Signal Processing
An Implant-to-Wearable IR-UWB Transmitter-Receiver Architecture and Layered Protocol for High-Density Brain-Computer Interfaces
G. D. Su and Y. Mo
High-rate neural telemetry requires an implant-towearable link whose
circuit partition, waveform mapping, packet processing, and failure semantics are mutually consistent. This paper specifies a chip-oriented, one-way impulse-
radio ultrawideband (IR-UWB) uplink comprising an implanted packet engine and free-running transmitter, a tissue-proxy channel, and a wearable mixed-signal receiver and digital baseband.
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Signal Processing
Denoising Rather Than Gap Filling: Missing-Data Handling in Sparse Outdoor BLE Positioning
Yu Sun, Zhiyi Zhu, Patrick Finnerty et al. (+3 more)
Received signal strength indicator (RSSI) positioning outdoors has one to two orders of magnitude fewer anchors than the indoor systems its methods come from. In the ten-day cattle-tracking deployment reported here, four gateways cover $4{,}302\,\mathrm{m}^2$, or $0.93$ anchors per $1000\,\mathrm{m}^2$. An animal is heard by $0.99$ gateways per second on average, so the observation vector for a given second is almost never complete. How the gaps are filled is therefore a first-order design choice, not a preprocessing detail. Filling at all is worth $8.1\,\mathrm{m}$, $96\%$ of the improvement the hold-length setting can deliver and a $29\%$ error reduction. How long a value is then held is worth the remaining $4\%$, from four seconds to unbounded. Once a value is available, the gain comes from removing noise rather than rebuilding the lost sample: a filtered channel estimate improves on a held raw sample, whereas filling backwards from future samples makes it worse. As that mechanism predicts, smoothing strength has a real interior optimum that is costly to miss in either direction. A smoother allowed to read the future gains only $0.55\,\mathrm{m}$, one fifteenth of what filling is worth, which bounds what any offline method can add. Three method families do not apply here for structural reasons rather than poor performance: two or more of the four channels are live in only $25\%$ of seconds, so the cross-channel structure generative imputation must learn is largely unobserved.
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All authors Yu Sun, Zhiyi Zhu, Patrick Finnerty, Takenao Ohkawa, Kenji Oyama, Chikara Ohta
Signal Processing
Toward Security-Resilient Cell-Free Massive MIMO: A Multi-Stage Framework
Junbin Yu, Tianyu Lu, Mohammadali Mohammadi et al. (+1 more)
This paper develops a robust security-resilient transmission framework for
cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (CF-mMIMO) systems under active pilot spoofing attacks. As a baseline, system performance is characterized under attack-free conditions to establish the target user's pre-attack service level. Upon attack detection, the system enters an absorption phase, during which, power allocation is adaptively adjusted across a limited subset of access points (APs) using contaminated channel state information (CSI). This phase quickly compensates for performance degradation while maintaining low operational overhead. Once the secrecy spectral efficiency (SSE) recovers to a prescribed loss level, the resulting power allocation initializes the restoration phase. Here, the transmit powers of all APs are jointly optimized, and a protective partial zero-forcing (PPZF) strategy further improves secrecy. In parallel, artificial noise (AN) is incorporated under a worst-case eavesdropping scenario accounting for large-scale fading uncertainty. The resulting stage-dependent non-convex problems are formulated within a unified framework and solved using successive convex approximation (SCA). Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves an effective time-quality tradeoff while maintaining the highest recovered secrecy; in a representative setup, it achieves gains of up to 3.6%, 15.7%, and 56% over the respective baseline schemes, with similar improvements under eavesdropper's channel uncertainty.
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All authors Junbin Yu, Tianyu Lu, Mohammadali Mohammadi, Michail Matthaiou
Signal Processing · Cross-listed from q-bio.NC
Slow-Fast Brain-Computer Interfaces: Preventing Neuroadaptive Overfitting in AI-Mediated Neural Interfaces
Aarthy Nagarajan
Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming
brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) from task-specific neural decoders into adaptive systems that complete
language, smooth movement, regulate rehabilitation support and adjust stimulation. These capabilities can increase speed, fluency, usability and clinical reach, yet conventional performance metrics may overlook losses in intent fidelity, authorship, agency, therapeutic challenge and durable clinical benefit. I define neuroadaptive overfitting as a closed-loop failure mode in which an AI-mediated BCI becomes over-optimized to short-term proxies of success, including reduced effort, rapid acceptance, lower workload or smooth task completion, while drifting from the user's durable goals. I then propose Slow-Fast BCI, a framework for pacing AI assistance according to decoder evidence, uncertainty, contextual and clinical stakes, fatigue, and user- or clinician-defined goals. The framework distinguishes fast assistance when intent is clear and stakes are low, guarded assistance under uncertainty and slow assistance when misalignment could compromise safety, agency, authorship, motor learning or therapeutic value. Across communication, motor-control, neurorehabilitation and closed-loop neuromodulation applications, I outline corresponding safeguards and evaluation measures. This Perspective argues that AI-mediated BCIs should be evaluated not only by decoding accuracy and task performance, but also by how AI assistance is deployed: when systems act autonomously, seek confirmation, preserve user effort or return control to the user.
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Signal Processing
Trajectory Analysis of ECG Motif Dynamics in the Run-up to Sudden Cardiac Arrest
Nivedita Bijlani and Mauricio Villarroel
Early warning signatures of sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) remain poorly characterised in long-duration ECG. We quantified pre-event changes in ECG morphology using a motif-based trajectory framework. Holter ECGs from 23 patients with annotated SCA were analysed over non-overlapping 10 s windows. Window-level motifs were extracted to quantify trajectories of instability, consistency, dispersion, heterogeneity, and personalised-baseline distance. Each trajectory was normalised to an early baseline using z-scores and aligned to ventricular fibrillation (VF) onset. Abnormal burden was defined as the proportion of windows with z>=3 within a rolling 10-minute window. Median sustained abnormal burden onset occurred 5.8-8.4 h before VF across morphological metrics. Motif dispersion showed the most consistent long-horizon detection, with sustained abnormal burden >=1 h before VF in 100% of patients and >=2 h in 89%. Motif consistency showed the strongest late-stage change, with 70% median abnormal burden in the final 10 min. Peak morphological deviation occurred ~2 h prior to VF. Our label-free framework transforms longitudinal ECG analysis from an event detection approach towards a continuous characterisation of evolving cardiac change, enabling a personalised early warning of SCA, well suited to long-duration wearable ECG monitoring.
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Signal Processing
Signal-Aware Cayley Completion: Choosing Between an Exact and a Lossy Abelian Host
Rigobert Fokam Soup and Laurent Bitjoka
Group-
embedding graph signal processing buys exact
Fourier analysis either by enlarging the domain until a graph embeds isometrically into an abelian Cayley graph, or by perturbing the graph until it is one. We give a linear-time procedure that chooses between the two, and study the criterion governing the lossy branch. We prove that the perturbation of the Dirichlet form is exactly the signed sum of the edited-edge energies, and is bounded in modulus by their total, into which the combinatorial cost of the completion does not enter. We confirm experimentally that this energy predicts signal fidelity strongly though not strictly monotonically (Spearman rho = -0.79 on an instance where the completion, and hence the cost, is held fixed), while the cost itself carries no information about it. Selecting among completions of identical cost by this energy recovers 61 percent of the available performance gap on the exhaustive range, on a sample too small to establish that the effect persists beyond eight vertices. On real payment data the router takes the exact branch everywhere; on real anti-money-laundering data the completion invariant is a re-encoding of maximum degree and is not distinguishable from it, and the linear-time bound it rivals is shown to have a blind spot on near-complete graphs.
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Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.NI
The Role of Collective Perception and 5G NR-V2X Sidelink in Road Safety
Vittorio Todisco, Mattia Andreani, Maria Luisa Merani et al. (+1 more)
Vehicles and roadside infrastructure are increasingly equipped with sensors capable of perceiving their surroundings. Sharing this information through vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications is a key enabler of Day-2 applications and is supported by the ETSI collective perception service (CPS). While CPS is expected to play a fundamental role in future intelligent transportation systems, its operation may significantly increase channel load, posing challenges in terms of
radio resource utilization, communication reliability, and information management. This paper reviews the current status of CPS standardization and investigates its impact in dense deployment scenarios where connected vehicles communicate through fifth-generation (5G) New
Radio-V2X (NR-V2X) sidelink (SL) communications. The main contribution is a realistic evaluation of communication reliability, latency, channel occupancy, and information usefulness under different object-selection strategies for collective perception messages. The analysis is conducted through a network-level simulation framework integrating empirical object traces derived from real-world
datasets, thereby avoiding the limitations of synthetic traffic models. Results show that perception message generation and
radio access mechanisms are tightly coupled and should be jointly designed to maximize the benefits of collective perception services.
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All authors Vittorio Todisco, Mattia Andreani, Maria Luisa Merani, Alessandro Bazzi
Signal Processing
Satellite Swarms for Direct-to-Cell Networks: A Distribution-Performance Trade-off Analysis
Xavier Artiga, Marius Caus, Ana I. Pérez-Neira et al. (+2 more)
This work investigates 2D distributed satellite swarm configurations for direct-to-
cell (D2C) applications. Unlike previous studies, which primarily considered swarms as deployment alternatives to monolithic arrays, this paper focuses on exploiting the increased spatial resolution enabled by large distributed apertures. Simulation results show that, for the considered scenarios, increasing the level of
antenna distribution across satellite platforms enlarges the effective aperture and improves the system sum rate under ideal operating conditions. While gains are moderate for uniformly distributed users, they become particularly pronounced in scenarios including hotspot with high user densities. The results further show that user scheduling strategies do not invalidate the superiority of highly distributed configurations, as these architectures provide a more balanced rate distribution across the coverage area, including hotspot regions. In addition, the paper analyzes several key implementation challenges associated with large distributed swarms, including errors in inter-satellite relative positioning, synchronization impairments, and limited beamforming and user-position update rates. Although within the range of swarm configurations and scenarios considered in this work, performance gains continue to increase with aperture size, these practical constraints may restrict swarm sizes in the medium term. Nevertheless, the observed performance gains strongly motivate further research into scalable synchronization, positioning and data distribution techniques for future large-scale satellite swarms.
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All authors Xavier Artiga, Marius Caus, Ana I. Pérez-Neira, Yerassyl Akhmetkaziyev, Malte Schellmann
Signal Processing
Why Is Cubic-Phase Airy Beamforming Sufficient for Blockage Recovery?
Yi Wang and Linglong Dai
Blockage is a critical challenge for near-field communications, where reliable transmission depends heavily on the line-of-sight (LoS) path and can suffer severe power degradation when that path is obstructed. Near-field Airy beams offer a promising solution for blockage mitigation by forming curved trajectories that guide energy around obstacles, and can be practically generated with phased arrays by imposing a cubic source phase. However, trajectory-based interpretations explain how Airy beams propagate, but not why cubic-phase Airy beamforming is sufficient for blockage recovery or how much received-power gain the cubic term itself contributes. To answer these questions, we identify the blockage-induced phase mismatch relative to conventional near-field focusing and quantify how successive phase orders compensate it. The resulting analysis reveals that the linear and quadratic degrees of freedom, originally used to compensate the free-space
geometric phase, can be reoptimized under blockage to provide resteering and refocusing, respectively. The quadratic term can compensate the dominant quadratic component of the additional mismatch, while the Airy cubic provides the first independent correction to the remaining non-quadratic mismatch. Simulations show that linear and quadratic compensation recover most of the available gain. The Airy cubic adds only $0.1433$ dB on average, yet enables the cubic-phase family to attain $99.77\%$ of the phase-only upper bound. Residual-phase analysis further determines when the remaining higher-order components are negligible within a prescribed received-power tolerance. These results explain why cubic-phase Airy beamforming is sufficient: lower-order phase terms provide most of the recovery, while the cubic term closes nearly all of the remaining gap.
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Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.AI
Analog-DB: An Agent-First Analog Integrated Circuit Database, From Blocks to Systems
Danial Noori Zadeh and Mohamed B. Elamien
Sharing analog integrated
circuit designs remains difficult: foundry non-disclosure agreements restrict the process details a design depends on, and the testbenches behind published results are rarely released. We present analog-db, an open-source, versioned database built on a shareable design representation. A domain-specific
language captures each design as a process-neutral
topology, reusable testbenches, and a machine-readable datasheet under one schema, so a design is shared in full and re-simulates on the process kits it is bound to. A parameterization scheme exposes functional sub-blocks and device sizes as named parameters that carry their matching constraints, making
circuits composable and retargetable; a schema-governed contract and queryable catalog let AI design
agents discover and reuse them directly. Across the regulator corpus, all 23
circuit-kit bindings on three open kits meet their own recorded specification bands (typical corner, matched devices, no layout) and 10 of 23 meet a common class band. Seventeen of the 23 imported sizings failed their testbenches and closed under a gm/ID sizing loop driven by the annotated sub-block roles, typically within one to three iterations. In a supervised case study, a coding
agent working from the released artifacts sized the op-amp cores of a chopper instrumentation amplifier on an open 130nm kit, locating four hand-entry defects and a missing common-mode feedback loop that the sizing-only baseline did not repair. The database holds 68
circuits across sixteen classes, verifiable at schematic level under a tiered harness and tracked on a power/performance scoreboard, released at https://github.com/MacAnalog/spicexplorer-release.
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Signal Processing
Joint PAPR and OOBE Reduction for AFDM via Chirp Parameter Tuning
Vincent Savaux, Hyeon Seok Rou, Zeping Sui et al. (+2 more)
This paper addresses the joint reduction of the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) and out-of-band emissions (OOBE) in affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM) systems by selecting the pre-chirp parameter c2. While existing approaches typically optimize either PAPR or OOBE independently, the proposed method jointly considers both metrics. To this end, a weighted cost function combining PAPR and OOBE is introduced to evaluate the trade-off between the two objectives. A pre-chirp selection scheme, inspired by the selected mapping (SLM) technique, is then employed to identify the optimal c2 value from a finite set of candidates, yielding a Pareto-optimal operating point within a discrete set. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach simultaneously reduces both PAPR and OOBE compared with conventional AFDM. Moreover, its performance remains close to that of methods specifically optimized for a single objective, with only about a 1 dB degradation in PAPR reduction and a 2-3 dB degradation in OOBE suppression.
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All authors Vincent Savaux, Hyeon Seok Rou, Zeping Sui, Giuseppe Thadeu Freitas de Abreu, Zilong Liu
Signal Processing
Freshness-Aware Constrained Sensing-Aided Beam Prediction with Knowledge Distillation
Abolfazl Zakeri, Nhan Thanh Nguyen, Ahmed Alkhateeb et al. (+1 more)
Beam prediction leveraging environmental data reduces over-the-air beam training overhead. Existing frameworks, however, assume continuous access to fresh sensory data, an assumption that breaks down under sensing budget constraints or sensor failures. To make this more practical, this paper proposes a sensing-aided beam prediction framework that operates under an average sensing rate constraint. We incorporate the age of information (AoI) directly into the beam prediction pipeline as a synthetic input modality: the age of the most recently captured data is encoded and fused with visual features through a gating mechanism. This provides the predictor with explicit context information about input sensory data reliability. We formalize and examine three fixed sampling policies, accumulated, uniform, and randomized, under the average sensing budget. We further develop a knowledge
distillation (KD) framework that operates as a robustness regularizer rather than a pure model compression method. In particular, the high-capacity teacher is trained unconstrained on fully sampled data, and its representational knowledge is transferred to a compact student deployed under the sensing budget. We conduct numerical experiments on the DeepSense 6G data set. The results show that AoI fusion nearly doubles top-1 accuracy at strict sensing budgets, and age-aware models achieve near-optimal top-3 accuracy with only 20% of the data. Furthermore, we find that the teacher training regime is a more consequential design choice than the
distillation loss function.
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All authors Abolfazl Zakeri, Nhan Thanh Nguyen, Ahmed Alkhateeb, Markku Juntti
Signal Processing
How Much Training is Needed with a Digital Twin?
Ahmad Bazzi and Marwa Chafii
The following paper addresses how much pilot training is needed when a digital twin (DT) of the wireless
radio channel is available to aid a wireless communication system with a channel estimation task. The DT of a wireless channel is widely expected to reduce the pilot overhead of channel estimation, following the informal rule that “the more accurate the twin, the fewer pilots are needed.” This trade-off, however, has only ever been demonstrated empirically and never quantified. We close this gap by treating the DT as a complementary measurement of the channel that the receiver fuses with its pilot observations in the physical world. Consequently, fusing the physical and digital worlds through the best linear unbiased
estimator, we derive a DT-aided Cramér-Rao bound, and from it a pilot-equivalence law that converts DT fidelity into an equivalent number of training symbols. For a biased twin unknown to the
estimator, we obtain the exact mismatch threshold beyond which trusting the DT is worse than ignoring it. We quantify how much training is needed with the DT to attain a desired mean square error on channel estimation. Particular cases are discussed to tell when training in the physical world can be completely bypassed. We finally translate these results into a block-fading achievable rate whose optimal training length is the unique root of a single equation, and identify the DT fidelity above which pilot training can be dispensed with altogether. Extensive numerical results corroborate closed-form expression and reveal that the value of a DT is largest at finite signal-to-noise ratio and vanishes in both the low- and high-SNR limits.
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Signal Processing
32-point DFT Approximations Based on Minimal Frobenius Error and DFT Symmetries
L. Andrade-Silva, W. A. S. Aleixo and R. J. Cintra
This work introduces low-complexity, multiplierless approximations for the 32-point discrete
Fourier transform. The proposed methods are obtained by minimizing the Frobenius error compared against the DFT
matrix over a set of trivial multipliers. A row-wise,
symmetry-constrained parameterization is employed to reduce the search space size, rendering the task computationally tractable. The resulting approximations could outperform the reference method in the literature according to energy-based error measurements. A sparse
matrix factorization is provided for efficient computation; the arithmetic costs are 152 real additions and 34 bit-shifts only.
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Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.IT
Generalized Tan-Arlery-Rabaste-Lehmann-Ovarlez Lower Bound on Ambiguity Function of a Set of Sequences With Mismatched Filters
Shibsankar Das
In this paper, a lower bound on the maximum ambiguity function (AF) sidelobes of a set of unimodular sequences is formulated for the desired low-ambiguity-zone (LAZ). Our main idea is to introduce a set of mismatched filters associated to a set of unimodular sequences and two weight vectors for the delay and Doppler shifts, respectively. The length of mismatched filter maybe different to the length of unimodular sequence. The proposed lower bound on the maximum AF sidelobes for the desired LAZ can be treated as an extension of Tan-Arlery-Rabaste-Lehmann-Ovarlez lower bound, published in 2020, which dealt with the conventional correlation of sequences.
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Signal Processing
OTFS Channel Estimation Utilizing Sparse Bayesian Generative Modelling
Louis Anseaume, Benedikt Böck, Franz Weißer et al. (+1 more)
One of the key challenges of future wireless communication systems is ensuring reliability in high-speed mobile scenarios, where accurate recovery of channel state information (CSI) is essential. Many recent studies have concluded that orthogonal time-frequency space (OTFS) modulation is a promising technology for addressing this challenge. Additionally, machine learning (ML)-based methods have the potential to improve channel estimation performance by leveraging ambient information more effectively than classical estimation techniques. This paper particularly addresses channel estimation for OTFS by employing a compressive sensing (CS)-based sparse
Bayesian generative model (SBGM), namely the recently introduced compressive sensing Gaussian mixture model (CSGMM). We show that our proposed approach yields significant improvement in normalized mean squared error (NMSE) over the next-best-performing baseline. We additionally provide insights into the theoretical potential of the model to optimally approximate complex channel distributions with arbitrary precision within the Doppler-delay (DD) domain. To summarize, this work establishes the OTFS-CSGMM framework as a promising solution for high mobility wireless channel estimation.
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All authors Louis Anseaume, Benedikt Böck, Franz Weißer, Wolfgang Utschick
Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.AI
Space Generative AI with Solar Energy Harvesting
Jierui Zhang, Jianhao Huang, Zhanwei Wang et al. (+1 more)
Satellites are emerging as promising platforms to extend generative artificial intelligence (AI) services to remote areas lacking terrestrial infrastructure. However, deploying space generative AI is fundamentally constrained by the limited, time-varying onboard energy supplied by solar energy harvesting (EH). This paper presents a framework for solar-powered space generative AI in which a satellite receives a user
prompt, executes a
diffusion-based image-generation model, and downlinks the compressed result within a strict time window. We identify the fundamental computation–communication (C$^2$) trade-offs governed by the shared harvested-energy budgets. Specifically, increasing the number of generation steps improves intrinsic image quality but depletes energy and time available for downlink transmission, whereas prioritizing communication guarantees reliable delivery but sacrifices semantic quality. To balance these trade-offs and maximize end-to-end (E2E) generative performance, we exploit the predictable solar-EH dynamics induced by deterministic orbital motion and develop a joint C$^2$ resource-optimization framework using a tractable two-step approach. First, we characterize the maximum downlink throughput for a fixed generation depth under continuous solar EH. This establishes a separation principle that decouples waiting-time selection from optimal transmit-power control. Next, we formulate a joint C$^2$ utility-maximization problem and derive a closed-form, low-complexity step-selection policy in the dominant constant-power regime. Extensive experiments under realistic orbital dynamics demonstrate that the proposed policy dynamically balances generation quality and transmission reliability. This yields significant E2E performance gains over static computation- and communication-centric baselines across diverse solar-EH states.
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All authors Jierui Zhang, Jianhao Huang, Zhanwei Wang, Kaibin Huang