In this paper, we propose a novelpolarforming antenna (PA)to achieve cost-effective wireless sensing and communication. Specifically, the PA can enable polarforming to adaptively control the antenna’s polarization electrically as well as tune its position/rotation mechanically, so as to effectively exploit polarization and spatial diversity to reconfigure wireless channels for improving sensing and communication performance. To analyze the performance gain of PA, we study a PA-enhanced integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system that utilizes user location sensing to facilitate communication between a PA-equipped base station (BS) and PA-equipped users, by focusing on a new practical channel setup where the locations of users are nearly time-invariant but their orientations may change frequently (e.g., mobile phones rotated by spectators seated in a stadium while taking live photos). First, we model the PA channel in terms of transceiver antenna polarforming vectors and antenna positions/rotations. We then propose a two-timescale ISAC protocol, where in the slow timescale, user localization is first performed, followed by the optimization of the BS antennas’ positions and rotations based on the sensed user locations; subsequently, in the fast timescale, transceiver polarforming is adapted to cater to the instantaneous orientation of user devices in three-dimensional (3D) space, with the optimized BS antennas’ positions and rotations. We propose a new polarforming-based user localization method that uses a structured time-domain pattern of pilot-polarforming vectors to extract the common stable components in the PA channel across different polarizations based on the parallel factor (PARAFAC) tensor model. Moreover, we maximize the achievable average sum-rate of users by jointly optimizing the fast-timescale transceiver polarforming, including phase shifts and amplitude variations, along with the slow-timescale antenna rotations and positions at the BS. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of polarforming-based localization algorithm and demonstrate the performance advantages of polarforming, antenna placement, and their joint design in comparison with various benchmarks without polarforming or antenna position/rotation adaptation.

This paper proposes a novel flexible coupler antenna array that incorporates additional degrees of freedom (DoF) in radiation pattern reconfiguration to achieve strong mechanical beamforming gains and enhanced communication coverage with low hardware cost. Particularly, passive couplers move around a fixed active antenna so that the induced currents on the passive elements can be reshaped to achieve radiation pattern reconfiguration. A new form of mechanical beamforming can be obtained by moving only the passive couplers while keeping the active antenna stationary. In addition, the flexible coupler antenna can slide along a rail toward users, thereby enhancing communication coverage. To fully exploit the potential of the flexible coupler array, we formulate a two-timescale sum-rate maximization problem with statistical channel state information (CSI). The active antenna position is optimized based on scattering cluster-core statistics in the slow timescale, while mechanical beamforming is optimized based on multipath channel statistics in the fast timescale, subject to movement and energy constraints. To address the coupling between timescales and the high cost of extensive channel sampling, we develop a digital agent framework that leverages an electromagnetic (EM) map to generate statistical channel information for different user and antenna positions. Then, a deep neural network is trained to learn a slow-fast performance (SFP) surrogate, which is fine-tuned with a small number of real measurements and then applied for position optimization at the slow timescale using projected gradient ascent. Mechanical beamforming at the fast timescale is obtained by selecting per-antenna radiation patterns from a predefined dictionary via a convex relaxation. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed flexible coupler array significantly improves system throughput, and the digital agent-assisted algorithm achieves satisfactory performance with greatly reduced online computational complexity.

Six-dimensional movable antenna (6DMA) offers a potential solution to enhance wireless transmission performance by physically reconfiguring antenna positions and orientations. However, prevailing snapshot-based reactive methods are ill-suited for continuously tracking mobile user equipments (UEs) due to their neglect of antenna kinematic constraints and system latency. To address these limitations, in this paper, we propose a proactive approach by modeling UE tracking as a single, long-term 6DMA trajectory optimization problem to maximize sum spectral efficiency. Leveraging a channel knowledge map (CKM) for predictive data, our model holistically incorporates the system’s complex kinematics and physical constraints, including velocity limits and safety distances, to ensure a physically feasible trajectory. To solve this high-dimensional, non-convex problem, we develop a novel manifold optimization algorithm. This method maps the antenna’s rotational states onto the SO(3) Lie group and employs an adaptive penalty measure with tangent space backpropagation for an efficient solution. Simulation results demonstrate our approach significantly enhances sum spectral efficiency over benchmarks, while ensuring continuous and physically feasible antenna trajectories.

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is emerging as a pivotal technology for next-generation wireless networks. However, existing ISAC systems are based on fixed-position antennas (FPAs), which inevitably incur a loss in performance when balancing the trade-off between sensing and communication. Movable antenna (MA) technology offers promising potential to enhance ISAC performance by enabling flexible antenna movement. Nevertheless, exploiting more spatial channel variations requires larger antenna moving regions, which may invalidate the conventional far-field assumption for channels between transceivers. Therefore, this paper utilizes the MA to enhance sensing and communication capabilities in near-field ISAC systems, where a full-duplex base station (BS) is equipped with multiple transmit and receive MAs movable in large-size regions to simultaneously sense multiple targets and serve multiple uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) users for communication. We aim to maximize the weighted sum of sensing and communication rates (WSR) by jointly designing the transmit beamformers, sensing signal covariance matrices, receive beamformers, and MA positions at the BS, as well as the UL power allocation. The resulting optimization problem is challenging to solve. Thus, we propose an efficient two-layer random position (RP) algorithm to tackle it. In addition, to reduce movement delay and cost, we design an antenna position matching (APM) algorithm based on the greedy strategy to minimize the total MA movement distance. Extensive simulation results demonstrate the substantial performance improvement achieved by deploying MAs in near-field ISAC systems. Moreover, the results show the effectiveness of the proposed APM algorithm in reducing the antenna movement distance, which is helpful for energy saving and time overhead reduction for MA-aided near-field ISAC systems with large moving regions.

Six-dimensional movable antenna (6DMA) is a promising technology to fully exploit spatial variation in wireless channels by allowing flexible adjustment of three-dimensional (3D) positions and rotations of antennas at the transceiver. In this paper, we investigate the practical low-complexity design of 6DMA-enabled communication systems, including transmission protocol, statistical channel information (SCI) acquisition, and joint position and rotation optimization of 6DMA surfaces based on the SCI of users. Specifically, an orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP)-based algorithm is proposed for the estimation of SCI of users at all possible position-rotation pairs of 6DMA surfaces based on the channel measurements at a small subset of positionrotation pairs. Then, the average sum logarithmic rate of all users is maximized by jointly designing the positions and rotations of 6DMA surfaces based on their SCI acquired. Different from prior works on 6DMA which adopt alternating optimization to design 6DMA positions/rotations with iterations, we propose a new sequential optimization approach that first determines 6DMA rotations and then finds their feasible positions to realize the optimized rotations subject to practical antenna placement constraints. Simulation results show that the proposed sequential optimization significantly reduces the computational complexity of conventional alternating optimization, while achieving comparable communication performance. It is also shown that the proposed SCI-based 6DMA design can effectively enhance the communication throughput of wireless networks over existing fixed (position and rotation) antenna arrays, yet with a practically appealing low-complexity implementation.

Six-dimensional movable antenna (6DMA) has been identified as a new disruptive technology for future wireless systems to support a large number of users with only a few antennas. However, the intricate relationships between the signal carrier wavelength and the transceiver region size lead to inaccuracies in traditional far-field 6DMA channel model, causing discrepancies between the model predictions and the hybrid-field channel characteristics in practical 6DMA systems, where users might be in the far-field region relative to the antennas on the same 6DMA surface, while simultaneously being in the near-field region relative to different 6DMA surfaces. Moreover, due to the high-dimensional channel and the coupled position and rotation constraints, the estimation of the 6DMA channel and the joint design of the 6DMA positions and rotations and the transmit beamforming at the base station (BS) incur extremely high computational complexity. To address these issues, we propose an efficient hybrid-field generalized 6DMA channel model, which accounts for planar-wave propagation within individual 6DMA surfaces and spherical-wave propagation among different 6DMA surfaces. Furthermore, by leveraging directional sparsity, we propose a low-overhead channel estimation algorithm that efficiently constructs a complete channel map for all potential antenna position-rotation pairs while limiting the training overhead incurred by antenna movement. In addition, we propose a low-complexity design leveraging deep reinforcement learning (DRL), which facilitates the joint design of the 6DMA positions, rotations, and beamforming in a unified manner. Numerical results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed hybrid-field channel model, which achieves sum rates closely approaching that of the near-field channel model. The results also show that the proposed channel estimation algorithm can accurately recover the channel with lower computational complexity than traditional channel estimation algorithm. Moreover, the 6DMA system enhanced by the proposed DRL algorithm significantly outperforms existing flexible antenna systems, especially in the near-field region.

This paper considers an active reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) aided device-based uplink integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system. In this context, base station (BS) receives pilot and communication signals transmitted concurrently from mobile users to provision sensing and communication services. For the considered setup, we investigate beamforming design by jointly optimizing RIS configuration, mobile users’ transmit power and linear combiner at the BS to minimize Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) of angle-of-arrival (AoA) estimation for the sensing users while ensuring spectral efficiency of communication users. The considered device-based sensing paradigm raises unique challenge since communication signals contribute to noise covariance in AoA measurements, which leads to a highly complicated CRB expression. To resolve this challenge, we transfer the problem into a quartic form, equivalently represent covariance matrix inverse into an equation condition, decouple the intractable covariance equality constraint by introducing splitting variables followed by penalty dual-decomposition (PDD) methodology, which develops an iterative process updating all variable blocks alternatively. Extensive numerical results verify the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm and demonstrate the significant advantage of device-based sensing scheme over the device-free counterpart when the sensing targets can get connected in the ISAC network.

In this paper, we propose a novel polarized six-dimensional movable antenna (P-6DMA) to enhance the performance of wireless communication cost-effectively. Specifically, the P-6DMA enables polarforming by adaptively tuning the antenna’s polarization electrically as well as controls the antenna’s rotation mechanically, thereby exploiting both polarization and spatial diversity to reconfigure wireless channels for improving communication performance. First, we model the P-6DMA channel in terms of transceiver antenna polarforming vectors and antenna rotations. We then propose a new two-timescale transmission protocol to maximize the weighted sumrate for a P-6DMA-enhanced multiuser system. Specifically, antenna rotations at the base station (BS) are first optimized based on the statistical channel state information (CSI) of all users, which varies at a much slower rate compared to their instantaneous CSI. Then, transceiver polarforming vectors are designed to cater to the instantaneous CSI under the optimized BS antennas’ rotations. Under the polarforming phase shift and amplitude constraints, a new polarforming and rotation joint design problem is efficiently addressed by a low-complexity algorithm based on penalty dual decomposition, where the polarforming coefficients are updated in parallel to reduce computational time. Simulation results demonstrate the significant performance advantages of polarforming, antenna rotation, and their joint design in comparison with various benchmarks without polarforming or antenna rotation adaptation.

Six-dimensional movable antenna (6DMA) is an innovative and transformative technology to improve wireless network capacity by adjusting the 3D positions and 3D rotations of antennas/surfaces (sub-arrays) based on the channel spatial distribution. For optimization of the antenna positions and rotations, the acquisition of statistical channel state information (CSI) is essential for 6DMA systems. In this paper, we unveil for the first time a new directional sparsity property of the 6DMA channels between the base station (BS) and the distributed users, where each user has significant channel gains only with a (small) subset of 6DMA position-rotation pairs, which can receive direct/reflected signals from the user. By exploiting this property, a covariance-based algorithm is proposed for estimating the statistical CSI in terms of the average channel power at a small number of 6DMA positions and rotations. Based on such limited channel power estimation, the average channel powers for all possible 6DMA positions and rotations in the BS movement region are reconstructed by further estimating the multi-path average power and direction-of-arrival (DOA) vectors of all users. Simulation results show that the proposed directional sparsitybased algorithm can achieve higher channel power estimation accuracy than existing benchmark schemes, while requiring a lower pilot overhead.

This paper presents a novel model-assisted learning scheme for resource allocation in environment-aware mobile augmented reality (AR) content delivery. The goal is to minimize the long-term communication resource consumption for delivering virtual content visible to an individual AR user by optimizing the communication resource allocation for user positioning and environment mapping. In specific, we first develop a mathematical model to estimate the content visibility uncertainty and the content delivery resource consumption. We then generate a reference resource allocation decision that guides a deep reinforcement learning-based decision process to efficiently adapt to non-stationary user and environment dynamics. We conduct trace-driven simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme, and the results demonstrate that, the proposed scheme significantly reduces communication resource consumption for delivering virtual content visible to an individual AR user, compared to benchmark schemes.

Six-dimensional movable antenna (6DMA) is an effective approach to improve wireless network capacity by adjusting the 3D positions and three-dimensional (3D) rotations of antennas/antenna surfaces (sub-arrays) based on the users’ spatial distribution and statistical channel information. Although continuously positioning/rotating 6DMA surfaces can achieve the greatest flexibility and thus the highest capacity improvement, it is difficult to implement due to the discrete movement constraints of practical stepper motors. Thus, in this paper, we consider a 6DMA-aided base station (BS) with only a finite number of possible discrete positions and rotations for the 6DMA surfaces. We aim to maximize the average sum rate for random numbers of users at random locations by jointly optimizing the 3D positions and 3D rotations of multiple 6DMA surfaces at the BS subject to discrete movement constraints. In particular, we consider the practical cases with and without statistical channel knowledge of the users, and propose corresponding offline and online optimization algorithms, by leveraging the Monte Carlo and conditional sample mean (CSM) methods, respectively. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of our proposed offline and online algorithms for discrete position/rotation optimization of 6DMA surfaces as compared to various benchmark schemes with fixed-position antennas (FPAs), fluid antennas, and 6DMAs with limited movability. It is shown that 6DMA-BS can significantly enhance wireless network capacity, even under discrete position/rotation constraints, by exploiting the spatial distribution characteristics of the users.

Channel acquisition presents a major challenge in deploying intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS) aided communication systems, due to massive reflective elements that create a complex multi-path channel and increase channel dimensions. For an IRS-aided communication system, complete channel includes three parts: From the users to IRS, from the IRS to BS, and from the BS back to the IRS. Thus, a generalized multi-IRS cascaded communication system with three cascaded IRSs is considered. Unfortunately, existing channel estimation methods focus on single or double IRS cascades, which is not applicable to the case of triple cascaded IRS channel estimation directly. In this paper, we study the uplink channel estimation for triple cascaded IRSs aided single-user single-input single-output (SISO) systems. Specifically, the triple IRS cascaded channel is typically sparse. It permits us to characterize the channel estimation as a problem of sparse matrix recovery. Then, the sparse learning is explored to achieve robust channel estimation with limited training overhead. Particularly, the sparse channel matrices of the cascaded triple IRS channels have a common row-column block sparsity structure. However, a unique challenge lies in characterizing and enhancing such a common row-column sparsity. To tackle this issue, we apply a random matrix prior to promote the common row-column-wise sparsity of the channel matrix, and then an efficient Bayesian tensor inference algorithm is proposed to estimate the IRS channel. Finally, simulation results confirm that the proposed scheme outperforms traditional counterparts in terms of accuracy.

In this paper, we propose a new six-dimensional movable antenna (6DMA) system for future wireless networks to improve the communication performance. Unlike the traditional fixed-position antenna (FPA) and existing fluid antenna (FA) systems that adjust the positions of antennas only, the proposed 6DMA system consists of distributed antenna surfaces with independently adjustable three-dimensional (3D) positions as well as 3D rotations within a given space. In particular, this paper applies the 6DMA to the base station (BS) in wireless networks to provide full degrees of freedom (DoFs) for the BS to adapt to the dynamic user spatial distribution in the network. However, a challenging new problem arises on how to optimally control the six-dimensional (6D) positions and rotations of all 6DMA surfaces at the BS to maximize the network capacity based on the user spatial distribution, subject to the practical constraints on 6D antennas’ movement. To tackle this problem, we first model the 6DMA-enabled BS and the user channels with the BS in terms of 6D positions and rotations of all 6DMA surfaces. Next, we propose an efficient alternating optimization algorithm to search for the best 6D positions and rotations of all 6DMA surfaces by leveraging the Monte Carlo simulation technique. Specifically, we sequentially optimize the 3D position/3D rotation of each 6DMA surface with those of the other surfaces fixed in an iterative manner. Numerical results show that our proposed 6DMA-BS design can significantly improve the average sum rate of users manifold as compared to benchmark BS architectures with FPAs or 6DMAs with limited/partial movability, especially when the user distribution is more spatially non-uniform.

The multi-sector intelligent surface (IS), benefiting from a smarter wave manipulation capability, has been shown to enhance channel gain and offer full-space coverage in communications. However, the benefits of multi-sector IS in wireless sensing remain unexplored. This paper introduces the application ofmulti-sector IS for wireless sensing/localization. Specifically, we propose a new self-sensing system, where an active source controller uses the multi-sector IS geometry to reflect/scatter the emitted signals towards the entire space, thereby achieving full-space coverage for wireless sensing. Additionally, dedicated sensors are installed aligned with the IS elements at each sector, which collect echo signals fromthe target and cooperate to sense the target angle. In this context, we develop a maximum likelihood estimator of the target angle for the proposed multi-sector IS self-sensing system, along with the corresponding theoretical limits defined by the Cram´er-Rao Bound. The analysis reveals that the advantages of the multi-sector IS self-sensing system stem from two aspects: enhancing the probing power on targets (thereby improving power efficiency) and increasing the rate of target angle (thereby enhancing the transceiver’s sensitivity to target angles). Finally, our analysis and simulations confirm that the multi-sector IS self-sensing system, particularly the 4-sector architecture, achieves full-space sensing capability beyond the single-sector IS configuration. Furthermore, similarly to communications, employing directive antenna patterns on each sector’s IS elements and sensors significantly enhances sensing capabilities. This enhancement originates from both aspects of improved power efficiency and target angle sensitivity, with the former also being observed in communications while the latter being unique in sensing.

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is envisioned as a key pillar for enabling the upcoming sixth generation (6G) communication systems, requiring not only reliable communication functionalities but also highly accurate environmental sensing capabilities. In this paper, we design a novel networked ISAC framework to explore the collaboration among multiple users for environmental sensing. Specifically, multiple users can serve as powerful sensors, capturing back scattered signals from a target at various angles to facilitate reliable computational imaging. Centralized sensing approaches are extremely sensitive to the capability of the leader node because it requires the leader node to process the signals sent by all the users. To this end, we propose a two-step distributed cooperative sensing algorithm that allows low-dimensional intermediate estimate exchange among neighboring users, thus eliminating the reliance on the centralized leader node and improving the robustness of sensing. This way, multiple users can cooperatively sense a target by exploiting the block-wise environment sparsity and the interference cancellation technique. Furthermore, we analyze the mean square error of the proposed distributed algorithm as a networked sensing performance metric and propose a beamforming design for the proposed network ISAC scheme to maximize the networked sensing accuracy and communication performance subject to a transmit power constraint. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms.

Intelligent surfaces (ISs) have emerged as a key technology to empower a wide range of appealing applications for wireless networks, due to their low cost, high energy efficiency, flexibility of deployment, and capability of constructing favorable wireless channels/radio environments. Moreover, the recent advent of several new IS architectures further expanded their electromagnetic functionalities from passive reflection to active amplification, simultaneous reflection, and refraction, as well as holographic beamforming. However, the research on ISs is still in rapid progress and there have been recent technological advances in ISs and their emerging applications that are worthy of a timely review. Thus, in this article, we provide a comprehensive survey on the recent development and advances of ISs-aided wireless networks. Specifically, we start with an overview on the anticipated use cases of ISs in future wireless networks such as 6G, followed by a summary of the recent standardization activities related to ISs. Then, the main design issues of the commonly adopted reflection-based IS and their state-of-the-art solutions are presented in detail, including reflection optimization, deployment, signal modulation, wireless sensing, and integrated sensing and communications. Finally, recent progress and new challenges in advanced IS architectures are discussed to inspire future research.

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) has attracted growing interests for enabling the future 6G wireless networks, due to its capability of sharing spectrum and hardware resources between communication and sensing systems. However, existing works on ISAC usually need to modify the communication protocol to cater for the new sensing performance requirement, which may be difficult to implement in practice. In this paper, we study a semi-passive intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) aided millimeter-wave (mmWave) ISAC system by exploiting the established beam scanning operation for simultaneous mmWave communications and sensing. First, we propose a two-phase ISAC protocol, consisting of beam scanning and data transmission. Specifically, in the beam scanning phase, the semi-passive IRS finds the optimal beam for reflecting signals from the base station to a communication user via its passive elements and, meanwhile, directly estimates the angle of a nearby target based on echo signals from the target using its active sensing elements. In the data transmission phase, the sensing accuracy is further improved by leveraging the data signals via possible IRS beam splitting. Next, we derive the achievable rate of the communication user as well as the Cramér-Rao bound and the approximate mean square error of the target angle estimation. Finally, extensive simulation results are provided to verify our analysis as well as the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

In this paper, we consider a challenging secure wireless sensing scenario where a legitimate radar station (LRS) intends to detect a target at unknown location in the presence of an unauthorized radar station (URS). We aim to enhance the sensing performance of the LRS and in the meanwhile prevent the detection of the same target by the URS. Under this setup, conventional stealth-based approaches such as wrapping the target with electromagnetic wave absorbing materials are not applicable, since they will disable the target detection by not only the URS, but the LRS as well. To tackle this challenge, we propose in this paper a new target-mounted IRS approach, where intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is mounted on the outer/echo surface of the target and by tuning the IRS reflection, the strength of its reflected radar signal in any angle of departure (AoD) can be adjusted based on the signal’s angle of arrival (AoA), thereby enhancing/suppressing the signal power towards the LRS/URS, respectively. To this end, we propose a practical protocol for the target-mounted IRS to estimate the LRS/URS channel and waveform parameters based on its sensed signals and control the IRS reflection for/against the LRS/URS accordingly. Specifically, we formulate new optimization problems to design the reflecting phase shifts at IRS for maximizing the received signal power at the LRS while keeping that at the URS below a certain level, for both the cases of short-term and long-term IRS operations with different dynamic reflection capabilities. To solve these non-convex problems, we apply the penalty dual decomposition method to obtain high-quality suboptimal solutions for them efficiently. Finally, simulation results are presented that verify the effectiveness of the proposed protocol and algorithms for the target-mounted IRS to achieve secure wireless sensing, as compared with various benchmark schemes.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is regarded as a promising technique to control wireless channels for improving the communication and/or sensing performance of wireless systems. In this paper, we propose a new target-mounted IRS approach for wireless sensing, where IRS is mounted on the outer/echo surface of a target for either enhancing the IRS/target reflected signal towards the legitimate radar station (LRS) to facilitate its detection of the target, or suppressing that towards the unauthorized radar station (URS) to prevent its detection of the target, by flexibly tuning the IRS reflection. To this end, we assume that sensors are installed along with the reflecting elements at IRS to detect the angles of arrival (AoA) of radar signals from the LRS/URS, based on which IRS reflection is designed to achieve signal enhancement/suppression in the angle of departure (AoD) towards the LRS/URS, respectively. Simulation results are presented to verify the performance of the proposed controllable wireless sensing approach with target-mounted IRS, as compared to various benchmark schemes.

With the rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT), low earth orbit (LEO) satellite IoT is expected to provide low power, massive connectivity and wide coverage IoT applications. In this context, this paper provides a massive grant-free random access (GF-RA) scheme for LEO satellite IoT. This scheme does not need to change the transceiver, but transforms the received signal to a tensor decomposition form. By exploiting the characteristics of the tensor structure, a Bayesian learning algorithm for joint active device detection and channel estimation during massive GF-RA is designed. Theoretical analysis shows that the proposed algorithm has fast convergence and low complexity. Finally, extensive simulation results confirm its better performance in terms of error probability for active device detection and normalized mean square error for channel estimation over baseline algorithms in LEO satellite IoT. Especially, it is found that the proposed algorithm requires short preamble sequences and support massive connectivity with a low power, which is appealing to LEO satellite IoT.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has emerged as a promising technology to reconfigure the radio propagation environment by dynamically controlling wireless signal’s amplitude and/or phase via a large number of reflecting elements. In contrast to the vast literature on studying IRS’s performance gains in wireless communications, we study in this paper a new application of IRS for sensing/localizing targets in wireless networks. Specifically, we propose a newself-sensing IRSarchitecture where the IRS controller is capable of transmitting probing signals that are not only directly reflected by the target (referred to as the direct echo link), but also consecutively reflected by the IRS and then the target (referred to as the IRS-reflected echo link). Moreover, dedicated sensors are installed at the IRS for receiving both the direct and IRS-reflected echo signals from the target, such that the IRS can sense the direction of its nearby target by applying a customized multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm. However, since the angle estimation mean square error (MSE) by the MUSIC algorithm is intractable, we propose to optimize the IRS passive reflection for maximizing the average echo signals’ total power at the IRS sensors and derive the resultant Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) of the angle estimation MSE. Last, numerical results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed new IRS sensing architecture and algorithm, as compared to other benchmark sensing systems/algorithms.

This paper investigates a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided unsourced random access (URA) scheme for the sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks with massive sporadic traffic devices. First of all, this paper proposes a novel joint active device separation (the message recovery of active device) and channel estimation architecture for the RIS-aided URA. Specifically, the RIS passive reflection is optimized before the successful device separation. Then, by associating the data sequences to multiple rank-one tensors and exploiting the angular sparsity of the RIS-BS channel, the detection problem is cast as a high-order coupled tensor decomposition problem without the need of exploiting pilot sequences. However, the inherent coupling among multiple sparse device-RIS channels, together with the unknown number of active devices make the detection problem at hand deviate from the widely-used coupled tensor decomposition format. To overcome this challenge, this paper judiciously devises a probabilistic model that captures both the element-wise sparsity from the angular channel model and the low-rank property due to the sporadic nature of URA. Then, based on such a probabilistic model, a iterative detection algorithm is developed under the framework of sparse variational inference, where each update iteration is obtained in a closed-form and the number of active devices can be automatically estimated for effectively avoiding the overfitting of noise. Extensive simulation results confirm the excellence of the proposed URA algorithm, especially for the case of a large number of reflecting elements for accommodating a significantly large number of devices.

Millimeter-wave (mmW)/Terahertz (THz) wideband communication employing a large-scale antenna array is a promising technique of the sixth-generation (6G) wireless network for realizing massive machine-type communications (mMTC). To reduce the access latency and the signaling overhead, we design a grant-free random access scheme based on joint active device detection and channel estimation (JADCE) for mmW/THz wideband massive access. In particular, by exploiting the simultaneously sparse and low-rank structure of mmW/THz channels with spreads in the delay-angular domain, we propose two multi-rank aware JADCE algorithms via applying the quotient geometry of product of complex rank-$L$matrices with the number of clusters$L$. It is proved that the proposed algorithms require a smaller number of measurements than the currently known bounds on measurements of conventional simultaneously sparse and low-rank recovery algorithms. Statistical analysis also shows that the proposed algorithms can linearly converge to the ground truth with low computational complexity. Finally, extensive simulation results confirm the superiority of the proposed algorithms in terms of the accuracy of both activity detection and channel estimation.

This paper investigates the problem of joint massive devices separation and channel estimation for a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided unsourced random access (URA) scheme in the sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks. In particular, by associating the data sequences to a rank-one tensor and exploiting the angular sparsity of the channel, the detection problem is cast as a high-order coupled tensor decomposition problem. However, the coupling among multiple devices to RIS (device-RIS) channels together with their sparse structure make the problem intractable. By devising novel priors to incorporate problem structures, we design a novel probabilistic model to capture both the element-wise sparsity from the angular channel model and the low rank property due to the sporadic nature of URA. Based on the this probabilistic model, we develop a coupled tensor-based automatic detection (CTAD) algorithm under the framework of variational inference with fast convergence and low computational complexity. Moreover, the proposed algorithm can automatically learn the number of active devices and thus effectively avoid noise overfitting. Extensive simulation results confirm the effectiveness and improvements of the proposed URA algorithm in large-scale RIS regime.

Recently, millimeter wave (mmWave) imaging has received widespread attention. However, due to its nonlinearity and ill-posedness, it is challenging to reconstruct the precise electromagnetic properties of unknown targets from the measured scattered fields. In this paper, a new concentrative intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) aided computational imaging scheme is proposed. In the scheme, by dividing the region of imaging (ROI) into pixels, the imaging process is transformed into a compressed sensing problem. This paper proposes a fast block sparse Bayesian learning (BSBL) algorithm, which exploits the block sparsity of the reflection vector of ROI, and reduces the computational complexity through the generalized approximate message passing (GAMP) algorithm. Finally, the simulation results validate the performance advantages of the proposed algorithm and the efficiency of IRS in the imaging process.

With the increasing development of Internet of Things (IoT), the upcoming sixth-generation (6G) wireless network is required to support grant-free random access of a massive number of sporadic traffic devices. In particular, at the beginning of each time slot, the base station (BS) performs joint activity detection and channel estimation (JADCE) based on the received pilot sequences sent from active devices. Due to the deployment of a large-scale antenna array and the existence of a massive number of IoT devices, conventional JADCE approaches usually have high computational complexity and need long pilot sequences. To solve these challenges, this paper proposes a novel deep learning framework for JADCE in 6G wireless networks, which contains a dimension reduction module, a deep learning network module, an active device detection module, and a channel estimation module. Then, prior-feature learning followed by an adaptive-tuning strategy is proposed, where an inner network composed of the Expectation-maximization (EM) and back-propagation is introduced to jointly tune the precision and learn the distribution parameters of the device state matrix. Finally, by designing the inner layer-by-layer and outer layer-by-layer training method, a feature-aided adaptive-tuning deep learning network is built. Both theoretical analysis and simulation results confirm that the proposed deep learning framework has low computational complexity and needs short pilot sequences in practical scenarios.

This paper designs a cooperative activity detection framework for massive grant-free random access in the sixth-generation (6G) cell-free wireless networks based on the covariance of the received signals at the access points (APs). In particular, multiple APs cooperatively detect the device activity by only exchanging the low-dimensional intermediate local information with their neighbors. The cooperative activity detection problem is non-smooth and the unknown variables are coupled with each other for which conventional approaches are inapplicable. Therefore, this paper proposes a covariance-based algorithm by exploiting the sparsity-promoting and similarity-promoting terms of the device state vectors among neighboring APs. An approximate splitting approach is proposed based on the proximal gradient method for solving the formulated problem. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is efficient for large-scale activity detection problems while requires shorter pilot sequences compared with the state-of-art algorithms in achieving the same system performance.

Millimeter-wave/Terahertz (mmW/THz) communications have shown great potential for wideband massive access in next-generation cellular internet of things (IoT) networks. To decrease the length of pilot sequences and the computational complexity in wideband massive access, this paper proposes a novel joint activity detection and channel estimation (JADCE) algorithm. Specifically, after formulating JADCE as a problem of recovering a simultaneously sparse-group and low rank matrix according to the characteristics of mmW/THz channel, we prove that jointly imposing l0norm and low rank on such a matrix can achieve a robust recovery under sufficient conditions, and verify that the number of measurements derived for the mmW/THz wideband massive access system is significantly smaller than currently known measurements bound derived for the conventional simultaneously sparse and low-rank recovery. Furthermore, we propose a multi-rank aware method by exploiting the quotient geometry of product of complex rank-Lmaxmatrices with the maximum number of scattering clusters Lmax. Theoretical analysis and simulation results confirm the superiority of the proposed algorithm in terms of computational complexity, detection error rate, and channel estimation accuracy.

Active device detection is a precondition of realizing grant-free random access in beyond fifth-generation (B5G) cellular Internet-of-Things (IoT). However, due to the deployment of a large antennas array and the existence of a huge number of IoT devices, activity detection usually has high computational complexity and needs long pilot sequences. To overcome these challenges, we first propose a dimension deduction method by projecting the original device state matrix to a much lower dimension space. Then, we develop an optimized design framework with a logarithmic smoothing objective function and a coupled full column rank constraint. Under that framework, we transform the original interested matrix to a positive semidefinite matrix, followed by proposing a Riemannian trust-region algorithm to solve the problem in complex field. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-art algorithms in terms of device detection performance.

With the increasing development of cellular internet of things (IoT), the upcoming fifth generation (5G) wireless network is required to support massive IoT with sporadic traffic. In order to realize massive access over limited radio spectrum, a three-phase transmission protocol which consists of device detection and channel estimation, uplink data transmission and downlink data transmission is designed for the cellular IoT. In particular, we analyze the performance of the proposed transmission protocol, and reveal the impact of system parameters on the sum rate. Finally, simulation results validate the effectiveness of the theoretical claims.

With the increasing development of the cellular Internet of Things (IoT), the upcoming fifth-generation wireless network is required to support massive access of sporadic traffic devices. In this context, we design a three-phase transmission protocol which consists of device detection and channel estimation, uplink data transmission, and downlink data transmission for the cellular IoT, so as to realize massive access over limited radio spectrum. We analyze the performance of the proposed transmission protocol and derive closed-form expressions for the uplink and downlink achievable rates in terms of channel conditions and system parameters. Moreover, to improve the overall performance, we propose a length allocation algorithm by coordinating the three-phase transmission protocol in the unified sense. Extensive simulation results show that substantial performance gain can be obtained by the proposed algorithm.