Signal Processing
Second-Order Fade Statistics in Underwater Optical Wireless Communications in Air-Bubble and Turbidity-Impaired Environments
Pedro Salcedo-Serrano, Mohammad-Ali Khalighi, Rubén Boluda-Ruiz et al. (+2 more)
The propagation of underwater optical signals through air-bubble-impaired channels induces irradiance fluctuations and partial line-of-sight blockages that degrade the performance of underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC) systems. Although the first-order fading statistics of such channels have been extensively investigated, their second-order statistics, namely the level crossing rate (LCR) and average fade duration (AFD), remain rather unexplored. This paper presents a theoretical and experimental characterization of the LCR and AFD in bubble-impaired UOWC channels under different bubble sizes and water turbidity conditions. Two analytical approaches are developed based on Rice's formula and on the cumulative distribution function (CDF) together with the bivariate CDF of the sampled irradiance, and are validated experimentally. The results show that water turbidity has a negligible effect on fade statistics under small-bubble conditions. In contrast, for large bubbles, turbid water leads to shorter but more frequent fades than tap water, as particle-induced beam spreading reduces the likelihood of deep fades and prolonged blockage events. Finally, the derived second-order statistics are applied to evaluate the packet outage probability (POP) performance using a two-state Markov channel model, demonstrating that the higher fade rate in the turbid water case results in a larger POP despite the shorter fade durations.
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All authors Pedro Salcedo-Serrano, Mohammad-Ali Khalighi, Rubén Boluda-Ruiz, José María Garrido-Balsells, Antonio García-Zambrana
Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.IT
Exact Degrees of Freedom of Spatially Sparse MIMO Channels Without Prior CSI
Yifeng Xiong, Weijiang Zhao, Fan Liu et al. (+2 more)
We characterize the degree of freedom (DoF) of a point-to-point blockwise memoryless channel without prior channel state information (CSI), with a fixed number $K$ of propagation paths, where the transmitter (Tx) and the receiver (Rx) are equipped with nonuniform linear arrays (NULAs) of $N_t$ and $N_r$
antennas, respectively. The positions of array elements are fixed, known, pairwise distinct, and need not be equally spaced. The uniform linear array (ULA) is a special case. In each block of length $T$, the continuous angles of arrival (AoAs), angles of departure (AoDs), and independent complex Gaussian path gains are redrawn. Both Tx and Rx know the state distributions but are not given the current realizations before transmission. The receiver may estimate the channel from reference signals or decode without explicit channel estimation, with reference symbols counted in $T$ and their energy counted against the power constraint. Under the aforementioned model, we show that the DoF is $1-\frac{1}{T}$ for $K=1$, and $K(1-\frac{3}{2T})$ for $K \geq 2$, when $N_r\ge K+1$, $N_t\ge\max\{K,2\}$, and $T\ge K$. The analytical results are further demonstrated by their applications to the DoF tradeoff analysis in integrated sensing and communication (
ISAC). For more general array structures, an achievability result is established, while the converse remains open in general.
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All authors Yifeng Xiong, Weijiang Zhao, Fan Liu, Shi Jin, Jianhua Zhang
Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.NI
The OCUDU dApp Platform: An Open Runtime and E3 Interface for Real-Time AI-RAN
Timothy O'Shea, Matthew Pennybacker and Andriy Kharchenko
Machine learning has shown its largest gains in the band below 10 ms inside a 3GPP new
radio (NR) 5G distributed unit (DU): link adaptation, per-slot scheduling, channel estimation, and the receiver itself. No open platform has let independently built software run there. Prior dApp frameworks reached the band only as external observers of an export stream. This paper is a guided introduction to the OCUDU dApp platform, an open runtime and E3 interface under which signed AI-RAN applications execute inside a production DU under three timing contracts: resident on the GPU receive chain (Class A), inside the scheduler's 100 us admitted deadline (Class B), or as never-blocking observers whose results the scheduler consumes (Class C). The conventional path is never displaced, and every authority is typed, validated, and operator-bounded. The paper explains how the runtime, the embedded E3
agent, and the three public repositories fit together; shows a dApp's source, its signed package, and its lifecycle state machine; defines the contracts a module is written against; and shows how one management surface serves a Python script, an operator's console, and an LLM
agent. On a GB10 gNB with attached handsets, dApps of all three classes, including an out-of-tree neural equalizer, ran together on a live
cell without a single fallback, and equalizer variants were compared over the air by lifecycle operations alone. Every measured checkpoint is reported with its conditions and its gaps. Platform, SDK, and a zero-hardware quickstart are public under BSD-3-Clause-Clear as a preview release of the OCUDU AI-RAN Working Group 2, inviting feedback, new use cases, and independent vetting ahead of upstreaming into the OCUDU mainline.
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Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.NI
Real-Time dApps for AI-RAN: Measured Interface Requirements for Inline PHY and Slot-Level Control
Timothy O'Shea, Matthew Pennybacker and Andriy Kharchenko
Distributed applications (dApps) bring AI to the microsecond-to-millisecond band beside the 5G distributed unit (DU), but every public dApp framework realizes them the same way: an external process that receives an indication and returns a control message. That boundary is right for sensing and advisory workloads. It cannot express a neural receiver that must finish inside a slot, and it cannot hold a scheduling decision the MAC is waiting on. This paper asks what a dApp interface must deliver, in latency and bandwidth, for the AI-RAN use cases now filed under that name to be realized as dApps at all. It treats the coupling between a dApp and the DU as a design axis with two legitimate ends, a C ABI inside the DU process and a protocol-standard E3AP association over SCTP, and places the three OCUDU dApp classes on it. An audited corpus of 39 runtime AI-RAN use cases, sized by 5G NR timing, shows that more than half cannot cross the observer boundary: inline PHY work because an indication has no return path into the same slot, and bounded control because of the tail under load. Measuring the mechanisms each framework actually uses, on a quiet host and with a live
cell on the air, shows that every carrier meets a 100 us control deadline on an idle host and that only the in-process paths still do once the DU is running. The asynchronous use cases remain feasible at every position, so the protocol-standard end is kept as a first-class option; what in-process placement adds for them is accountable staleness and an observation-to-decision path with no message on it. These measurements derive the released ABI, a stream for inline work, a validated call for bounded control, and a choice of lease, supervised ring, or portable E3 client for observation, and four dApps of all three classes are validated together on one over-the-air
cell.
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Signal Processing
Pre-Whitening and BCJR Posterior Distillation for Bi-LSTM Detection in Faster-than-Nyquist Signaling
Nurettin Safak, Osman Tokluoglu and Enver Cavus
Recurrent detectors such as bidirectional long short-term
memory (Bi-LSTM) networks are low-complexity alternatives to the optimal Bahl-Cocke-Jelinek-Raviv (BCJR) detector for faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) signaling. Motivated by convolutional detectors that build the intersymbol interference (ISI) structure into their architecture, we ask whether processing nested ISI windows in separate recurrent branches improves the bit error rate (BER) of a Bi-LSTM. Across roughly 260 controlled trainings it does not: at a matched parameter budget and a matched readout, the multi-window architecture never significantly beats a plain Bi-LSTM. Nested windowing is an invertible rearrangement that adds no information, extra branches only add bottlenecks, and a
distillation diagnostic shows the network is already near optimal for its window. The limitation is therefore the observation model, not the architecture. Keeping the architecture fixed, we pre-whiten the input, restoring the conditional independence that colored matched-filter noise violates, and distill the BCJR soft posterior into the network. With 3.4% more parameters this reaches 1.05 times the BCJR BER at a compression factor of 0.8 and 1.89 times at 0.7, improving to 1.47 times when the whitened window is widened. The 23.7% BER reduction at 0.8 requires an ill-conditioned ISI
matrix but is not monotone in the conditioning, and it holds across five independent noise realizations and a symbol-level McNemar test.
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Signal Processing
Sub-6 GHz Over-the-Air AMC via Curriculum Fine-Tuned CNN-Transformers
Nurettin Safak, Muhammet Sefa Demirel, Alperen Marasli et al. (+3 more)
Automatic modulation classification (AMC) models are frequently trained and validated on synthetic or channel-cabled data, leaving open the question of how they behave once path loss and
antenna pointing error are introduced by a genuine free-space link. We report a curriculum fine-tuning study of a hybrid CNN-
Transformer AMC model. The general-purpose, all-32-class
dataset underlying the model was built entirely at 915 MHz, on a controlled, clock/PPS-synchronized
MIMO-expansion-cable link (not spatial-multiplexing transmission); all subsequent free-space, real-hardware experimentation - the sequential fine-tuning curriculum, matched-distance evaluation, and every reported over-the-air accuracy figure - was carried out at 4 GHz, across five directional-
antenna distances (25, 35, 50, 70, 75 cm) under fixed TX/RX gain. Three distances used near-ideal
antenna alignment (~99%) and two used a deliberately introduced partial misalignment (~85%), fine-tuned last in the curriculum. We report matched-distance test accuracy (91.8-93.7% across all five 4 GHz conditions) and confusion-
matrix analysis grounded in RF theory, and report honestly where our sequential fine-tuning order confounds cumulative link adaptation with
antenna alignment, rather than overstating what the data can support.
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All authors Nurettin Safak, Muhammet Sefa Demirel, Alperen Marasli, Taha Eren Atmaca, Durdu Can Yerdeyatar, Ozgun Ersoy
Signal Processing
Non-Uniform Antenna Array Design with Large Inter-Element Spacing for Massive MIMO
Lin Chen, Qu Luo, Orestis Christogeorgos et al. (+5 more)
In massive multiple-input multiple-output (
MIMO) systems, uniform arrays are typically configured with inter-element spacing no greater than half a wavelength to avoid grating lobes and spatial aliasing. However, many emerging fifth- and sixth-generation (5G/6G) applications rely on distributed arrays whose inter-element spacing far exceeds half a wavelength. In this paper, we propose an electromagnetic mutual-information-theoretic (EMIT)-guided non-uniform array (NUA) design with large inter-element spacing for massive
MIMO systems to address the grating lobes and spatial aliasing artifacts, and in the meantime, to reduce the hardware cost and energy consumption. We start by developing a multipath channel model for non-uniform planar arrays, and analyze the resulting channel characteristics in terms of inter-user interference, aperture efficiency, favorable propagation and channel capacity for the proposed typical NUA patterns. The model is further extended to wideband scenarios, where NUAs demonstrate improved robustness against beam squint due to their more compact element distribution. In addition, we introduce an EMIT approach to NUA design, which links the spatial sampling pattern of an
antenna array to the capacity of the resulting
MIMO channel. This gives rise to two complementary shaping strategies, amplitude tapering and
geometric shaping, and their joint optimization. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed NUAs significantly outperform conventional uniform arrays in aperture efficiency, channel orthogonality, beam squint mitigation, capacity, and error rate performance.
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All authors Lin Chen, Qu Luo, Orestis Christogeorgos, Pei Xiao, Gabriele Gradoni, Mohsen Khalily, Yang Hao, Hongbin Li
Signal Processing
Robust Multi-Source DoA Estimation under Weather-Induced Distortion: Structured Covariance Methods and Performance Bounds
Chenyang Yan, Geert Leus and Mats Bengtsson
Direction-of-arrival (DoA) estimation in adverse weather is degraded by propagation-induced phase and amplitude distortions that violate the covariance structure assumed by classical subspace methods. Motivated by a physics-based model of rain propagation, we develop a structured covariance formulation for rain-distorted arrays in both single- and multi-source scenarios. A key ingredient is to relax the physically parameterized distortion model and instead model the distortion covariance as an unknown real-valued Hermitian Toeplitz
matrix. For the single-source case, we derive a closed-form covariance-matching calibration
algorithm and provide structured-covariance and physics-informed Cramer-Rao lower bounds (CRLBs). For the multi-source case, we prove that the original per-source distortion model is non-identifiable and introduce a collinear approximation across angles. Under this approximation, we propose three multi-source calibration methods: alternating LASSO, joint LASSO, and a joint nuclear-norm formulation. Simulations under heavy rain demonstrate improved DoA accuracy and source resolvability compared with conventional baselines, highlighting the benefit of structured covariance modeling and calibration for safety-critical sensing.
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Signal Processing
Resolving the Discontinuity of Continuous-Time AFDM Waveforms
Yewen Cao and Yulin Shao
Continuous-time affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM) waveforms, constructed via frequency wrapping and phase correction, are known to be sample-wise equivalent to the widely adopted discrete AFDM framework. In this paper, we uncover a fundamental and previously overlooked flaw in this construction: its complex envelope is inherently discontinuous for generic chirp parameters. We show that these discontinuities are the direct cause of the high out-of-band emission (OOBE). To resolve this issue, we propose a fundamentally different continuous-time waveform, termed stepped frequency division multiplexing (SFDM). Unlike conventional approaches that allow continuous frequency variation, SFDM freezes the instantaneous frequency at the midpoint of the underlying chirp trajectory within each Nyquist sampling interval. This design yields a complex envelope that is strictly continuous over the entire symbol duration while preserving exact sample-wise equivalence with discrete AFDM. A unified spectral analysis reveals that the superior OOBE performance of SFDM stems from the absence of internal jump discontinuities, which otherwise dominate the far-out spectral roll-off. Numerical results confirm that SFDM consistently achieves significantly lower OOBE across a wide range of chirp rates.
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Signal Processing
Masking Radar Cognition under Adversarial Surveillance: A Distributional Privacy Framework
Sreedevi K, Nandhini K, Anup Aprem et al. (+1 more)
In this article, we propose an online electronic counter-countermeasure (ECCM) framework designed to conceal the strategic decision-making processes of a cognitive radar (CR) operating under
adversarial surveillance. We model the CR under two distinct decision paradigms: a static constrained utility-maximizing behavior and a dynamic expected utility-maximizing behavior. The radar's utility function is modeled via a von Mises–Fisher (vMF) distribution, with the distributional parameter constituting the private information to be protected from
adversarial inference. We adopt a distribution
privacy framework to conceal this private information and provide formal distribution
privacy guarantees for cognition masking. In this work, we develop cognition-hiding
algorithms for both static constrained utility maximization (WDPCH-SU), and dynamic expected utility maximization (WDPCH-DU). Through rigorous mathematical analysis, we show that both WDPCH-SU and WDPCH-DU satisfy $\epsilon$-distribution
privacy ($\epsilon$-DistP) against inference-based
adversarial attacks and present the
privacy–performance trade-off bounds, quantifying utility loss (in static setting) and expected utility deviation (in dynamic setting) as functions of $\epsilon$. Numerical results show that WDPCH-SU gives about 15% improvement in utility loss at maximum
privacy compared to the existing methodology while WDPCH-DU achieves a greater reduction in
adversarial Fisher information without requiring explicit Fisher information constraints, at a moderate, analytically bounded utility deviation. These results are highly promising in many 6G communication scenarios such as network slicing for automated driving and swarm
UAV coordination, where it is essential to keep the resource allocation policy robust against
privacy attacks.
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All authors Sreedevi K, Nandhini K, Anup Aprem, Deepthi P P
Signal Processing
Performance Analysis of LoRa and LR-FHSS in 3GPP LEO Satellite and HAPS Channel Scenarios for Remote Area IoT Coverage
Jean Michel de Souza Sant'Ana, Nurul Huda Mahmood and Vinicius Pozzobon Borin
In this paper, we analyze and compare the performance of LoRa and LR-FHSS in a remote area Internet-of-Things (IoT) connectivity scenario using a low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites and high-altitude platform station (HAPS)-mounted gateway. We conducted a link budget analysis to evaluate communication stability to assess the ability of the technologies to support the different distances and behaviors using a 3GPP channel model for non-terrestrial networks. Several parameters are considered, such as altitude, minimum elevation angle as well as the impact of different types of loss, such as shadow and fast fading, ionosphere scintillation loss, for example. Our findings highlight the performance gap between LR-FHSS and LoRa in terms of both connectivity. We also highlight how lower HAPS altitudes can benefit certain LoRa settings compared to LEO satellites. We show that HAPS can enable the use of lower LoRa spreading factors, which improves scalability and energy efficiency, while LR-FHSS and a higher spreading factor LoRa remain the solution for LEO satellites.
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Signal Processing
On the Removal of Artifacts of Known-Shape from Noisy Signals
Alessandro Schaer, Henrik Maurenbrecher, George Chatzipirpiridis et al. (+1 more)
A general method for the estimation and removal of quasi-periodic, artifact-like disturbances from single channel measurements is presented. The method is based on a wavelet template and data-driven template extraction from single channel, noisy signals. The method is tested on an example application in modern neurology. The method is compared to an autoencoder, trained and deployed under idealized conditions, thus acting as reference system. It is found that the proposed method yields signal estimates with median root mean squared error improvement of 33% compared to the baseline, which is 4% more than the autoencoder, while relying on fewer assumptions and parameters, and without the need for any training data.
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All authors Alessandro Schaer, Henrik Maurenbrecher, George Chatzipirpiridis, Hamdi Torun
Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.AI
EEG-Driven Decoding Framework for Passenger Hazard Perception in Highly Automated Vehicles
Yingkai Yang, Ashton Yu Xuan Tan, Bowen Li et al. (+10 more)
Reliable risk assessment remains a central challenge for Autonomous Vehicles (AVs). Despite advances in automation, passenger cognition provides a non-intrusive auxiliary signal that improves both objective and perceived safety without requiring active human intervention. We introduce an Electroencephalogram (
EEG)-based
Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) that decodes passenger neural responses for both Risk Prediction (RP) and Danger Identification (DI), explicitly modeling humans as passengers to match real-world AV use. To achieve this, we propose the Passenger Cognitive Model (PCM), Risk-aware Sequential Labeling (RSL), and the Passenger
EEG Decoding Strategy (PEDS), which integrates a 3D Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (3D-CRNN) model for joint
EEG decoding. Experimental results show that 3D-CRNN achieves a Balanced Accuracy (BA) of $95.3\% \pm 2.7\%$ in RP and improves single-subject DI from $80.9\% \pm 3.9\%$ to $85.0\% \pm 3.2\%$ with RSL. Event-wise analyses further show that 3D-CRNN consistently outperforms other models across different event types in RP and DI. In generalization experiments, 3D-CRNN achieves $77.0\% \pm 5.3\%$ BA in cross-session DI and $77.4\% \pm 1.1\%$ BA on seen subjects in cross-subject evaluation, while maintaining a $64.9\% \pm 8.5\%$ BA on unseen subjects, demonstrating promising generalizability and transferability across both intra-subject and inter-subject variability. These findings establish an Electroencephalogram (
EEG) decoding framework for AV passenger hazard perception and suggest that passenger cognitive signals can provide auxiliary supervision for future AV decision-making and Safety of the Intended Functionality (SOTIF) support.
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All authors Yingkai Yang, Ashton Yu Xuan Tan, Bowen Li, Xiaorong Gao, Sifa Zheng, Jianqiang Wang, Xinyu Gu, Yang Zhao, Yuxin Zhang, Sharon X. Huang, Tania Stathaki, Jun Li, Hong Wang
Signal Processing
Joint Communication Sensing Beamforming and Uplink Power Control for Network-Assisted Full-Duplex Cell-Free ISAC Systems
Reza Roshanghias, Seyed Mohammad Karbasi and Reza Saadat
In this paper, we investigate the problem of designing joint downlink (DL) communication beamformer and uplink (UL) power as well as sensing beamformer in a multi static integrated sensing and communication (
ISAC) enabled
cell free massive multiple input multiple output (CF mMIMO) system. To this goal, we first consider two priority based beamforming strategies. In the communication prioritized sensing design, we first design the communication beamformers and then the sensing beamformer is projected onto the nullspace of the effective communication channels to suppress its additional interference to both the DL UEs and UL receivers. In the sensing prioritized communication design, we select the sensing beamformer first according to the target direction, while the communication beamformers are subsequently optimized using a max min SINR formulation. In addition to these priority based designs, we formulate a sensing centric joint optimization problem to determine the optimal DL communication beamformers, sensing beamformer, and UL UE transmit powers. Our objective is to maximize the sensing SINR while guaranteeing individual DL and UL SINR requirements and satisfying the per AP and per UE transmitpower constraints. Since the resulting problem is non convex because of the coupled beamforming and UL power variables, the beamforming vectors are lifted into positive semidefinite transmit covariance
matrices and semidefinite relaxation (SDR) is applied.
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Signal Processing
Lightweight Generative Image Semantic Communication over Packet Erasure Channels
Yufei Bo, Haoshuo Zhang, Meixia Tao et al. (+2 more)
This paper addresses packet loss in semantic communication caused by network congestion or channel fluctuations. We propose LGSemCom, a lightweight generative packet-level joint source-channel coding (JSCC) framework for efficient and robust image transmission over packet erasure channels. Unlike conventional distortion-oriented recovery methods that yield blurry averages over erased regions, LGSemCom reformulates image recovery under packet erasures as a conditional generative task. By leveraging
adversarial learning, the proposed decoder synthesizes plausible details without increasing complexity during inference. A key innovation of our framework is an erasure-aware weighting (EAW) strategy, which prioritizes generation in erased regions while preserving pixel fidelity in correctly received areas. To ensure computational efficiency, LGSemCom employs a fully convolutional codec based on efficient long-range
attention blocks (ELABs) that capture global semantic dependencies with low complexity. Extensive experiments show that LGSemCom achieves superior perceptual reconstruction quality compared with existing
benchmarks under severe packet loss, while achieving an order of magnitude faster inference. These attributes make LGSemCom highly suitable for latency-sensitive applications on resource-constrained edge devices.
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All authors Yufei Bo, Haoshuo Zhang, Meixia Tao, Jing He, Xinming Huang
Signal Processing
Networked Embodied Communication: From Collective Distinguishability to Communication Reliability
Yewen Cao and Yulin Shao
Embodied
agents need to convey information to surrounding infrastructure, but their active communication interfaces may be unavailable, constrained, or intentionally inactive. Their ability to manipulate physical states offers a complementary path: messages can be encoded in deliberately selected configurations and recovered through infrastructure sensing. This principle underlies embodied communication. Yet physical differences do not guarantee distinguishable messages: a single sensing viewpoint may leave ambiguities that repeated sensing cannot resolve. This paper develops networked embodied communication, where distributed access points (APs) jointly observe message-bearing scatterer positions under fixed illumination. Under a correlated Gaussian sensing model, we characterize the additional distinguishability supplied by receive APs, establish exact redundancy conditions, and reveal how distinctions absent from individual observations can emerge through cross-AP statistical relationships. We then establish the exact asymptotic optimal maximum-error behavior of a finite alphabet under repeated independent sensing. The largest group of indistinguishable messages determines the error floor; once all messages are distinguishable, the minimum pairwise Chernoff information determines the error exponent. For a given alphabet, receiver cooperation can therefore eliminate an error floor that repetition at any individual AP cannot overcome. Building on these results, we derive finite-budget reliability conditions and jointly design the receive AP set and message-bearing positions. Numerical results show that the proposed search closely approaches exact
benchmarks on reduced instances with substantially fewer candidate evaluations than exhaustive enumeration, while receiver cooperation reduces the sensing intervals needed to guarantee reliable decoding.
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