real applications of microwave photonic filters., Comment: 4 pages, 7 figures, MWP2017