HF Communications: Past, Present, and Future

High frequency(HF) communication, commonly covering frequency range between 3 and 30 MHz, is an important wireless communication paradigm to offer over-thehorizon or even global communications with ranges up to thousands of kilometers via skywave propagation with ionospheric refraction. It has widespread applications in fields such as emergency communications in disaster areas, remote communications with aircrafts or ships and non-light-of-the-sight military operations. This tutorial article overviews the history of HF communication, demystifies the recent advances, and provides a preview of the next few years, which the authors believe will see fruitful outputs towards wideband, intelligent and integrated HF communications. Specifically, we first present brief preliminaries on the unique features of HF communications to facilitate general readers in the communication community. Then, we provide a historical review to show the technical evolution on the three generations of HF communication systems. Further, we highlight the key challenges and research directions. We hope that this article will stimulate more interests in addressing the technical challenges on the research and development of future HF radio communication systems.

A Heterogeneous Information Fusion Deep Reinforcement Learning for Intelligent Frequency Selection of HF Communication

The high-frequency(HF) communication is one of essential communication methods for military and emergency application. However, the selection of communication frequency channel is always a difficult problem as the crowded spectrum, the time-varying channels, and the malicious intelligent jamming. The existing frequency hopping, automatic link establishment and some new anti-jamming technologies can not completely solve the above problems. In this article, we adopt deep reinforcement learning to solve this intractable challenge. First, the combination of the spectrum state and the channel gain state is defined as the complex environmental state, and the Markov characteristic of defined state is analyzed and proved. Then, considering that the spectrum state and channel gain state are heterogeneous information, a new deep Q network(DQN) framework is designed, which contains multiple sub-networks to process different kinds of information. Finally, aiming to improve the learning speed and efficiency, the optimization targets of corresponding sub-networks are reasonably designed, and a heterogeneous information fusion deep reinforcement learning(HIF-DRL) algorithm is designed for the specific frequency selection. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm performs well in channel prediction, jamming avoidance and frequency channel selection.

Exploring Channel Diversity in HF Communication Systems： A Matching-Potential Game Approach

This paper investigates the channel diversity problem in high frequency(HF) communication systems. Due to the limited HF spectrum resources, a HF communication system with shared channels is considered, where each user equipment(UE) has individual communication demand. In order to maximize the communication probability of the whole system, a matching-potential game framework is designed. In detail, the channel diversity problem is decomposed into two sub-problems. One is channel-transmitter matching problem, which can be formulated as a many-to-one matching game. The other is the transmitter allocation problem which decides the transmission object that each transmitter communicates with under channel-transmitter matching result, and this sub-problem can be modeled as a potential game. A multiple round stable matching algorithm(MRSMA) is proposed, which obtains a stable matching result for the first sub-problem, and a distributed BR-based transmitter allocation algorithm(DBRTAA) is designed to reach Nash Equilibrium(NE) of the second sub-problem. Simulation results verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.

Deep Spectrum Prediction in High Frequency Communication Based on Temporal-Spectral Residual Network

High frequency(HF) communication is widely spread due to some merits like easy deployment and wide communication coverage. Spectrum prediction is a promising technique to facilitate the working frequency selection and enhance the function of automatic link establishment. Most of the existing spectrum prediction algorithms focus on predicting spectrum values in a slot-by-slot manner and therefore are lack of timeliness. Deep learning based spectrum prediction is developed in this paper by simultaneously predicting multi-slot ahead states of multiple spectrum points within a period of time. Specifically, we first employ supervised learning and construct samples depending on longterm and short-term HF spectrum data. Then, advanced residual units are introduced to build multiple residual network modules to respectively capture characteristics in these data with diverse time scales. Further, convolution neural network fuses the outputs of residual network modules above for temporal-spectral prediction, which is combined with residual network modules to construct the deep temporal-spectral residual network. Experiments have demonstrated that the approach proposed in this paper has a significant advantage over the benchmark schemes.

Research on Multi-Layer Distributed HF Radio Network Structure

High frequency（HF）transmission is an important communication techniques.However,conven-tional point-to-point transmission can be easily destroyed,which limits its utilization in practice.HF networking communication has the capability against demolishment.The network structure is one of the key factors for HF networking communication.In this paper,a novel analysis method of the network connectedness based on the eigenvalue is derived,and a multi-layer distributed HF radio network structure is proposed.Both the theore-tical analysis and the computer simulation results verify that the application of the proposed network structure in the HF radio communication can improve the anti-demolishment ability of the HF network efficiently.