Biodiversity of macrozoobenthos in a large river, the Austrian Danube, including quantitative studies in a free-flowing stretch below Vienna: a short review

The Danube is ca. 2850 km in length and is the second largest river in Europe. The Austrian part of the Danube falls 156 metres in altitude over its 351 km length and, since the early 1950s, the river has been developed into a power-generating waterway, so that the continuity of the river is now interrupted by ten impounded areas. Only two stretches of the original free-flowing river are left, the Wachau region (above river-km 2005, west of Vienna) and the region downstream from the impoundment at Vienna (river-km 1921). Most of the recent theories and concepts related to invertebrates, in the context of the ecology of running waters, are based on studies on small streams, whereas investigations of large rivers have played a minor role for a long time, mainly due to methodological difficulties. The authors' recent detailed studies on macroinvertebrates in the free-flowing section of the Danube below Vienna, provide an excellent opportunity to survey or restate scientific hypotheses on the basis of a large river. In this review the main interest focuses on the investigation of biodiversity, i.e. the number of species and their relative proportions in the whole invertebrate community, as well as major governing environmental factors. The article summarises the species composition, the important environmental variables at the river cross-section and the effect of upstream impoundment on the riverbed and its fauna

Linear and Nonlinear MMSE Estimation in One-Bit Quantized Systems under a Gaussian Mixture Prior

We present new fundamental results for the mean square error (MSE)-optimal conditional mean estimator (CME) in one-bit quantized systems for a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) distributed signal of interest, possibly corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). We first derive novel closed-form analytic expressions for the Bussgang estimator, the well-known linear minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimator in quantized systems. Afterward, closed-form analytic expressions for the CME in special cases are presented, revealing that the optimal estimator is linear in the one-bit quantized observation, opposite to higher resolution cases. Through a comparison to the recently studied Gaussian case, we establish a novel MSE inequality and show that that the signal of interest is correlated with the auxiliary quantization noise. We extend our analysis to multiple observation scenarios, examining the MSE-optimal transmit sequence and conducting an asymptotic analysis, yielding analytic expressions for the MSE and its limit. These contributions have broad impact for the analysis and design of various signal processing applications

A novel deep-learning based approach to DNS over HTTPS network traffic detection

Domain name system (DNS) over hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS) (DoH) is currently a new standard for secure communication between DNS servers and end-users. Secure sockets layer (SSL)/transport layer security (TLS) encryption should guarantee the user a high level of privacy regarding the impossibility of data content decryption and protocol identification. Our team created a DoH data set from captured real network traffic and proposed novel deep-learning-based detection models allowing encrypted DoH traffic identification. Our detection models were trained on the network traffic from the Czech top-level domain maintainer, Czech network interchange center (CZ.NIC), and successfully applied to the identification of the DoH traffic from Cloudflare. The reached detection model accuracy was near 95%, and it is clear that the encryption does not prohibit the DoH protocol identification

Enhanced Low-Complexity FDD System Feedback with Variable Bit Lengths via Generative Modeling

Recently, a versatile limited feedback scheme based on a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) was proposed for frequency division duplex (FDD) systems. This scheme provides high flexibility regarding various system parameters and is applicable to both point-to-point multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) communications. The GMM is learned to cover the operation of all mobile terminals (MTs) located inside the base station (BS) cell, and each MT only needs to evaluate its strongest mixture component as feedback, eliminating the need for channel estimation at the MT. In this work, we extend the GMM-based feedback scheme to variable feedback lengths by leveraging a single learned GMM through merging or pruning of dispensable mixture components. Additionally, the GMM covariances are restricted to Toeplitz or circulant structure through model-based insights. These extensions significantly reduce the offloading amount and enhance the clustering ability of the GMM which, in turn, leads to an improved system performance. Simulation results for both point-to-point and multi-user systems demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed extensions

Leveraging Variational Autoencoders for Parameterized MMSE Channel Estimation

In this manuscript, we propose to utilize the generative neural network-based variational autoencoder for channel estimation. The variational autoencoder models the underlying true but unknown channel distribution as a conditional Gaussian distribution in a novel way. The derived channel estimator exploits the internal structure of the variational autoencoder to parameterize an approximation of the mean squared error optimal estimator resulting from the conditional Gaussian channel models. We provide a rigorous analysis under which conditions a variational autoencoder-based estimator is mean squared error optimal. We then present considerations that make the variational autoencoder-based estimator practical and propose three different estimator variants that differ in their access to channel knowledge during the training and evaluation phase. In particular, the proposed estimator variant trained solely on noisy pilot observations is particularly noteworthy as it does not require access to noise-free, ground-truth channel data during training or evaluation. Extensive numerical simulations first analyze the internal behavior of the variational autoencoder-based estimators and then demonstrate excellent channel estimation performance compared to related classical and machine learning-based state-of-the-art channel estimators.Comment: 13 pages, 12 figure

Enhancing Channel Estimation in Quantized Systems with a Generative Prior

Channel estimation in quantized systems is challenging, particularly in low-resolution systems. In this work, we propose to leverage a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) as generative prior, capturing the channel distribution of the propagation environment, to enhance a classical estimation technique based on the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm for one-bit quantization. Thereby, a maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimate of the most responsible mixture component is inferred for a quantized received signal, which is subsequently utilized in the EM algorithm as side information. Numerical results demonstrate the significant performance improvement of our proposed approach over both a simplistic Gaussian prior and current state-of-the-art channel estimators. Furthermore, the proposed estimation framework exhibits adaptability to higher resolution systems and alternative generative priors

Channel Estimation for Quantized Systems based on Conditionally Gaussian Latent Models

This work introduces a novel class of channel estimators tailored for coarse quantization systems. The proposed estimators are founded on conditionally Gaussian latent generative models, specifically Gaussian mixture models (GMMs), mixture of factor analyzers (MFAs), and variational autoencoders (VAEs). These models effectively learn the unknown channel distribution inherent in radio propagation scenarios, providing valuable prior information. Conditioning on the latent variable of these generative models yields a locally Gaussian channel distribution, thus enabling the application of the well-known Bussgang decomposition. By exploiting the resulting conditional Bussgang decomposition, we derive parameterized linear minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimators for the considered generative latent variable models. In this context, we explore leveraging model-based structural features to reduce memory and complexity overhead associated with the proposed estimators. Furthermore, we devise necessary training adaptations, enabling direct learning of the generative models from quantized pilot observations without requiring ground-truth channel samples during the training phase. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate the superiority of our introduced estimators over existing state-of-the-art methods for coarsely quantized systems, as evidenced by significant improvements in mean square error (MSE) and achievable rate metrics