We consider the problem of finding the best subset of sensors in wireless sensor networks where linear Bayesian parameter estimation is conducted from the selected measurements corrupted by correlated noise. We aim to directly minimize the estimation error which is manipulated by using the QR and LU factorizations. We derive an analytic result which expedites the sensor selection in a greedy manner. We also provide the complexity of the proposed algorithm in comparison with previous selection methods. We evaluate the performance through numerical experiments using random measurements under correlated noise and demonstrate a competitive estimation accuracy of the proposed algorithm with a reasonable increase in complexity as compared with the previous selection methods.

Emergency Medical Services (EMS) play a crucial role in healthcare systems, managing pre-hospital or out-of-hospital emergencies from the onset of an emergency call to the patient’s arrival at a healthcare facility. The design of an efficient ambulance location model is pivotal in enhancing survival rates, controlling morbidity, and preventing disability. Key factors in the classical models typically include travel time, demand zones, and the number of stations. While urban EMS systems have received extensive examination due to their centralized populations, rural areas pose distinct challenges. These include lower population density and longer response distances, contributing to a higher fatality rate due to sparse population distribution, limited EMS stations, and extended travel times. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel mathematical model that aims to optimize coverage and equity. A distinctive feature of our model is the integration of equity within the objective function, coupled with a focus on practical response time that includes the period required for personal protective equipment procedures, ensuring the model’s applicability and realism in emergency response scenarios. We tackle the proposed problem using a tailored genetic algorithm and propose a greedy algorithm for solution construction. The implementation of our tailored Genetic Algorithm promises efficient and effective EMS solutions, potentially enhancing emergency care and health outcomes in rural communities.

Effects of Al thickness in Ti/Al/Ti/Au ohmic contact on AlGaN/GaN heterostructures are studied. Samples having Al thickness of 30, 90 and 120 nm in Ti/Al/Ti/Au have been investigated by electrical and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) depth profile analysis. It is found that thick Al samples show lower resistance and formation of Al-based alloy under the oxidized Al layer.

In this paper, a cluster-based three-dimensional (3D) non-stationary vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) channel model with circular arc motions and antenna rotates is proposed. The channel model simulates the complex urban communication scenario where clusters move with arbitrary velocities and directions. A novel cluster evolution algorithm with time-array consistency is developed to capture the non-stationarity. For time evolution, the birth-and-death (BD) property of clusters including birth, death, and rebirth are taken into account. Additionally, a visibility region (VR) method is proposed for array evolution, which is verified to be applicable to circular motions. Based on the Taylor expansion formula, a detailed derivation of space-time correlation function (ST-CF) with circular arc motions is shown. Statistical properties including ST-CF, Doppler power spectrum density (PSD), quasi-stationary interval, instantaneous Doppler frequency, root mean square delay spread (RMS-DS), delay PSD, and angular PSD are derived and analyzed. According to the simulated results, the non-stationarity in time, space, delay, and angular domains is captured. The presented results show that motion modes including linear motions as well as circular motions, the dynamic property of the scattering environment, and the velocity of the vehicle all have significant impacts on the statistical properties.

The dispersion problem is a variant of facility location problems, that has been extensively studied. Given a polygon with n edges on a plane we want to find k points in the polygon so that the minimum pairwise Euclidean distance of the k points is maximized. We call the problem the k-dispersion problem in a polygon. Intuitively, for an island, we want to locate k drone bases far away from each other in flying distance to avoid congestion in the sky. In this paper, we give a polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS) for this problem when k is a constant and ε < 1 (where ε is a positive real number). Our proposed algorithm runs in O(((1/ε)2 + n/ε)k) time with 1/(1 + ε) approximation, the first PTAS developed for this problem. Additionally, we consider three variations of the dispersion problem and design a PTAS for each of them.

A rectangle-of-influence drawing of a plane graph G is a straight-line planar drawing of G such that there is no vertex in the proper inside of the axis-parallel rectangle defined by the two ends of any edge. In this paper, we show that any given 5-connected plane graph G with five or more vertices on the outer face has a rectangle-of-influence drawing in an integer grid such that W + H ≤ n - 2, where n is the number of vertices in G, W is the width and H is the height of the grid.

This paper reports on the details of the International Competition on Graph Counting Algorithms (ICGCA) held in 2023. The graph counting problem is to count the subgraphs satisfying specified constraints on a given graph. The problem belongs to #P-complete, a computationally tough class. Since many essential systems in modern society, e.g., infrastructure networks, are often represented as graphs, graph counting algorithms are a key technology to efficiently scan all the subgraphs representing the feasible states of the system. In the ICGCA, contestants were asked to count the paths on a graph under a length constraint. The benchmark set included 150 challenging instances, emphasizing graphs resembling infrastructure networks. Eleven solvers were submitted and ranked by the number of benchmarks correctly solved within a time limit. The winning solver, TLDC, was designed based on three fundamental approaches: backtracking search, dynamic programming, and model counting or #SAT (a counting version of Boolean satisfiability). Detailed analyses show that each approach has its own strengths, and one approach is unlikely to dominate the others. The codes and papers of the participating solvers are available: https://afsa.jp/icgca/.

With the advent of gated quantum computers and the regular structures for qubit layout, methods for placement, routing, noise estimation, and logic to hardware mapping become imminently required. In this paper, we propose a method for quantum circuit layout that is intended to solve such problems when mapping a quantum circuit to a gated quantum computer. The proposed methodology starts by building a Circuit Interaction Graph (CIG) that represents the ideal hardware layout minimizing the distance and path length between the individual qubits. The CIG is also used to introduce a qubit noise model. Once constructed, the CIG is iteratively reduced to a given architecture (qubit coupling model) specifying the neighborhood, qubits, priority, and qubits noise. The introduced constraints allow us to additionally reduce the graph according to preferred weights of desired properties. We propose two different methods of reducing the CIG: iterative reduction or the iterative isomorphism search algorithm. The proposed method is verified and tested on a set of standard benchmarks with results showing improvement on certain functions while in average improving the cost of the implementation over the current state of the art methods.

Boolean functions play an important role in symmetric ciphers. One of important open problems on Boolean functions is determining the maximum possible resiliency order of n-variable Boolean functions with optimal algebraic immunity. In this letter, we search Boolean functions in the rotation symmetric class, and determine the maximum possible resiliency order of 9-variable Boolean functions with optimal algebraic immunity. Moreover, the maximum possible nonlinearity of 9-variable rotation symmetric Boolean functions with optimal algebraic immunity-resiliency trade-off is determined to be 224.

In this letter, a novel projection algorithm is proposed in which projection onto a triangle consisting of the three even-vertices closest to the vector to be projected replaces check polytope projection, achieving the same FER performance as exact projection algorithm in both high-iteration and low-iteration regime. Simulation results show that compared with the sparse affine projection algorithm (SAPA), it can improve the FER performance by 0.2 dB as well as save average number of iterations by 4.3%.

To improve the direction-of-arrival estimation performance of the small-aperture array, we propose a source localization method inspired by the Ormia fly’s coupled ears and MUSIC-like algorithm. The Ormia can local its host cricket’s sound precisely despite the tremendous incompatibility between the spacing of its ear and the sound wavelength. In this paper, we first implement a biologically inspired coupled system based on the coupled model of the Ormia’s ears and solve its responses by the modal decomposition method. Then, we analyze the effect of the system on the received signals of the array. Research shows that the system amplifies the amplitude ratio and phase difference between the signals, equivalent to creating a virtual array with a larger aperture. Finally, we apply the MUSIC-like algorithm for DOA estimation to suppress the colored noise caused by the system. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed method can improve the localization precision and resolution of the array.

The concept of dual function radar-communication (DFRC) provides solution to the problem of spectrum scarcity. This paper examines a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) DFRC system with the assistance of a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS). The system is capable of sensing multiple spatial directions while serving multiple users via orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). The objective of this study is to design the radiated waveforms and receive filters utilized by both the radar and users. The mutual information (MI) is used as an objective function, on average transmit power, for multiple targets while adhering to constraints on power leakage in specific directions and maintaining each user’s error rate. To address this problem, we propose an optimal solution based on a computational genetic algorithm (GA) using bisection method. The performance of the solution is demonstrated by numerical examples and it is shown that, our proposed algorithm can achieve optimum MI and the use of RIS with the MIMO DFRC system improving the system performance.

In recent years, the increasing complexity of deep network structures has hindered their application in small resource constrained hardware. Therefore, we urgently need to compress and accelerate deep network models. Channel pruning is an effective method to compress deep neural networks. However, most existing channel pruning methods are prone to falling into local optima. In this paper, we propose a channel pruning method via Improved Grey Wolf Optimizer Pruner which called IGWO-Pruner to prune redundant channels of convolutional neural networks. It identifies pruning ratio of each layer by using Improved Grey Wolf algorithm, and then fine-tuning the new pruned network model. In experimental section, we evaluate the proposed method in CIFAR datasets and ILSVRC-2012 with several classical networks, including VGGNet, GoogLeNet and ResNet-18/34/56/152, and experimental results demonstrate the proposed method is able to prune a large number of redundant channels and parameters with rare performance loss.

With the popularization of software defined networks, switch migration as an important network management strategy has attracted increasing attention. Most existing switch migration strategies only consider local conditions and simple load thresholds, without fully considering the overall optimization and dynamics of the network. Therefore, this article proposes a switch migration algorithm based on global optimization. This algorithm adds a load prediction module to the migration model, determines the migration controller, and uses an improved whale optimization algorithm to determine the target controller and its surrounding controller set. Based on the load status of the controller and the traffic priority of the switch to be migrated, the optimal migration switch set is determined. The experimental results show that compared to existing schemes, the algorithm proposed in this paper improves the average flow processing efficiency by 15% to 40%, reduces switch migration times, and enhances the security of the controller.

Dependent Quantization (DQ) is a new quantization tool introduced in the Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard. While it provides better rate-distortion calculation accuracy, it also increases the computational complexity and hardware cost compared to the widely used scalar quantization. To address this issue, this paper proposes a parallel-dependent quantization hardware architecture using Verilog HDL language. The architecture preprocesses the coefficients with a scalar quantizer and a high-frequency filter, and then further segments and processes the coefficients in parallel using the Viterbi algorithm. Additionally, the weight bit width of the rate-distortion calculation is reduced to decrease the quantization cycle and computational complexity. Finally, the final quantization of the TU is determined through sequential scanning and judging of the rate-distortion cost. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm reduces the quantization cycle by an average of 56.96% compared to VVC’s reference platform VTM, with a Bjøntegaard delta bit rate (BDBR) loss of 1.03% and 1.05% under the Low-delay P and Random Access configurations, respectively. Verification on the AMD FPGA development platform demonstrates that the hardware implementation meets the quantization requirements for 1080P@60Hz video hardware encoding.

Space is becoming increasingly congested and contested, which calls for effective means to conduct effective monitoring of high-value space assets, especially in Space Situational Awareness (SSA) missions, while there are imperfections in existing methods and corresponding algorithms. To overcome such a problem, this letter proposes an algorithm for accurate Connected Element Interferometry (CEI) in SSA based on more interpolation information and iterations. Simulation results show that: (i) after iterations, the estimated asymptotic variance of the proposed method can basically achieve uniform convergence, and the ratio of it to ACRB is 1.00235 in δ0 ∈ [-0.5, 0.5], which is closer to 1 than the current best AM algorithms; (ii) In the interval of SNR ∈ [-14dB, 0dB], the estimation error of the proposed algorithm decreases significantly, which is basically comparable to CRLB (maintains at 1.236 times). The research of this letter could play a significant role in effective monitoring and high-precision tracking and measurement with significant space targets during futuristic SSA missions.

In the software testing phase, software reliability growth models (SRGMs) are commonly used to evaluate the reliability of software systems. Traditional SRGMs are restricted by their assumption of a continuous growth pattern for the failure detection rate (FDR) throughout the testing phase. However, the assumption is compromised by Change-Point phenomena, where FDR fluctuations stem from variations in testing personnel or procedural modifications, leading to reduced prediction accuracy and compromised software reliability assessments. Therefore, the objective of this study is to improve software reliability prediction using a novel approach that combines genetic algorithm (GA) and deep learning-based SRGMs to account for the Change-point phenomenon. The proposed approach uses a GA to dynamically combine activation functions from various deep learning-based SRGMs into a new mutated SRGM called MuSRGM. The MuSRGM captures the advantages of both concave and S-shaped SRGMs and is better suited to capture the change-point phenomenon during testing and more accurately reflect actual testing situations. Additionally, failure data is treated as a time series and analyzed using a combination of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Attention mechanisms. To assess the performance of MuSRGM, we conducted experiments on three distinct failure datasets. The results indicate that MuSRGM outperformed the baseline method, exhibiting low prediction error (MSE) on all three datasets. Furthermore, MuSRGM demonstrated remarkable generalization ability on these datasets, remaining unaffected by uneven data distribution. Therefore, MuSRGM represents a highly promising advanced solution that can provide increased accuracy and applicability for software reliability assessment during the testing phase.

The steady-state and convergence performances are important indicators to evaluate adaptive algorithms. The step-size affects these two important indicators directly. Many relevant scholars have also proposed some variable step-size adaptive algorithms for improving performance. However, there are still some problems in these existing variable step-size adaptive algorithms, such as the insufficient theoretical analysis, the imbalanced performance and the unachievable parameter. These problems influence the actual performance of some algorithms greatly. Therefore, we intend to further explore an inherent relationship between the key performance and the step-size in this paper. The variation of mean square deviation (MSD) is adopted as the cost function. Based on some theoretical analyses and derivations, a novel variable step-size algorithm with a dynamic limited function (DLF) was proposed. At the same time, the sufficient theoretical analysis is conducted on the weight deviation and the convergence stability. The proposed algorithm is also tested with some typical algorithms in many different environments. Both the theoretical analysis and the experimental result all have verified that the proposed algorithm equips a superior performance.

The study proposes a personalised session-based recommender system that embeds items by using Word2Vec and sequentially updates the session and user embeddings with the hierarchicalization and aggregation of item embeddings. To process a recommendation request, the system constructs a real-time user embedding that considers users’ general preferences and sequential behaviour to handle short-term changes in user preferences with a low computational cost. The system performance was experimentally evaluated in terms of the accuracy, diversity, and novelty of the ranking of recommended items and the training and prediction times of the system for three different datasets. The results of these evaluations were then compared with those of the five baseline systems. According to the evaluation experiment, the proposed system achieved a relatively high recommendation accuracy compared with baseline systems and the diversity and novelty scores of the proposed system did not fall below 90% for any dataset. Furthermore, the training times of the Word2Vec-based systems, including the proposed system, were shorter than those of FPMC and GRU4Rec. The evaluation results suggest that the proposed recommender system succeeds in keeping the computational cost for training low while maintaining high-level recommendation accuracy, diversity, and novelty.

The detection of hardware trojans has been extensively studied in the past. In this article, we propose a side-channel analysis technique that uses a wrapper-based feature selection technique for hardware trojan detection. The whale optimization algorithm is modified to carefully extract the best feature subset. The aim of the proposed technique is multiobjective: improve the accuracy and minimize the number of features. The power consumption traces measured from AES-128 trojan circuits are used as features in this experiment. The stabilizing property of the feature selection method helps to bring a mutual trade-off between the precision and recall parameters thereby minimizing the number of false negatives. The proposed hardware trojan detection scheme produces a maximum of 10.3% improvement in accuracy and reduction up to a single feature by employing the modified whale optimization technique. Thus the evaluation results conducted on various trust-hub cryptographic benchmark circuits prove to be efficient from the existing state-of-art methods.