Ning Ge

• Ph.D
• Professor at Tsinghua University

Motion in-betweening that aims to generate motion transitions between known keyframes plays a significant role in the 3D character animation industry. However, generating long-term transitions is highly challenging due to the non-stationary nature and considerable spatio-temporal uncertainty of motions. Leading transformer-based methods operate at...

The future sixth-generation (6G) networks are envisioned to support machines and robots besides human beings. In order to efficiently support machines and robots working in remote and post-disaster areas, satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be utilized. In this article, we investigate how satellite-UAV networks can serve robots for t...

To accommodate the evolving demands of unmanned operations, the future sixth-generation (6G) network will support not only communication links but also sensing-communication-computing-control ($\mathbf{SC}^3$) loops. In each $\mathbf{SC}^3$ cycle, the sensor uploads sensing data to the computing center, and the computing center calculates the contr...

Rapid advancements in field robots have brought a new kind of cyber physical system (CPS)--unmanned robotic system--under the spotlight. In the upcoming sixth-generation (6G) era, these systems hold great potential to replace humans in hazardous tasks. This paper investigates an unmanned robotic system comprising a multi-functional unmanned aerial...

In unmanned space exploration, the cooperation among space robots requires advanced communication techniques. In this paper, we propose a communication optimization scheme for a specific cooperation system named the “mother-daughter system”. In this setup, the mother spacecraft orbits the planet, while daughter probes are distributed across the pla...

The upcoming sixth generation (6G) wireless communication network is envisioned to cover space, air, and maritime areas, in addition to urban-centered terrestrial coverage by the fifth generation (5G) network, to support intelligent Internet of Things (IoT). Towards this end, we investigate structured integration of satellites, unmanned aerial vehi...

Quick response to disasters is crucial for saving lives and reducing loss. This requires low-latency uploading of situation information to the remote command center. Since terrestrial infrastructures are often damaged in disaster areas, non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) are preferable to provide network coverage, and mobile edge computing (MEC) could...

Non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) using flying objects such as satellites play key roles in the next-generation wireless system (6 G). The NTN links with long propagation delay and random packet losses pose a great challenge to the performance of Transport Control Protocol (TCP), which many Internet applications rely on. Performance enhancing proxy (...

Malicious traffic has posed a significant threat to current 5G networks. In the upcoming 6G era, with the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), defending against malicious traffic has become even more challenging due to the diverse nature and widespread distribution of IoT devices. This paper presents a new distributed framework for de...

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks pose a significant threat to the Internet of Vehicles, causing delays in driving operations and risking personal safety. With the emerging of Space-Air-Ground Integrated Sixth-Generation (6G) networks, DDoS defense faces new challenges, especially in open and complex Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) connectio...

The sixth-generation (6G) network is envisioned to shift its focus from the service requirements of human beings to those of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. Satellite communications are indispensable in 6G to support IoT devices operating in rural or disaster areas. However, satellite networks face the inherent challenges of low data rate and lar...

The sixth-generation (6G) network is expected to provide both communication and sensing (C&S) services. However, spectrum scarcity poses a major challenge to the harmonious coexistence of C&S systems. Without effective cooperation, the interference resulting from spectrum sharing impairs the performance of both systems. This paper addresses C&S int...

Quick response to disasters is crucial for saving lives and reducing loss. This requires low-latency uploading of situation information to the remote command center. Since terrestrial infrastructures are often damaged in disaster areas, non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) are preferable to provide network coverage, and mobile edge computing (MEC) could...

An increasing number of field robots would be used for mission-critical tasks in remote or post-disaster areas. Due to the limited individual abilities, these robots usually require an edge information hub (EIH), with not only communication but also sensing and computing functions. Such EIH could be deployed on a flexibly-dispatched unmanned aerial...

To accommodate the evolving demands of unmanned operations, the future sixth-generation (6G) network will support not only communication links but also sensing-communication-computing-control (SC3) loops. In each SC3 cycle, the sensor uploads sensing data to the computing center, and the computing center calculates the control command and sends it...

Benefiting from the fusion of communication and intelligent technologies, network-enabled robots have become important to support future machine-assisted and unmanned applications. To provide high-quality services for robots in wide areas, hybrid satellite-terrestrial networks are a key technology. Through hybrid networks, computation-intensive and...

The sixth-generation (6G) network is envisioned to shift its focus from the service requirements of human beings' to those of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices'. Satellite communications are indispensable in 6G to support IoT devices operating in rural or disastrous areas. However, satellite networks face the inherent challenges of low data rate and...

With a growing interest in outer space, space robots have become a focus of exploration. To coordinate them for unmanned space exploration, we propose to use the "mother-daughter structure". In this setup, the mother spacecraft orbits the planet, while daughter probes are distributed across the surface. The mother spacecraft senses the environment,...

In the upcoming large-scale Internet of Things (IoT), it is increasingly challenging to defend against malicious traffic, due to the heterogeneity of IoT devices and the diversity of IoT communication protocols. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised learning-based approach to detect malicious traffic at the access side. It overcomes the resou...

The sixth-generation (6G) network will shift its focus to supporting everything including various machine-type devices (MTDs) in an every-one-centric manner. To ubiquitously cover the MTDs working in rural and disastrous areas, satellite communications become indispensable, while mobile edge computing (MEC) also plays an increasingly crucial role....

To cover remote areas where terrestrial cellular networks may not be available, non-terrestrial infrastructures such as satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be utilized in the upcoming sixth-generation (6G) era. Considering the spectrum scarcity problem, satellites and UAVs need to share the spectrum to save costs, leading to a cognit...

The upcoming sixth generation (6G) network is expected to be more open and heterogeneous, posing new challenges to conventional security architectures. Traditionally, these architectures rely on the construction of a security perimeter at network boundaries. In this article, we propose a software-defined zero trust architecture (ZTA) for 6G network...

Networked robots have become crucial for unmanned applications since they can collaborate to complete complex tasks in remote/hazardous/depopulated areas. Due to the cost inefficiency of deploying cellular network infrastructure in these areas, hybrid satellite-UAV networks emerge as a promising solution. These networks provide seamless and on-dema...

The sixth generation (6G) network is envisioned to cover remote areas, with the help of satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Considering the vastness of remote areas and the sparsity of users therein, we investigate a cognitive satellite-UAV network, where satellites and UAVs coordinately share spectrum to provide low-rate and high-rate...

Satellite Internet (SI) dramatically expanded the ground-based Internet, and it is also the future direction of 6G. However, due to limited computing power and bandwidth resources, Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks can cause more severe damage to SI, and even paralysis of the entire network. Current DDoS defense mechanisms are built on a...

Due to its high mobility and flexible deployment, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is drawing unprecedented interest in both military and civil applications to enable agile and ubiquitous connectivity. Mainly operating in an open environment, UAV communications benefit from dominant line-of-sight links; however, this on the other hand renders the comm...

This letter presents a sensing-communication-computing-control (SC3) integrated satellite unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) network, where the UAV is equipped with on-board sensors, mobile edge computing (MEC) servers, base stations and satellite communication module. Like the nervous system, this integrated network is capable of organizing multiple fi...

The sixth-generation (6G) network is envisioned to integrate communication and sensing functions, so as to improve the spectrum efficiency (SE) and support explosive novel applications. Although the similarities of wireless communication and radio sensing lay the foundation for their combinations, their different requirements for electromagnetic si...

Wideband extremely large-scale multiple-input-multiple-output (XL-MIMO) is a promising technique to achieve Tbps data rates in future 6G systems through beamforming and spatial multiplexing. Due to the extensive bandwidth and the huge number of antennas for wideband XL-MIMO, a significant near-field beam split effect will be induced, where beams at...

With the rapid development of the sixth generation (6G) network and Internet of Things (IoT), it has become extremely challenging to efficiently detect and prevent the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks originating from IoT devices. In this paper we propose an innovative trust model for IoT devices to prevent potential DDoS attacks by eva...

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is considered a novel paradigm for computation-intensive and delay-sensitive tasks in fifth generation (5G) networks and beyond. However, its uncertainty, referred to as dynamic and randomness, from the mobile device, wireless channel, and edge network sides, results in high-dimensional, nonconvex, nonlinear, and NP-hard...

Current fifth-generation (5G) networks do not cover maritime areas, causing difficulties in developing maritime Internet of Things (IoT). To tackle this problem, we establish a nearshore network by collaboratively using on-shore terrestrial base stations (TBSs) and tethered unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). These TBSs and UAVs form virtual clusters...

Space communication network (SCN) is a feasible and flexible solution to enable global seamless coverage, as well as service orchestration in a wide range. It's emerged as a promising perspective for the next-generation communication network. However, the design of SCN architecture with both efficiency and security remains an open challenge. In thi...

While 5G networks have accelerated the development of the Internet of Things (IoT), they have also introduced a large number of vulnerable IoT devices into the network, which would lead to severe distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. The newly emerging DDoS attack methods generally have a shorter duration, which imposes higher requirements...

With the prosperous development of e-commerce, customized products have gradually become an important part of online transactions, opening up a new promising market for traditional e-commerce. However, mainstream transaction networks do not provide efficient support to transactions of customized products, thus failing to meet the personalized needs...

Due to the heterogeneity of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and the diversity of IoT communication protocols, it is challenging to model the communication behaviors of IoT devices to facilitate attack defense. Considering the complex correlation between the IoT device types and the patterns of their communication behaviors, one possible solution i...

Wideband extremely large-scale multiple-input-multiple-output (XL-MIMO) plays an important role in boosting the data rate for 6G networks. Because of the huge bandwidth and the large number of antennas, wideband XL-MIMO introduces a significant near-field beam split effect, where beams at different frequencies are focused on different locations. Th...

The sixth-generation (6G) network is envisioned to integrate communication and sensing functions, so as to improve the spectrum efficiency (SE) and support explosive novel applications. Although the similarities of wireless communication and radio sensing lay the foundation for their combination, there is still considerable incompatible interest be...

In the upcoming sixth-generation (6G) era, the demand for constructing a wide-area time-sensitive Internet of Things (IoT) continues to increase. As conventional cellular technologies are difficult to directly use for wide-area time-sensitive IoT, it is beneficial to use non-terrestrial infrastructures, including satellites and unmanned aerial vehi...

In this letter, beam selection and power allocation are investigated for maritime offshore communications. Considering the slow-changing network topology and the line-of-sight (LOS) dominant propagation of land-sea links, we define a beam configuration period (BCP) as a time span to contain numerous coherence intervals (CIs), and provide a two-time...

Due to its high mobility and flexible deployment, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is drawing unprecedented interest in both military and civil applications to enable agile wireless communications and provide ubiquitous connectivity. Mainly operating in an open environment, UAV communications can benefit from dominant line-of-sight links; however, it...

Current fifth-generation (5G) networks do not cover the maritime area, causing difficulties in developing maritime Internet of Things (IoT). To tackle this problem, we establish a nearshore network by collaboratively using on-shore terrestrial base stations (TBSs) and tethered unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). These TBSs and UAVs form virtual cluste...

Terrestrial communication networks mainly focus on users in urban areas but have poor coverage performance in harsh environments, such as mountains, deserts, and oceans. Satellites can be exploited to extend the coverage of terrestrial fifth-generation (5G) networks. However, satellites are restricted by their high latency and relatively low data r...

In the upcoming sixth-generation (6G) era, the demand for constructing a wide-area time-sensitive Internet of Things (IoT) keeps increasing. As conventional cellular technologies are hard to be directly used for wide-area timesensitive IoT, it is beneficial to use non-terrestrial infrastructures including satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles (UA...

With the rapid development of marine activities, there has been an increasing number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices on the ocean. This leads to a growing demand for high-speed and ultra-reliable maritime communications. It has been reported that a large performance loss is often inevitable if the existing fourth-generation (4G), fifth-generati...

With the fast development of Internet of Things in the 5G era, it has been attracting increasing research attention to provide broadband wireless data coverage in the remote rural and maritime areas. Owing to the geographical limitation of available base station (BS) sites in these tough scenarios, various transmission platforms, e.g. elevated terr...

Nowadays, network users' demands for low latency services and individual data security grow rapidly. In this article, we conceive a new communication network architecture based on the concept of intelligent agents. The proposed intelligent agent serves as a virtual secretary of the corresponding user to request desired service from Internet compani...

Terrestrial communication networks can provide high-speed and ultra-reliable services for users in urban areas but have poor coverage performance for the ubiquitous Internet of Things (IoT) in harsh environments, such as mountains, deserts, and oceans. Satellites can be exploited to extend the coverage of terrestrial fifth-generation (5G) and beyon...

Due to the rapid development of the internet of Things (ioT), a massive number of devices are connected to the internet. For these distributed devices in ioT networks, how to ensure their security and privacy becomes a significant challenge. Blockchain technology provides a promising solution to protect the data integrity, provenance, privacy, and...

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs), consisting of many low-cost elements that reflect the incident waves by an adjustable phase shift, have attracted sudden attention for their potential of reconfiguring the signal propagation environment and enhancing the performance of wireless networks. The passive nature of RISs is indeed beneficial, bu...

In this paper, we build a remote-sensing satellite imagery priori-information data set, and propose an approach to evaluate the robustness of remote-sensing image feature detectors. The building TH Priori-Information (TPI) data set with 2297 remote sensing images serves as a standardized high-resolution data set for studies related to remote-sensin...

The 19th IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Informatics and Cognitive Computing (ICCI*CC 2020), a flagship conference in this field, has been held at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China and online worldwide during Sept. 26-28, 2020. Cognitive Informatics (CI) is a transdisciplinary field that studies the internal information processing mech...

Current fifth generation (5G) cellular networks mainly focus on the terrestrial scenario. Due to the difficulty of deploying communications infrastructure on the ocean, the performance of existing maritime communication networks (MCNs) is far behind 5G. This problem can be solved by using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as agile aerial platforms to...

In fifth generation (5G) and beyond Internet of Things (IoT), it becomes increasingly important to serve a massive number of IoT devices outside the coverage of terrestrial cellular networks. Due to their own limitations, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and satellites need to coordinate with each other in the coverage holes of 5G, leading to a cogn...

In fifth generation (5G) and beyond Internet of Things (IoT), it becomes increasingly important to serve a massive number of IoT devices outside the coverage of terrestrial cellular networks. Due to their own limitations, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and satellites need to coordinate with each other in the coverage holes of 5G, leading to a cogn...

Current fifth generation (5G) cellular networks mainly focus on the terrestrial scenario. Due to the difficulty of deploying communications infrastructure on the ocean, the performance of existing maritime communication networks (MCNs) is far behind 5G. This problem can be solved by using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as agile aerial platforms to...

Due to the rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT), a massive number of devices are connected to the Internet. For these distributed devices in IoT networks, how to ensure their security and privacy becomes a significant challenge. The blockchain technology provides a promising solution to protect the data integrity, provenance, privacy, and...

To satisfy the growing demand for broadband maritime communications, space-ground integrated maritime communication networks (MCNs) arise, which are envisioned to take full advantage of both satellites and terrestrial shore-based networks. In practice, due to the frequent beam hopping of satellites and the limited number of geographically available...

Due to the agile maneuverability, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have shown great promise for on-demand communications. In practice, UAV-aided aerial base stations are not separate. Instead, they rely on existing satellites/terrestrial systems for spectrum sharing and efficient backhaul. In this case, how to coordinate satellites, UAVs and terrest...

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs), consisting of many low-cost elements that reflect the incident waves by an adjustable phase shift, have attracted sudden attention for their potential of reconfiguring the signal propagation environment and enhancing the performance of wireless networks. The passive nature of RISs is indeed beneficial, bu...

Satellite networks are able to provide seamless services for ground users with the wide coverage, which is intrinsically suitable for providing broadcasting or multicasting services. While terrestrial networks have experienced rapid development in the past years, in the next‐generation communications, the architecture of integrated terrestrial–sate...

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs), which can deliberately adjust the phase of incident waves, have shown enormous potentials to reconfigure the signal propagation for performance enhancement. In this paper, we investigate the RIS-aided offshore system to provide a cost-effective coverage of high-speed data service. The shipborne RIS is pla...

In hybrid satellite-terrestrial networks (HSTNs), spectrum sharing is crucial to alleviate the “spectrum scarcity” problem. Therein, the transmit beams should be carefully designed to mitigate the inter-satellite-terrestrial interference. Different from previous studies, this work considers the impact of both nonlinear power amplifier (PA) and larg...

Recently, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications have attracted great research interest. Due to the limited on-board energy, the optimization of energy efficiency (EE) is critical for UAV communications. In this paper, we propose an EE maximization scheme for UAV swarm-enabled small cell networks using large-scale channel state information at...

Unlike aerial base station enabled by a single unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), aerial coordinated multiple points (CoMP) can be enabled by a UAV swarm. In this case, the management of multiple UAVs is important. This paper considers the power allocation strategy for a UAV swarm-enabled aerial network to enhance the physical layer security of the dow...

Future wireless networks are confronted with the pressure to meet the requirements of network efficiency and communication secrecy, which require a new communication framework to unify and jointly optimize efficiency and secrecy. The challenges are to extend the current communication architecture and reveal the relationship of efficiency and secrec...

The Integrated Terrestrial-satellite Network (ITSN) combines cellular networks and satellite networks to provide services for the ever-increasing users, where the coexistence of the two systems can highlight their advantages but also bring serious interference. Confronted with the target of maximizing the network capacity and ensuring the Quality o...

Energy efficiency is a crucial issue for maritime communications, due to the high path loss and limited number of geographically available base station sites. Different from previous studies, we promote the energy efficiency by exploiting the specific characteristics of maritime channels and user mobility. Particularly, we utilize the shipping lane...

Unlike aerial base station enabled by a single unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), aerial coordinated multiple points (CoMP) can be enabled by a UAV swarm. In this case, the management of multiple UAVs is important. This paper considers the power allocation strategy for a UAV swarm-enabled aerial network, to enhance the physical layer security of the do...

In hybrid satellite-terrestrial networks (HSTNs), spectrum sharing is crucial to alleviate the "spectrum scarcity" problem. Therein, the transmit beams should be carefully designed to mitigate the inter-satellite-terrestrial interference. Different from previous studies, this work considers the impact of both nonlinear power amplifier (PA) and impe...

Due to its agile maneuverability, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have shown great promise for ondemand communications. In practice, UAV-aided aerial base stations are not separate. Instead, they rely on existing satellites/terrestrial systems for spectrum sharing and efficient backhaul. In this case, how to coordinate satellites, UAVs and terrestr...

With the rapid development of marine activities, there has been an increasing number of maritime mobile terminals, as well as a growing demand for high-speed and ultra-reliable maritime communications to keep them connected. Traditionally, the maritime Internet of Things (IoT) is enabled by maritime satellites. However, satellites are seriously res...

Energy efficiency is a crucial issue for maritime communications, due to the limitation of geographically available base station sites. Different from previous studies, we promote the energy efficiency by exploiting the specific characteristics of maritime channels and user mobility. Particularly, we utilize the shipping lane information to obtain...

Satellite networks are able to provide seamless services for ground users with wide coverage, which is intrinsically suitable for providing broadcasting or multicasting services. While terrestrial networks have experienced rapid development in recent years, in next generation communications, the architecture of integrated terrestrial-satellite netw...

In this chapter, we investigate the downlink transmission of a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-based integrated terrestrial-satellite network, in which the NOMA-based terrestrial networks and the satellite cooperatively provide coverage for ground users while reusing the entire bandwidth. A channel quality-based scheme is proposed to select u...

Due to the high maneuverability of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), they have been widely deployed to boost the performance of Internet of Things (IoT). In this paper, to promote the coverage performance of UAV-aided IoT communications, we maximize the minimum average rate of the IoT devices by jointly optimizing the resource allocation strategy an...