Energy harvesting (EH) is a promising technique to fulfill the long-term and self-sustainable operations for Internet of things (IoT) systems. In this paper, we study the joint access control and battery prediction problems in a small-cell IoT system including multiple EH user equipments (UEs) and one base station (BS) with limited uplink access channels. Each UE has a rechargeable battery with finite capacity. The system control is modeled as a Markov decision process without complete prior knowledge assumed at the BS, which also deals with large sizes in both state and action spaces. First, to handle the access control problem assuming causal battery and channel state information, we propose a scheduling algorithm that maximizes the uplink transmission sum rate based on reinforcement learning (RL) with deep Q-network (DQN) enhancement. Second, for the battery prediction problem, with a fixed round-robin access control policy adopted, we develop a RL based algorithm to minimize the prediction loss (error) without any model knowledge about the energy source and energy arrival process. Finally, the joint access control and battery prediction problem is investigated, where we propose a two-layer RL network to simultaneously deal with maximizing the sum rate and minimizing the prediction loss: the first layer is for battery prediction, the second layer generates the access policy based on the output from the first layer. Experiment results show that the three proposed RL algorithms can achieve better performances compared with existing benchmarks.

In this paper, a novel indoor localization system with channel state information (CSI) fingerprints is proposed, which learns the spatial and frequency features of CSI in the fifth-generation (5G) cellular network by a Siamese convolution neural network. In particular, considering that the CSI continuously collected by a moving target possesses the implicit spatial association, we locate the target by the successive CSI data gathered within a time interval which can be regarded as an information subspace of the fingerprint database. Therefore, the fingerprint localization can be modeled as a subspace matching problem and solved by the Siamese network-based similarity learning. In the proposed system, we design a structure of CSI fingerprint which includes the information from multiple base stations in spatial and frequency domains. Then, the proposed Siamese architecture extracts the CSI feature and estimates the location of the target by feature similarity comparison. Compared with the existing algorithms, it can increase the positioning accuracy significantly by the feature relevance among the CSI data collected at different positions. The field tests indicate that compared to other CSI fingerprint-based positioning methods, our proposed algorithm can effectively reduce the localization error.

The WiFi-based fingerprint indoor-positioning system has attracted increasing interest from industry and academia, benefiting from the widespread deployment of the wireless local area network (WLAN) infrastructure. However, with the expansion of application scenarios, this system suffers from labor-intensive work for received signal strength (RSS) fingerprint construction. In this article, we propose a crowdsourcing-based radio map construction method and trajectory matching algorithm to solve the time-consuming preliminary fingerprint data collection in the offline phase, where the tedious collection work is replaced by the massive crowdsourcing sensor data. First, the latent information of the map is extracted by using some image processing methods, and all possible routes are obtained simultaneously with the depth-first traversal method. Then, considering the strict restrictions on walking in indoor environments, the crowdsourcing trajectories are produced by matching the result of pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) with the candidate routes based on the Shape Context algorithm. Further, a crowdsourcing trajectory can be represented by uniformly distributed reference points based on step detection, and each point corresponds to a unique RSS of access points (APs). Since such a fingerprint construction method can be performed while smartphone holders are moving and not aware of their actual positions, it can be referred to the dynamic construction method of the radio map. The real scenario experiments reveal that the proposed solution can significantly reduce the time and manpower consumption to build the radio map. Moreover, compared with traditional schemes, our crowdsourcing-based radio map construction method for the WiFi fingerprinting localization (CRCLoc) system can improve the accuracy and robustness of the indoor-positioning results.

The Internet of things (IoT) application has a crucial need for long-term and self-sustainable operations. Energy harvesting (EH) technique has attracted great attention in IoT as it may significantly increase the network lifetime by using renewable energy sources. In this paper, we study a simple IoT system composed of one base station (BS) and multiple EH user equipments (UEs), where the system control is modeled as a Markov decision process without any prior knowledge assumed on the energy dynamics. The central controller, i.e., the BS, is in charge of scheduling a subset of UEs to access the limited orthogonal channels and regulating transmission power for the scheduled UEs. Applying reinforcement learning (RL) methods in this situation is technically challenging since the state and action spaces are continuous. With a long short-term memory (LSTM) based algorithm to predict the UEs’ battery states, we propose an actor-critic deep Q-network (DQN) RL algorithm to simultaneously deal with the access and continuous power control problem, by considering both the sum rate and prediction loss. Experiment results show that the proposed RL algorithm can achieve better performances compared with the existing benchmarks.

In this paper, we propose a constructive interference (CI)-based block-level precoding (CI-BLP) approach for the downlink of a multi-user multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) communication system. Contrary to existing CI precoding approaches which have to be designed on a symbol-by-symbol level, here a constant precoding matrix is applied to a collection of symbols within a given transmission block, thus significantly reducing the computational costs over traditional CI-based symbol-level precoding (CI-SLP) as the CI-BLP optimization problem only needs to be solved once per block. For both PSK and QAM modulation, we formulate an optimization problem to maximize the minimum CI effect over the block subject to a block-rather than symbol-level power budget. We mathematically derive the optimal precoding matrix for CI-BLP as a function of the Lagrange multipliers in closed form. By formulating the dual problem, the original CI-BLP optimization problem is further shown to be equivalent to a quadratic programming (QP) optimization. Numerical results validate our derivations, and show that the proposed CI-BLP scheme achieves improved performance over the traditional CI-SLP method, thanks to the relaxed power constraint over the considered block of symbol slots.

A 3-D arbitrary-elevation two-cylinder reference model is proposed for multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) air-to-air communications in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) channels. This model accounts for not only the Line-of-Sight (LoS) but also the single-bounced at the transmitter (SBT) and the single-bounced at the receiver (SBR), as well as the double-bounced (DB) rays. Therefore, it is endowed with a high adaptability to various UAV-to-UAV communication scenarios. From the reference model, a closed-form expression of the space-time correlation function (ST-CF) is derived. This expression is shown to be the generalizations of many existing correlation functions from the 2-D one-ring, the 3-D low-elevation one-cylinder, the 2-D two-ring, and the 3-D low-elevation two-cylinder model. Corresponding deterministic and stochastic simulation models are also developed in addition to the reference model. The well agreements between the channel capacities obtained from the simulation models and those from the derived ST-CF not only display the usefulness of the simulators but also confirm the correctness of the derivations. Based on the derived closed-form ST-CF, the effects of some model parameters on the capacity are evaluated in a computationally efficient manner.