In wireless-powered communication networks (WPCNs) augmented by reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), achieving high throughput while managing signaling overhead remains a critical challenge. Conventional approaches rely on instantaneous channel state information (I-CSI) for dynamic RIS beamforming, which leads to prohibitive channel estimation and feedback overhead in large-scale deployments. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel two-timescale protocol that integrates statistical CSI for long-term RIS beamforming optimization and short-term I-CSI for optimizing resource allocation. In particular, the proposed method designs multiple RIS beamforming patterns using statistical information, while dynamically adjusting time and power allocation within each coherence interval based on effective I-CSI. An alternating optimization (AO) based algorithm is then developed to iteratively refine RIS phase shifts for both downlink energy transfer and uplink information transfer using gradient projection, and derive optimal resource allocation in closed-form expressions via Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions. Simulation results validate the framework’s efficacy, demonstrating that using only 33% of the total RIS beamforming patterns can achieve 94% of the sum-rate performance of full I-CSI approaches, which provides useful guidelines for reducing the feedback overhead in the considered RIS aided WPCNs.

In intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, a strong line-of-sight (LoS) link is required to compensate for the severe cascaded path loss. However, such a link renders the effective channel highly rank-deficient and fundamentally limits spatial multiplexing. To overcome this limitation, this paper leverages the large aperture of sparse arrays to harness near-field spherical wavefronts, and establishes a deterministic deployment criterion that strategically positions the IRS in the near-field of a base station (BS). This placement exploits the spherical wavefronts of the BS–IRS link to engineer decorrelated channels, thereby fundamentally overcoming the rank-deficiency issue in far-field cascaded channels. Based on a physical channel model for the sparse BS array and the IRS, we characterize the rank properties and inter-user correlation of the cascaded BS–IRS–user channel. We further derive a closed-form favorable propagation metric that reveals how the sparse array geometry and the IRS position can be tuned to reduce inter-user channel correlation. The resulting geometry-driven deployment rule provides a simple guideline for creating a favorable propagation environment with enhanced effective degrees of freedom. The favorable channel statistics induced by our deployment criterion enable a low-complexity maximum-ratio transmission (MRT) precoding scheme. This serves as the foundation for an efficient algorithm that jointly optimizes the IRS phase shifts and power allocation based solely on long-term statistical channel state information (CSI). Simulation results validate the effectiveness of our deployment criterion and demonstrate that our optimization framework achieves significant performance gains over benchmark schemes.

This paper investigates an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) aided wireless federated learning (FL) system, where an access point (AP) coordinates multiple edge devices to train a machine leaning model without sharing their own raw data. During the training process, we exploit the joint channel recon figuration via IRS and resource allocation design to reduce the latency of a FL task. Particularly, we propose three transmission protocols for assisting the local model uploading from multiple devices to an AP, namely IRS aided time division multiple access (I-TDMA), IRS aided frequency division multiple access (I-FDMA), and IRS aided non-orthogonal multiple access (I NOMA), to investigate the impact of IRS on the multiple access for FL. Under the three protocols, we minimize the per-round latency subject to a given training loss by jointly optimizing the device scheduling, IRS phase-shifts, and communication computation resource allocation. For the associated problem under I-TDMA, an efficient algorithm is proposed to solve it optimally by exploiting its intrinsic structure, whereas the high quality solutions of the problems under I-FDMA and I-NOMA are obtained by invoking a successive convex approximation (SCA) based approach. Then, we further develop a theoretical framework for the performance comparison of the proposed three transmission protocols. Sufficient conditions for ensuring that I-TDMA outperforms I-NOMA and those of its opposite are unveiled, which is fundamentally different from that NOMA always outperforms TDMA in the system without IRS. Simulation results validate our theoretical findings and also demonstrate the usefulness of IRS for enhancing the fundamental tradeoff between the learning latency and learning accuracy.

This paper investigates a multi-intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) aided integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system, where multiple IRSs are strategically deployed not only to assist the communication from a multi-antenna base station (BS) to a multi-antenna communication user (CU), but also enable the sensing service for a point target in the non-line-of-sight (NLoS) region of the BS. First, we propose a hybrid multi-IRS architecture, which consists of several passive IRSs and one semi-passive IRS equipped with both active sensors and reflecting elements. To be specific, the active sensors are exploited to receive the echo signals for estimating the target’s angle information, and the multiple reflecting paths provided by multi-IRS are employed to improve the degree of freedoms (DoFs) of communication. Under the given budget on the number of total IRSs elements, we theoretically show that increasing the number of deployed IRSs is beneficial for improving DoFs of spatial multiplexing for communication while increasing the Crámer-Rao bound (CRB) of target estimation, which unveils a fundamental tradeoff between the sensing and communication performance. To characterize the rate-CRB tradeoff, we study a rate maximization problem, by optimizing the BS transmit covariance matrix, IRSs phase-shifts, and the number of deployed IRSs, subject to a maximum CRB constraint. Analytical results reveal that the communication-oriented design becomes optimal when the total number of IRSs elements exceeds a certain threshold, wherein the relationships of the rate and CRB with the number of IRS elements/sensors, transmit power, and the number of deployed IRSs are theoretically derived and demystified. Simulation results validate our theoretical findings and also demonstrate the superiority of our proposed designs over the benchmark schemes.

This paper investigates an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided movable antenna (MA) system, where multiple IRSs cooperate with a multi-MA base station to extend wireless coverage to multiple target areas. The objective is to maximize the worst-case signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) across all locations within these areas through joint optimization of MA positions, IRS phase shifts, and transmit beamforming. To achieve this while balancing the performance-cost trade-off, we propose three coverage-enhancement schemes: thearea-adaptive MA-IRSscheme, where both the MA positions and IRS phase shifts are adaptively adjusted for each target area; thearea-adaptive MA-staIRSscheme, where only the MA positions are adjusted, while the IRS phase shifts remain unchanged after initial configuration (withstaIRSdenoting static IRSs); and theshared MA-staIRSscheme, where a common MA placement and static IRS configuration are applied across all areas. These schemes lead to challenging non-convex optimization problems with implicit objective functions, which are difficult to solve optimally. To address these problems, we propose a general algorithmic framework that can be applied to solve each problem efficiently albeit suboptimally. Simulation results demonstrate that: 1) the proposed MA-based schemes consistently outperform their fixed-position antenna (FPA)-based counterparts under both area-adaptive and static IRS configurations, with the area-adaptive MA-IRS scheme achieving the highest worst-case SNR; 2) as transmit antennas are typically far fewer than IRS elements, the area-adaptive MA-staIRS scheme may underperform the baseline FPA scheme with area-adaptive IRSs in terms of the worst-case SNR, but a modest increase in antenna number can reverse this trend; 3) under a fixed total cost, the optimal MA-to-IRS-element ratio for the worst-case SNR maximization is empirically found to be proportional to the reciprocal of their unit cost ratio.

Pinching antennas (PAs), a new type of reconfigurable and flexible antenna structures, have recently attracted significant research interest due to their ability to create line-of-sight links and mitigate large-scale path loss. Owing to their potential benefits, integrating PAs into wireless powered mobile edge computing (MEC) systems is regarded as a viable solution to improve both the efficiency of the energy transfer and task offloading. Unlike prior studies that assume ideal continuous PA placement along waveguides, this paper investigates a practical discrete PA-assisted wireless powered MEC framework, where devices first harvest energy from PA-emitted radio-frequency signals and then adopt a partial offloading mode, allocating part of the harvested energy to local computing and the remainder to uplink offloading. The uplink phase considers both the time-division multiple access (TDMA) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), each examined under three levels of PA activation flexibility. For each configuration, we formulate a joint optimization problem to maximize the total computational bits and conduct a theoretical performance comparison between the TDMA and NOMA schemes. To address the resulting mixed-integer nonlinear problems, we develop a two-layer algorithm that combines closed-form solutions based on Karush–Kuhn–Tucker (KKT) conditions with a cross-entropy-based learning method. Numerical results validate the superiority of the proposed design in terms of the harvested energy and computation performance, revealing that TDMA and NOMA achieve comparable performance under coarser PA activation levels, whereas finer activation granularity enables TDMA to achieve superior computation performance over NOMA.

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have been recognized as a revolutionary technology for future wireless networks. However, RIS-assisted communications have to continuously tune phase-shifts relying on accurate channel state information (CSI) that is generally difficult to obtain due to the large number of RIS channels. The joint design of CSI acquisition and subsection RIS phase-shifts remains a significant challenge in dynamic environments. In this paper, we propose a diffusion-enhanced decision Transformer (DEDT) framework consisting of a diffusion model (DM) designed for efficient CSI acquisition and a decision Transformer (DT) utilized for phase-shift optimizations. Specifically, we first propose a novel DM mechanism, i.e., conditional imputation based on denoising diffusion probabilistic model, for rapidly acquiring real-time full CSI by exploiting the spatial correlations inherent in wireless channels. Then, we optimize beamforming schemes based on the DT architecture, which pre-trains on historical environments to establish a robust policy model. Next, we incorporate a fine-tuning mechanism to ensure rapid beamforming adaptation to new environments, eliminating the retraining process that is imperative in conventional reinforcement learning (RL) methods. Simulation results demonstrate that DEDT can enhance efficiency and adaptability of RIS-aided communications with fluctuating channel conditions compared to state-of-the-art RL methods.

In this paper, we investigate a novel wireless powered mobile edge computing (MEC) system assisted by pinching antennas (PAs), where devices first harvest energy from a base station and then offload computation-intensive tasks to an MEC server. As an emerging technology, PAs utilize long dielectric waveguides embedded with multiple localized dielectric particles, which can be spatially configured through a pinching mechanism to effectively reduce large-scale propagation loss. This capability facilitates both efficient downlink energy transfer and uplink task offloading. To fully exploit these advantages, we adopt a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) framework and formulate a joint optimization problem to maximize the system’s computational capacity by jointly optimizing device transmit power, time allocation, PA positions in both uplink and downlink, and radiation control. To address the resulting non-convexity caused by variable coupling, we develop an alternating optimization algorithm that integrates particle swarm optimization (PSO) with successive convex approximation. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed PA-assisted design substantially improves both energy harvesting efficiency and computational performance compared to conventional antenna systems.

In this study, we explore integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) networks to strike a more effective balance between sensing and communication (S&C) performance at the network scale. We leverage stochastic geometry to analyze the S&C performance, shedding light on critical cooperative dependencies of ISAC networks. According to the derived expres-sions of network performance, we optimize the user/target loads and the cooperative base station cluster sizes for S&C to achieve a flexible trade-off between network-scale S&C performance. It is observed that the optimal strategy emphasizes the full utilization of spatial resources to enhance multiplexing and diversity gain when maximizing communication ASE. In contrast, for sensing objectives, parts of spatial resources are allocated to cancel inter-cell sensing interference to maximize sensing ASE. Simulation results validate that the proposed ISAC scheme realizes a remarkable enhancement in overall S&C network performance.

Federated learning (FL) based on the centralized design faces both challenges regarding the trust issue and a single point of failure. To alleviate these issues, blockchain-aided decentralized FL (BDFL) introduces the decentralized network architecture into the FL training process, which can effectively overcome the defects of centralized architecture. However, deploying BDFL in wireless networks usually encounters challenges, such as limited bandwidth, computing power, and energy consumption. Driven by these considerations, a dynamic stochastic optimization problem is formulated to minimize the average training delay by jointly optimizing the resource allocation and client selection under the constraints of limited energy budget and client participation. We solve the long-term mixed integer nonlinear programming problem by employing the tool of Lyapunov optimization and thereby propose the dynamic resource allocation and client scheduling BDFL (DRC-BDFL) algorithm. Furthermore, we analyse the learning performance of DRC-BDFL and derive an upper bound for convergence regarding the global loss function. Extensive experiments conducted on the SVHN and CIFAR-10 data sets demonstrate that the DRC-BDFL achieves comparable accuracy to the baseline algorithms while significantly reducing the training delay by 9.24% and 12.47%, respectively.

Intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) have recently attained growing popularity in wireless networks owning to their capability to customize the wireless channel via smartly configured passive reflections. In addition to optimizing IRS reflection patterns, the flexible deployment of IRSs offers another design degree of freedom (DoF) to reconfigure the wireless propagation environment in favour of signal transmission. To unveil the impact of IRS deployment on the system capacity, we investigate the capacity of a broadcast channel with a multi-antenna base station (BS) sending independent messages to multiple users, aided by IRSs with N elements. In particular, both the distributed and centralized IRS deployment architectures are considered. Regarding the distributed IRS, the N IRS elements form multiple IRSs and each of them is installed near a user cluster; while for the centralized IRS, all IRS elements are located in the vicinity of the BS. To draw essential insights, we first derive the maximum capacity achieved by the distributed IRS and centralized IRS, respectively, under the assumption of line-of-sight (LoS) propagation and homogeneous channel setups. By carefully capturing the fundamental tradeoff between the spatial multiplexing gain and passive beamforming gain, we rigourously prove that the capacity of the distributed IRS is higher than that of the centralized IRS provided that the total number of IRS elements is above a threshold. Motivated by the superiority of the distributed IRS, we then focus on the transmission and element allocation design under the distributed IRS. By exploiting the user channel correlation of intra-clusters and inter-clusters, an efficient hybrid multiple access scheme relying on both spatial and time domains is proposed to fully exploit both the passive beamforming gain and spatial DoF. Moreover, the IRS element allocation problem is investigated for the objectives of the sum-rate maximization and the minimum user rate maximization, respectively. Finally, extensive numerical results are provided to validate our theoretical finding and also to unveil the effectiveness of the distributed IRS for improving the system capacity under various system setups.

With the emerging environment-aware applications, ubiquitous sensing is expected to play a key role in future networks. In this paper, we study a 3-dimensional (3D) multi-target localization system where multiple intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) are applied to create virtual line-of-sight (LoS) links that bypass the base station (BS) and targets. To fully unveil the fundamental limit of IRS for sensing, we first study a single-target-single-IRS case and propose a novel two-stage localization protocol by controlling the on/off state of IRS. To be specific, in the IRS-off stage, we derive the Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) of the azimuth/elevation direction-of-arrival (DoA) of the BS-target link and design a DoA estimator based on the MUSIC algorithm. In the IRS-on stage, the CRB of the azimuth/elevation DoA of the IRS-target link is derived and a simple DoA estimator based on the on-grid IRS beam scanning method is proposed. Particularly, the impact of echo signals reflected by IRS from different paths on sensing performance is analyzed and we show that only the signal passing through the BS-IRS-target link is required while that of the BS-target link can be neglected provided that the number of BS antennas is sufficiently large and the dedicated sensing beam at the BS is aligned with the departure transmit array response from the BS to the IRS. Moreover, we prove that the single-beam of the IRS is not capable of sensing, but it can be achieved with multi-beam. Based on the two obtained DoAs, the 3D single-target location is constructed. We then extend to the multi-target-multi-IRS case and propose an IRS-adaptive sensing protocol by controlling the on/off state of multiple IRSs, and a multi-target localization algorithm is developed. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our scheme and show that sub-meter-level positioning accuracy can be achieved.

In this work, we study integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) networks with the aim of effectively balancing sensing and communication (S&C) performance at the network level. Focusing on monostatic sensing, the tool of stochastic geometry is exploited to capture the S&C performance, which facilitates us to illuminate key cooperative dependencies in the ISAC network and optimize key network-level parameters. Based on the derived tractable expression of area spectral efficiency (ASE), we formulate the optimization problem to maximize the network performance from the view point of two joint S&C metrics. Towards this end, we further jointly optimize the cooperative BS cluster sizes for S&C and the serving/probing numbers of users/targets to achieve a flexible tradeoff between S&C at the network level. It is verified that interference nulling can effectively improve the average data rate and radar information rate. Surprisingly, the optimal communication tradeoff for ASE maximization tends to use all spatial resources for multiplexing and diversity gain, without interference nulling. In contrast, for sensing objectives, resource allocation tends to eliminate interference, especially when there are sufficient antenna resources, because inter-cell interference becomes a more dominant factor affecting sensing performance. This work first reveals the insight into spatial resource allocation for ISAC networks. Furthermore, we prove that the ratio of the optimal number of users and the number of transmit antennas is a constant value when the communication performance is optimal. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed cooperative ISAC scheme achieves a substantial gain in S&C performance at the network level.

In this paper, we develop a hybrid multiple access (MA) protocol for an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) aided uplink transmission network by incorporating the IRS-aided time-division MA (I-TDMA) protocol and the IRS-aided non-orthogonal MA (I-NOMA) protocol as special cases. Two typical communication scenarios, namely the transmit power limited case and the transmit energy limited case are considered, where the device’s rearranged order, time and power allocation, as well as dynamic IRS beamforming patterns over time are jointly optimized to minimize the sum transmission delay. To shed light on the superiority of the proposed IRS-aided hybrid MA (I-HMA) protocol over conventional protocols, the conditions under which I-HMA outperforms I-TDMA and I-NOMA are revealed by characterizing their corresponding optimal solution. Then, a computationally efficient algorithm is proposed to obtain the high-quality solution to the corresponding optimization problems. Simulation results validate our theoretical findings, demonstrate the superiority of the proposed design, and draw some useful insights. Specifically, it is found that the proposed protocol can significantly reduce the sum transmission delay by combining the additional gain of dynamic IRS beamforming with the high spectral efficiency of NOMA, which thus reveals that integrating IRS into the proposed HMA protocol is an effective solution for delay-aware optimization. Furthermore, it reveals that the proposed design reduces the time consumption not only from the system-centric view, but also from the device-centric view.

In this paper, we develop a unified dynamic intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) beamforming framework to boost the sum computation rate of an IRS-aided mobile edge computing (MEC) system, where each device follows a binary offloading policy. Specifically, the task of each device has to be either executed locally or offloaded to MEC servers as a whole with the aid of given number of IRS beamforming vectors available. By flexibly controlling the number of times for IRS reconfiguring phase-shifts, the system can achieve a balance between the performance and associated signalling overhead. We aim to maximize the sum computation rate by jointly optimizing the computational mode selection for each device, offloading time allocation, and IRS beamforming vectors across time. Since the resulting optimization problem is non-convex and NP-hard, there are generally no standard methods to solve it optimally. To tackle this problem, we first propose a penalty-based successive convex approximation algorithm, where all the associated variables in the inner-layer iterations are optimized simultaneously and the obtained solution is guaranteed to be locally optimal. Then, we further derive the offloading activation condition for each device by deeply exploiting the intrinsic structure of the original optimization problem. According to the offloading activation condition, a low-complexity algorithm based on the successive refinement method is proposed to obtain high-quality suboptimal solutions, which are more appealing for practical systems with a large number of devices and IRS elements. Moreover, the optimal condition for the proposed low-complexity algorithm is revealed. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithms is demonstrated through numerical examples. In addition, the results illustrate the practical significance of the IRS in MEC systems for achieving coverage extension and supporting multiple energy-limited devices for task offloading, and also unveil the fundamental performance-cost tradeoff embedded in the proposed dynamic IRS beamforming framework.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has recently received significant attention in wireless networks owing to its ability to smartly control the wireless propagation through passive reflection. Although prior works have employed the IRS to enhance the system performance under various setups, the fundamental capacity limits of an IRS aided multi-antenna multi-user system have not yet been characterized. Motivated by this, we investigate an IRS aided multiple-input single-output (MISO) broadcast channel by considering the capacity-achieving dirty paper coding (DPC) scheme and dynamic beamforming configurations. We first propose a bisection based framework to characterize its capacity region by optimally solving the sum-rate maximization problem under a set of rate constraints, which is also applicable to characterize the achievable rate region with the zero-forcing (ZF) scheme. Interestingly, it is rigorously proved that dynamic beamforming is able to enlarge the achievable rate region of ZF if the IRS phase-shifts cannot achieve fully orthogonal channels, whereas the attained gains become marginal due to the reduction of the channel correlations induced by smartly adjusting the IRS phase-shifts. The result implies that employing the IRS is able to reduce the demand for implementing dynamic beamforming. Finally, we analytically prove that the sum-rate achieved by the IRS aided ZF is capable of approaching that of the IRS aided DPC with a sufficiently large IRS in practice. Simulation results shed light on the impact of the IRS on transceiver designs and validate our theoretical findings, which provide useful guidelines to practical systems by indicating that replacing sophisticated schemes with easy-implementation schemes would only result in slight performance loss.

Anintelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided wireless-powered mobile edge computing (WP-MEC) system is conceived, where each device’s computational task can be divided into two parts for local computing and offloading to mobile edge computing (MEC) servers, respectively. Both time division multiple access (TDMA) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) schemes are considered for uplink (UL) offloading. To fully unleash the potential benefits of the IRS, employing multiple IRS beamforming (BF) patterns/vectors in the considered operating frame to create time-selectivity channels, i.e., dynamic IRS BF (DIBF), is in principle possible at the cost of additional signaling overhead. To strike a balance between the system performance and associated signalling overhead, we propose three cases of DIBF configurations based on the maximum number of IRS reconfiguration times. The degree-of-freedom provided by the IRS may introduce different impacts on the TDMA and NOMA-based UL offloading schemes. Thus, it is still fundamentally unknown which multiple access scheme is superior for MEC UL offloading by considering the impact of the IRS. To answer this question, we provide a comprehensively theoretical performance comparison for the TDMA and NOMA-based offloading schemes under the three cases of DIBF configurations by characterizing their achievable computation rate. Analytical results demonstrate that offloading adopting TDMA can achieve the same computation rate as that of NOMA, when all the devices share the same IRS BF vector during the UL offloading. By contrast, computation offloading exploiting TDMA outperforms NOMA, when the IRS BF vector can be flexibly adapted for UL offloading. Then, we propose computationally efficient algorithms by invoking alternating optimization for solving their associated computation rate maximization problems. Our numerical results demonstrate the significant performance gains achieved by the proposed designs over various benchmark schemes and also unveil that the optimal time allocated to downlink wireless power transfer can be effectively reduced with the aid of IRSs, which is beneficial for both the system’s spectral efficiency and its energy efficiency.

In this paper, we investigate the fundamental multiple access (MA) scheme in an active intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) aided energy-constrained Internet-of-Things (IoT) system, where an active IRS is deployed to assist the uplink transmission from multiple IoT devices to an access point (AP). Our goal is to maximize the sum throughput by optimizing the IRS beamforming vectors across time and resource allocation. To this end, we first study two typical active IRS aided MA schemes, namely time division multiple access (TDMA) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), by analytically comparing their achievable sum throughput and proposing corresponding algorithms. Interestingly, we prove that given only one available IRS beamforming vector, the NOMA-based scheme generally achieves a larger throughput than the TDMA-based scheme, whereas the latter can potentially outperform the former if multiple IRS beamforming vectors are available to harness the favorable time selectivity of the IRS. To strike a flexible balance between the system performance and the associated signaling overhead incurred by more IRS beamforming vectors, we then propose a general hybrid TDMA-NOMA scheme with device grouping, where the devices in the same group transmit simultaneously via NOMA while devices in different groups occupy orthogonal time slots. By controlling the number of groups, the hybrid TDMA-NOMA scheme is applicable for any given number of IRS beamforming vectors available. Despite of the non-convexity of the considered optimization problem, we propose an efficient algorithm based on alternating optimization, where each subproblem is solved optimally. Simulation results illustrate the practical superiorities of the active IRS over the passive IRS in terms of the coverage extension and supporting multiple energy-limited devices, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed hybrid MA scheme for flexibly balancing the performance-cost tradeoff.

The application of intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) into wireless powered mobile edge computing (WP-MEC) systems is investigated, where both time division multiple access (TDMA) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) schemes are considered for uplink (UL) offloading. We propose three different dynamic IRS beamforming (DIBF) schemes based on the flexibility for the IRS in adjusting its beamforming (BF) vector in each transmission frame. Under the DIBF framework, computation rate maximization problems are formulated for both the TDMA and NOMA schemes, respectively, by jointly optimizing the IRS BF and the resource allocation. An analytical comparison for the computation rate of TDMA and NOMA-based UL offloading schemes is provided. Finally, we propose computationally efficient algorithms to solve the corresponding computation rate maximization problems under the proposed DIBF framework. Numerical results unveil that the optimal time allocated to DL WPT can be effectively reduced with the aid of IRSs, which is beneficial for both the system’s spectral efficiency and energy efficiency.

This paper develops an analytical framework for exploring the benefits of applying cluster-based multi-antenna non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) in dense wireless networks. Using the tools of stochastic geometry, a new explicit expression and a tight approximation for per-cluster average data rates are derived in terms of relevant system parameters. Moreover, simulation results are provided to validate the accuracy of our analytical results and draw some essential system design insights. Based on the tractable expressions, we further consider the analysis and optimization of area spectral efficiency (ASE). It is analytically demonstrated that: 1) In terms of the per-cluster average data rate, there exists a wide range for the power allocation coefficient within a cluster where NOMA outperforms orthogonal multiple access (OMA); 2) The per-cluster average data rate of NOMA benefits more from the additional deployment of antennas at base stations (BSs) than that of OMA when the accuracy of channel state information at transmitter (CSIT) is fixed; 3) Regarding to ASE, there exists an optimal combination of the number of clusters and power allocation coefficient to maximize ASE. The performance gain of NOMA relative to OMA becomes marginal when the requirement of user fairness is stringent; 4) As for a special case that the power allocation coefficient is fixed, the analytical results indicate that ASE scales linearly with the number of antennas when the number of clusters is set optimally.

From the perspective of statistical performance, this paper presents a framework for the per-user throughput analysis in random cache based multi-antenna heterogeneous networks (HetNets) with user-centric inter-cell interference nulling (IN). Using tools from stochastic geometry, an explicit expression for the per-user throughput is derived. Based on the analytical results, the optimal cache probabilities for maximizing the per-user throughput are analyzed. Theoretical analysis and numerical results reveal that the optimal random cache under interference nulling fully harvests the file diversity gain (FDG) and achieves a promising per-user throughput.

From the perspective of statistical performance, this paper presents an analytical framework to handle the mutual interference between cellular networks and Device-to-Device (D2D) pairs in D2D underlaid downlink cellular networks. We assume that the D2D transmitters adopt power control and the base stations (BSs) adopt zero-forcing beamforming (ZFBF) to suppress the mutual interference. Using stochastic geometry, we derive the expressions for the coverage probability and the average data rate of users. Based on the analytical results, we discuss the optimal values of some important parameters to maximize the system area spectral efficiency (ASE) while guaranteeing the quality-of-service (QoS) of users, i.e., the coverage probability of users is above a threshold. The result shows that power control at D2D is always suboptimal for system ASE when the density of BSs is large enough.