Quantum-Assisted Adaptive Beamforming in UASs Network: Enhancing Airborne Communication via Collaborative UASs for NextG IoT

This paper introduces a novel quantum-based method for dynamic beamforming and re-forming in Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UASs), specifically addressing the critical challenges posed by the unavoidable hovering characteristics of UAVs. Hovering creates significant beam path distortions, impacting the reliability and quality of distributed beamforming in airborne networks. To overcome these challenges, our Quantum Search for UAS Beamforming (QSUB) employs quantum superposition, entanglement, and amplitude amplification. It adaptively reconfigures beams, enhancing beam quality and maintaining robust communication links in the face of rapid UAS state changes due to hovering. Furthermore, we propose an optimized framework, Quantum-Position-Locked Loop (Q-P-LL), that is based on the principle of the Nelder-Mead optimization method for adaptive search to reduce prediction error and improve resilience against angle-of-arrival estimation errors, crucial under dynamic hovering conditions. We also demonstrate the scalability of the system performance and computation complexity by comparing various numbers of active UASs. Importantly, QSUB and Q-P-LL can be applied to both classical and quantum computing architectures. Comparative analyses with conventional Maximum Ratio Transmission (MRT) schemes demonstrate the superior performance and scalability of our quantum approaches, marking significant advancements in the next-generation Internet of Things (IoT) applications requiring reliable airborne communication networks.

From Ambiguity to Explicitness: NLP-Assisted 5G Specification Abstraction for Formal Analysis

Formal method-based analysis of the 5G Wireless Communication Protocol is crucial for identifying logical vulnerabilities and facilitating an all-encompassing security assessment, especially in the design phase. Natural Language Processing (NLP) assisted techniques and most of the tools are not widely adopted by the industry and research community. Traditional formal verification through a mathematics approach heavily relied on manual logical abstraction prone to being time-consuming, and error-prone. The reason that the NLP-assisted method did not apply in industrial research may be due to the ambiguity in the natural language of the protocol designs nature is controversial to the explicitness of formal verification. To address the challenge of adopting the formal methods in protocol designs, targeting (3GPP) protocols that are written in natural language, in this study, we propose a hybrid approach to streamline the analysis of protocols. We introduce a two-step pipeline that first uses NLP tools to construct data and then uses constructed data to extract identifiers and formal properties by using the NLP model. The identifiers and formal properties are further used for formal analysis. We implemented three models that take different dependencies between identifiers and formal properties as criteria. Our results of the optimal model reach valid accuracy of 39% for identifier extraction and 42% for formal properties predictions. Our work is proof of concept for an efficient procedure in performing formal analysis for largescale complicate specification and protocol analysis, especially for 5G and nextG communications.

Distributed 3D-Beam Reforming for Hovering-Tolerant UAVs Communication over Coexistence: A Deep-Q Learning for Intelligent Space-Air-Ground Integrated Networks

In this paper, we present a novel distributed UAVs beam reforming approach to dynamically form and reform a space-selective beam path in addressing the coexistence with satellite and terrestrial communications. Despite the unique advantage to support wider coverage in UAV-enabled cellular communications, the challenges reside in the array responses' sensitivity to random rotational motion and the hovering nature of the UAVs. A model-free reinforcement learning (RL) based unified UAV beam selection and tracking approach is presented to effectively realize the dynamic distributed and collaborative beamforming. The combined impact of the UAVs' hovering and rotational motions is considered while addressing the impairment due to the interference from the orbiting satellites and neighboring networks. The main objectives of this work are two-fold: first, to acquire the channel awareness to uncover its impairments; second, to overcome the beam distortion to meet the quality of service (QoS) requirements. To overcome the impact of the interference and to maximize the beamforming gain, we define and apply a new optimal UAV selection algorithm based on the brute force criteria. Results demonstrate that the detrimental effects of the channel fading and the interference from the orbiting satellites and neighboring networks can be overcome using the proposed approach. Subsequently, an RL algorithm based on Deep Q-Network (DQN) is developed for real-time beam tracking. By augmenting the system with the impairments due to hovering and rotational motion, we show that the proposed DQN algorithm can reform the beam in real-time with negligible error. It is demonstrated that the proposed DQN algorithm attains an exceptional performance improvement. We show that it requires a few iterations only for fine-tuning its parameters without observing any plateaus irrespective of the hovering tolerance.

Ground-to-UAV Integrated Network: Low Latency Communication over Interference Channel

We present a novel and first-of-its-kind information-theoretic framework for the key design consideration and implementation of a ground-to-UAV (G2U) communication network to minimize end-to-end transmission delay in the presence of interference. The proposed framework is useful as it describes the minimum transmission latency for an uplink ground-to-UAV communication must satisfy while achieving a given level of reliability. To characterize the transmission delay, we utilize Fano's inequality and derive the tight upper bound for the capacity for the G2U uplink channel in the presence of interference, noise, and potential jamming. Subsequently, given the reliability constraint, the error exponent is obtained for the given channel. Furthermore, a relay UAV in the dual-hop relay mode, with amplify-and-forward (AF) protocol, is considered, for which we jointly obtain the optimal positions of the relay and the receiver UAVs in the presence of interference. Interestingly, in our study, we find that for both the point-to-point and relayed links, increasing the transmit power may not always be an optimal solution for delay minimization problems. Moreover, we prove that there exists an optimal height that minimizes the end-to-end transmission delay in the presence of interference. The proposed framework can be used in practice by a network controller as a system parameters selection criteria, where among a set of parameters, the parameters leading to the lowest transmission latency can be incorporated into the transmission. The based analysis further set the baseline assessment when applying Command and Control (C2) standards to mission-critical G2U and UAV-to-UAV(U2U) services.