OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Enhancing massive MIMO: A new approach for Uplink training based on heterogeneous coherence time
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is one of the key technologies in future generation networks. Owing to their considerable spectral and energy efficiency gains, massive MIMO systems provide the needed performance to cope with the ever increasing wireless capacity demand. Nevertheless, the number of scheduled users stays limited in massive MIMO both in time division duplexing (TDD) and frequency division duplexing (FDD) systems. This is due to the limited coherence time, in TDD systems, and to limited feedback capacity, in FDD mode. In current systems, the time slot duration in TDD mode is the same for all users. This is a suboptimal approach since users are subject to heterogeneous Doppler spreads and, consequently, different coherence times. In this paper, we investigate a massive MIMO system operating in TDD mode in which, the frequency of uplink training differs among users based on their actual channel coherence times. We argue that optimizing uplink training by exploiting this diversity can lead to considerable spectral efficiency gain. We then provide a user scheduling algorithm that exploits a coherence interval based grouping in order to maximize the achievable weighted sum rate.
Novel Device-to-Device Discovery Scheme based on Random Backoff in LTE-Advanced Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

Device-to-Device (D2D) discovery is a key enabler of D2D communications for the direct exchange of local area traffic between proximity users (UEs) to improve spectral efficiency. The direct D2D discovery relies on the capabilities of the D2D UEs to autonomously indicate their presence to proximity D2D UEs. {Despite} its potential of reducing energy and signalling burden, the direct D2D discovery {has not drawn adequate attention}. In this paper, we propose a direct D2D discovery scheme based on the random backoff procedure, where D2D UEs randomly choose a backoff interval and retransmit a beacon. Compared with existing schemes, the performance of the proposed scheme can be significantly enhanced in terms of the discovery probability and the discovery delay. Several useful guidelines for its design are proposed based on our analysis. Finally, numerical results provide valuable insights on the performance tradeoff inherent to the proposed D2D discovery scheme.
Enhanced Socket API for MPTCP - Controlling Sub-flow Priority
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2017
Year: 2017

Multipath TCP (MPTCP) can exploit multiple available interfaces at the end devices by establishing concurrent multiple connections between source and destination. MPTCP is a drop-in replacement for TCP and this makes it an attractive choice for various applications. In recent times, MPTCP is finding its way into newer devices such as robots and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). However, its usability is often restricted due to unavailability of suitable socket APIs to control its behaviour at the application layer. In this paper, we have introduced several socket APIs to control the sub-flow properties of MPTCP at the application layer. We have proposed a modification in MPTCP kernel data-structure to make the sub-flow priority persistent across sub-flow failures. We have also presented Primary Path only Scheduler (PPoS), a novel sub-flow scheduler, for UAVs and similar applications/devices where it is necessary to segregate data on different links based upon type of data or Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. We have also introduced the socket APIs for providing the fine grained control over the behaviour of PPoS for particular application(s) rather than changing the behaviour system wide. The scheduler and the socket APIs are extensively tested in Mininet based emulation environment as well as on real Raspberry Pi based testbed.
Joint Multicast Beamforming and User Scheduling in Large-scale Antenna Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

This paper studies the joint multicast beamforming and user scheduling problem, with the objective of minimizing total transmitting power across multiple channels by jointly assigning each user to appropriate channel and designing multicast beamformer for each channel. The problem of interest is formulated in two different optimization problems, a mixed binary quadratically constrained quadratic program and a highly-structured nonsmooth program. Two different algorithms, based on convex relaxation and convex restriction, respectively, are proposed to solve the problem. The performance ratio between the approximate solution provided by the convex-relaxation-based algorithm and optimal solution is proved to be upper bounded by a constant independent of problem data. The convex-restriction-based algorithm is guaranteed to converge to a critical point to the nonsmooth formulation problem. Finally, extensive simulation results verify the theoretical analysis and demonstrate the advantage of the proposed co-design scheme over conventional fixed scheduling and random scheduling in terms of power consumption.
Coordinated Multicell Multicast Beamforming Based on Manifold Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

Multicast beamforming is a key technology for next-generation wireless cellular networks to support high-rate content distribution services. In this paper, the coordinated downlink multicast beamforming design in multicell networks is considered. The goal is to maximize the minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio of all users under individual base station power constraints. We exploit the fractional form of the objective function and geometric properties of the con-straints to reformulate the problem as a parametric manifold optimization program. Afterwards we propose a low-complexity Dinkelbach-type algorithm combined with adaptive exponential smoothing and Riemannian conjugate gradient iteration, which is guaranteed to converge. Numerical experiments show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing SDP-based method and DC-programming-based method and achieves near-optimal performance.
Dynamic Feedback for Consensus of Networked Lagrangian Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2017
Year: 2017

This paper investigates the consensus problem of multiple uncertain Lagrangian systems. Due to the discontinuity resulted from the switching topology, achieving consensus in the context of uncertain Lagrangian systems is challenging. We propose a new adaptive controller based on dynamic feedback to resolve this problem and additionally propose a new analysis tool for rigorously demonstrating the stability and convergence of the networked systems. The new introduced analysis tool is referred to as uniform integral-L_p stability, which is motivated for addressing integral-input-output properties of linear time-varying systems. It is then shown that the consensus errors between the systems converge to zero so long as the union of the graphs contains a directed spanning tree. It is also shown that the proposed controller enjoys the robustness with respect to constant communication delays. The performance of the proposed adaptive controllers is shown by numerical simulations.
Optical Mapping Near-eye Three-dimensional Display with Correct Focus Cues
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

We present an optical mapping near-eye (OMNI) three-dimensional display method for wearable devices. By dividing a display screen into different sub-panels and optically mapping them to various depths, we create a multiplane volumetric image with correct focus cues for depth perception. The resultant system can drive the eye's accommodation to the distance that is consistent with binocular stereopsis, thereby alleviating the vergence-accommodation conflict, the primary cause for eye fatigue and discomfort. Compared with the previous methods, the OMNI display offers prominent advantages in adaptability, image dynamic range, and refresh rate.
Discrete Gyrator Transforms: Computational Algorithms and Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

As an extension of the 2D fractional Fourier transform (FRFT) and a special case of the 2D linear canonical transform (LCT), the gyrator transform was introduced to produce rotations in twisted space/spatial-frequency planes. It is a useful tool in optics, signal processing and image processing. In this paper, we develop discrete gyrator transforms (DGTs) based on the 2D LCT. Taking the advantage of the additivity property of the 2D LCT, we propose three kinds of DGTs, each of which is a cascade of low-complexity operators. These DGTs have different constraints, characteristics, and properties, and are realized by different computational algorithms. Besides, we propose a kind of DGT based on the eigenfunctions of the gyrator transform. This DGT is an orthonormal transform, and thus its comprehensive properties, especially the additivity property, make it more useful in many applications. We also develop an efficient computational algorithm to significantly reduce the complexity of this DGT. At the end, a brief review of some important applications of the DGTs is presented, including mode conversion, sampling and reconstruction, watermarking, and image encryption.
Deep Fisher Discriminant Learning for Mobile Hand Gesture Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Gesture recognition is a challenging problem in the field of biometrics. In this paper, we integrate Fisher criterion into Bidirectional Long-Short Term Memory (BLSTM) network and Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (BGRU),thus leading to two new deep models termed as F-BLSTM and F-BGRU. BothFisher discriminative deep models can effectively classify the gesture based on analyzing the acceleration and angular velocity data of the human gestures. Moreover, we collect a large Mobile Gesture Database (MGD) based on the accelerations and angular velocities containing 5547 sequences of 12 gestures. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the superior performance of the proposed networks as compared to the state-of-the-art BLSTM and BGRU on MGD database and two benchmark databases (i.e. BUAA mobile gesture and SmartWatch gesture).
Multiband NFC for High-Throughput Wireless Computer Vision Sensor Network
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2017
Year: 2017

Vision sensors lie in the heart of computer vision. In many computer vision applications, such as AR/VR, non-contacting near-field communication (NFC) with high throughput is required to transfer information to algorithms. In this work, we proposed a novel NFC system which utilizes multiple frequency bands to achieve high throughput.
A Decentralized Multi-Agent Unmanned Aerial System to Search, Pick Up, and Relocate Objects
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2017
Year: 2017

We present a fully integrated autonomous multi- robot aerial system for finding and collecting moving and static objects with unknown locations. This task addresses multiple relevant problems in search and rescue (SAR) robotics such as multi-agent aerial exploration, object detection and tracking, and aerial gripping. Usually, the community tackles these problems individually but the integration into a working system generates extra complexity which is rarely addressed. We show that this task can be solved reliably using only simple components. Our decentralized system uses accurate global state estimation, reactive collision avoidance, and sweep planning for multi-agent exploration. Objects are detected, tracked, and picked up using blob detection, inverse 3D-projection, Kalman filtering, visual-servoing, and a magnetic gripper. We evaluate the individual components of our system on the real platform. The full system has been deployed successfully in various public demonstrations, field tests, and the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge 2017 (MBZIRC). Among the contestants we showed reliable performances and reached second place out of 17 in the individual challenge.
P-Tree Programming
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2017
Year: 2017

We propose a novel method for automatic program synthesis. P-Tree Programming represents the program search space through a single probabilistic prototype tree. From this prototype tree we form program instances which we evaluate on a given problem. The error values from the evaluations are propagated through the prototype tree. We use them to update the probability distributions that determine the symbol choices of further instances. The iterative method is applied to several symbolic regression benchmarks from the literature. It outperforms standard Genetic Programming to a large extend. Furthermore, it relies on a concise set of parameters which are held constant for all problems. The algorithm can be employed for most of the typical computational intelligence tasks such as classification, automatic program induction, and symbolic regression.
Mechanics Automatically Recognized via Interactive Observation: Jumping
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2017
Year: 2017

Jumping has been an important mechanic since its introduction in Donkey Kong. It has taken a variety of forms and shown up in numerous games, with each jump having a different feel. In this paper, we use a modified Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) emulator to semi-automatically run experiments on a large subset (30%) of NES platform games. We use these experiments to build models of jumps from different developers, series, and games across the history of the console. We then examine these models to gain insights into different forms of jumping and their associated feel.
Autoencoder-augmented Neuroevolution for Visual Doom Playing
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2017
Year: 2017

Neuroevolution has proven effective at many reinforcement learning tasks, but does not seem to scale well to high-dimensional controller representations, which are needed for tasks where the input is raw pixel data. We propose a novel method where we train an autoencoder to create a comparatively low-dimensional representation of the environment observation, and then use CMA-ES to train neural network controllers acting on this input data. As the behavior of the agent changes the nature of the input data, the autoencoder training progresses throughout evolution. We test this method in the VizDoom environment built on the classic FPS Doom, where it performs well on a health-pack gathering task.
Automatic Mapping of NES Games with Mappy
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2017
Year: 2017

Game maps are useful for human players, general-game-playing agents, and data-driven procedural content generation. These maps are generally made by hand-assembling manually-created screenshots of game levels. Besides being tedious and error-prone, this approach requires additional effort for each new game and level to be mapped. The results can still be hard for humans or computational systems to make use of, privileging visual appearance over semantic information. We describe a software system, Mappy, that produces a good approximation of a linked map of rooms given a Nintendo Entertainment System game program and a sequence of button inputs exploring its world. In addition to visual maps, Mappy outputs grids of tiles (and how they change over time), positions of non-tile objects, clusters of similar rooms that might in fact be the same room, and a set of links between these rooms. We believe this is a necessary step towards developing larger corpora of high-quality semantically-annotated maps for PCG via machine learning and other applications.
Cooperative HARQ Assisted NOMA Scheme in Large-scale D2D Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

This paper develops an interference aware design for cooperative hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) assisted non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme for large-scale device-to-device (D2D) networks. Specifically, interference aware rate selection and power allocation are considered to maximize long term average throughput (LTAT) and area spectral efficiency (ASE). The design framework is based on stochastic geometry that jointly accounts for the spatial interference correlation at the NOMA receivers as well as the temporal interference correlation across HARQ transmissions. It is found that ignoring the effect of the aggregate interference, or overlooking the spatial and temporal correlation in interference, highly overestimates the NOMA performance and produces misleading design insights. An interference oblivious selection for the power and/or transmission rates leads to violating the network outage constraints. To this end, the results demonstrate the effectiveness of NOMA transmission and manifest the importance of the cooperative HARQ to combat the negative effect of the network aggregate interference. For instance, comparing to the non-cooperative HARQ assisted NOMA, the proposed scheme can yield an outage probability reduction by $32$%. Furthermore, an interference aware optimal design that maximizes the LTAT given outage constraints leads to $47$% throughput improvement over HARQ-assisted orthogonal multiple access (OMA) scheme.
Policy by Example: An Approach for Security Policy Specification
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2017
Year: 2017

Policy specification for personal user data is a hard problem, as it depends on many factors that cannot be predetermined by system developers. Simultaneously, systems are increasingly relying on users to make security decisions. In this paper, we propose the approach of Policy by Example (PyBE) for specifying user-specific security policies. PyBE brings the benefits of the successful approach of programming by example (PBE) for program synthesis to the policy specification domain. In PyBE, users provide policy examples that specify if actions should be allowed or denied in certain scenarios. PyBE then predicts policy decisions for new scenarios. A key aspect of PyBE is its use of active learning to enable users to correct potential errors in their policy specification. To evaluate PyBE's effectiveness, we perform a feasibility study with expert users. Our study demonstrates that PyBE correctly predicts policies with 76% accuracy across all users, a significant improvement over naive approaches. Finally, we investigate the causes of inaccurate predictions to motivate directions for future research in this promising new domain.
Asymptotic Optimality of Rapidly Exploring Random Tree
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2017
Year: 2017

In this paper we investigate the asymptotic optimality property of a randomized sampling based motion planner, namely RRT. We prove that a RRT planner is not an asymptotically optimal motion planner. Our result, while being consistent with similar results which exist in the literature, however, brings out an important characteristics of a RRT planner. We show that the degree distribution of the tree vertices follows a power law in an asymptotic sense. A simulation result is presented to support the theoretical claim. Based on these results we also try to establish a simple necessary condition for sampling based motion planners to be asymptotically optimal.
Spatial Interference Detection for Mobile Visible Light Communication
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2017
Year: 2017

Taking advantage of the rolling shutter effect of CMOS cameras in smartphones is a common practice to increase the transfered data rate with visible light communication (VLC) without employing external equipment such as photodiodes. VLC can then be used as replacement of other marker based techniques for object identification for Augmented Reality and Ubiquitous computing applications. However, the rolling shutter effect only allows to transmit data over a single dimension, which considerably limits the available bandwidth. In this article we propose a new method exploiting spacial interference detection to enable parallel transmission and design a protocol that enables easy identification of interferences between two signals. By introducing a second dimension, we are not only able to significantly increase the available bandwidth, but also identify and isolate light sources in close proximity.
DCRoute: Speeding up Inter-Datacenter Traffic Allocation while Guaranteeing Deadlines
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2017
Year: 2017

Datacenters provide the infrastructure for cloud computing services used by millions of users everyday. Many such services are distributed over multiple datacenters at geographically distant locations possibly in different continents. These datacenters are then connected through high speed WAN links over private or public networks. To perform data backups or data synchronization operations, many transfers take place over these networks that have to be completed before a deadline in order to provide necessary service guarantees to end users. Upon arrival of a transfer request, we would like the system to be able to decide whether such a request can be guaranteed successful delivery. If yes, it should provide us with transmission schedule in the shortest time possible. In addition, we would like to avoid packet reordering at the destination as it affects TCP performance. Previous work in this area either cannot guarantee that admitted transfers actually finish before the specified deadlines or use techniques that can result in packet reordering. In this paper, we propose DCRoute, a fast and efficient routing and traffic allocation technique that guarantees transfer completion before deadlines for admitted requests. It assigns each transfer a single path to avoid packet reordering. Through simulations, we show that DCRoute is at least 200 times faster than other traffic allocation techniques based on linear programming (LP) while admitting almost the same amount of traffic to the system.
A Padé-Weierstrass technique for the rigorous enforcement of control limits in power flow studies
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2017
Year: 2017

A new technique is presented for solving the problem of enforcing control limits in power flow studies. As an added benefit, it greatly increases the achievable precision at nose points. The method is exemplified for the case of Mvar limits in generators regulating voltage on both local and remote buses. Based on the framework of the Holomorphic Embedding Loadflow Method (HELM), it provides a rigorous solution to this fundamental problem by framing it in terms of \emph{optimization}. A novel Lagrangian formulation of power-flow, which is exact for lossless networks, leads to a natural physics-based minimization criterion that yields the correct solution. For networks with small losses, as is the case in transmission, the AC power flow problem cannot be framed exactly in terms of optimization, but the criterion still retains its ability to select the correct solution. This foundation then provides a way to design a HELM scheme to solve for the minimizing solution. Although the use of barrier functions evokes interior point optimization, this method, like HELM, is based on the analytic continuation of a germ (of a particular branch) of the algebraic curve representing the solutions of the system. In this case, since the constraint equations given by limits result in an unavoidable singularity at $s=1$, direct analytic continuation by means of standard Padé approximation is fraught with numerical instabilities. This has been overcome by means of a new analytic continuation procedure, denominated Padé-Weierstrass, that exploits the covariant nature of the power flow equations under certain changes of variables. One colateral benefit of this procedure is that it can also be used when limits are not being enforced, in order to increase the achievable numerical precision in highly stressed cases.