Future 6G mobile networks are expected to provide ubiquitous communication to a wide range of mobile devices through heterogeneous networks including non-terrestrial networks (NTNs). As an important complement to terrestrial networks, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) based NTNs offer benefits such as flexible deployment, mobility control, and strong line-of-sight links. In this paper, a cognitive radio (CR) assisted cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) UAV system is proposed and its performance is analysed. In this system, the base station uses power-domain NOMA regarding the UAVs. The UAVs act as decode-and-forward relays serving clusters of user equipments (UEs). The CR concept is applied to reduce the interference caused by the UAVs to adjacent clusters of UEs. Analytical expressions of the outage probability and sum rate of this system are derived for the case of Nakagami-m fading. Numerical results are provided to reveal the impact of system parameters on the outage probability and sum rate. Further, design options and trade-offs between orthogonal multiple access and CR assisted cooperative NOMA UAV systems are illustrated.

In this paper, a mobile virtual reality (VR) video streaming system is considered and assessed. The system comprises of a VR server, a VR center offering mobile edge computing along with a buffer, and a mobile head-mounted display (HMD). Markov-modulated processes are used to model the arrival and departure traffic at the VR center and the time-varying link quality of the wireless channel to the mobile HMD. As the Markovian arrival process at the VR center is independent of the link quality variations of the wireless channel, the VR center controls the delivery of VR video packets to the mobile HMD subject to the link quality of the wireless channel. The Markov models are used to derive expressions of queueing theoretical performance measures, i.e., throughput, queueing delay, and packet loss probability. Numerical results are provided to investigate performance trade-offs for real data traces.

In this paper, we consider a downlink scenario in which a base station (BS) communicates with user equipment (UE) that move with high speed. Orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) modulation is used to overcome the effects of high Doppler shifts inherent with high-mobility scenarios. To increase spectral efficiency, power-domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is combined with OTFS to form an OTFS-NOMA system. The K-means clustering algorithm is deployed which partitions the coverage area of the BS into clusters such that the UEs within a cluster have a shorter distance to the respective cluster center than to the centers of the other clusters. The cluster centers act as simultaneous multiple users on which basis power-domain NOMA selects the power allocation coefficients to reduce the mutual interference among UEs. OTFS can control the resolution of the delay-Doppler domain to more accurately compensate for propagation delays and Doppler shifts. The performance of this OTFS-NOMA system with K-means clustering of the UEs is assessed in terms of sum rate. The numerical results illustrate that the successive interference cancellation of power-domain NOMA significantly improves sum rate. Additional improvements are obtained by choosing a sufficiently large size of the delay-Doppler grid of OTFS which effectively copes with the high Doppler shifts of the considered high-mobility scenario.

The performance of remotely rendered Virtual Re-ality (VR) is sensitive to temporal disturbances in communication channels. An earlier Quality of Experience (QoE) study of tem-poral impacts in the form of frame stalls has revealed difficulties with subjective disturbance ratings while performing a task in an interactive 6-degrees-of-freedom (DOF) VR environment. This study follows up on above observation by comparing QoE ratings in the presence and absence of a task. The exploratory findings show that the task-free subjective tests yield lower ratings compared to the subjective tests with task. This indicates that the participants became more sensitive to temporal impairments in the absence of a task. Also, the positive impact of reprojection on the QoE ratings decreased in the task-free environment. The simulator sickness results for individual symptoms were on similar low levels in both settings. The total score (TS) of sickness severity was higher after than before the subjective tests with task while the difference between the TS before and after the task-free subjective tests was insignificant,

Subjective 360° video quality experiments provide the ground truth for developing related systems such that acceptable quality of experience is offered to the users. To obtain statistically meaningful insights from the data recorded in quality experiments, engaging a sufficiently large number of subjects is essential. In contrast to conventional videos, little has been reported on statistical measures that may guide the choice of the number of subjects required for 360° video quality experiments. In this paper, the standard deviation of opinion score (SOS) hypothesis, measuring the diversity among the opinion scores given by a panel of subjects, is used to reveal the number of subjects needed. It is shown that the number of subjects needed varies depending on a threshold on SOS characteristics in terms of diversity among opinion scores.

Remotely rendered Virtual Reality (VR) typically has to rely upon less capable and less reliable communication channels as compared to locally rendered VR. Such communication channels pose the risk of impairing the VR experience with temporary disturbances in form of frame stalls that would not be present in local VR. However, it is not obvious to which extent the durations of temporary stalls affect the Quality of Experience (QoE) in interactive 6-degrees-of-freedom (DOF) VR, and neither to which extent present reprojection/warping techniques mitigate any adverse effects of such stalls on user perception. In this paper, subjective experiments were conducted with N =29 users to quantify the relationship between QoE and single, isolated stall durations in interactive 6-DOF remote VR when stalls either freeze the frame in place, or when frames are reprojected by the VR driver. Results indicate that given a 90 fps headset and a simple task that requires moderate head-movement; (1) short, isolated stalls of up to 4 frames go unnoticed on average, no matter whether reprojection is used or not, (2) the number of perceived stalls when using reprojection is the same or lower than the reference (no stall) in the range 1–4 frame stalls, (3) reprojection entails significantly higher user ratings for stalls ranging from 8 frames and beyond, (4) the improvement of using reprojection over freezes in terms of making more stalling events imperceptible is highest in the range 8–16 frames.

A dataset has been created from an experiment regarding the subjective Quality of Experience (QoE) in relation to stalling video feeds in interactive 6-Degrees-of-freedom Virtual Reality (6-DOF VR). The main purpose of collecting this data is to provide insight into the QoE of stalls that may occur in interactive remote-rendered 6-DOF VR. The data contains information regarding user ratings coupled with various stall lengths and for both frozen or reprojected images. Additionally, user motion and pixel changes (in the form of Mean Square Errors) in successive images in the vicinity of the stall are also stored. In summary, 29 users participated in testing, each rating 16 scenes, amounting to a total of 464 rated scenes.

In this paper, we propose and assess the performance of a downlink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)based full-duplex (FD) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) network for disaster scenarios. The K-means algorithm is used to partition the user equipments (UEs) residing in the disaster region into a number of clusters. The UAVs are located at the cluster centers and act as decode-and-forward relays to secure coverage from an operational base station (BS) into the disaster region. The power-domain NOMA used at the BS and the UAVs operating in FD mode improve the system performance in terms of outage probability and sum rate compared to orthogonal multiple access and half-duplex mode. In particular, analytical expressions for the outage probability and sum rate are derived. Numerical results are provided to reveal the impact of system parameters on the performance of the NOMA-based FD UAV network over Nakagami-m fading which in turn illustrate design options for applications in disaster scenarios.

Abstract Emerging 5G and future 6G mobile networks are expected to cater for high mobility scenarios ranging from vehicle-to-vehicle communications to unmanned aerial vehicles and airborne platforms. Communications in this type of deployments suffer from severe Doppler shifts which require new modulation waveforms. Orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) modulation has recently been proposed as a promising technology for coping with high Doppler channels. OTFS converts a time-varying fading channel into a time-independent channel in the two-dimensional delay-Doppler (DD) domain. The transmit symbols are multiplexed into a nearly constant channel with a complex channel gain in the DD domain. In this paper, we consider a high Doppler airborne communication network where relative mobile node speeds can be above 1200 m/s. The considered system represents a mobile ad-hoc network where the airborne mobile nodes can join or leave the network. Furthermore, each node is equipped with an antenna array that supports directed communication among mobile nodes. The Doppler shifts in this airborne communication network are in the order of 52-72 kHz and may potentially be even higher depending on the selected carrier frequency and the relative speed among the airborne platforms. As such, OTFS modulation is used in this work to efficiently compensate for the high Doppler shifts in the DD domain. In particular, a comprehensive performance assessment in terms of bit error rate (BER) is conducted to reveal the potential of OTFS modulation in dealing with such extreme transmission scenarios. The impact of physical layer parameters, number of delay-Doppler bins in the DD domain used for OTFS modulation, directed versus two-ray channels, and the combination of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with OTFS modulation on the BER is assessed. It is shown that both OTFS modulation over a two-ray channel as well as MIMO-OTFS modulation provide a reliable airborne communication network with low BER.

In this paper, we propose a medium access control (MAC) protocol for multi-channel cognitive cooperative radio networks (CCRNs). In this protocol, each secondary user (SU) senses for spectrum opportunities within M licensed bands of the primary users (PUs). To enhance the accuracy of spectrum sensing, we employ cooperative sequential spectrum sensing where SUs mutually exchange their sensing results. Moreover, the information obtained from cooperative spectrum sensing at the physical layer is integrated into the channel negotiation process at the MAC layer to alleviate the hidden terminal problem. Finally, the performance of the proposed MAC protocol in terms of aggregate throughput of the CCRNs is analyzed. Numerical results are provided to assess the impact of channel utilization by PUs, number of contenting CCRNs, number of licensed bands, and false alarm probability of SUs on the aggregate throughput.

In this paper, we examine a full-duplex transmission scheme for cognitive cooperative radio networks (CCRNs) to improve capacity. In this network, the secondary transmitter and secondary relay are allowed to utilize the licensed spectrum of the primary user by using underlay spectrum access. We assume that the CCRN is subject to the interference power constraint of the primary receiver and maximum transmit power limit of the secondary transmitter and secondary relay. Under these constraints, we propose an optimal power allocation policy for the secondary transmitter and the secondary relay based on average channel state information (CSI) to optimize capacity. Then, we derive an expression for the corresponding achievable capacity of the secondary network over Nakagami-m fading. Numerical results are provided for several scenarios to study the achievable capacity that can be offered by this full-duplex underlay CCRN using the proposed optimal power allocation scheme.

In this paper, we study the outage probability of a multiple relay cooperative cognitive radio network over amp;#954;-amp;#956; shadowed fading channels where the relays use the decode-and-forward (DF) protocol. The probability density function and cumulative distribution function of the total signal-to-noise ratio at the secondary receiver is derived for the case of selection combining. In particular, approximating the channels by Nakagami-m fading results in an analytical expression for the outage probability that can be expressed in terms of well-known functions. This approximation provides a good match when the parameters of the amp;#954;-amp;#956; shadowed fading channels translate to integer values of fading severity parameter $m$. Numerical results are provided to illustrate the impact of system parameters on the outage probability for amp;#954;-amp;#956; shadowed fading channels.

In this paper, we analyze the outage probability of multiple-input multiple-output cognitive cooperative radio networks (CCRNs) with multiple opportunistic amplify-and-forward relays. The CCRN applies underlay spectrum access accounting for the interference power constraint of a primary network and utilizes orthogonal space-time block coding to transmit multiple data streams across a number of antennas over several time slots. As such, the system exploits both time and space diversity to improve the transmission reliability over Nakagami-m fading. The CCRN applies opportunistic relaying in which the relay offering the highest signal-to-noise ratio at the receiver is selected to forward the transmit signal. Furthermore, selection combining is adopted at the secondary receiver to process the signal from the direct and relaying transmissions. To evaluate system performance, we derive an expression for the outage probability which is valid for an arbitrary number of antennas at the source, relays, and receiver of the CCRN. Selected numerical results are provided using Mathematica for analysis and Matlab for simulations, to reveal the effect of network parameters on the outage probability of the system.

In this paper, we consider a two-tier cellular network consisting of a primary macro cell base station (PMBS) which is overlaid by cognitive small cell base stations (CSBSs) to achieve efficient spectrum utilization. The deployment of two-tier cellular networks can provide higher capacity for the system but also causes cross-tier, intra-tier, and inter-tier interference within the cellular networks. Thus, we employ transmit and receive beamforming in the considered two-tier cellular network to mitigate interference. We first design the receive beamforming vector for a primary user (PU) such that it cancels all inter-tier interference from other PUs. Then, the transmit beamforming vectors at the secondary users (SUs) are designed to null out the cross-tier interference to the PUs. Further, the receive beam-forming vectors at the SUs are designed to mitigate the cross-tier interference from the PUs to the SUs. Finally, the transmit beamforming vector at the PMBS is designed to maximize the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio at the PUs. To quantify the performance of the system, we derive an expression for the channel capacity in the downlink from the CSBSs to the SUs. Numerical results are provided to reveal the effect of network parameters such as intra-tier interference distances, fading conditions, and number of antennas on the channel capacity of the SUs.

In this study, the authors first analyse system performance of beamforming amplify‐and‐forward two‐way relay networks with physical‐layer network coding under the impact of co‐channel interference from multiple surrounding terminals and then propose the associated power allocation strategies. The performance of the two‐way communications in terms of outage probability, symbol error rate (SER), and total ergodic channel capacity of the system is quantified. Asymptotic performance analysis for sufficiently high signal‐to‐noise ratio is also provided to obtain further valuable insights into system designs. Based on the analysis, power allocation strategies to minimise the asymptotic outage probability and SER as well as to maximise the ergodic channel capacity under the total power constraint are developed. The numerical results show that the proposed power allocation approaches outperform equal power allocation given the same total power budget and other system parameters.

In this paper, we consider the application of partial buffer sharing to an M/G/1/K queueing system for cognitive radio networks (CRNs). It is assumed that the CRN is subject to Nakagami-?? fading. Secondary users are allowed to utilize the licensed radio spectrum of the primary users through underlay spectrum access. A finite buffer at the secondary transmitter is partitioned into two regions, the first region serves both classes of packets while the second region serves only packets of the highest priority class. Therefore, the examined CRN can be modeled as an M/G/1/K queueing system using partial buffer sharing. An embedded Markov chain is applied to analyze the queueing behavior of the system. Utilizing the balance equations and the normalized equation, the equilibrium state distribution of the system at an arbitrary time instant can be found. This outcome is utilized to investigate the impact of queue length, arrival rates, and fading parameters on queueing performance measures such as blocking probability, throughput, mean packet transmission time, channel utilization, mean number of packets in the system, and mean packet waiting time for each class of packets.

In this paper, we investigate the system performance in terms of outage probability and symbol error rate of cognitive relay networks with underlay spectrum access over Nakagami-m frequency selective fading channels. Underlay spectrum access is deployed at the secondary transmitters, i.e., the secondary source and relay, as a means of providing high spectrum utilization efficiency. It is assumed that the whole system operates in frequency selective fading channels which commonly occur in broadband communication networks. In addition, direct communication from the secondary source to destination is present together with relay communication such that the selection combining is applied at the destination. That is, either the direct or relay channel is selected for communication depending on which one provides the best signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Analytical expressions for crucial performance measures such as outage probability and symbol error rate are formulated. Based on these analytical outcomes, respective system performance is investigated through numerical results for various system parameters and scenarios.

Abstract In this paper, we study the performance of multiple‐input multiple‐output cognitive amplify‐and‐forward relay networks using orthogonal space–time block coding over independent Nakagami‐m fading. It is assumed that both the direct transmission and the relaying transmission from the secondary transmitter to the secondary receiver are applicable. In order to process the received signals from these links, selection combining is adopted at the secondary receiver. To evaluate the system performance, an expression for the outage probability valid for an arbitrary number of transceiver antennas is presented. We also derive a tight approximation for the symbol error rate to quantify the error probability. In addition, the asymptotic performance in the high signal‐to‐noise ratio regime is investigated to render insights into the diversity behavior of the considered networks. To reveal the effect of network parameters on the system performance in terms of outage probability and symbol error rate, selected numerical results are presented. In particular, these results show that the performance of the system is enhanced when increasing the number of antennas at the transceivers of the secondary network. However, increasing the number of antennas at the primary receiver leads to a degradation in the secondary system performance. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In this paper, we analyze the performance of cognitive amplify-and-forward (AF) relay networks with beamforming under the peak interference power constraint of the primary user (PU). We focus on the scenario that beamforming is applied at the multi-antenna secondary transmitter and receiver. Also, the secondary relay network operates in channel state information-assisted AF mode, and the signals undergo independent Nakagami-m fading. In particular, closed-form expressions for the outage probability and symbol error rate (SER) of the considered network over Nakagami-m fading are presented. More importantly, asymptotic closed-form expressions for the outage probability and SER are derived. These tractable closed-form expressions for the network performance readily enable us to evaluate and examine the impact of network parameters on the system performance. Specifically, the impact of the number of antennas, the fading severity parameters, the channel mean powers, and the peak interference power is addressed. The asymptotic analysis manifests that the peak interference power constraint imposed on the secondary relay network has no effect on the diversity gain. However, the coding gain is affected by the fading parameters of the links from the primary receiver to the secondary relay network

This paper studies the performance of adaptive modulation and coding in a cognitive incremental decode-and-forward relaying network where a secondary source can directly communicate with a secondary destination or via an intermediate relay. To maximize transmission efficiency, a policy which flexibly switches between the relaying and direct transmission is proposed. In particular, the transmission, which gives higher average transmission efficiency, will be selected for the communication. Specifically, the direct transmission will be chosen if its instantaneous signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is higher than one half of that of the relaying transmission. In this case, the appropriate modulation and coding scheme (MCS) of the direct transmission is selected only based on its instantaneous SNR. In the relaying transmission, since the MCS of the transmissions from the source to the relay and from the relay to the destination are implemented independently to each other, buffering of packets at the relay is necessary. To avoid buffer overflow at the relay, the MCS for the relaying transmission is selected by considering both the queue state and the respective instantaneous SNR. Finally, a finite-state Markov chain is modeled to analyze key performance indicators such as outage probability and average transmission efficiency of the cognitive relay network.

In this paper, we investigate the performance of cognitive multiple decode-and-forward relay networks under the interference power constraint of the primary receiver wherein the cognitive downlink channel is shared among multiple secondary relays and secondary receivers. In particular, only one relay and one secondary receiver which offers the highest instantaneous signal-to-noise ratio is scheduled to transmit signals. Accordingly, only one transmission route that offers the best end-to-end quality is selected for communication at a particular time instant. To quantify the system performance, we derive expressions for outage probability and symbol error rate over Nakagami-m fading with integer values of fading severity parameter m. Finally, numerical examples are provided to illustrate the effect of system parameters such as fading conditions, the number of secondary relays and secondary receivers on the secondary system performance.

In this study, the authors analyse the average end‐to‐end packet delay for a cognitive ad hoc network where multiple secondary nodes randomly contend for accessing the licensed bands of primary users in non‐slotted time mode. Before accessing the licensed bands, each node must perform spectrum sensing and collaboratively exchange the sensing results with other nodes of the corresponding communication as a means of improving the accuracy of spectrum sensing. Furthermore, the medium access control with collision avoidance mechanism based distributed coordination function specified by IEEE 802.11 is applied to coordinate spectrum access for this cognitive ad hoc network. To evaluate the system performance, the authors model the considered network as an open G/G/1 queuing network and utilise the method of diffusion approximation to analyse the end‐to‐end packet delay. The authors’ analysis takes into account not only the number of secondary nodes, the arrival rate of primary users and the arrival rate of secondary users but also the effect of the number of licensed bands when assessing the average end‐to‐end packet delay of the networks.

In this paper, we study a hybrid interweave-underlay spectrum access system that integrates amplify-and-forward relaying. In hybrid spectrum access, the secondary users flexibly switch between interweave and underlay schemes based on the state of the primary users. A continuous-time Markov chain is proposed to model and analyze the spectrum access mechanism of this hybrid cognitive cooperative radio network (CCRN). Utilizing the proposed Markov model, steady-state probabilities of spectrum access for the hybrid CCRN are derived. Furthermore, we assess performance in terms of outage probability, symbol error rate (SER), and outage capacity of this CCRN for Nakagami-$m$fading with integer values of fading severity parameter$m$. Numerical results are provided showing the effect of network parameters on the secondary network performance, such as the primary arrival rate, the distances from the secondary transmitters to the primary receiver, the interference power threshold of the primary receiver in underlay mode, and the average transmit signal-to-noise ratio of the secondary network in interweave mode. To show the performance improvement of the CCRN, comparisons for outage probability, SER, and capacity between the conventional underlay scheme and the hybrid scheme are presented. The numerical results show that the hybrid approach outperforms the conventional underlay spectrum access.

In this paper, we study the performance of cognitive amplify-and-forward (AF) relay networks where the secondary users opportunistically access M licensed bands of the primary users over Nakagami-m fading channels. In order to enhance the accuracy of spectrum sensing and strongly protect the primary users from being interfered by the secondary transmission, collaborative spectrum sensing is deployed among the secondary transmitter, secondary relay, and secondary receiver. In particular, an analytical expression for the capacity of the considered network is derived. Numerical results are provided to show the influence of the arrival rate of the primary users on the channel utilization of licensed bands. Finally, the impact of the number of the licensed bands, channel utilization of the primary users, false alarm probability, and transmission distances on the capacity of the considered system are investigated.

In this paper, we study the use of adaptive modulation (AM) for a dual-hop multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) network with transmit antenna selection (TAS) at the transmitter and maximal ratio combining (MRC) at the receiver. Our system deploys incremental amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying with AM to forward the source signal. A switching policy for selecting between the relaying and the direct communications is utilized to maximize spectrum efficiency. In particular, we derive expressions for the outage probability, spectrum efficiency, and bit error rate (BER) for the considered system over Nakagami-m fading. The considered network not only takes advantage of TAS transmission such as achieving full diversity order with low transmit complexity but also inherits the beneficial feature of AM such as spectrum efficiency improvement.

In this study, the authors analyse the impact of channel estimation error (CEE), feedback delay (FD), and co‐channel interference (CCI) on the performance of multiple‐input multiple‐output (MIMO) systems deploying maximum ratio transmission (MRT). In particular, the authors derive closed‐form expressions for the ergodic capacity and the symbol error rate (SER) as well as the outage probability (OP). In addition, to reveal the effect of CEE, FD and CCI on the MIMO‐MRT system, the authors adopt more simplified and tractable formulas in terms of asymptotic expressions for the ergodic capacity, SER and OP. The analysis shows that the system performance is degraded considerably under imperfect transmission conditions such as CEE, FD and CCI. However, the authors can compensate part of this degradation by deploying MRT transmission with a large number of antennas at the transmitter and receiver. Finally, the selected examples exhibit consistency between analytical results and Monte Carlo simulations.

In this paper, we examine the performance of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) cognitive amplify-and-forward (AF) relay systems with maximum ratio transmission (MRT). In particular, closed-form expressions in terms of a tight upper bound for outage probability (OP) and symbol error rate (SER) of the system are derived when considering channel estimation error (CEE) and feedback delay (FD) in our analysis. Through our works, one can see the impact of FD and CEE on the system as well as the benefits of deploying multiple antennas at the transceivers utilizing the spatial diversity of an MRT system. Finally, we also provide a comparison between analytical results and Monte Carlo simulations for some examples to verify our work.

In this paper, we study the performance for the primary and secondary transmissions in cognitive radio networks where the amplify-and-forward (AF) secondary relay helps to transmit the signals for both the primary and secondary transmitters over independent Nakagami-m fading. First, we derive exact closed-form expressions for outage probability and symbol error rate (SER) of the primary network. Then, we derive an exact closed-form expression for outage probability and a closed-form expression of a tight upper bound for SER of the secondary network. Furthermore, we also make a comparison for the performance of the primary system with and without the help of the secondary relay. Finally, we show a good agreement between analytical results and Monte-Carlo simulations.