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Monday 7 September

Signal Processing

Second-Order Fade Statistics in Underwater Optical Wireless Communications in Air-Bubble and Turbidity-Impaired Environments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2609.07128 · 7 Sep · 31 pages, 8 figures, 13 tables, including appendices. Accepted for publication in Automotive Innovation. Yingkai Yang and Ashton Yu Xuan Tan contributed equally. Corresponding author: Hong Wang. Data: https://doi.org/10.21227/jw72-m261 ; Code: https://github.com/SOTIF-AVLab/EEG2023

Signal Processing

Joint Communication Sensing Beamforming and Uplink Power Control for Network-Assisted Full-Duplex Cell-Free ISAC Systems

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

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

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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Sunday 6 September

Signal Processing

Outpainting: spatially extending aero-optic phase screens

Aero-optic effects distort light wave propagation near a high-speed aircraft, thereby degrading performance in airborne imaging and communication systems. Measuring aero-optic data through experiment is costly and the resulting data often has a limited spatial size. Further, alternative methods for simulating this data, including computational fluid dynamics and conventional phase screen generation algorithms (e.g., boiling flow), face drawbacks such as large computation time or inaccurate statistics. More recently, data-driven algorithms have been proposed that can synthesize data that matches relevant statistics of measured aero-optic data. However, these methods cannot spatially extend aero-optic data. In this paper, we introduce ReVAR-ext (Re-whitened Vector AutoRegression-extender), an algorithm that builds on an existing data-driven approach, ReVAR, to spatially extend measured aero-optic data (a process called outpainting) and match the spatial and temporal correlations of the measured data. ReVAR-ext generalizes the generation process of ReVAR by combining multiple sets of synthetic data with the input measured data. This approach generates multiple fixed-sized synthetic images, each of which overlaps with the input data, and then stitches them together. When paired with ReVAR, the ReVAR-ext algorithm can generate aero-optic data with arbitrary temporal duration and arbitrary spatial size. Our experiments show that extended data generated by ReVAR-ext closely matches the temporal power spectrum of two measured aero-optic data sets. Further, the extended data approximately matches the spatial autocorrelation, with reduced accuracy at large spatial lags and at vertical lags.
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All authors Jeffrey W. Utley, Gregery T. Buzzard, Charles A. Bouman, Matthew R. Kemnetz

Signal Processing

Tri-Hybrid Beamforming Design for DMA-Aided Secure ISAC Systems

This paper proposes a tri-hybrid beamforming scheme for secure integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) with a dynamic metasurface antenna (DMA) architecture, where the base station (BS) is capable of communicating with legitimate users and sensing the target. There is also an eavesdropper in the system intending to eavesdrop on the confidential information. The tri-hybrid beamforming design problem is formulated with the objective of maximizing the sensing signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) under the constraints of secrecy spectral efficiency (SSE), transmit power, and physical structure limitations. We first solve the problem and obtain the optimized fully-digital beamforming solution through successive convex approximation (SCA) and semidefinite relaxation (SDR) approaches. A triple alternating optimization scheme is then developed to iteratively optimize the digital, analog, and DMA beamformers, progressively approximating the fully-digital solution. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed secure tri-hybrid beamforming design for DMA-aided ISAC improves the sensing SNR by approximately 3 dB compared to a tri-hybrid beamforming scheme with a fixed DMA electromagnetic design.
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All authors Siyi Li, Zhuoming Li, Mohammadali Mohammadi, Jiajun He, Hien Quoc Ngo, Michail Matthaiou

Signal Processing

A GNN-Enhanced Reinforcement Learning Framework for Emergency Communications in ORAN-based Non-Terrestrial Networks

During disaster scenarios and periods of extreme data demand in next-generation wireless communications, conventional terrestrial networks (TNs) often become unreliable or fail entirely, leading to critical service disruptions. In such contexts, non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) emerge as a promising solution to ubiquitous and resilient connectivity. Furthermore, the open radio access network (ORAN) paradigm facilitates network disaggregation and flexible functional splitting among its key components, namely the central unit (CU), distributed unit (DU), and radio unit (RU), which can be deployed across heterogeneous NTN platforms according to service requirements. However, this flexibility introduces significant challenges in terms of network complexity and real-time control. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an intelligent ORAN-enabled NTN framework for emergency communication scenarios. The proposed system leverages graph neural networks (GNNs) to model the dynamic network topology and employs a reinforcement learning (RL)-based Q-learning algorithm, formulated as a Markov decision process (MDP), to enable adaptive and real-time network control. In this framework, network nodes are treated as states, and optimal decisions are learned based on system dynamics. The spatial distribution of user equipment (UE) is modeled using an inhomogeneous Poisson point process (IPPP) with a rejection sampling technique, capturing realistic user density variations. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed GNN-enhanced RL approach significantly improves network performance in terms of latency and service reliability, thereby enabling efficient and robust operation under emergency conditions.
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All authors Md. Thouhidur Rahman, Mustapha Benjillali, Halim Yanikomeroglu, Samir Saoudi

Signal Processing

Computation-Limited Signals in Practice: A Throughput Anomaly in Software-Defined O-RAN PHY Layers

We formalize a performance anomaly in software-based wireless physical-layer (PHY) implementations, a key enabling technology for Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) systems. For a fixed offered load, the number of PHY symbols required to transmit the load decreases as the nominal bit rate increases because each symbol conveys more bits. Shorter bursts, however, provide fewer opportunities to exploit pipelined modulation, transmission, and demodulation. Processing latency therefore represents a larger fraction of the total delivery time and may cause a nominally faster PHY configuration to deliver lower effective throughput. We call the operating condition in which computational latency governs effective throughput the computation-limited regime. Its most pronounced manifestation occurs when the offered load fits in a single symbol: intersymbol pipelining cannot be exploited, and modulation and demodulation latencies cannot be amortized. Their combined latency may exceed the symbol duration even when transmitter and receiver processing independently meet their real-time deadlines. Because PHY processing complexity often scales superlinearly with the resources allocated to each symbol, a higher-rate configuration may consequently deliver lower throughput than a slower one. We validate this anomaly using processing-latency measurements reported for established software-defined PHY implementations. The results show that PHY processing latency should be incorporated into link-adaptation algorithms for very-high-throughput services in future 6G wireless networks.
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All authors Gabriel Alessi Posonski, Saulo Queiroz, João P. Vilela, Benjamin Koon Kei Ng, Chan-Tong Lam, Edmundo Monteiro

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.IT

Constrained Capacity for Faster-than-Nyquist Signaling in Frequency-Selective Fading Channels

In this paper, we investigate the constrained capacity of discrete Fourier transform (DFT)-precoded faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) signaling over frequency-selective channels with finite-alphabet inputs. With a cyclic prefix (CP) and cyclic suffix (CS), the FTN and multipath induced intersymbol interference (ISI) is decomposed into parallel eigenchannels, whose gains are jointly determined by the folded FTN spectrum and the channel frequency response. Based on this decomposition, we derive the constrained capacity for finite-alphabet constellations and formulate a mismatched decoding achievable information rate for DFT-precoded FTN signaling without CP/CS, quantifying the finite-block rate loss caused by imperfect diagonalization. We find that even under mismatched decoding, FTN significantly improves upon Nyquist transmission.
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All authors Zichao Zhang, Melda Yuksel, Gokhan M. Guvensen, Halim Yanikomeroglu

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from math.ST

Global minimax risk and acquisition laws for heterogeneous information fusion

We prove an all-allocation global target-risk theorem for independent Gaussian sources that share a scalar nuisance and an unknown contact coordinate. For a fixed immersed nuisance curve with finitely many multiple fibres and pairwise nonparallel branch tangents, squared target risk is comparable to a primary estimation floor plus a target-gap-weighted Gaussian discrimination profile. Independent localization, finite branch selection and target-class refitting give an estimator attaining this comparison across every nonnegative integer allocation. A full-box specialization has positive-definite primary Fisher information everywhere and globally identifies its target, yet models with identical derivatives of every order along a critical hypersurface have different polynomial risk exponents. We construct a finite certified estimator and quantify the numerical accuracy needed to preserve rare branch decisions and acquisition windows. A polynomial tangency family both demonstrates the geometric boundary and quantifies its repair: known auxiliary gain, source contact order and target vanishing order determine a risk law uniform through zero gain. For a shared spherical direction, a separately proved composite-testing result transfers through an unknown contact coordinate using only counted observations. These theorems distinguish the resources needed for local estimation, discrimination between parameter regions and nuisance alignment, and yield acquisition thresholds under explicit scalar-observation costs.
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Signal Processing

Large-System Analysis of Sparse Bayesian Learning

Sparse Bayesian learning is widely used for sparse linear inverse problems, yet its large-system stationary behavior remains poorly understood because all variance hyperparameters are estimated from the same data. We study classical sparse Bayesian learning, formulated as evidence maximization (type-II maximum likelihood), for underdetermined linear models with sensing matrices having independent and identically distributed Gaussian entries, Gaussian measurement noise, and an unknown deterministic signal sequence. Hyperparameter reoptimization induces a nonvanishing feedback term: a typical coordinate obeys a reoptimization-corrected scalar Gaussian law whose signal coefficient is governed by the normalized adaptive response rather than the frozen resolvent trace. A one-coordinate leave-one-out construction gives an exact conditional Gaussian law, which is transferred to a selected full stationary branch without assuming asymptotic closeness of the reduced and full stationary vectors. Combining this law with the Karush–Kuhn–Tucker conditions of the evidence objective yields a generally set-valued scalar relation and three branchwise large-system consistency relations. If the model noise variance is jointly estimated by evidence maximization, interior joint stationarity yields an exact finite-dimensional equality between the normalized residual energy and normalized resolvent trace. When the limiting signal law has nonzero mass at zero, this identity further yields a parameter-free asymptotic chi-square null law. Under an additional differentiability condition on the selected scalar branch, the large-system characterization also gives a closed relation for the reconstruction error of the posterior mean. The analysis is stationary-point based and permits multiple stationary branches.
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Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.LG

Model-Adaptive and Risk-Constrained Frequency Hopping Against Predictive Jammers

Adaptive frequency hopping against predictive jamming must address both model uncertainty and policy exposure: the context-loss relationship may vary across operating regimes, while persistent hopping patterns may expose high-probability channels to attack. We propose D-PACT-AFH, a model-adaptive and risk-constrained adversarial contextual-bandit framework in which a Tsallis-FTRL master combines a global linear learner with a partitioned local learner and selects the model class online. D-PACT-Hit incorporates channel-wise marginal hit risk into model selection, while D-PACT-Safe applies a minimum-Kullback-Leibler projection to enforce a per-slot risk budget. We establish estimator validity under non-anticipating attacks, an oracle decomposition relative to the better fixed base, and an exact conditional-risk guarantee for the Safe projection. Experiments across diverse channel regimes and jammer types demonstrate effective model adaptation and a controllable goodput-risk tradeoff: D-PACT-AFH recovers 95.5% of the local learner's gain under observable switching while avoiding 77.7% of its degradation in a negative-control regime.
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Signal Processing · Cross-listed from quant-ph

Generation of entanglement statistics with a large-scale integrated photonic-electronic circuit

Continuous-variable quantum processors scale with the modes they can transform, and each transformation adds loss. We demonstrate optoelectronic quantum information processing, moving the mixing into radio-frequency electronics after homodyne detection. Squeezed vacuum falls on a large-scale integrated photonic-electronic circuit, a 32-channel coherent receiver array whose radio-frequency network mixes the analog photocurrents. A local-oscillator ramp reconstructs the two-mode covariance at the aperture, which is physical, and its partial transpose has smallest symplectic eigenvalue 0.99270, three standard deviations below the separability bound. Mode transformation becomes a circuit function whose scale follows integrated electronics. With electro-optic transducers in place of the photodiodes, the same receiver would transfer optical modes into superconducting circuits and back, toward a photonic-electronic quantum computer spanning the optical and microwave bands.
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Signal Processing

Active STAR-RIS-Aided RSMA IoT Systems: Performance Analysis, Model-Based and Data-Driven Resource Allocation Frameworks

STAR-RISs have emerged as a promising technology for achieving full-space signal coverage with low hardware complexity and energy consumption. In parallel, RSMA offers a flexible interference management mechanism that enhances spectral efficiency and user fairness. Integrating STAR-RIS with RSMA provides strong potential for robust and energy-efficient communications; however, the resulting double-fading cascaded channels and the inherent imbalance between near and far users pose reliability and fairness challenges. This study presents comprehensive information-theoretic and optimization frameworks for active STAR-RIS-assisted RSMA Internet-of-Things systems. Closed-form expressions for the OP and EC are derived under both the presence and absence of direct links. Based on these results, asymptotic OP and EC, diversity order, and array gain are analyzed to characterize system behavior. In addition, throughput-based and spectral-based energy efficiency metrics are investigated to quantify the tradeoffs between transmission performance and power consumption. To enhance user fairness, a fairness-oriented RA framework is developed to jointly optimize power allocation and rate-splitting coefficients using successive convex approximation and block coordinate descent techniques. To further improve scalability and real-time applicability, we introduce a data-driven RA framework based on DMNN, CMNN, and MXGB. This framework approximates the optimization-based solutions with substantially reduced computational complexity. Numerical results show that the proposed MXGB model achieves the shortest execution time while maintaining performance comparable to ground truth-based benchmarks. Extensive Monte Carlo simulations validate the analytical results and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed frameworks.
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Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.NI

The LQ Digital Mode Family: Protocol Architecture and Reference Specification for Weak-Signal Communications

This paper introduces LQ8, an open-source weak-signal digital mode for amateur radio that completes structured two-way contacts in 4 transmissions (60 s), achieving a 1.50x speedup over canonical 6-transmission exchanges (90 s) and 1.25x over 5-transmission RR73 exchanges (75 s) while preserving complete bidirectional exchange of Maidenhead grid locators, signal reports, and mutual acknowledgments. By replacing fixed-width message-type headers with variable-length prefix codes matched to physical-layer bit budgets, LQ8 packs the answering station's grid locator and measured signal report into a single 77-bit reply. In multi-station pileup operations, LQ8 confirms up to two answering stations simultaneously within a single-carrier 50.0 Hz transmission with a 0.0 dB RF power-splitting penalty, achieving a peak rate of 240 QSOs/h in continuous pileup (4x over single-carrier FT8; 480 QSOs/h dual-carrier) while retaining -21.0 dB SNR sensitivity. The protocol family also defines three extended profiles (LQ16, LQ4, and LQ2) tailored for extreme sensitivity, VHF/UHF contesting, and fast-burst channels.
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Signal Processing

Sparse Channel Acquisition in Aging Fluid Antenna Systems: A Reliability-Calibrated Posterior Reconstruction Approach

Fluid antenna systems (FASs) exploit port-domain diversity within a compact aperture, but their gain can be lost if the receiver has to scan too many ports before data transmission. This paper studies sparse channel acquisition for aging FAS receivers, where the available information has mixed reliability: current observations are fresh but sparse, whereas historical channel state information (CSI) is dense but stale due to Doppler-induced temporal decorrelation. We formulate the problem from a communication perspective by linking aperture-field reconstruction to port-selection rate, outage, probing budget, and online inference latency. We then cast the acquisition task as reliability-calibrated posterior reconstruction, in which the sparse current observations serve as hard measurement evidence and historical CSI is reused only as soft temporal side information. The resulting reliability-controlled conditional diffusion posterior (DCP) framework conditions the denoising process on the sparse current observations, the observation mask, and the historical CSI, and refines the reverse trajectory through observation consistency, mismatch-aware temporal gating, spatial trust weighting, progressive temporal activation, and warm initialization. Analysis shows how aging and reconstruction error induce rate distortion and rate regret. Simulations across probing budgets, signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), temporal correlations, observation patterns, ablation settings, and latency tests show consistent reconstruction gains with millisecond-level online inference latency, indicating that stale CSI can be beneficial when its strength, timing, and spatial support are explicitly controlled.
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All authors Xiaokai Song, Jie Tang, Tuo Wu, Geyang Xu, Zhongqing Wu, Baiyang Liu, Kin-Fai Tong, Naofal Al-Dhahir

Signal Processing

Reconfiguring Sparse Apertures: Partial-Mobility Planar FAS for 2-D DOA Estimation

Classical sparse arrays enlarge the sensing aperture under limited element and radio-frequency (RF) chain budgets, but their fixed geometries impose a persistent tradeoff between wide-sector identifiability and local angular resolution. This paper converts this static design into a two-state reconfigurable sparse aperture by allowing only part of a planar fluid antenna system (FAS) to move after an initial observation. A compact, Nyquist-spaced seed first provides an ambiguity-controlled acquisition geometry. The remaining fluid ports then move or switch to information-efficient refinement positions, and the measurements collected before and after reconfiguration are jointly processed. We formulate the receiver under fixed total numbers of ports and RF chains, a movement budget, and a common total-snapshot budget. A policy-level Fisher information matrix (FIM) identity accounts for the observation-dependent refinement geometry. For a single source, a relaxed planar D-optimal analysis gives the corner-favoring aperture law, while a finite-port certificate bounds the information retained under spacing, reachability, and partial-actuation constraints. For multiple sources, an aperture-and-conditioning surrogate generates feasible sparse layouts that are ranked and locally refined using the exact frame FIM with coarray, spacing, and movement regularization. Seed multiple signal classification (MUSIC) identifies a reliable angular basin, followed by joint concentrated-likelihood refinement over both states. Equal-budget simulations show that reconfiguring a sparse aperture converts available area and movement into lower angular error and retains much of the all-movable gain with fewer actuated ports. They also identify the operating boundary: if a full sparse aperture can remain permanently deployed, avoiding movement and snapshot splitting can be preferable.
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All authors Xiaokai Song, Tuo Wu, Jie Tang, Maged Elkashlan, K. C. Ho, Kin-Fai Tong

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.IT

A Graph Foundation Model for Large-Scale MIMO Detection

Large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) detection is fundamental to modern wireless networks but constrained by performance-complexity trade-offs. Existing detectors, whether classical or learning-based, often fall short in either scalability or generalizability across heterogeneous scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a wireless-native graph foundation model (GFM) tailored for large-scale MIMO detection. The proposed GFM employs a physics-informed hybrid architecture, integrating the local correlation extraction of message passing neural networks with the global attention of graph Transformers, encoding the physical interference patterns from the expectation propagation algorithm. Via extensive pre-training, this synergy enables the learning of a general-purpose detection mapping scalable across antenna dimensions and channel conditions. For rapid downstream deployment, parameter-efficient fine-tuning is leveraged to adapt the GFM to specific non-ideal system regimes with minimal overhead. To enhance inference efficiency, a mixture-of-experts mechanism is embedded at downstream deployment to dynamically activate only the necessary sub-modules. Evaluations show that the proposed GFM consistently outperforms classical detectors and advanced data-driven baselines in accuracy, configuration generality, and cross-scenario transferability across various challenging zero-shot and few-shot conditions.
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All authors Xingyu Zhou, Le Liang, Hao Ye, Jing Zhang, Chao-Kai Wen, Xiao Li, Shi Jin, Wei Zhang