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Wednesday 12 August

Signal Processing

End-to-End Modelling of Earthquake-Induced Polarisation Perturbations in Submarine Optical Fibres

We present an end-to-end model of earthquake-perturbed signal propagation in submarine fibres. Ground displacements are converted to fibre strain via ocean pressure, and injected into a split-step model. Our model shows good qualitative alignment with measurements from the Curie cable during the 2020 Oaxaca earthquake.
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All authors Rick M. Butler, José Núñez-Kasaneva, Gabriele Liga, Magnus Karlsson, Alex Alvarado, Christian Häger

Signal Processing

A Universal Random Precoding Framework for MIMO Systems

Current wireless systems combat inter-symbol interference (ISI) by diagonalizing or sparsifying the channel matrix, yet they remain vulnerable to selective fading. To address this, we propose a universal random precoding (RP) transmission framework based on the universality class. RP leverages random transforms to statistically exploit all subchannels and construct an equivalent channel belonging to the universality class, thereby enhancing diversity gain while maintaining backward compatibility with existing waveforms. Low-complexity implementations include the randomly permuted fast transform (FT-RP) and the interleaved block-sparse fast transform (IBSFT-RP). A cross-domain OAMP/MAMP (CD-OAMP/MAMP) detector is designed for RP systems, which is replica maximum a posteriori (MAP)-optimal according to state evolution (SE). Simulation results on MIMO systems demonstrate that RP with CD-OAMP/MAMP achieves near-RM performance with much lower complexity, with additional benefits of flexible compression ratios for spectral efficiency.
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All authors Jiazhen Dong, Lei Liu, Xiaojun Yuan, Baoming Bai

Signal Processing

TRACE: A Modular Framework for RIS-Assisted Channel Estimation and Differential Channel-Aware Reconfiguration

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) research tightly couples channel-estimation, control and communication, yet existing implementations often rely on fixed algorithmic pipelines, making it difficult to compare alternative estimation, tracking and communication strategies under identical conditions and to study low-overhead RIS adaptation under time-varying channels. This paper addresses both challenges through two complementary contributions. First, it presents TRACE (Toolkit for RIS-assisted channel-estimation, adaptive control and communication experimentation), a modular socket-based framework that decouples the transmitter, radio environment, controller and receiver through separate control- and data-plane interfaces, enabling reproducible evaluation across substitutable modules. Second, it proposes the differential channel-aware RIS update (DCAR) algorithm, which estimates channel perturbations from reduced probe observations using a regularized differential update to reduce retraining overhead. TRACE is validated through interchangeable minimum mean square error and orthogonal matching pursuit channel-estimation, Gaussian random walk and Gauss–Markov channel evolution, BPSK, QPSK and 16-QAM modulation techniques and multiple RIS sizes, without modifying the underlying framework. Within TRACE, DCAR is observed to reduce pilot overhead and computational complexity while maintaining beamforming performance close to Kalman-filter-based tracking under time-varying channels.
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All authors Smriti Kumar, Mansi Ambwani, Arzad Alam Kherani, Vimal Bhatia

Signal Processing

RaStream: Edge-Deployable Streaming Human Mesh Recovery from mmWave Radar

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar provides a privacy-preserving sensing modality for human motion analysis, yet continuous SMPL-X recovery on edge devices remains challenging because accurate reconstruction benefits from dense volumetric radar observations that preserve weak articulated reflections, while repeatedly processing such high-dimensional data over time incurs substantial computational cost. Temporal context is also necessary to resolve frame-local ambiguity, but SMPL-X attributes evolve at different rates, with body morphology remaining relatively stable and articulated pose, root orientation, and global translation changing rapidly. We present RaStream, a causal streaming framework that separates rich volumetric spatial perception from lightweight temporal reasoning. For each radar observation, a localization-conditioned spatial encoder exploits global scene context to estimate a coarse body location and focuses detailed reconstruction on a center-guided region of interest while preserving native 3D radar structure. Global and local features are then fused into a compact representation, allowing volumetric evidence to be extracted once per observation and temporal history to be propagated through compact representations and fixed-size persistent states. RaStream further maintains a slow morphology state for shape-related information and a fast motion state for pose, orientation, and translation. On the 661K-frame M4Human benchmark, RaStream reduces MVE from 90.90 mm for RT-Mesh to 84.27 mm with spatial-only inference and to 72.05 mm with causal temporal refinement. The Base configuration requires 26.93 ms per FP32 invocation on a Jetson Orin Nano. These results demonstrate practical edge-streaming radar mesh recovery through one-time volumetric evidence extraction and compact causal temporal propagation.
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Signal Processing

Characterizing Nonlinearities in IM-DD Links via the Best Linear Approximation: Distortion Analysis and Modulation Optimization

We use the best linear approximation (BLA) to characterize nonlinearities in IM-DD links. The orthogonal nonlinear distortion is shown to be non-Gaussian. The BLA is used to approximate the optimum modulation depth for different equalizer structures.
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All authors Sebastian Fraga Fernández, Leonardo Minelli, Fernando de Bernardinis, Felipe Villenas, Yunus Can Gültekin, Alex Alvarado

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from eess.AS

Deep Learning Based Relative Transfer Matrix Estimation for Multiple Sources and Multiple Microphones

The Relative Transfer Matrix (ReTM), recently introduced as a generalization of the relative transfer function for multiple receivers and sources, shows promising performance when applied to speech enhancement in noisy environments. Estimating the ReTM of sound sources by exploiting the covariance matrices of multichannel recordings is highly beneficial for practical applications and, to date, remains the only proposed approach. This paper investigates deep learning-based ReTM estimation. We propose three novel supervised learning frameworks using time and short-time frequency transform domain convolutional networks, and a Long Short-Term Memory-based recurrent neural network. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed models achieve more accurate estimation of the ReTM using five objective metrics compared to the covariance-based method. We also show the effectiveness of the proposed frameworks for speech enhancement, achieving performance on par with the baseline method.
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Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.LG

FM-LLM: A frequency-enhanced mixture-of-experts framework for adapting LLMs to time series forecasting

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have spurred cross-modal solutions for time-series forecasting. However, existing methods rely heavily on textual prompts for modality alignment-introducing nontrivial computational overhead and failing to leverage the rich spectral dynamics inherent in time-series data. To enable prompt-free, frequency-aware adaptation of frozen LLMs, we propose FM-LLM (Frequency-Enhanced Mixture-of-Experts for adapting LLMs to Time Series Forecasting), an autoregressive framework grounded in constrained asymmetric coupling. A Fourier Analysis Network (FAN)-based spectral token aligner injects structured harmonic representations directly into the frozen LLM with numerical compatibility. An asymmetric Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) decoder enforces role separation: shared experts with lightweight FAN layers reconstruct the global periodic backbone, while routed experts-restricted to standard FFNs-specialize in modeling non-periodic residual dynamics. A time-frequency hybrid loss function jointly optimizes temporal accuracy and spectral consistency, mitigating error accumulation during long-horizon autoregressive rollouts. Evaluated across eleven public benchmarks, FM-LLM achieves state-of-the-art performance on 59 out of 78 evaluation metrics. Compared to the strongest autoregressive LLM-based baseline, it delivers average improvements of 5.3% in MSE and 5.6% in MAE, with maximum gains reaching 8.0% for MSE and 8.4% for MAE. FM-LLM also demonstrates robust transferability, maintaining superior performance in 10% few-shot and zero-shot forecasting scenarios.
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All authors Rentao Gu, Yihang Ding, Junjie Li, Yi Ding, Weijing Sang, Xiaoli Huo, Xin Qin, Yuefeng Ji

Signal Processing

Small Language Model enabled Autonomous agent for Language-Conditioned Cognitive Radar

Modern radar systems require adapting their processing strategies in response to changing interference, clutter, and data availability. This paper introduces a framework for a small language model (SLM)-driven autonomous agent designed for language-conditioned cognitive radar, functioning as an intelligent controller for a suite of array signal processing tools. Given a natural-language command, the agent extracts radar-operation-related cues, selects an appropriate sequence of signal-processing methods, configures parameters, and invokes executable tools for numerical computation. Experiments with a synthetic uniform linear array (ULA) radar demonstrate that, given a natural-language command, the agent performs meaningful algorithm selection across diverse scenarios for sidelobe control, jammer suppression, multiple-null beamforming, coherent-source handling, and low-snapshot direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation. Ablation results show that radar-specific prompting and physics-grounded tool execution are both required for reliable decisions and hallucination-free numerical results.
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All authors Minhaj Uddin Ahmad, Zakia Zaman, Shunqiao Sun, Mizanur Rahman

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.HC

Measuring Browser Webcam Gaze Honestly: A Capture-Clock Methodology and Open Reference Implementation

Browser-based webcam gaze trackers are increasingly used for crowd-scale data collection and in clinical settings where lab eye trackers are impractical, but the reported latency numbers may not represent real world functionality. The common practice of timestamping each gaze sample when it is emitted, rather than when its source frame was captured, makes the measured inference latency read about $0\,$ms no matter how slow the engine really is. We show how to measure it honestly, recovering a per-frame capture clock from the browser's re\-quest\-Video\-Frame\-Call\-back (rVFC) API (captureTime where the browser exposes it for local camera streams, else presentationTime, in which case every recovered latency is a verifiable lower bound): exact source-frame pairing through a per-frame queue for engines that expose their inference pipeline, and a further lower bound for engines that do not, such as WebGazer. We release an open TypeScript implementation and benchmark harness, demonstrated on two interchangeable engines: WebGazer and a new FaceMesh+KRR pipeline.
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Tuesday 11 August

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.IT

When to Stop? Dynamic Early Termination of Sequential Ensembles

Ordered-statistics decoding (OSD) post-processing substantially improves the performance of belief propagation (BP) ensembles, but it also removes their natural syndrome-based stopping criterion. The high computational complexity of ensemble decoding and OSD can be reduced by sequential activation of ensemble members paired with an early termination. Instead of a syndrome-based termination we therefore apply dynamic ensemble termination (DET) to sequential ensembles: members are evaluated one at a time and decoding stops when the estimated risk that an unseen member would correct the current decision falls below an offline-fitted threshold. With hardware-oriented design in mind, we instantiate the framework with layered normalized min-sum component decoders, a row-boosted ensemble, conditional low-order OSD on the dual code, and a conventional low-cost decoder gate. A decision tree estimates the residual risk from statistics of the current candidate list. Member-dependent thresholds then target a prescribed frame error rate (FER) loss. We validate this framework on mutliple IEEE 802.11 low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes with blocklengths \(648,1296\), and \(1944\) at rates \(1/2\) and \(5/6\). At each code's design point, where the full \(64\)-member list reaches an FER of \(10^{-3}\), the DET decoder processes \(1.04\) to \(1.15\) members on average. On the \((648,540)\) code, it reduces BP work by \(39\times\) and OSD activations by \(18\times\) against the full list while retaining an signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gain of about \(0.4\,\mathrm{dB}\).
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Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.LG

Bridging the Data Gap: Digital Twin as a New Paradigm for AI-based Radio Sensing

We present a methodology that places a 3D digital twin (DT) of the environment as the main enabler behind the development of radio sensing at scale. The DT acts as a world model, providing geometry, materials, and transmitter/receiver placements to a ray-tracing engine that generates time-indexed channel impulse responses (CIRs) for large numbers of plausible scenes (moving people and objects, layout variants, seasonal/weather conditions, etc). From these synthetic sequences, we train a sequential neural network that maps CIR time series to spatial occupancy estimates, enabling device-free localization (DFL) without instrumented targets. We posit that sensing is best approached as an environment-conditioned learning problem: rather than seeking a single global model, we advocate training or fine-tuning local models specialized to a site-specific DT. As a first experiment, we introduce a novel State Space Model architecture, trained and evaluated across multiple room geometries. The localization performances obtained demonstrate the potential of the approach.
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All authors Éloi Sainte-Beuve, Guillaume Larue, Louis-Adrien Dufrène, Quentin Lampin, Ali Al Khansa

Signal Processing

Hardware-in-the-Loop Phase-Aware CNN for Real-Time 5G Channel Estimation

This demo presents real-time AI-based uplink channel-estimation inference using data collected from a hardware-in-the-loop 5G platform. The data-collection setup integrates commercial RF signal generation, programmable channel emulation, an O-RAN Radio Unit, DU emulation, and a lightweight phase-aware convolutional neural network (CNN) that estimates the channel response directly from received DMRS signals. Unlike simulation-only evaluations, the hardware-derived dataset exposes the estimator to practical RF and system-level impairments, including calibration mismatches, synchronization imperfections, quantization effects, phase noise, and implementation-specific nonlinearities. During the demo, attendees will observe real-time CNN inference and channel reconstruction using captured hardware-generated DMRS observations and compare the proposed CNN against Least Squares (LS) and frequency-domain LMMSE baselines. The objective is to showcase a practical AI-native physical-layer inference pipeline that combines hardware-derived 5G data with real-time neural channel estimation for future 5G-Advanced and 6G systems.
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All authors Javad Zolfaghari-Bengar, Rakibul Rony, Elisa Gomez-de-Lope, Alejandro Villena-Rodriguez, Abhinav Mahadevan, Nicolas Kourtellis

Signal Processing

Extremely Large Beyond-Diagonal RIS: Low-Rank Modal Optimization for Near-Field Communications

Beyond-diagonal reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (BD-RIS) achieve their best performance when fully connected, at the price of an optimization and hardware burden that grows quadratically, and per iteration cubically, with the number of elements. Extremely large surfaces make this burden prohibitive, while their sheer aperture places both the base station and the users in the radiative near field, where far-field design tools break down. This paper introduces the extremely large BD-RIS (XL-BD-RIS) concept and shows that near-field geometry is precisely what makes fully connected performance affordable at scale. Modeling the cascade with the free-space Green function, we prove that the aperture fields live in a low-dimensional subspace spanned by the spherical-wave responses of the terminal positions, and we design a compact unitary modal matrix on this subspace, built from localization information alone, that provably attains the fully connected optimum with a number of reconfigurable entries set by the geometry and independent of the panel size. A weighted-MMSE Riemannian algorithm optimizes the beamformers and the modal matrix with monotone convergence at panel-size-independent cost. Numerical results show that a $24\times24$-element panel reaches the fully connected optimum with about two hundred entries instead of three hundred thousand. A mismatched DFT beamspace pays a sixty-fold entry penalty rooted in the beam spread of spherical wavefronts, while the classical block-wise architecture delivers strictly lower rates at any matched entry budget.
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All authors Giovanni Iacovelli, Chandan Kumar Sheemar, Eva Lagunas, Symeon Chatzinotas

Signal Processing

Laser-Diode LiFi With Diffused-Beam Optics: System-Level Modeling and a Cross-Validated ns-3 Simulation Framework

Laser diodes (LDs) promise an order-of-magnitude bandwidth advantage over light-emitting diodes for indoor optical wireless access, but reported prototype studies frequently leave the gap between hardware demonstrations and system-level performance unquantified. This paper develops a complete, reproducible system model of a diffused-beam LD LiFi transceiver - a 500-mW laser source beam-shaped by a holographic diffuser, an intensity-modulation/ direct-detection (IM/DD) receiver, and adaptive M-QAM signaling - and embeds it in two cross validated simulators: an open ns-3 module providing full-stack network simulation (channel, PHY, ARQ MAC, Net Device, IP/UDP/TCP) and a Python link-level engine used for Monte Carlo validation of all analytical error models. Starting from a hardware prototype that transferred data, real-time voice, and images over a 14-m line-of-sight link, we identify and close the technical gaps typical of prototype-class reports: serial-interface throughput ceilings misread as optical-link capacity, absent noise modeling, unmeasurable error floors, and unexamined beamwidth/coverage trade-offs. The framework shows that the same optical front end, freed of its 2-Mbaud UART bottleneck and driven at its 250-MHz electrical bandwidth, supports 930 Mb/s net at 14 m under a $3.8 \times 10^{-3}$ HD-FEC threshold with 16-QAM, scales to 1.86 Gb/s at 5 m with 256-QAM, and sustains on-off keying to 23.3 m; a $20^\circ$ diffuser covers a 4.2-m-radius cell of a standard room at desk height. Network simulations over the ns-3 stack yield saturation goodput within 7% of the PHY line rate and sub-0.11-ms 99th-percentile latency at 70% load. All models, code, and figures are released for reproduction.
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All authors Hussain Ahmad, Syed Muhammad Talha Gillani, Toheed Omer, Saleem Aslam

Signal Processing

CII: Novel CSI-RS Metric for Joint Precoder and RIS Reporting in Multi-User NextG Networks

While reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) are among the key enablers for next-generation (NextG) wireless networks, efficient feedback reporting for joint base station (BS) precoding and passive RIS configuration remains a major challenge due to the associated signaling overhead. By extending the standard-compliant channel state information reference signal framework, this paper introduces a novel channel information indicator (CII) that jointly represents the active BS precoding matrix and passive RIS configuration within a single feedback metric for multi-user multiple-input single-output systems. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed unified feedback framework significantly reduces uplink signaling overhead compared with conventional disjoint reporting schemes. Furthermore, despite only a modest increase in the feedback payload, the proposed CII-based scheme outperforms conventional precoding matrix indicator approaches in terms of system performance, offering a practical and standards-compatible solution for RIS integration in NextG wireless networks.
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All authors Ali Fuat Sahin, Sefa Kayraklik, Ali Gorcin, Ibrahim Hokelek, Ertugrul Basar, Halim Yanikomeroglu

Signal Processing

Adaptive Source-Channel Coding for Bi-static Integrated Sensing and Semantic Communications

Semantic communication (SemCom) has emerged as a new paradigm to facilitate the performance of integrated sensing and communication systems in 6G, due to its potential to enhance transmission efficiency by transmitting task-relevant semantic features rather than raw bits. However, most of the existing works mainly focus on sensing data compression to reduce the subsequent communication overheads, without considering the integrated transmission framework for both the SemCom and sensing tasks. This paper proposes a sensing-aware adaptive source-channel coding (SA-ASCC) and beamforming design framework for bi-static integrated sensing and SemCom (ISSC) systems by jointly optimizing the coding rate for SemCom task and the transmit beamforming for both the SemCom and sensing tasks. Specifically, an end-to-end semantic distortion function is approximated by deriving an upper bound composing of source and channel coding induced components, and then a hybrid Cramér-Rao bound (HCRB) is derived for target position under imperfect time synchronization due to the transceiver deployed at different places in our considered bi-static ISSC system. To characterize the achievable region between SemCom and sensing performance, a distortion minimization problem is formulated by considering the HCRB threshold, channel uses, and power budget, which is non-convex due to the coupled design variables and the mixed-integer program. Subsequently, an alternating optimization (AO) algorithm is proposed to decompose this problem into the model selection and joint rate and beamforming optimization subproblems, which are solved by the exhaustive search method and the combination of successive convex approximation and fractional programming, respectively. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms the DJSCC-WF-ZF and BPG-WF-ZF benchmarks.
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All authors Haotian Wang, Dan Wang, Xiaodong Xu, Chuan Huang, Hao Chen, Nan Ma, Ping Zhang

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from q-bio.NC

Modeling and Interpreting Correlations, Null Distributions and Significance Levels in Neural Tracking of Natural Stimuli

Neural tracking - the time-locking of neural responses to continuous stimuli such as speech, music, and video - is widely used to study how the brain processes natural input. Tracking strength is typically quantified as the correlation between the recorded neural response and the stimulus, decoded and/or encoded through data-driven models, and this correlation is routinely used to compare stimulus features, models, or settings. However, its magnitude depends not only on how strongly the brain tracks the stimulus, but also on the statistical properties of the signals being correlated. For example, a smallband speech envelope carrying almost no information about speech content yields among the highest correlations, simply because it is easier to reconstruct. Meaningful interpretation therefore requires comparing each correlation to its null distribution: the correlations expected without any stimulus-response relationship. We show that the randomization procedures commonly used to construct this null distribution are not interchangeable: each implicitly encodes a different null hypothesis, and we motivate stimulus-response misalignment as the most practical and appropriate choice. Because reliable null distributions require many permutations, we introduce a semi-parametric model using the normal distribution after the Fisher transform that yields accurate significance levels from only 3-5 min of data and predicts them across analysis window lengths. Building on this, we propose the null-normalized tracking score, an interpretable measure placing features and models on a common scale, which relates directly to the widely used match-mismatch accuracy. Applied to EEG from 121 participants listening to continuous speech, the framework reverses conclusions drawn from raw correlations, providing an efficient and principled methodology for interpreting neural tracking correlations.
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All authors Simon Geirnaert, Alexander Bertrand, Tom Francart, Jonas Vanthornhout

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.NI

Multi-UAV Tracking Evaluation Using 5G Uplink Signals on an O-RAN ISAC Simulation Testbed

We evaluate multi-target detection, association and tracking end to end on an O-RAN simulation testbed built from OpenAirInterface, FlexRIC and Sionna RT that repurposes the 5G NR uplink sounding reference signal as a passive radar waveform, and against what a counter-UAS command-and- control (C2) consumer requires rather than by detection alone. Three UAVs differing in altitude, velocity and radar cross section (-8 to -20 dBsm) fly one bistatic pair with an 8-element planar receive array. Once every target is detected the binding limit is contention, not sensitivity - two targets share one nearest detection in about 74% of coherent processing intervals, and targets are detected far more often than they are tracked. Elevation from that array cannot separate targets sharing a range-Doppler cell, but it decides association in 58% of intervals. Concurrent tracks are exported from the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) xApp to a C2 fusion node over a SAPIENT interface carrying a calibrated detection confidence, validated at schema level against a mock fusion node. The evaluation is emulation-only on one geometry with 10 noise seeds, the mechanisms are characterized and analyzed to identify the key factors influencing multi-target tracking performance.
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Signal Processing

Optimal Measurement Point Selection for Radio Environment Maps: A Two-Stage Approach

Electromagnetic (EM) situational awareness is essential for the deployment and operation of local and temporary non-public networks (NPNs). Radio Environment Maps (REMs) provide an effective basis for network planning and operation by capturing the prevailing EM conditions. However, efficient measurement location selection for REM construction remains a key challenge, particularly under strict time and cost constraints. This paper presents a two-stage measurement selection framework that employs Optimal Experimental Design (OED)-based strategies to generate a reduced candidate set during a pre-selection phase. In a subsequent optimization stage, combinatorial optimization is applied to select an improved subset of measurement locations by minimizing the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of the resulting REM, using a scenario-specific propagation simulation model. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework reduces the number of required measurement locations while consistently improving REM construction accuracy across all evaluated strategies. Validation using real-world measurement data confirms the practical applicability of the approach, with the optimization stage achieving MAE reductions from about 4% to around 50%, independent of the chosen pre-selection strategy.
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All authors Bastian Perner, Friedemann Laue, Maximilian Lubke, Norman Franchi

Signal Processing

Unified Analytical Framework for Emergency RIS-UAV Networks Under Practical Impairments

Heterogeneous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks embedded with reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) present a promising paradigm for emergency wireless communications (EWC), offering enhanced coverage and resilience in harsh environments. However, extreme conditions in disaster areas necessitate robust performance evaluation under practical impairments, including outdated/imperfect channel state information (CSI) and discrete RIS phase shifts. Existing works lack a unified analytical framework for modeling CSI errors, employing inconsistent approaches that treat errors either as channel gain or as equivalent interference, leading to ambiguous benchmarks. To address this, we propose the $\zeta$-Model, a unified receiver-equivalent signal-to-noise (SNR) framework that continuously parameterizes residual-error exploitability via $\zeta$. This framework unifies the information-theoretic model (ITM) and the engineering baseline model (EBM) as the optimistic and pessimistic benchmark receiver treatments, while incorporating the simplified engineering model (SEM) as a tractable approximation. By employing the Fisher-Snedecor $\mathcal{F}$ distribution to capture severe fading and shadowing, we derive moment-matching-based closed-form or finite-sum approximate expressions and asymptotic expressions for average capacity (AC), effective capacity (EC), and outage probability (OP) under the proposed unified framework and its boundary cases. Validated by Monte Carlo simulations, our framework quantifies performance limits and provides crucial insights for designing robust and efficient EWC systems under various channel conditions and system impairments.
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All authors Yinong Chen, Wenchi Cheng, Jingqing Wang, Jiangzhou Wang

Signal Processing

Robust Beamforming and Power Allocation for Coherent Cell-Free Massive MIMO with Residual Calibration Errors

This paper investigates robust downlink transmission to tolerate calibration aging in time-division duplex cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (CF-mMIMO) systems with residual calibration errors (RCEs). Unlike existing studies that typically treat RCEs as static impairments, we develop a time-evolving RCE model that characterizes the joint effects of residual phase mismatches, residual carrier frequency offsets, and oscillator phase noise. Based on this model, two practical processing architectures are considered: instantaneous calibrated-channel-based robust beamforming (BF) and statistical beamformed-channel-based robust power allocation (PA). For both architectures, tractable achievable rate lower bounds are derived, which explicitly reveal the impact of calibration aging on coherent combining, BF-gain uncertainty, and inter-user interference. Using these lower bounds as design metrics, we formulate an effective weighted sum-rate (EWSR) maximization problem over the data transmission interval, so that the resulting BF and PA designs can account for the temporal evolution of RCEs rather than a single calibrated instant. To efficiently solve the resulting problems, a Gauss–Legendre quadrature-based weighted minimum mean square error (WMMSE) optimization framework is developed, where both robust BF and PA are updated in an access point (AP)-block manner with closed-form solutions under per-AP power constraints. Simulation results demonstrate that: i) the proposed algorithms exhibit stable convergence; ii) the proposed robust BF and PA schemes achieve higher EWSR by explicitly accounting for calibration aging than their non-robust counterparts; and iii) robust BF achieves higher spectral efficiency (SE), whereas robust PA provides a more favorable tradeoff between SE and implementation cost in terms of computational complexity and fronthaul overhead.
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All authors Mingjun Sun, Xidong Mu, Shaochuan Wu, Chongjun Ouyang, Hyundong Shin

Signal Processing

Statistical Channel Model for FSO Systems Assisted by a UAV-Mounted IRS

Integrating optical intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) into aerial platforms, such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), has been proposed to relax the line-of-sight (LoS) constraint, extend coverage, and enhance deployment flexibility of free space optical (FSO) systems. However, misalignment errors induced by the UAV hovering, in both position and orientation, may degrade connectivity and impair the end-to-end channel quality. In this paper, we develop novel expressions for the electric fields incident on and reflected by an optical IRS, based on the Huygens-Fresnel principle. The resulting expressions are applicable for any combination of incident and reflected propagation directions. Building on this framework, we derive a closed-form statistical channel model that captures the geometric and misalignment losses of an FSO link assisted by a UAV-mounted IRS in the presence of random UAV fluctuations. In particular, we develop a statistical model for the beam misalignment at the receiver lens, assuming Gaussian fluctuations in both the UAV position and orientation. The proposed analytical model is validated through Monte Carlo (MC) simulations and is further used to provide practical design guidelines regarding the optimal placement of the UAV-mounted IRS for the minimization of the outage probability.
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All authors Ferdaous Tarhouni, Vasilis K. Papanikolaou, Laura Cottatellucci, Mohammad-Ali Khalighi, Robert Schober

Signal Processing

AI-Assisted ISAC Localization-as-a-Service for 6G UAV-IoT Networks

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) can enable sixth-generation (6G) unmanned aerial vehicle-assisted Internet of Things (UAV-IoT) networks to provide reliable Localization-as-a-Service (LaaS), but activating all aerial/terrestrial anchors and beams increases pilot overhead, energy use, and beam-training delay. This article proposes artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted ISAC resource selection for LaaS (AIRS-LaaS), an edge-intelligent framework that ranks candidate anchor–beam pairs using line-of-sight (LoS) likelihood, signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), sensing confidence, geometry, mobility risk, and resource cost. A lightweight selector then activates only a compact subset before localization. Simulations compare AIRS-LaaS with all-anchor, Fisher information matrix/Cramér–Rao lower bound (FIM/CRLB)-greedy, strongest-SINR, nearest-anchor, and random schemes under LoS/non-line-of-sight (NLoS) conditions and UAV mobility. Results show a balanced localization–communication–overhead tradeoff, while the discussion highlights standard-driven key performance indicators (KPIs), ISAC reporting, localization confidence, fallback operation, AI model management, and privacy-aware data exchange.
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Signal Processing

Covert Communication with Spatially Heterogeneous User Cooperation Against a Geometry-Aware Warden

This paper investigates covert communication in which a single covert user is assisted by multiple spatially distributed non-covert users against a geometry-aware warden. Unlike prior works based on receiver-centric activation, homogeneous channels, or averaged geometry, the proposed framework retains the individual user-to-warden large-scale fading coefficients in both cooperative user activation and the warden's detection analysis. Under the adopted analytical formulation for large-scale user deployments, we establish an on–off activation structure that balances the interference caused at Bob and the interference effectiveness at warden. Based on the resulting aggregate-interference statistics, we derive a closed-form approximation of the detection error probability, the detection threshold that minimizes it, and the minimum number of cooperative users required to satisfy the covert constraint. Then, we reduce the original high-dimensional power-control problem to a one-dimensional piecewise search and develop a low-complexity algorithm that avoids resolution-dependent grid search. The analysis shows that greater warden-side spatial dispersion can reduce the required cooperative users, whereas a larger average user-to-warden distance increases it. Numerical results validate the analysis and show that finite-sample detection approaches the large-sample benchmark, while imperfect user-to-Bob channel estimation mainly reduces the achievable rate through activation errors.
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Signal Processing

Digital Twin-Aided Prescreening for User Scheduling in MU-MIMO Downlink Systems

In dense deployments, massive multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) base stations can acquire instantaneous channel state information (CSI) for only a limited subset of users per scheduling interval, restricting multiuser diversity. We therefore propose Digital Twin User pre-Screening (DiTUS), a digital-twin (DT)-aided framework that identifies promising users before instantaneous CSI acquisition. DiTUS forms spatial covariances from DT-inferred departure angles and path powers. Optional Gaussian-process (GP) calibration mitigates path-power bias, while the dominant rank-r eigenspace of the aggregate covariance yields common reference beams. It prescreens the pool using DiTUS-P, a low-complexity projection-energy rule, or DiTUS-L, a greedy log-determinant rule that promotes spatial compatibility. A two-level protocol collects scalar beam reports from shortlisted users and requests r-dimensional effective-channel vectors only from the scheduled set. The framework also supports proportional-fair scheduling. At 15 dB under DT imperfections, simulations with 128 candidates, a 64-user effective-CSI acquisition budget, and a 64-user shortlist show that DiTUS-L achieves 35.06 +/- 0.49 bps/Hz versus 30.28 +/- 0.60 bps/Hz for semi-orthogonal user selection (SUS) with full-dimensional CSI from 64 users, demonstrating that DT-based prescreening preserves substantial multiuser-diversity gains by identifying strong, spatially compatible users before acquiring effective-channel vectors.
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All authors Namhyun Kim, Mahmoud Saad Abouamer, Jeonghun Park, Petar Popovski, Ahmed Alkhateeb

Signal Processing

Neural implants and human safety: single-fault detection for DC-coupled recording front ends

DC-coupled analogue front ends (AFEs) for neural implants provide a low-area solution. However, removing the coupling capacitor eliminates the intrinsic barrier that protects cortical tissue: a single-fault event, such as gate-oxide breakdown of a low-noise amplifier (LNA) input transistor, can open a direct DC path from the supply rail into the brain. On the stimulation side this hazard is well understood, and single-fault tolerance is enforced by a series DC-blocking capacitor; on the recording side, DC-coupled front ends discard the equivalent safeguard, yet their protection has gone almost unexamined. This paper presents a single-fault detection mechanism that monitors the LNA for the DC imbalance produced by such a failure and disables the amplifier before the resulting fault current can irreversibly damage tissue. The imbalance is encoded in the duty cycle of a current-starved relaxation oscillator and read out as a time-to-digital measurement. Designed in 65 nm, the mechanism resolves a worst-case fault of 6.4 nA across all corners within 0.81 ms - compliant with the ISO~14708-3 limit for an 8533 um2 electrode - opening a broader discussion of safety in DC-coupled recording.
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Monday 10 August

Signal Processing

Beyond the Raw Waveform: Fusing Visual Representations of EDA for Stress Detection

Electrodermal activity (EDA) is widely used in automatic stress detection, yet most pipelines treat it only as a raw one-dimensional waveform. This study examines whether complementary visual representations of EDA provide useful information for stress classification and whether their fusion im- proves recognition performance. Six image-based representations are derived from each EDA recording: an unwrapped short-time Fourier transform (STFT) phase spectrogram, an instantaneous-frequency map computed from that phase, a power spectral density (PSD) spectrogram, a continuous wavelet transform scalogram, a recurrence plot, and a rendered waveform trace. The selected representations are stacked as channels of a single multichannel input, together with the raw waveform, and processed by a shared asymmetric-attention architecture. Experiments on a 58-subject stress dataset show that representation fusion improves over the raw waveform. The best configuration, which combines five representations while excluding the unwrapped phase spectrogram, reaches 70.97% test accuracy, compared with 67.36% for the raw waveform. The single PSD spectrogram achieves 69.44%, remaining close to the best-fused configuration at a lower computational cost. The results show that alternative visual forms of the same EDA signal can provide useful inductive biases for stress detection, and that a compact selection of complementary representations can be more effective than the raw waveform alone.
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All authors Stefanos Gkikas, Thomas Kassiotis, Yang Guo, Guangliang Li, Eric Nichols, Houshyar Asadi, Nikolaos Smyrnis, Giorgos Giannakakis

Signal Processing

Achievable Accuracy and Cramer Rao Bounds for SSB Based LEO Positioning in NR NTN

Advanced Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks, such as Starlinks Mobile Satellite Service (MSS), will adopt the 5G New Radio (NR) Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) standard. This enables the use of ubiquitous Synchronization Signal Blocks (SSBs) for opportunistic receiver positioning based on pseudorange and Doppler measurements. In this work, we characterize the estimation theoretic limits of SSB-based positioning by deriving single SSB Cramer Rao lower bounds (CRLBs) for delay and carrier frequency observables associated with pseudorange and Doppler. These bounds are obtained using the full SSB time-frequency energy distribution and extended into a multi epoch, multi satellite Fisher information framework that jointly bounds stationary user position, clock bias, and clock drift. Each SSB contribution is weighted according to a range dependent CRLB determined by the received SNR, so the estimator and the bound share a common noise model. In simulation, the resulting bound closely matches achievable performance, and a physically weighted least squares estimator approaches the CRLB at realistic operating SNR. Using a Starlink based constellation, we analyze the operating SNR experienced by a ground user and demonstrate sub-meter positioning accuracy.
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Signal Processing

A JEPA-Based Field-Layer World Model for Bridging Channel Prediction and Estimation

Channel state information (CSI) acquisition, reconstruction, and prediction are fundamental yet costly tasks in modern MIMO-OFDM wireless systems. Direct coefficient-level prediction of raw CSI is fragile in realistic propagation environments, since small spatial perturbations, local scattering changes, and phase variations can cause large errors in the complex channel domain. However, the underlying wireless propagation field still contains stable and predictable structures that can be exploited across time, frequency, antenna, and carrier dimensions. Motivated by this observation, we propose a JEPA-based field-layer world model (FWM) that learns a shared latent propagation state from multi-resolution CSI observations across the considered carrier bands and predicts its task-relevant evolution in the latent domain. The proposed FWM maps multiple CSI observation resolutions to a shared latent propagation-field space through scale-specific tokenizer heads. A latent prediction backbone is then trained to infer masked or future field states, while an incremental multi-scale alignment strategy allows new observation scales to be incorporated without retraining the entire model from scratch. For downstream reconstruction, the predicted latent field is used as a structured prior and combined with sparse current pilots. Experiments on single-band and cross-band reconstruction demonstrate improved symbol detection and, more notably, substantial beamforming gains despite modest NMSE improvements, indicating that FWM captures task-relevant spatial propagation structure beyond coefficient-wise CSI fitting.
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All authors Yuzhi Yang, Brahim Mefgouda, Hang Zou, Lina Bariah, Anis Bara, Yuhuan Lu, Hao Zhang, MérouaneDebbah

Signal Processing

Transceiver Design for Cell-Free Unsourced Random Access

We propose a low-complexity, energy-efficient solution for cell-free unsourced random access (URA), in which multiple distributed access points are connected to a central processing unit via a fronthaul. Assuming that each user transmits a pilot sequence followed by a polar codeword whose symbols are placed to the data part of the frame according to an on-off pattern, we utilize iterative decoding, including orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP)-based pilot detection and channel estimation, symbol estimation using a linear minimum mean square error (MMSE) solution, symbol combining, single-user decoding, and successive interference cancellation (SIC). We also present finite blocklength (FBL) performance and detailed complexity analyses. Numerical results demonstrate that the FBL analysis properly characterizes system performance and that the proposed cell-free URA scheme offers superior performance compared to existing low-complexity schemes. Namely, it offers a superior performance of up to 4.5 dB and can accommodate up to 1800 active users.
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All authors Mert Ozates, Mohammad Kazemi, Eduard Jorswieck, Deniz Gündüz