The engineering vision of relying on the “smart sky” for supporting air traffic and the “internet-above-the-clouds” for in-flight entertainment has become imperative for the future aircraft industry. Aeronautical ad hoc networking (AANET) constitutes a compelling concept for providing broadband communications above clouds by extending the coverage of air-to-ground (A2G) networks to oceanic and remote airspace via autonomous and self-configured wireless networking among commercial passenger airplanes. The AANET concept may be viewed as a new member of the family of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) in action above the clouds. However, AANETs have more dynamic topologies, larger and more variable geographical network size, stricter security requirements, and more hostile transmission conditions. These specific characteristics lead to more grave challenges in aircraft mobility modeling, aeronautical channel modeling, and interference mitigation as well as in network scheduling and routing. This paper provides an overview of AANET solutions by characterizing the associated scenarios, requirements, and challenges. Explicitly, the research addressing the key techniques of AANETs, such as their mobility models, network scheduling and routing, security, and interference, is reviewed. Furthermore, we also identify the remaining challenges associated with developing AANETs and present their prospective solutions as well as open issues. The design framework of AANETs and the key technical issues are investigated along with some recent research results. Furthermore, a range of performance metrics optimized in designing AANETs and a number of representative multiobjective optimization algorithms are outlined.

In the 5G intelligent edge scenario, more and more accelerator-based single-board computers (SBCs) with low power consumption and high performance are being used as edge devices to run the inferencing part of the artificial intelligence (AI) model to deploy intelligent applications. In this paper, we investigate the inference workflow and performance of the You Only Look Once (YOLO) network, which is the most popular object detection model, in three different accelerator-based SBCs, which are NVIDIA Jetson Nano, NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX and Raspberry Pi 4B (RPi) with Intel Neural Compute Stick2 (NCS2). Different video contents with different input resize windows are detected and benchmarked by using four different versions of the YOLO model across the above three SBCs. By comparing the inference performance of the three SBCs, the performance of RPi + NCS2 is more friendly to lightweight models. For example, the FPS of detected videos from RPi + NCS2 running YOLOv3-tiny is 7.6 times higher than that of YOLOv3. However, in terms of detection accuracy, we found that in the process of realizing edge intelligence, how to better adapt a AI model to run on RPi + NCS2 is much more complex than the process of Jetson devices. The analysis results indicate that Jetson Nano is a trade-off SBCs in terms of performance and cost; it achieves up to 15 FPSs of detected videos when running YOLOv4-tiny, and this result can be further increased by using TensorRT.

A pin-loaded patch antenna fed with a dual-mode substrate-integrated waveguide (SIW) resonator is proposed in this letter for enhanced bandwidth and stable high gain. The loading effect of shorting pins on quality factor of the radiator is investigated with characteristic mode analysis at first. As such, the pin location can be properly selected to enhance gain with the least negative effect on bandwidth. A SIW resonator operating in TE110 and TE120 modes is introduced to feed the patch through aperture coupling. The dual modes of SIW resonator increase the resonant order of the antenna with compact size, which significantly widens the bandwidth. Moreover, the undesired high-order mode is well suppressed with the proposed feeding scheme, which further contributes to steady radiation performance. Simulated and measured results demonstrate that the proposed patch antenna has obtained an enhanced bandwidth of 22% and stable high gain up to 11.9 dBi simultaneously.

In order to deploy minimum number of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-mounted mobile base stations (MBSs) to service all given ground terminals, this paper proposes an MBS placement based on sparse recovery (MBS-PBSR) algorithm. By exploiting the sparsity inherent in the differences between any two dedicated MBSs, the problem of UAV-mounted MBS placement could be formulated as an ℓ0-norm constrained optimization problem, which is then be solved by the reweighted ℓ1-norm method. Subsequently, the resulted solutions to the MBS placement are adjusted by the iterative redundant circle deletion algorithm, eventually leading to the redundant MBSs removal as much as possible. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed MBS-PBSR algorithm works well with affordable computational complexity, and is nearly optimum in the sense of the number of deployed UAV-mounted MBSs.

In this article, we propose a multi-label convolution neural network (MLCNN)-aided transmit antenna selection (AS) scheme for end-to-end multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) Internet of Things (IoT) communication systems in correlated channel conditions. In contrast to the conventional single-label multi-class classification ML schemes, we opt for using the concept of multi-label in the proposed MLCNN-aided transmit AS MIMO IoT system, which may greatly reduce the length of training labels in the case of multi-antenna selection. Additionally, applying multi-label concept may significantly improve the prediction accuracy of the trained MLCNN model under correlated large-scale MIMO channel conditions with less training data. The corresponding simulation results verified that the proposed MLCNN-aided AS scheme may be capable of achieving near-optimal capacity performance in real time, and the performance is relatively insensitive to the effects of imperfect CSI.

In this paper, we propose and implement a novel framework of deep learning based antenna selection (DLBAS)-aided multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) software defined radio (SDR) system. The system is constructed with the following three steps: (1) a MIMO SDR communication platform is first constructed, which is capable of achieving uplink communication from users to the base station via time division duplex (TDD); (2) we use the deep neural network (DNN) from our previous work to construct a deep learning decision server to assist the MIMO SDR platform for making intelligent decision for antenna selection, which transforms the optimization-driven decision making method into a data-driven decision making method; and (3) we set up the deep learning decision server as a multithreading server to improve the resource utilization ratio. To evaluate the performance of the DLBAS-aided MIMO SDR system, a norm-based antenna selection (NBAS) scheme is selected for comparison. The results show that the proposed DLBAS scheme performed equally to the NBAS scheme in real-time and out-performed the MIMO system without AS with up to 53% improvement on average channel capacity gain.