This article studies the design of vehicular edge computing networks (VECNs) with multiple moving vehicles and roadside units (RSUs). Uniquely, our study reflects a pragmatic situation where wireless channels are time-varying in the duration of task offloading and vehicles can travel with inconstant speeds in a real-world scenario. By jointly optimizing transmit power and time allocation for task offloading as well as computation task partition in the VECN, our goal is to minimize the cost at the vehicles for energy consumption on task offloading and computing, and rent on task computing service at RSUs. However, solving the formulated optimization problem directly is impossible due to the requirement of noncausal vehicular position information (VPI) and noncausal channel state information (CSI) between vehicles and RSUs. To address this issue, a path prediction model is adopted to predict the noncausal VPI, based on which the noncausal CSI can be estimated. Then, a novel receding horizon optimization method is proposed to transform the original problem into a sequence of tractable problems. Despite this, the problems remain complex due to the computationally prohibitive task of identifying the optimal task offloading duration at each vehicle in a centralized manner. To overcome this difficulty, the consensus alternating directions method of multipliers is proposed to solve the problem in a distributed manner with low computational complexity. Numerical results show that our proposed scheme can save at most 30% of monetary cost as compared with existing baseline schemes.

In this article, a dual-function intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) assisted cognitive radio (CR) nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) networks for secure transmission is studied. Considering the scenario of both internal and multiple external Eves in the system, our goal is to maximize the sum achievable secrecy rate through jointly optimizing the transmit beamforming of cognitive base station (CBS), the mode selection of each IRS element and the phase vector of IRS, while both the passive dual-function IRS and active dual-function IRS are investigated. For passive dual-function IRS setup, we decouple the proposed nonconvex optimization problem into two subproblems, the transmit beamforming subproblem and the phase vector subproblem. For transmit beamforming subproblem, we first use arithmetic geometric mean (AGM) inequality and linear matrix inequality (LMI) to deal with the nonconvex fraction form in the objective function and in constraints. Then, successive convex approximation (SCA) is applied to iteratively solve it. For the phase vector subproblem, we utilize the penalty function to handle the rank one constraint and the binary constraint. By alternately optimizing these two subproblems, we obtain a local optimal solution. Then, we extend the proposed algorithm to the secure transmission scheme with active dual-function IRS. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme with the help of a dual-function IRS effectively enhances the security of the CR-NOMA network compared to other benchmark schemes. Moreover, when the maximum transmitting power$P_{\max }\ge 15$dBm, the proposed active IRS scheme is superior to the proposed passive IRS scheme.

In this article, a wireless multirelay network in which the relays are energy constrained is studied. Especially, in order to consume the harvested energy efficiently at the relays so as to improve the network throughput, a new hybrid relaying protocol is first proposed. In the proposed protocol, each relay can flexibly switch its operation among energy harvesting (EH), information receiving (IR), active information transmission (IT), and two passive backscatter communication (BC) modes according to the channel states as well as its data buffer states and energy states in each transmission block, by which the harvested energy can be efficiently utilized and superior throughput performance can be achieved. However, under the hybrid relaying protocol, it is challenging to achieve a strategy to optimally determine the operation mode for each relay, and the energy and information scheduling at the relays that operate in the IR, IT, and BC modes. To address this issue, the involved optimization problem is formulated as a stochastic optimization problem, which cannot be tackled directly. To make it tractable, the stochastic optimization problem is transformed into a Markov decision process (MDP) with finite state and action spaces. By solving the MDP via a dynamic programming (DP) algorithm, the optimal strategy for the multirelay network is achieved. Furthermore, to reduce the computational complexity in the DP algorithm, an efficient algorithm with low complexity is developed by using a Lyapunov optimization framework. Numerical simulations show that our proposed hybrid relaying strategy can achieve superior throughput performance in wireless multirelay networks.

In this article, the joint design for user scheduling and analog beam selection in a downlink multiuser millimeter-wave (mmWave) system is studied. Our objective is to maximize the achievable sum rate under the user scheduling constraint, the analog beam selection constraint, and the resource capacity constraint. This problem is nonconvex and NP hard. We first propose a whale optimization algorithm (WOA)-based scheme to obtain a near-global-optimal solution with fast convergence and low complexity. Since the joint optimization user scheduling and beam selection problem is a constrained integer programming problem, the binary version of WOA is applied to deal with integer variables and the penalty method is used to handle the constraints. Besides, a nonlinear convergence factor is introduced to enhance the optimal solutions. For real-time use, we also propose a low-complexity machine-learning (ML)-based scheme. In the ML-based scheme, we decompose the original optimization problem into two subproblems: 1) user classification subproblem and 2) the analog beam selection subproblem. The user classification subproblem is solved based on the$k$-means algorithm, where the users are clustered according to channel correlation. To solve the analog beam selection subproblem, we reformulate this subproblem as a multiclass classification problem. Considering the imbalance nature of the data set of the subproblem, we train the multiclass classifiers via the biased-SVM algorithm. Finally, the simulation results of the WOA-based scheme and the proposed ML-based scheme against the state-of-the-art schemes have shown the advantages of our proposed schemes.

This article studies a mobile-edge computing (MEC) system, where an access point (AP) and a relay node serve a user terminal over multicarrier subchannels. In the MEC system, the relay can assist not only task offloading but also task computation. Aiming at minimizing total energy consumption at the user terminal and the relay, the resource allocations, such as subcarrier allocation, power allocation, task partition, and offloading time and computation time allocation, are to be optimized, subject to a given task computation delay constraint. To achieve this goal, a novel cooperative MEC protocol is designed, where multicarrier subchannels are utilized for parallel task offloading by integrating the rateless coding technique. Then, under the newly designed protocol, the resource allocation optimization problem is formulated as a mixed-integer programming (MIP) problem that is challenging to solve. To tackle this MIP problem, continuous relaxation and algebraic transformation techniques are applied to transform it into a convex problem in order to reveal the lower bound of energy consumption performance. After that, by equivalently rewriting the integer subcarrier allocation constraint in the original optimization problem as the intersection of a convex set and a d.c. (difference of two convex sets) set, the problem is solved by the successive convex approximation to achieve a practical and efficient resource allocation scheme. Simulation results show that the proposed jointly cooperative task offloading and computation scheme can significantly reduce the energy consumption as compared to the baseline schemes, where the relay only assists the task offloading or task computation.

This article studies a network where a transmitter communicates with a receiver by hybrid communications that consist of passive information transmission (IT) via backscatter communication (BC) and active IT via wireless-powered communication (WPC). Because the circuit energy consumption in the passive IT of BC is much lower than that in the active IT of WPC, BC usually achieves a higher data transmission rate than WPC. Thus, it was suggested in the literature that the network throughput performance could not be improved by hybrid communications. However, our work in this article demonstrates that the throughput can be enhanced by a newly designed hybrid communication strategy. To demonstrate this, we develop a novel protocol that enables the transmitter to adaptively switch its operation between BC, active IT, and energy harvesting in one time block while scheduling energy consumption flexibly among multiple time blocks. Under the developed protocol, we formulate an optimization problem to jointly optimize the operation mode and resource allocation at the transmitter. The formulated problem is difficult to solve because the energy scheduling at the transmitter is coupled across multiple time blocks, and noncausal channel state information (CSI) is required. To address this problem, we first solve a simplified optimization problem via dynamic programming (DP) and a layered optimization method by assuming that the noncausal CSI is known. Then, we employ an approximate DP approach to solve the original problem with causal CSI. Finally, we verify by simulations that the proposed scheme can achieve superior throughput performance.

By the integration of cooperative cognitive radio (CR) and nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA), cooperative CR NOMA networks can improve the spectrum efficiency of wireless networks significantly. Due to the openness and exposure of wireless signals, secure communication is an important issue for cooperative CR NOMA networks. In this paper, we investigate the physical layer security design for cooperative CR NOMA networks. Our objective is to achieve maximum secrecy rate of the secondary user by designing optimal beamformers and artificial noise covariance matrix at the multiantenna secondary transmitter under the quality-of-service at the primary user and the transmit power constraint at the secondary transmitter. We consider the practical case that the channel state information (CSI) of the eavesdropper is imperfect, and we model the imperfect CSI by the worst-case model. We show that the robust secrecy rate maximization problem can be transformed to a series of semidefinite programmings based on S-procedure and rank-one relaxation. We also propose an effective method to recover the optimal rank-one solution. Simulations are provided to show the effectiveness of our proposed robust secure algorithm with comparison to the nonrobust secure design and traditional orthogonal multiple access schemes.

This paper considers the distributed beamforming design for a simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) in two-way relay network, which consists of two sources, K relay nodes and one energy harvesting (EH) node. For such a network, assuming perfect channel state information (CSI) is available, and we study two different beamforming design schemes. As the first scheme, we design the beamformer through minimization of the average mean squared error (MSE) subject to the total transmit power constraint at the relays and the energy harvesting constraint at the EH receiver. Due to the intractable expression of the objective function, an upper bound of MSE is derived via the approximation of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Based on the minimization of this upper bound, this problem can be turned into a convex feasibility semidefinite programming (SDP) and, therefore, can be efficiently solved using interior point method. To reduce the computational complexity, a suboptimal beamforming scheme is proposed in the second scheme, for which the optimization problem could be recast to the form of the Rayleigh–Ritz ratio and a closed-form solution is obtained. Numerical results are provided and analyzed to demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed beamforming schemes.

Nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is expected to be a promising technique for future wireless networks. In this letter, we investigate the secrecy sum rate optimization problem for a downlink multiple-input-multiple-output NOMA system that consists of a base station, multiple legitimate users, and an eavesdropper. Our objective is to maximize achievable secrecy sum rate subject to successful successive interference cancellation constraints and transmit power constraint. The formulated optimization problem is nonconvex. Motivated by the relationship between mutual information rate and minimum mean square error, we propose to transform the secrecy sum rate optimization problem into a biconvex problem. The biconvex problem is solved by alternating optimization method where in each iteration, we solve a second-order cone programming. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed NOMA scheme outperforms conventional orthogonal multiple access scheme.