Broadcast plays a vital role in wireless ad hoc networks for information dissemination, while one of the key system parameters for maximizing broadcast performance is the transmission rate. However, due to the entangled impact of various factors on the broadcast performance such as node distribution, interference, transmission rate, and multi-hop links, theoretically modeling of the impact of different parameters on the broadcast performance is intractable, and hence the optimal transmission rate is still unknown. Inspired by the similarity between the process of packet broadcasting and the spreading of contagious diseases, we resort to epidemic theory to propose a tractable approach for modeling the dynamics of message broadcast process in wireless ad hoc networks. To characterize the impact of transmission rate on the broadcast performance, a novel utility function is proposed by jointly considering the packet delivery delay and packet size. Then, we derive the dynamics of packet broadcasting analytically and obtain the approximated expression for the proposed utility function in closed-form. Furthermore, the optimization of the transmission rate is carried out based on our proposed analytical model. Simulation results show that our analytical model can accurately characterize the process of broadcasting under a wide range of system parameters and that optimizing the transmission rate can improve broadcast performance significantly.

Recently, the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has been employed as an enabling technology for smart transportation, which can be further enhanced by integrating space–air–ground-integrated networks (SAGIN). Since the data packets of vehicular user equipments (VUEs) are generally short, random access is usually considered for VUEs to connect to the network. However, collisions caused by the multiple VUEs initiating random access simultaneously are inevitable. To relieve the performance degradation by collisions, data aggregation can be carried out in IoV, where aggregated packets can be relayed to a base station. In this article, we first propose an aggregators-aided random access scheme for IoV, where unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), as one of the key components in SAGIN, are deployed as data aggregators to help transmissions of VUEs. Then, a semi-Markov chain is used to analyze the average number of aggregated packets, and the metric of the average data to overhead ratio (ADOR) is presented to evaluate the efficiency of aggregation. Finally, the altitude of UAVs and the duration of data aggregation are optimized to maximize ADOR. By numerical simulations, the accuracy of the analysis as well as the effectiveness of the proposed scheme are validated.

To extend the conventional wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to support wider applications such as intruder detection and border security monitoring, active radar sensors are introduced into WSNs to further enhance their capability, thus forming wireless radar sensor networks (WRSNs). To improve the network efficiency, the technology of integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) can be applied to co-design the sensing and communication functionalities of radar sensors. Since the cooperative operations of WRSNs require effective information interaction among radar sensors, data dissemination techniques need to be investigated, which become even more critical in desolate areas without the coverage of the base stations (BSs). Therefore, in this paper, a duty cycling mechanism is applied to the network to enhance the usage of WRSNs and support data dissemination, where a storage node is deployed to store the data spreading from radar sensors and a mobile data collector is employed to collect the data from the storage node periodically. Then, the epidemic theory, as an innovative tool for modeling data dissemination, is adopted to analyze the performance of WRSNs. After epidemiological modeling, the density of radar sensors is optimized by the epidemiological analytical method to maximize the throughput of the storage node by jointly considering the functions of radar detection and communication. Simulation results validate the accuracy of analysis, which also show the efficiency of the optimization for data dissemination.

In 5G and beyond wireless scenarios, it is expected to support tremendous amount of communicating machines. With an exponential increase of machine-to-machine (M2M) system deployments, efficient approaches to massive access by a large number of devices are to be studied. In this paper, we propose a massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) based grant-free random access (RA) with resolution of preamble collision for massive access. Based on the channel hardening and favorable propagation characteristics of massive MIMO, collided signals processed at the base station (BS) can be viewed as a variation of superposition modulation, and are to be recovered by successive interference cancellation (SIC) techniques. Besides, taking into consideration the effect of pass loss and fractional power control (FPC), analytic expressions of success probability of the proposed collision resolution with conjugate beamforming (CB) and zero-forcing beamforming (ZFB) are derived. With simulation results, we verify the analyses and show that the proposed protocol can resolve most preamble collisions.