Secrecy rate maximization for 6G cognitive satellite-UAV networks

In recent years, low-latency tasks such as real-time communication, virtual reality, and augmented reality have higher latency requirements. Since users have relatively weak computing power, the past practice was to offload low-latency tasks to base stations (BSs) with more powerful computing power for execution, which can reduce computing latency in real-time communication. Duetothe inflexible deployment of BSs and the uneven distribution of computing resources, users often find it difficult to meet the needs of low-latency tasks in places that lack BSs, so unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are needed to alleviate this problem. UAVs can serve as communication relays between users and BSs and provide computing services directly to users. However, when there are few BSs, UAVs may experience load imbalance, that is, some UAVs are overloaded while other UAVs are idle. To solve this problem, we propose a UAV collaborative three-layer mobile edge computing (MEC) system model and describe the problem as a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem. Then, we propose an extended genetic algorithm for UAV collaboration in three-layer MEC task allocation and optimization (EGAC-3MEC) where the three-layer structure includes users, UAVs, and BSs. The proposed EGAC- 3MEC achieves reasonable allocation of tasks and resources through offloading and resource allocation decisions, reduces system delay and energy consumption as much as possible, and prioritizes the delay of high-priority users. Experimental results show that the algorithm in this paper converges quickly when various parameters change, achieves better performance than the baseline algorithms when the user task size is different, and moreover, the necessity of UAV collaboration is proven.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have a significant potential for sensing applications in further cellular networks due to their extensive coverage and flexible deployment. In this paper, we consider a multi-cell cellular network with a cellular-connected UAV, which senses data with onboard sensors and uploads sensory data to the ground base stations (BSs). To evaluate the freshness of sensory data, we employ the concept of age of information (AoI), which is defined as the time elapsed since the latest successful transmission of sensory data. A lower AoI implies fresher sensory data, which may lead to the increase of UAV operation time. To balance such tradeoff, we aim to minimize the weighted sum of operation time and total AoI for the UAV by jointly optimizing transmission scheduling, BS association, as well as UAV trajectory. The problem is formulated as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem, which is difficult to solve due to the time-varying propagation channels. To this end, we first characterize the average communication performance with statistic channel information, and then develop a search algorithm to obtain the optimal solution via employing the optimal structure as well as convex optimization techniques, while a low-complexity Double Graph based Algorithm (DGA) is developed to obtain a suboptimal solution. Then, by taking into account the site-specific performance and making fast decisions online, we propose a Deep reinforcement Learning Algorithm (DLA). Compared to DGA, DLA can adapt to the specific local environment and obtain a solution more rapidly once the training process is completed. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms outperform the benchmarks about 30%, and achieve flexible tradeoff between operation time and AoI of UAV sensing, which is not available by considering just one objective.

We consider the downlink of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) assisted cellular network consisting of multiple cooperative UAVs, whose operations are coordinated by a central ground controller using wireless fronthaul links, to serve multiple ground user equipments (UEs). A problem of jointly designing UAVs’ positions, transmit beamforming, as well as UAV-UE association is formulated in the form of mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) to maximize the sum UEs’ achievable rate subject to limited fronthaul capacity constraints. Solving the considered problem is hard owing to its non-convexity and the unavailability of channel state information (CSI) due to the movement of UAVs. To tackle these effects, we propose a novel algorithm comprising of two distinguishing features: (i) exploiting a deep Q-learning approach to tackle the issue of CSI unavailability for determining UAVs’ positions, (ii) developing a difference of convex algorithm (DCA) to efficiently solve for the UAV’s transmit beamforming and UAV-UE association. The proposed algorithm recursively solves the problem of interest until convergence, where each recursion executes two steps. In the first step, the deep Q-learning (DQL) algorithm allows UAVs to learn the overall network state and account for the joint movement of all UAVs to adapt their locations. In the second step, given the determined UAVs’ positions from the DQL algorithm, the DCA iteratively solves a convex approximate subproblem of the original non-convex MINLP problem with the updated parameters, where the problem’s variables are transmit beamforming and UAV-UE association. Numerical results show that our design outperforms the existing algorithms in terms of algorithmic convergence and network performance with a gain of up to 70%.

The rise of IoT devices and big data generation pose challenges to Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), particularly in remote areas. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have shown potential in enhancing computation and communication, but there is a lack of literature on a well-developed model that combines UAVs with a multi-hop, fog-cloud collaborative architecture. This work proposes an optimized multi-hop fog-cloud offloading architecture that uses UAVs to improve job offloading and resource allocation in ITS. The approach combines fog and cloud computing with UAV-enabled multi-hop collaboration to address the limitations of fog computing devices in processing large amounts of data and time-sensitive tasks. The offloading problem is formulated as a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem with constraints on user association, UAV positioning, task offloading, and resource allocation. The proposed multi-hop collaborative algorithm minimizes energy consumption, latency, and optimizes job prioritization across fog and cloud layers.

We investigate the problem of scalable video multicast in emerging cognitive radio (CR) networks. Although considerable advances have been made in CR research, such important problems have not been well studied. Naturally, 'bandwidth hungry' multimedia applications are excellent candidates for fully capitalizing the potential of CRs. We propose a crosslayer optimization approach to multicast video in CR networks. Specifically, we consider an infrastructure-based CR network collocated with N primary networks and model CR video multicast over the N channels as a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem. The objective is three-fold: to optimize the overall received video quality; to achieve proportional fairness among multicast users; and to keep the interference to primary users below a prescribed threshold. We propose a sequential fixing algorithm and a greedy algorithm to solve the MINLP, while the latter has low complexity and proven optimality gap. Our simulations with MPEG-4 fine grained scalability (FGS) video demonstrate the efficacy and superior performance of the proposed algorithms.

In the past years, the issues of energy efficiency and interference are becoming increasingly serious in wireless local area network (WLAN) since lots of access points (AP) are deployed densely to provide high-speed users access. However, current works focus on solving the two issues separately and the influence of each other is rarely considered. To address these problems, we propose a joint optimization scheme of energy efficiency and interference to reduce energy consumption and interference together without sacrificing users’ traffic demands. Firstly, based on energy consumption measurement of AP and network interference analysis, we establish energy efficiency and interference models respectively. Then, the weighting method is introduced to build the joint optimization to quantify the effects of user-AP association, AP switch, AP transmit power and AP channel on energy consumption and interference. Lastly, we formulate the joint optimization as an Mixed Integer Non-Linear Programming (MINLP) problem. Since the MINLP problem is NP-hard, we proposed an Joint Optimization of Energy Efficiency and Interference (JOEI) algorithm based on greedy method to simplify its computational complexity. The evaluation results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively reduce the network energy consumption while improve the capacity of WLANs.

In this paper, we consider a micro unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm network enabled by simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT). The network consists of one base station (BS) and multiple micro UAVs, where the BS aims to train a machine learning model over the data that resides on each UAV by utilizing federated learning (FL). Particularly, at each iteration of FL, the BS broadcasts both the global model and energy simultaneously to all UAVs, and each UAV relies on its harvested and battery-stored energy to train the received model and then upload it to the BS for global model aggregation. To improve the learning performance, we formulate a problem of maximizing the percentage of scheduled UAVs at each iteration of FL by jointly optimizing UAV scheduling and sub-channel assignment, as well as broadcasting/uploading time and power allocation. The formulated problem is a challenging mixed integer nonlinear programming problem and is NP-hard in general. By exploiting the special property of the problem structure, we develop a low-complexity suboptimal algorithm to efficiently solve the formulated problem. Numerical results show the advantages of our suboptimal algorithm.

Unlike aerial base station enabled by a single unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), aerial coordinated multiple points (CoMP) can be enabled by a UAV swarm. In this case, the management of multiple UAVs is important. This paper considers the power allocation strategy for a UAV swarm-enabled aerial network to enhance the physical layer security of the downlink transmission, where an eavesdropper moves following the trajectory of the swarm for better eavesdropping. Unlike existing works, we use only the large-scale channel state information (CSI) and maximize the secrecy throughput in a whole-trajectory-oriented manner. The overall transmission energy constraint on each UAV and the total transmission duration for all the legitimate users are considered. The non-convexity of the formulated problem is solved by using max-min optimization with iteration. Both the transmission power of desired signals and artificial noise (AN) are derived iteratively. Simulation results are presented to validate the effectiveness of our proposed power allocation algorithm and to show the advantage of aerial CoMP by using only the large-scale CSI.

Since the flight of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) greatly consumes the limited on-board energy and affects the ability to afford computation services, it is urgent and challenging to minimize UAV’s endurance time while satisfying varieties of constraints from the UAVs and users, such as energy budgets, cache capacities, computation resources, and latency requirements. In this paper, the UAVs are endowed with the capability to temporarily buffer some offloaded tasks and process them later, then adopt cooperative computation and cache scheduling to minimize their total endurance time. Following this, the formulated problem is a mix-integer nonlinear programming problem, which can be further transformed into three more tractable subproblems: 1) PO, offloading decision and scheduling strategy for computing & caching; 2) PH, hovering trajectory design; 3) PC, computation resource allocation, and then iteratively tackled in a sequence. Due to the high complexity of solving PO, the low-complexity algorithm based on the K-means clustering and Penalty Method is proposed to reduce complexity and facilitate the processing procedure, which can save about 91.04%-189.36% running time and ONLY sacrifice 8.05%-22.08% of the total endurance time. Simulation results show that cooperative computation and cache scheduling has a great effect on saving endurance time.

Caching the contents of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) could significantly improve the content fetching performance of request users (RUs). In this paper, we study UAV trajectory design, content fetching, power allocation, and content placement problems in multi-UAV-aided networks, where multiple UAVs can transmit contents to the assigned RUs. To minimize the energy consumption of the system, we develop a constrained optimization problem that simultaneously designs UAV trajectory, power allocation, content fetching, and content placement. Since the original minimization problem is a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem that is difficult to solve, the optimization problem was first transformed into a semi-Markov decision process (SMDP). Next, we developed a new technique to solve the joint optimization problem: option-based hierarchical deep reinforcement learning (OHDRL). We define UAV trajectory planning and power allocation as the low-level action space and content placement and content fetching as the high-level option space. Stochastic optimization can be handled using this strategy, where the agent makes high-level option selections, and the action is carried out at a low level based on the chosen option’s policy. When comparing the proposed approach to the current technique, the numerical results show that it can produce more consistent learning performance and reduced energy consumption.

Vehicular networks are envisioned to deliver data transmission services ubiquitously, especially in the upcoming autonomous driving era. Accordingly, the high data traffic load poses a heavy burden to the terrestrial network infrastructure. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) show enormous potential to assist vehicular networks in providing services. In a dense UAV-assisted vehicular network with a large number of users, spectrum sharing is leveraged for alleviating the spectrum scarcity. However, the increasing data traffic still leads to the UAV energy consumption problem. This paper considers a specific network scenario where a UAV transmits its cached content files to vehicular users over UAV-to-vehicle (U2V) links while vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) links reuse the U2V spectrum for safety-critical message exchanges. To improve the UAV's energy efficiency while guaranteeing users' quality of service (QoS), we jointly optimize content placement, spectrum allocation, co-channel link pairing, and power control, which are the key factors affecting energy efficiency and QoS. The joint optimization problem is formulated as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem, which is solved by combining Hungarian and DDQN. We perform system performance evaluations, demonstrating that our approach can not only improve the UAV's energy efficiency while satisfying the users' QoS requirements but also increase the timeliness of making decisions.

Drone cell (DC) is an emerging technique to offer flexible and cost-effective\nwireless connections to collect Internet-of-things (IoT) data in uncovered\nareas of terrestrial networks. The flying trajectory of DC significantly\nimpacts the data collection performance. However, designing the trajectory is a\nchallenging issue due to the complicated 3D mobility of DC, unique DC-to-ground\n(D2G) channel features, limited DC-to-BS (D2B) backhaul link quality, etc. In\nthis paper, we propose a 3D DC trajectory design for the DC-assisted IoT data\ncollection where multiple DCs periodically fly over IoT devices and relay the\nIoT data to the base stations (BSs). The trajectory design is formulated as a\nmixed integer non-linear programming (MINLP) problem to minimize the average\nuser-to-DC (U2D) pathloss, considering the state-of-the-art practical D2G\nchannel model. We decouple the MINLP problem into multiple quasi-convex or\ninteger linear programming (ILP) sub-problems, which optimizes the user\nassociation, user scheduling, horizontal trajectories and DC flying altitudes\nof DCs, respectively. Then, a 3D multi-DC trajectory design algorithm is\ndeveloped to solve the MINLP problem, in which the sub-problems are optimized\niteratively through the block coordinate descent (BCD) method. Compared with\nthe static DC deployment, the proposed trajectory design can lower the average\nU2D pathloss by 10-15 dB, and reduce the standard deviation of U2D pathloss by\n56%, which indicates the improvements in both link quality and user fairness.\n

Resource allocation for device-to-device (D2D) communications is usually formulated as mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problems, which are generally NP-hard and difficult to solve. Traditional methods are based on mathematical optimization techniques, which suffer from forbidding computational complexity or unsatisfactory optimality. In this paper, we introduce a machine leaning (ML) technique, imitation learning, to address the resource allocation in D2D communications. The key idea is learning a good prune policy to speed up the widely-used globally optimal algorithm for the MINLP problems, the branch- and-bound (B&B) algorithm. With appropriate feature selection, imitation learning can be converted into a binary classification problem, which can be solved by the classical support vector machine (SVM). Extensive simulation demonstrates that the proposed method can achieve good optimality and reduce computational complexity simultaneously. It only needs hundreds of training samples and has a good generalization ability. Our proposed method can be also applied to the MINLP problems in other wireless communication networks.

The sustainability of water resources is one of the major concerns of the world. Industries are finding ways to minimize water costs and to reduce water pollution through efficient use of supplies. One of effective solutions is the use of water pinch technology or process integration techniques. Property integration emerged as the third trend of process integration technique (aside from energy and mass integration) to solve the problem of water network synthesis by considering physical stream properties such as pH or resistivity. Various techniques have been done to solve this property-based problem. In this paper, mixed integer non-linear programming (MINLP) problems with topological constraints is studied. Nowadays, various evolutionary algorithms are also used to solve such MINLP problems. In this study, particle swarm optimization is used to solve the property integration problem. A comparison is made between this algorithm and commercial genetic algorithm (GA) applications. Particle swarm optimization is observed to perform favorably compared to GA.

Federated learning (FL) over wireless networks has become a key enabler for privacy-preserving distributed artificial intelligence (AI). However, high learning latency remains a critical bottleneck due to the presence of stragglers, limited wireless resources, and frequent model uploads. While model quantization can mitigate this issue by reducing communication overhead, its effectiveness is sensitive to device heterogeneity and time-varying channel conditions. To address this issue, we propose <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">FedDamQu</i>, a communication-efficient FL framework with doubly-adaptive model quantization, which dynamically adjusts quantization bit-widths across devices and communication rounds to balance latency and accuracy. Our objective is to maximize the model performance under learning latency constraints. The main contributions are summarized as follows. 1) Convergence Analysis under Unreliable Channels: We derive a novel convergence error upper bound for <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">FedDamQu</i>, which explicitly quantifies the impact of device selection, unreliable transmission, and quantization error on the global model performance, under both fixed and dynamic quantization gain settings. 2) Joint Optimization Framework: Based on the knowledge from the proposed theoretical bound, we formulate a joint mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem that integrates device selection, quantization bit-width configuration, and bandwidth allocation to minimize the convergence error under latency constraints. 3) Efficient Solution Design: The MINLP problem is decomposed into three subproblems, where closed-form solutions for quantization bit-width configuration and bandwidth allocation subproblems are derived, and a lightweight yet effective iterative algorithm is developed to obtain a suboptimal solution for the device selection subproblem. Extensive experiment results validate the theoretical analysis and demonstrate that <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">FedDamQu</i> consistently outperforms existing methods in terms of convergence rate and model accuracy, while significantly reducing the overall learning latency.