Rate Maximization for Downlink Pinching-Antenna Systems

In this letter, we consider a new type of flexible-antenna system, termed pinching-antenna, where multiple low-cost pinching antennas, realized by activating small dielectric particles on a dielectric waveguide, are jointly used to serve a single-antenna user. Our goal is to maximize the downlink transmission rate by optimizing the locations of the pinching antennas. However, these locations affect both the path losses and the phase shifts of the user's effective channel gain, making the problem challenging to solve. To address this challenge and solve the problem in a low complexity manner, a relaxed optimization problem is developed that minimizes the impact of path loss while ensuring that the received signals at the user are constructive. This approach leads to a two-stage algorithm: in the first stage, the locations of the pinching antennas are optimized to minimize the large-scale path loss; in the second stage, the antenna locations are refined to maximize the received signal strength. Simulation results show that pinching-antenna systems significantly outperform conventional fixed-location antenna systems, and the proposed algorithm achieves nearly the same performance as the highly complex exhaustive search-based benchmark.

Communication-Efficient Federated Learning by Quantized Variance Reduction for Heterogeneous Wireless Edge Networks

Federated learning (FL) has been recognized as a viable solution for local-privacy-aware collaborative model training in wireless edge networks, but its practical deployment is hindered by the high communication overhead caused by frequent and costly server-device synchronization. Notably, most existing communication-efficient FL algorithms fail to reduce the significant inter-device variance resulting from the prevalent issue of device heterogeneity. This variance severely decelerates algorithm convergence, increasing communication overhead and making it more challenging to achieve a well-performed model. In this paper, we propose a novel communication-efficient FL algorithm, named FedQVR, which relies on a sophisticated variance-reduced scheme to achieve heterogeneity-robustness in the presence of quantized transmission and heterogeneous local updates among active edge devices. Comprehensive theoretical analysis justifies that FedQVR is inherently resilient to device heterogeneity and has a comparable convergence rate even with a small number of quantization bits, yielding significant communication savings. Besides, considering non-ideal wireless channels, we propose FedQVR-E which enhances the convergence of FedQVR by performing joint allocation of bandwidth and quantization bits across devices under constrained transmission delays. Extensive experimental results are also presented to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed algorithms over their counterparts in terms of both communication efficiency and application performance.

Optimal Joint Fronthaul Compression and Beamforming Design for Networked ISAC Systems

This study investigates a networked integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system, where multiple base stations (BSs), connected to a central processor (CP) via capacity-limited fronthaul links, cooperatively serve communication users while simultaneously sensing a target. The primary objective is to minimize the total transmit power while meeting the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) requirements for communication and sensing under fronthaul capacity constraints, resulting in a joint fronthaul compression and beamforming design (J-FCBD) problem. We demonstrate that the optimal fronthaul compression variables can be determined in closed form alongside the beamformers, a novel finding in this field. Leveraging this insight, we show that the remaining beamforming design problem can be solved globally using the semidefinite relaxation (SDR) technique, albeit with considerable complexity. Furthermore, the tightness of its SDR reveals zero duality gap between the considered problem and its Lagrangian dual. Building on this duality result, we exploit the novel UL-DL duality within the ISAC framework to develop an efficient primal-dual (PD)-based algorithm. The algorithm alternates between solving beamforming with a fixed dual variable via fixed-point iteration and updating dual variable via bisection, ensuring global optimality and achieving high efficiency due to the computationally inexpensive iterations. Numerical results confirm the global optimality, effectiveness, and efficiency of the proposed PD-based algorithm.

Distributed Signal Processing for Extremely Large-Scale Antenna Array Systems: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions

Extremely large-scale antenna arrays (ELAA) play a critical role in enabling the functionalities of next generation wireless communication systems. However, as the number of antennas increases, ELAA systems face significant bottlenecks, such as excessive interconnection costs and high computational complexity. Efficient distributed signal processing (SP) algorithms show great promise in overcoming these challenges. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of distributed SP algorithms for ELAA systems, tailored to address these bottlenecks. We start by presenting three representative forms of ELAA systems: single-base station ELAA systems, coordinated distributed antenna systems, and ELAA systems integrated with emerging technologies. For each form, we review the associated distributed SP algorithms in the literature. Additionally, we outline several important future research directions that are essential for improving the performance and practicality of ELAA systems.

Beyond ADMM: A Unified Client-variance-reduced Adaptive Federated Learning Framework

As a novel distributed learning paradigm, federated learning (FL) faces serious challenges in dealing with massive clients with heterogeneous data distribution and computation and communication resources. Various client-variance-reduction schemes and client sampling strategies have been respectively introduced to improve the robustness of FL. Among others, primal-dual algorithms such as the alternating direction of method multipliers (ADMM) have been found being resilient to data distribution and outperform most of the primal-only FL algorithms. However, the reason behind remains a mystery still. In this paper, we firstly reveal the fact that the federated ADMM is essentially a client-variance-reduced algorithm. While this explains the inherent robustness of federated ADMM, the vanilla version of it lacks the ability to be adaptive to the degree of client heterogeneity. Besides, the global model at the server under client sampling is biased which slows down the practical convergence. To go beyond ADMM, we propose a novel primal-dual FL algorithm, termed FedVRA, that allows one to adaptively control the variance-reduction level and biasness of the global model. In addition, FedVRA unifies several representative FL algorithms in the sense that they are either special instances of FedVRA or are close to it. Extensions of FedVRA to semi/un-supervised learning are also presented. Experiments based on (semi-)supervised image classification tasks demonstrate superiority of FedVRA over the existing schemes in learning scenarios with massive heterogeneous clients and client sampling.

Low-Complexity Channel Estimation for Massive MIMO Systems with Decentralized Baseband Processing

The traditional centralized baseband processing architecture is faced with the bottlenecks of high computation complexity and excessive fronthaul communication, especially when the number of antennas at the base station (BS) is large. To cope with these two challenges, the decentralized baseband processing (DPB) architecture has been proposed, where the BS antennas are partitioned into multiple clusters, and each is connected to a local baseband unit (BBU). In this paper, we are interested in the low-complexity distributed channel estimation (CE) method under such DBP architecture, which is rarely studied in the literature. The aim is to devise distributed CE algorithms that can perform as well as the centralized scheme but with a small inter-BBU communication cost. Specifically, based on the low-complexity diagonal minimum mean square error channel estimator, we propose two distributed CE algorithms, namely the aggregate-then-estimate algorithm and the estimate-then-aggregate algorithm. In contrast to the existing distributed CE algorithm which requires iterative information exchanges among the nodes, our algorithms only require one roundtrip communication among BBUs. Extensive experiment results are presented to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed distributed CE algorithms in terms of estimation accuracy, inter-BBU communication cost, and computation complexity.

CSI Sensing from Heterogeneous User Feedbacks: A Constrained Phase Retrieval Approach

This paper investigates the downlink channel state information (CSI) sensing in 5G heterogeneous networks composed of user equipments (UEs) with different feedback capabilities. We aim to enhance the CSI accuracy of UEs only affording the low-resolution Type-I codebook. While existing works have demonstrated that the task can be accomplished by solving a phase retrieval (PR) formulation based on the feedback of precoding matrix indicator (PMI) and channel quality indicator (CQI), they need many feedback rounds. In this paper, we propose a novel CSI sensing scheme that can significantly reduce the feedback overhead. Our scheme involves a novel parameter dimension reduction design by exploiting the spatial consistency of wireless channels among nearby UEs, and a constrained PR (CPR) formulation that characterizes the feasible region of CSI by the PMI information. To address the computational challenge due to the non-convexity and the large number of constraints of CPR, we develop a two-stage algorithm that firstly identifies and removes inactive constraints, followed by a fast first-order algorithm. The study is further extended to multi-carrier systems. Extensive tests over DeepMIMO and QuaDriGa datasets showcase that our designs greatly outperform existing methods and achieve the high-resolution Type-II codebook performance with a few rounds of feedback.

Quantized Federated Learning under Transmission Delay and Outage Constraints

Federated learning (FL) has been recognized as a viable distributed learning paradigm which trains a machine learning model collaboratively with massive mobile devices in the wireless edge while protecting user privacy. Although various communication schemes have been proposed to expedite the FL process, most of them have assumed ideal wireless channels which provide reliable and lossless communication links between the server and mobile clients. Unfortunately, in practical systems with limited radio resources such as constraint on the training latency and constraints on the transmission power and bandwidth, transmission of a large number of model parameters inevitably suffers from quantization errors (QE) and transmission outage (TO). In this paper, we consider such non-ideal wireless channels, and carry out the first analysis showing that the FL convergence can be severely jeopardized by TO and QE, but intriguingly can be alleviated if the clients have uniform outage probabilities. These insightful results motivate us to propose a robust FL scheme, named FedTOE, which performs joint allocation of wireless resources and quantization bits across the clients to minimize the QE while making the clients have the same TO probability. Extensive experimental results are presented to show the superior performance of FedTOE for a deep learning-based classification task with transmission latency constraints.