This paper investigates the UAV-assisted wireless powered IoT system, where a UAV takes off from a data center, flies to each of the ground sensor nodes (SNs) in order to transfer energy and collect data form the SNs, and then returns to the data center. For such a system, an optimization problem is formulated to minimize the average age of information (AoI) of the data collected from all ground SNs. Since the average AoI depends on the UAV’s trajectory, the time required for energy harvesting (EH) and data collection for each SN, these factors need to be optimized jointly. Moreover, instead of the traditional linear EH model, we employ a non-linear model because the behavior of the EH circuits are non-linear by nature. To solve this non-convex problem, we propose to decompose it into two sub-problems, i.e., a joint energy transfer and data collection time allocation problem and a UAV’s trajectory planning problem. For the first sub-problem, we prove that it is convex and give an optimal solution by using Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions. This solution is used as the input for the second sub-problem, and we solve optimally it by designing dynamic programming (DP) and ant colony (AC) heuristic algorithms. Simulation results show that the DP-based algorithm obtains the minimal average AoI of the system, and the AC-based heuristic finds solutions with near-optimal average AoI. The results also reveal that the average AoI increases as the flying altitude of the UAV increases and linearly with the size of the collected data at each ground SN.

This paper investigates reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) networks with rate splitting multiple access (RSMA). An energy efficiency (EE) maximization problem is formulated subject to the power budget at the transmitter and the quality of service (QoS) requirements of both information communication and energy harvesting, where the beamforming vectors, the power splitting (PS) ratios, the common message rates, and the discrete phase shifts are jointly optimized. To tackle the non-convex problem with both discrete and continuous variables, a deep reinforcement learning-based approach is proposed with the proximal policy optimization (PPO) framework. Different from traditional optimization approaches which optimizes the beamforming vectors and phase shifts separately and alternatively, our proposed PPO-based approach optimizes all the variables in unison. Besides, to perform beamforming design in action space, the beamforming vectors for the common stream and the private stream are respectively designed based on the maximum-ratio transmission and the zero forcing to enhance both energy and information transmission. To evaluate the performance of the PPO-based approach, a successive convex approximation (SCA) and Dinkelbach’s method based solution scheme (named SCA-D scheme) is also presented. Simulation results show that the system EE obtained by the proposed PPO-based approach is close to that obtained by the SCA-D scheme while outperforming various benchmarks. The RSMA contributes to the EE of the system greatly compared with traditional scheme. As for the case of time-varying channels, the proposed PPO-based approach is with much smaller running time by only sacrificing a slight EE performance compared with the SCA-D scheme.

This article investigates the unmanned-aerial-vehicle (UAV)-enabled wireless powered cooperative mobile edge computing (MEC) system, where a UAV installed with an energy transmitter (ET) and an MEC server provides both energy and computing services to sensor devices (SDs). The active SDs desire to complete their computing tasks with the assistance of the UAV and their neighboring idle SDs that have no computing task. An optimization problem is formulated to minimize the total required energy of UAV by jointly optimizing the CPU frequencies, the offloading amount, the transmit power, and the UAV’s trajectory. To tackle the nonconvex problem, a successive convex approximation (SCA)-based algorithm is designed. Since it may be with relatively high computational complexity, as an alternative, a decomposition and iteration (DAI)-based algorithm is also proposed. The simulation results show that both proposed algorithms converge within several iterations, and the DAI-based algorithm achieve the similar minimal required energy and optimized trajectory with the SCA-based one. Moreover, for a relatively large amount of data, the SCA-based algorithm should be adopted to find an optimal solution, while for a relatively small amount of data, the DAI-based algorithm is a better choice to achieve smaller computing energy consumption. It also shows that the trajectory optimization plays a dominant factor in minimizing the total required energy of the system and optimizing acceleration has a great effect on the required energy of the UAV. Additionally, by jointly optimizing the UAV’s CPU frequencies and the amount of bits offloaded to UAV, the minimal required energy for computing can be greatly reduced compared to other schemes and by leveraging the computing resources of idle SDs, the UAV’s computing energy can also be greatly reduced.

This paper explores the rate-energy (R-E) region of simultaneous wireless information and power transfer for MIMO broadcasting channel under the nonlinear radio frequency energy harvesting (EH) model. The goal is to characterize the tradeoff between the maximal energy transfer versus information rate. The separated EH and information decoding (ID) receivers and the co-located EH and ID receivers scenarios are considered. For the co-located receivers scenario, both time switching (TS) and power splitting (PS) receiver architectures are investigated. Optimization problems are formulated to derive the boundaries of the R-E region s for the considered systems. As the problems are nonconvex, we first transform them into equivalent ones and derive some semi-closed-form solutions, and then design efficient algorithms to solve them. Numerical results are provided to show the R-E region s of the systems, which provide some interesting insights. It is shown that all practical circuit specifications greatly affect the system R-E region. Compared with the systems under traditional linear EH model, the ones under the nonlinear EH model achieve smaller R-E region s due to the limitations of practical circuit features and also show very different R-E tradeoff behaviors.

Recognizing the tremendous improvements that the integration of generative AI can bring to intelligent transportation systems, this article explores the integration of generative AI technologies in vehicular networks, focusing on their potential applications and challenges. Generative AI, with its capabilities of generating realistic data and facilitating advanced decision-making processes, enhances various applications when combined with vehicular networks, such as navigation optimization, traffic prediction, data generation, and evaluation. Despite these promising applications, the integration of generative AI with vehicular networks faces several challenges, such as real-time data processing and decision-making, adapting to dynamic and unpredictable environments, as well as privacy and security concerns. To address these challenges, we propose a multi-modality semanticaware framework to enhance the service quality of generative AI. By leveraging multi-modal and semantic communication technologies, the framework enables the use of text and image data for creating multi-modal content, providing more reliable guidance to receiving vehicles and ultimately improving system usability and efficiency. To further improve the reliability and efficiency of information transmission and reconstruction within the framework, taking generative AI-enabled vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) as a case study, a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based approach is proposed for resource allocation. Finally, we discuss potential research directions and anticipated advancements in the field of generative AI-enabled vehicular networks.

This article studies the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted wireless powered network, where a UAV is dispatched to wirelessly charge multiple ground nodes (GNs) by using radio frequency (RF) energy transfer and then the GNs use their harvested energy to upload the sensed information to the UAV. At each moment, the UAV is scheduled to charge the GNs or only one GN is scheduled to upload its data. An optimization problem is formulated to minimize the average Age of Information (AoI) of the GNs by jointly optimizing the trajectory of the UAV and the scheduling of information transmission and energy harvesting of GNs. As the problem is a combinational optimization problem with a set of binary variables, it is difficult to be solved. Thus, it is modeled as a Markov problem with large state spaces and a deep ${Q}$ network (DQN)-based scheme is proposed to find its near-optimal solution on the basis of the deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework. Two nets are structured with artificial neural network (ANN), where one is for evaluating the reward of the action performed in current state, and the other is for predicting realistic action. The corresponding state spaces, the efficient action spaces, and reward function are designed. Simulation results demonstrate the convergence of the proposed DQN scheme, which also show that the proposed DQN scheme gets much smaller average AoI than the three other known schemes. Moreover, by involving the energy punishment in the reward, the UAV may save its energy but yield higher AoI. Additionally, the effects of the packet size, the transmit power, and the distribution area of GNs on the GNs’ average AoI are also discussed, which are expected to provide some useful insights.