To obtain a full picture of potential applications for propagation-delay based X channels, it is important to obtain all feasible schemes of cyclic interference alignment including the encoder, channel instance, and decoder. However, when the dimension goes larger, theoretical analysis about this issue will become tedious and even impossible. In this letter, we propose a computer-aided solution by searching the channel space and the scheduling space, which can find all feasible schemes in details. Examples are given for some typical X channels. Computational complexity is further analyzed.

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) has the capability of boosting system performance by manipulating the wireless propagation environment. This paper investigates a downlink RIS-aided non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system, where a RIS is deployed to enhance physical-layer security (PLS) in the presence of an eavesdropper. In order to improve the main link's security, the RIS is deployed between the source and the users, in which a reflecting element separation scheme is developed to aid data transmission of both the cell-center and the cell-edge users. Additionally, the closed-form expressions of secrecy outage probability (SOP) are derived for the proposed RIS-aided NOMA scheme. To obtain more deep insights on the derived results, the asymptotic performance of the derived SOP is analyzed. Moreover, the secrecy diversity order is derived according to the asymptotic approximation in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and main-to-eavesdropper ratio (MER) regime. Furthermore, based on the derived results, the power allocation coefficient and number of elements are optimized to minimize the system SOP. Simulations demonstrate that the theoretical results match well with the simulation results and the SOP of the proposed scheme is clearly less than that of the conventional orthogonal multiple access (OMA) scheme obviously.

Multi-band transmission technologies promise to cost-effectively expand the capacity of optical networks by exploiting low-loss spectrum windows beyond the conventional band used in already-deployed fibers. While such technologies offer a high potential for capacity upgrades, available capacity is seriously restricted not only by the wavelength-continuity constraint but also by the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) constraint. In fact, exploiting more bands can cause higher SNR imbalance over multiple bands, which is mainly due to stimulated Raman scattering. To relax these constraints, we propose wavelength-selective band switching-enabled networks (BSNs), where each wavelength channel can be freely switched to any band and in any direction at any optical node on the route. We also present two typical optical node configurations utilizing all-optical wavelength converters, which can realize the switching proposal. Moreover, numerical analyses clarify that our BSN can reduce the fiber resource requirements by more than 20% compared to a conventional multi-band network under realistic conditions. We also discuss the impact of physical-layer performance of band switching operations on available benefits to investigate the feasibility of BSNs. In addition, we report on a proof-of-concept demonstration of a BSN with a prototype node, where C+L-band wavelength-division-multiplexed 112-Gb/s dual-polarization quadrature phase-shift keying signals are successfully transmitted while the bands of individual channels are switched node-by-node for up to 4 cascaded nodes.

With the network function virtualization technology, a middlebox can be deployed as software on commercial servers rather than on dedicated physical servers. A backup server is necessary to ensure the normal operation of the middlebox. The workload can affect the failure rate of backup server; the impact of workload-dependent failure rate on backup server allocation considering unavailability has not been extensively studied. This paper proposes a shared backup allocation model of middlebox with consideration of the workload-dependent failure rate of backup server. Backup resources on a backup server can be assigned to multiple functions. We observe that a function has four possible states and analyze the state transitions within the system. Through the queuing approach, we compute the probability of each function being available or unavailable for a certain assignment, and obtain the unavailability of each function. The proposed model is designed to find an assignment that minimizes the maximum unavailability among functions. We develop a simulated annealing algorithm to solve this problem. We evaluate and compare the performances of proposed and baseline models under different experimental conditions. Based on the results, we observe that, compared to the baseline model, the proposed model reduces the maximum unavailability by an average of 29% in our examined cases.

Mobile edge computing (MEC) technology guarantees the privacy and security of large-scale data in the Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT) by deploying MEC servers near base stations to provide sufficient computing, storage, and data processing capacity to meet the delay and energy consumption requirements of NB-IoT terminal equipment. For the NB-IoT MEC system, this paper proposes a resource allocation algorithm based on deep reinforcement learning to optimize the total cost of task offloading and execution. Since the formulated problem is a mixed-integer non-linear programming (MINLP), we cast our problem as a multi-agent distributed deep reinforcement learning (DRL) problem and address it using dueling Q-learning network algorithm. Simulation results show that compared with the deep Q-learning network and the all-local cost and all-offload cost algorithms, the proposed algorithm can effectively guarantee the success rates of task offloading and execution. In addition, when the execution task volume is 200KBit, the total system cost of the proposed algorithm can be reduced by at least 1.3%, and when the execution task volume is 600KBit, the total cost of system execution tasks can be reduced by 16.7% at most.

Vehicles on the road are expected to connect continuously to the Internet at sufficiently high speeds, e.g., several Mbps or higher, to support multimedia applications. However, even when passing through a well-facilitated city area, Internet access can be unreliable and even disconnected if the travel speed is high. We therefore propose a network path selection technique to meet network throughput requirements. The proposed technique is based on the attractor selection model and enables vehicles to switch the path from a route connecting directly to a cellular network to a relay type through neighboring vehicles for Internet access. We also develop a mechanism that prevents frequent path switching when the performance of all available paths does not meet the requirements. We conduct field evaluations by platooning two vehicles in a real-world driving environment and confirm that the proposed technique maintains the required throughput of up to 7Mbps on average. We also evaluated our proposed technique by extensive computer simulations of up to 6 vehicles in a platoon. The results show that increasing platoon length yields a greater improvement in throughput, and the mechanism we developed decreases the rate of path switching by up to 25%.

To understand the radiation mechanism of an electrically small spherical helix antenna, we develop a theory on the radiation characteristics of the antenna. An analytical model of the antenna presuming a current on the wire to be sinusoidally distributed is proposed and analyzed with the spherical wave expansion. The radiation efficiency, radiation resistance, and radiation patterns are obtained in closed-form expression. The radiation efficiency evidently varies with the surface area of the wire and the radiation resistance depends on the square of the length of the wire. The obtained result for the radiation pattern illustrates the tilt of the pattern caused by the modes asymmetric to the z-axis. The radiation efficiency formula indicates a good agreement between the simulation and measurement result. In addition, the radiation resistance of the theoretical and simulation results exhibits good agreement. Considering the effect of the feeding structure of the fabricated antenna, the radiation resistance of the analytical model can be treated as a reasonable result. The result of radiation pattern also shows good agreement between the simulation and measurement results excluding a small contribution from the feeding cable acting as a scatterer.

In this paper, a metadata-based quality-estimation model is proposed for tile-based omnidirectional video streaming services, aiming to realize quality monitoring during service provision. In the tile-based omnidirectional video (ODV) streaming services, the ODV is divided into tiles, and the high-quality tiles and the low-quality tiles are distributed in accordance with the user's viewing direction. When the user changes the viewing direction, the user temporarily watches video with the low-quality tiles. In addition, the longer the time (delay time) until the high-quality tile for the new viewing direction is downloaded, the longer the viewing time of video with the low-quality tile, and thus the delay time affects quality. From the above, the video quality of the low-quality tiles and the delay time significantly impact quality, and these factors need to be considered in the quality-estimation model. We develop quality-estimation models by extending the conventional quality-estimation models for 2D adaptive streaming. We also show that the quality-estimation model using the bitrate, resolution, and frame rate of high- and low-quality tiles and that the delay time has sufficient estimation accuracy based on the results of subjective quality evaluation experiments.

Parallel line feeder (PLF) consisting of a two-wire transmission line operating in the MHz band has been proposed as a wide-coverage short-distance wireless charging. In the MHz band, a PLF of several meters suffers from standing wave effect, resulting in fluctuation in power transfer efficiency accordingly to the receiver's position. This paper studies a modified version of the system, where the PLF is divided into individually compensated segments to mitigate the standing wave effect. Modelling the PLF as a lossy transmission line, this paper theoretically shows that if the segments' lengths are properly determined, it is able to improve and stabilize the efficiency for all positions. Experimental results at 27.12 MHz confirm the theoretical analysis and show that a fairly high efficiency of 70% can be achieved.

In this paper, a design method for an over octave hybrid continuous mode power amplifier (PA) based on modified real frequency technique (MRFT) is proposed. The extended continuous class-F/F-1 modes greatly expand the design space, which provides the possibility of over octave design, the optimal impedances at internal current-generator (I-Gen) plane and package plane are investigated. Then a novel broadband matching network based on MRFT is presented for impedance match. To verify the proposed methodology, an over octave PA with radial stub is fabricated and measured. The PA achieves a bandwidth of 133% from 0.8GHz to 4GHz, over this frequency range, the drain efficiency is 58.3-68.7% and large-signal gain is greater than 9.6dB.

Visual Question Answering (VQA) usually uses deep attention mechanisms to learn fine-grained visual content of images and textual content of questions. However, the deep attention mechanism can only learn high-level semantic information while ignoring the impact of the low-level semantic information on answer prediction. For such, we design a High- and Low-Level Semantic Information Network (HLSIN), which employs two strategies to achieve the fusion of high-level semantic information and low-level semantic information. Adaptive weight learning is taken as the first strategy to allow different levels of semantic information to learn weights separately. The gate-sum mechanism is used as the second to suppress invalid information in various levels of information and fuse valid information. On the benchmark VQA-v2 dataset, we quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate HLSIN and conduct extensive ablation studies to explore the reasons behind HLSIN's effectiveness. Experimental results demonstrate that HLSIN significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art, with an overall accuracy of 70.93% on test-dev.

Fine-grained image classification is one of the key basic tasks of computer vision. The appearance of traditional deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) combined with attention mechanism can focus on partial and local features of fine-grained images, but it still lacks the consideration of the embedding mode of different attention modules in the network, leading to the unsatisfactory result of classification model. To solve the above problems, three different attention mechanisms are introduced into the DCNN network (like ResNet, VGGNet, etc.), including SE, CBAM and ECA modules, so that DCNN could better focus on the key local features of salient regions in the image. At the same time, we adopt three different embedding modes of attention modules, including serial, residual and parallel modes, to further improve the performance of the classification model. The experimental results show that the three attention modules combined with three different embedding modes can improve the performance of DCNN network effectively. Moreover, compared with SE and ECA, CBAM has stronger feature extraction capability. Among them, the parallelly embedded CBAM can make the local information paid attention to by DCNN richer and more accurate, and bring the optimal effect for DCNN, which is 1.98% and 1.57% higher than that of original VGG16 and Resnet34 in CUB-200-2011 dataset, respectively. The visualization analysis also indicates that the attention modules can be easily embedded into DCNN networks, especially in the parallel mode, with stronger generality and universality.

The selection of mutation strategy greatly affects the performance of differential evolution algorithm (DE). For different types of optimization problems, different mutation strategies should be selected. How to choose a suitable mutation strategy for different problems is a challenging task. To deal with this challenge, this paper proposes a novel DE algorithm based on local fitness landscape, called FLIDE. In the proposed method, fitness landscape information is obtained to guide the selection of mutation operators. In this way, different problems can be solved with proper evolutionary mechanisms. Moreover, a population adjustment method is used to balance the search ability and population diversity. On one hand, the diversity of the population in the early stage is enhanced with a relative large population. One the other hand, the computational cost is reduced in the later stage with a relative small population. The evolutionary information is utilized as much as possible to guide the search direction. The proposed method is compared with five popular algorithms on 30 test functions with different characteristics. Experimental results show that the proposed FLIDE is more effective on problems with high dimensions.

Car navigation systems provide traffic jam information. In this study, we attempt to provide more detailed traffic jam information that considers the lane in which a traffic jam is in. This makes it possible for users to avoid long waits in queued traffic going toward an unintended destination. Lane-specific traffic jam detection utilizes image processing, which incurs long processing time and high cost. To reduce these, we propose a “suddenness index (SI)” to categorize candidate areas as sudden or periodic. Sudden traffic jams are prioritized as they may lead to accidents. This technology aggregates the number of connected cars for each mesh on a map and quantifies the degree of deviation from the ordinary state. In this paper, we evaluate the proposed method using actual global positioning system (GPS) data and found that the proposed index can cover 100% of sudden lane-specific traffic jams while excluding 82.2% of traffic jam candidates. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of time savings by integrating the proposed method into a demonstration framework. In addition, we improved the proposed method's ability to automatically determine the SI threshold to select the appropriate traffic jam candidates to avoid manual parameter settings.

The original single-shot multibox detector (SSD) algorithm has good detection accuracy and speed for regular object recognition. However, the SSD is not suitable for detecting small objects for two reasons: 1) the relationships among different feature layers with various scales are not considered, 2) the predicted results are solely determined by several independent feature layers. To enhance its detection capability for small objects, this study proposes an improved SSD-based algorithm called proportional channels' fusion SSD (PCF-SSD). Three enhancements are provided by this novel PCF-SSD algorithm. First, a fusion feature pyramid model is proposed by concatenating channels of certain key feature layers in a given proportion for object detection. Second, the default box sizes are adjusted properly for small object detection. Third, an improved loss function is suggested to train the above-proposed fusion model, which can further improve object detection performance. A series of experiments are conducted on the public database Pascal VOC to validate the PCF-SSD. On comparing with the original SSD algorithm, our algorithm improves the mean average precision and detection accuracy for small objects by 3.3% and 3.9%, respectively, with a detection speed of 40FPS. Furthermore, the proposed PCF-SSD can achieve a better balance of detection accuracy and efficiency than the original SSD algorithm, as demonstrated by a series of experimental results.

Ontologies are regarded as the solution to data heterogeneity on the Semantic Web (SW), but they also suffer from the heterogeneity problem, which leads to the ambiguity of data information. Ontology Meta-Matching technique (OMM) is able to solve the ontology heterogeneity problem through aggregating various similarity measures to find the heterogeneous entities. Inspired by the success of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in solving complex optimization problems, this work proposes a RL-based OMM technique to address the ontology heterogeneity problem. First, we propose a novel RL-based OMM framework, and then, a neural network that is called evaluated network is proposed to replace the Q table when we choose the next action of the agent, which is able to reduce memory consumption and computing time. After that, to better guide the training of neural network and improve the accuracy of RL agent, we establish a memory bank to mine depth information during the evaluated network's training procedure, and we use another neural network that is called target network to save the historical parameters. The experiment uses the famous benchmark in ontology matching domain to test our approach's performance, and the comparisons among Deep Reinforcement Learning(DRL), RL and state-of-the-art ontology matching systems show that our approach is able to effectively determine high-quality alignments.

Tool condition monitoring is one of the core tasks of intelligent manufacturing in digital workshop. This paper presents an intelligent recognize method of tool condition based on deep learning. First, the industrial microphone is used to collect the acoustic signal during machining; then, a central fractal decomposition algorithm is proposed to extract sensitive information; finally, the multi-scale convolutional recurrent neural network is used for deep feature extraction and pattern recognition. The multi-process milling experiments proved that the proposed method is superior to the existing methods, and the recognition accuracy reached 88%.

Automatic continuous tracking of objects involved in a construction project is required for such tasks as productivity assessment, unsafe behavior recognition, and progress monitoring. Many computer-vision-based tracking approaches have been investigated and successfully tested on construction sites; however, their practical applications are hindered by the tracking accuracy limited by the dynamic, complex nature of construction sites (i.e. clutter with background, occlusion, varying scale and pose). To achieve better tracking performance, a novel deep-learning-based tracking approach called the Multi-Domain Convolutional Neural Networks (MD-CNN) is proposed and investigated. The proposed approach consists of two key stages: 1) multi-domain representation of learning; and 2) online visual tracking. To evaluate the effectiveness and feasibility of this approach, it is applied to a metro project in Wuhan China, and the results demonstrate good tracking performance in construction scenarios with complex background. The average distance error and F-measure for the MDNet are 7.64 pixels and 67, respectively. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach can be used by site managers to monitor and track workers for hazard prevention in construction sites.

The traditional manual inspection is gradually replaced by the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) automatic inspection. However, due to the limited computational resources carried by the UAV, the existing deep learning-based algorithm needs a large amount of computational resources, which makes it impossible to realize the online detection. Moreover, there is no effective online detection system at present. To realize the high-precision online detection of electrical equipment, this paper proposes an SSD (Single Shot Multibox Detector) detection algorithm based on the improved Dual network for the images of insulators and spacers taken by UAVs. The proposed algorithm uses MnasNet and MobileNetv3 to form the Dual network to extract multi-level features, which overcomes the shortcoming of single convolutional network-based backbone for feature extraction. Then the features extracted from the two networks are fused together to obtain the features with high-level semantic information. Finally, the proposed algorithm is tested on the public dataset of the insulator and spacer. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can detect insulators and spacers efficiently. Compared with other methods, the proposed algorithm has the advantages of smaller model size and higher accuracy. The object detection accuracy of the proposed method is up to 95.1%.

The data augmentation method is known as a helpful technique to generate a dataset with a large number of images from one with a small number of images for supervised training in deep learning. However, a low validity augmentation method for image recognition was reported in a recent study on artificial intelligence (AI). This study aimed to clarify the optimal data augmentation method in deep learning model generation for the recognition of white blood cells (WBCs). Study Design: We conducted three different data augmentation methods (rotation, scaling, and distortion) on original WBC images, with each AI model for WBC recognition generated by supervised training. The subjects of the clinical assessment were 51 healthy persons. Thin-layer blood smears were prepared from peripheral blood and subjected to May-Grünwald-Giemsa staining. Results: The only significantly effective technique among the AI models for WBC recognition was data augmentation with rotation. By contrast, the effectiveness of both image distortion and image scaling was poor, and improved accuracy was limited to a specific WBC subcategory. Conclusion: Although data augmentation methods are often used for achieving high accuracy in AI generation with supervised training, we consider that it is necessary to select the optimal data augmentation method for medical AI generation based on the characteristics of medical images.