In this paper, we consider a scenario where an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) collects data from a set of sensors on a straight line. The UAV can either cruise or hover while communicating with the sensors. The objective is to minimize the UAV’s total flight time from a starting point to a destination while allowing each sensor to successfully upload a certain amount of data using a given amount of energy. The whole trajectory is divided into non-overlapping data collection intervals, in each of which one sensor is served by the UAV. The data collection intervals, the UAV’s speed and the sensors’ transmit powers are jointly optimized. The formulated flight time minimization problem is difficult to solve. We first show that when only one sensor is present, the sensor’s transmit power follows a water-filling policy and the UAV’s speed can be found efficiently by bisection search. Then, we show that for the general case with multiple sensors, the flight time minimization problem can be equivalently reformulated as a dynamic programming (DP) problem. The subproblem involved in each stage of the DP reduces to handle the case with only one sensor node. Numerical results present insightful behaviors of the UAV and the sensors. Specifically, it is observed that the UAV’s optimal speed is proportional to the given energy of the sensors and the intersensor distance, but inversely proportional to the data upload requirement.

Communication has been known to be one of the primary bottlenecks of federated learning (FL), and yet existing studies have not addressed the efficient communication design, particularly in wireless FL where both uplink and downlink communications have to be considered. In this paper, we focus on the design and analysis of physical layer quantization and transmission methods for wireless FL. We answer the question of what and how to communicate between clients and the parameter server and evaluate the impact of the various quantization and transmission options of the updated model on the learning performance. We provide new convergence analysis of the wellknown FEDAVG under non-i.i.d. dataset distributions, partial clients participation, and finite-precision quantization in uplink and downlink communications. These analyses reveal that, in order to achieve an O(1/T ) convergence rate with quantization, transmitting the weight requires increasing the quantization level at a logarithmic rate, while transmitting the weight differential can keep a constant quantization level. Comprehensive numerical evaluation on various real-world datasets reveals that the benefit of a FL-tailored uplink and downlink communication design is enormous – a carefully designed quantization and transmission achieves more than 98% of the floating-point baseline accuracy with fewer than 10% of the baseline bandwidth, for majority of the experiments on both i.i.d. and non-i.i.d. datasets. In particular, 1-bit quantization (3:1% of the floating-point baseline bandwidth) achieves 99:8% of the floating-point baseline accuracy at almost the same convergence rate on MNIST, representing the best known bandwidth-accuracy tradeoff to the best of the authors’ knowledge.

In status update scenarios, the freshness of information is measured in terms of age-of-information (AoI), which essentially reflects the timeliness for real-time applications to to transmit status update packets to a remote controller. For some applications, computational expensive and time consuming data processing is inevitable for status information of packets to be displayed. Mobile edge servers are equipped with adequate computation resources and they are placed close to users. Thus, mobile edge computing (MEC) can be a promising technology to reduce AoI for computation-intensive messages. In this paper, we study the AoI for computation-intensive messages with MEC, and consider three computing schemes: local computing, remote computing at MEC server, and partial computing, i.e., some part of computing tasks is performed locally, and the rest is executed at MEC server. Zero-wait policy is adopted in all three schemes. Specifically, in local computing, a new message is generated immediately after the previous one is revealed by computing. While in remote computing and partial computing, a new message is generated once the previous one is received by the remote MEC server. With infinite queue size and exponentially distributed transmission time, closed-form average AoI for exponentially distributed computing time is derived for the three computing schemes. For deterministic computing time, the averageAoIisanalyzednumerically.Simulationresultsshowthat by carefully partitioning the computing tasks, the average AoI in partial computing is the smallest compared to local computing and remote computing. The results also indicate numerically the conditions on which remote computing attains smaller average AoI compared with local computing.

In this paper, we investigate the security of a cacheaided multi-relay communication network in the presence of multiple eavesdroppers, where each relay can pre-store a part of the requested files in order to assist secure data transmission from source to destination. If the relays have cached the requested file, then they can directly send it to the destination; otherwise, traditional dual-hop data transmission is used. For both cases, relay selection is performed to assist the secure data transmission. We analyze the network secrecy performance in both scenarios of non-colluding and colluding eavesdroppers, and obtain a closed-form expression for the average secrecy outage probability (SOP), as well as an asymptotic expression for the high mainto-eavesdropper ratio (MER). Through minimizing the network SOP, we further optimize the cache placement by proposing a stochastic sampling based cache learning (SacLe) strategy, which can be implemented in parallel and thus reduces the implementation latency substantially. Numerical and simulation results are finally presented to verify the proposed analysis, and show that the caching strategy has a significant impact on the network secrecy performance through affecting the caching diversity gain and signal cooperation gain at the relays. The proposed SacLe strategy is shown to be able to achieve the optimal performance obtained by the brute force (BF) algorithm.

In Internet of Things (IoT), the freshness of status updates is crucial for mission-critical applications. In this regard, it is suggested to quantify the freshness of updates by using Age of Information (AoI) from the receiver’s perspective. Specifically, the AoI measures the freshness over time. However, the freshness in the content is neglected. In this paper, we introduce an age-based utility, named as Age of Changed Information (AoCI), which captures both the passage of time and the change of information content. By modeling the underlying physical process as a discrete time Markov chain, we investigate the AoCI in a time-slotted status update system, where a sensor samples the physical process and transmits the update packets to the destination. With the aim of minimizing the weighted sum of the AoCI and the update cost, we formulate an infinite horizon average cost Markov Decision Process. We show that the optimal updating policy has a special structure with respect to the AoCI and identify the condition under which the special structure exists. By exploiting the special structure, we provide a low complexity relative policy iteration algorithm that finds the optimal updating policy. We further investigate the optimal policy for two special cases. In the first case where the state of the physical process transits with equiprobability, we show that optimal policy is of threshold type and derive the closed-form of the optimal threshold. We then study a more generalized periodic Markov model of the physical process in the second case. Lastly, simulation results are laid out to exhibit the performance of the optimal updating policy and its superiority over the zero-wait baseline policy.