Accurately predicting beam-level reference signal received power (RSRP) is essential for beam management in dense multi-user wireless networks, yet challenging due to high measurement overhead and fast channel variations. This paper proposes Neural Beam Field (NBF), a hybrid neural-physical framework for efficient and interpretable spatial beam RSRP prediction. Central to our approach is the introduction of the Multi-path Conditional Power Profile (MCPP), a learnable physical intermediary representing the site-specific propagation environment. This approach decouples the environment from specific antenna/beam configurations, which helps the model learn site-specific multipath features and enhances its generalization capability. We adopt a decoupled ``blackbox-whitebox" design: a Transformer-based deep neural network (DNN) learns the MCPP from sparse user measurements and positions, while a physics-inspired module analytically infers beam RSRP statistics. To improve convergence and adaptivity, we further introduce a Pretrain-and-Calibrate (PaC) strategy that leverages ray-tracing priors for physics-grounded pretraining and then RSRP data for on-site calibration. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that NBF significantly outperforms conventional table-based channel knowledge maps (CKMs) and pure blackbox DNNs in prediction accuracy, training efficiency, and generalization, while maintaining a compact model size. The proposed framework offers a scalable and physically grounded solution for intelligent beam management in next-generation dense wireless networks.

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 towed movable antenna (ToMA) array architecture to enhance the physical layer security of airborne communication systems. Unlike conventional onboard arrays with fixed-position antennas (FPAs), the ToMA array employs multiple subarrays mounted on flexible cables and towed by distributed drones, enabling agile deployment in three-dimensional (3D) space surrounding the central aircraft. This design significantly enlarges the effective array aperture and allows dynamic geometry reconfiguration, offering superior spatial resolution and beamforming flexibility. We consider a secure transmission scenario where an airborne transmitter communicates with multiple legitimate users in the presence of potential eavesdroppers. To ensure security, zero-forcing beamforming is employed to nullify signal leakage toward eavesdroppers. Based on the statistical distributions of locations of users and eavesdroppers, the antenna position vector (APV) of the ToMA array is optimized to maximize the users’ ergodic achievable rate. Analytical results for the case of a single user and a single eavesdropper reveal the optimal APV structure that minimizes their channel correlation. For the general multiuser scenario, we develop a low-complexity alternating optimization algorithm by leveraging Riemannian manifold optimization. Simulation results confirm that the proposed ToMA array achieves significant performance gains over conventional onboard FPA arrays, especially in scenarios where eavesdroppers are closely located to users under line-of-sight (LoS)-dominant channels.

This work focuses on the optimal placement of meta-surfaces (MTSs) onto the ceiling of an industrial manufacturing workshop. In particular, we assume that a total ofMMTSs are deployed, and that there areLpossible positions for each MTS. The resulting signal-to-noise (SNR) maximization problem is difficult to tackle directly because of the coupling between the placement decisions of the different MTSs. Mathematically, we are faced with a nonlinear discrete optimization problem withLMpossible solutions. A remarkable result shown in this paper is that the above challenging problem can be efficiently solved withinO(ML2log(ML)) time. There are two key steps in developing the proposed algorithm. First, we successfully decouple the placement variables of different MTSs by introducing a continuous auxiliary variable μ; the discrete primal variables are now easy to optimize when μ is held fixed, but the optimization problem of μ is nonconvex. Second, we show that the optimization of continuous μ can be recast into a discrete optimization problem with onlyLMpossible solutions, so the optimal μ can now be readily obtained. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm can not only guarantee a global optimum but also reach the optimal solution efficiently.

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) has been a key technology for wireless systems for decades. For typical MIMO communication systems, antenna array elements are usually separated by half of the carrier wavelength, thus termed as co-located MIMO. In this paper, we investigate the performance of multi-user sparse MIMO communication, with sparse arrays at both the transmitter and receiver side, i.e., the array elements are separated by more than half wavelength. Given the same number of array elements, the performance of sparse MIMO is compared with co-located MIMO. On one hand, sparse MIMO has a larger aperture, which can achieve narrower main lobe beams that make it easier to resolve densely located users. Besides, increased array aperture also enlarges the near-field communication region, which can enhance the spatial multiplexing gain, thanks to the spherical wavefront property in the near-field region. On the other hand, element spacing larger than half wavelength leads to undesired grating lobes, which, if left unattended, may cause severe multi-user interference (MUI). Specifically, we first study the spatial multiplexing gain of the basic single-user sparse MIMO communication system, where a closed-form expression of the near-field effective degree of freedom (EDoF) is derived. The result shows that EDoF increases with the array sparsity for sparse MIMO before reaching its upper bound, which equals to the minimum value between the transmit and receive antenna numbers. Furthermore, the scaling law for the achievable data rate with varying array sparsity is analyzed and an array sparsity-selection strategy is proposed.We then consider the more general multi-user sparse MIMO communication system. It is shown that sparse MIMO is less likely to experience severe MUI than co-located MIMO, especially when users are densely located, thanks to the non-uniform distribution of spatial angle difference among users. Finally, numerical results are provided to validate our theoretical analysis.

The movable antenna (MA) technology has attracted great attention recently due to its promising capability in improving wireless channel conditions by flexibly adjusting antenna positions. To reap maximal performance gains of MA systems, existing works mainly focus on MA position optimization to cater to the instantaneous channel state information (CSI). However, the resulting real-time antenna movement may face challenges in practical implementation due to the additional time overhead and energy consumption required, especially in fast time-varying channel scenarios. To address this issue, we propose in this paper a new approach to optimize the MA positions based on the users’ statistical CSI over a large timescale. In particular, we propose a general field response based statistical channel model to characterize the random channel variations caused by the local movement of users. Based on this model, a two-timescale optimization problem is formulated to maximize the ergodic sum rate of multiple users, where the precoding matrix and the positions of MAs at the base station (BS) are optimized based on the instantaneous and statistical CSI, respectively. To solve this non-convex optimization problem, a log-barrier penalized gradient ascent algorithm is developed to optimize the MA positions, where two methods are proposed to approximate the ergodic sum rate and its gradients with different complexities. Finally, we present simulation results to evaluate the performance of the proposed design and algorithms based on practical channels generated by ray-tracing. The results verify the performance advantages of MA systems compared to their fixed-position antenna (FPA) counterparts in terms of long-term rate improvement, especially for scenarios with more diverse channel power distributions in the angular domain.

In this paper, we propose a new rotatable antenna (RA) model to improve the performance of wireless communication systems. Different from conventional fixed antennas, the proposed RA system can flexibly and independently alter the boresight direction of each antenna via mechanical or electronic means to exploit new spatial degrees-of-freedom (DoFs). Specifically, we investigate an RA-enabled uplink communication system, where the receive beamforming and the boresight directions of all RAs at the base station (BS) are jointly optimized to maximize the minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) among all the users. In the special single-user and free-space propagation setup, the optimal boresight directions of RAs are derived in closed form with the maximum-ratio combining (MRC) beamformer applied at the BS. In the general multi-user and multipath channel setup, we first propose an alternating optimization (AO) algorithm to alternately optimize the receive beamforming and the boresight directions of RAs in an iterative manner. Then, a two-stage algorithm that solves the formulated problem without the need for iteration is proposed to further reduce computational complexity. Moreover, we extend the channel model to incorporate polarization effects and frequency-selective fading while catering to antenna boresight rotation. Simulation results are provided to validate our analytical results and demonstrate that the proposed RA system can significantly improve the communication performance as compared to other benchmark schemes.

core challenge in physical-layer security is the difficulty of obtaining the channel state information (CSI) of potential eavesdroppers. The inherent sensing functionality of integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems offers a promising solution by enabling the estimation of key parameters, such as the eavesdropper’s angles of departure (AoDs). Capitalizing on this capability, we propose a sensing-assisted secure communication scheme for a movable antenna (MA)-aided ISAC system. The scheme comprises two stages: eavesdropper AoD sensing and secure communication. In the first stage, the base station (BS) optimizes the positions of its transmit and receive MAs to enhance sensing accuracy. We derive the closed-form Cramèr-Rao bound (CRB) for the estimated AoDs to fundamentally characterize how MA positions influence the estimation uncertainty. In the second stage, the BS ensures secure communication by designing a robust beamforming vector that accounts for the AoD uncertainty region and by further optimizing the transmit MAs’ positions to maximize the secrecy rate. To manage the end-to-end design, we formulate a joint optimization problem. This intractable non-convex problem is decomposed into two subproblems. For the first subproblem, we develop an alternating optimization (AO) algorithm to solve the CRB minimization problem. For the second subproblem, we solve the worst-case secrecy rate maximization problem using a method based on backward induction, convex hull construction, and AO. Finally, simulation results are provided to demonstrate the significant advantages of the proposed scheme compared to various benchmarks.

Movable antenna (MA)-enabled multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems offer a promising enhancement for integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) applications. Unlike conventional MIMO systems with fixed-position antenna (FPA) arrays, MAs can flexibly adjust their positions within a given region, enabling reconfiguration of both communication and sensing channels with additional spatial degrees of freedom. In this paper, we propose a unified mutual information (MI) framework for MA-enabled MIMO ISAC systems, where MI characterizes communication performance as reliably conveyable information and sensing performance as extractable target information in cluttered environments. We formulate an optimization problem to maximize the weighted sum of communication and sensing MI by jointly optimizing the transmit beamforming matrix under a transmit power constraint and the MA positions under practical constraints, with a weighting coefficient characterizing their trade-off. To tackle the non-convexity arising from the log-det objective, position constraints, and the nonlinear coupling between optimization variables, we develop an alternating optimization-based algorithm that iteratively updates the transmit beamforming matrix and the MA positions. Specifically, with the fixed MA positions, we optimize the beamforming by approximating the objective function using weighted mean square error and majorization-minimization methods, yielding a closed-form solution. Moreover, with fixed beamforming, the MA positions are sequentially refined by decomposing the position optimization into simpler subproblems, resulting in an efficient suboptimal solution. Numerical results show that the unified MI framework with MAs significantly outperforms conventional FPA systems in both communication and sensing. Channel amplitude heatmap visualizations further illustrate how MA positioning strategies exploit spatial flexibility in array geometry to enhance overall system performance.

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.

This paper investigates energy efficiency maximization for movable antenna (MA)-aided multi-user uplink communication systems by considering the time delay and energy consumption incurred by practical antenna movement. We first examine the special case with a single user and propose an optimization algorithm based on the one-dimensional (1D) exhaustive search to maximize the user’s energy efficiency. Moreover, we derive an upper bound on the energy efficiency and analyze the conditions required to achieve this performance bound under different numbers of channel paths. Then, for the general multi-user scenario, we propose an iterative algorithm to fairly maximize the minimum energy efficiency among all users. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in improving energy efficiency compared to existing MA schemes that do not account for movement-related costs, as well as the conventional fixed-position antenna (FPA) scheme. In addition, the results show the robustness of the proposed scheme to imperfect channel state information (CSI) and provide valuable insights for practical system deployment.

Movable antenna (MA), which can flexibly change the position of antenna in three-dimensional (3D) continuous space, is an emerging technology for achieving full spatial performance gains. In this paper, a prototype of MA communication system with ultra-accurate movement control is presented to verify the performance gain of MA in practical environments. The prototype utilizes the feedback control to ensure that each power measurement is performed after the MA moves to a designated position. The system operates at 3.5 GHz or 27.5 GHz, where the MA moves along a one-dimensional horizontal line with a step size of 0.01λ and in a two-dimensional square region with a step size of 0.05λ, respectively, with λ denoting the signal wavelength. The scenario with mixed line-of-sight (LoS) and non-LoS (NLoS) links is considered. Extensive experimental results are obtained with the designed prototype and compared with the simulation results, which validate the great potential of MA technology in improving wireless communication performance. For example, the maximum variation of measured power in the considered scenario reaches over 40 dB and 23 dB at 3.5 GHz and 27.5 GHz, respectively, thanks to the flexible antenna movement. In addition, experimental results indicate that the power gain of MA system relies on the estimated path state information (PSI), including the number of paths, their elevation and azimuth angles of arrival (AoAs), as well as the complex gain of each path.

Movable antenna (MA) has been recognized as a promising technology to improve communication performance in future wireless networks such as 6G. To unleash its potential, this paper proposes a novel architecture, namely extremely large-scale MA (XL-MA), which allows flexible antenna/subarray positioning over an extremely large spatial region for effectively enhancing near-field effects and spatial multiplexing performance. In particular, this paper studies an uplink XL-MA-enabled multiuser system, where single-antenna users distributed in a coverage area are served by a base station (BS) equipped with multiple movable subarrays. We begin by presenting a spatially non-stationary channel model to capture the near-field effects, including position-dependent large-scale channel gains and line-of-sight visibility. To evaluate system performance, we further derive a closed-form approximation of the expected weighted sum rate under maximum ratio combining (MRC), revealing that optimizing XL-MA placement enhances user channel power gain to increase desired signal power and reduces channel correlation to decreases multiuser interference. Building upon this, we formulate an antenna placement optimization problem to maximize the expected weighted sum rate, leveraging statistical channel conditions and user distribution. To efficiently solve this challenging non-linear binary optimization problem, we propose a polynomial-time successive replacement algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed XL-MA placement strategy achieves near-optimal performance, significantly outperforming benchmark schemes based on conventional fixed-position antennas.

This paper proposes a new hierarchically tunable six-dimensional movable antenna (HT-6DMA) architecture for base station (BS) in future wireless networks, aiming to improve the performance of both wireless communication and sensing. The HT-6DMA BS consists of multiple antenna arrays that can flexibly move on a spherical surface, with their three-dimensional (3D) positions and 3D rotations/orientations efficiently characterized in the global spherical coordinate system (SCS) and their individual local SCSs, respectively. As a result, the 6DMA system is hierarchically tunable in the sense that each array’s global position and local rotation can be separately adjusted in a sequential manner with the other being fixed, thus greatly reducing their design complexity and improving the achievable performance. In particular, we consider an HT-6DMA BS serving multiple single-antenna users in the uplink communication or sensing potential unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)/drones in a given airway area. Specifically, for the communication scenario, we aim to maximize the average sum rate of communication users in the long term by optimizing the positions and rotations of all 6DMA arrays at the BS. For the airway sensing scenario, we maximize the minimum received sensing signal power along the airway by optimizing the 6DMA arrays’ positions and rotations along with the BS’s transmit covariance matrix. Despite that the formulated problems are both non-convex and challenging to solve, we propose efficient solutions to them by exploiting the hierarchical tunability of positions/rotations of 6DMA arrays in our proposed model. Numerical results show that the proposed HT-6DMA design significantly outperforms not only the traditional BS with fixed-position antennas (FPAs), but also the existing 6DMA scheme based on alternating array position/rotation optimization. Furthermore, it is unveiled that the performance gains of HT-6DMA mostly come from the arrays’ global position adjustments on the spherical surface, rather than their local rotation adjustments, which provides a useful guide for implementing 6DMA systems under practical performance-complexity trade-off consideration.

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.

The recently emerged movable antenna (MA) shows great potential in leveraging spatial degrees of freedom for enhancing the performance of wireless systems. However, resource allocation in MA-aided systems faces unique challenges due to the non-convex and coupled constraints on antenna positions. This paper systematically reveals the challenges brought by the minimum MA separation constraints, and proposes a penalty framework for resource allocation under such new constraints in MA-aided systems. By introducing auxiliary variables, the proposed framework separates the non-convex and coupled antenna distance constraints from the movable region constraint. This enables the resulting problem be efficiently solved by alternating optimization, where the optimization of the original variables resembles that in conventional resource allocation problem while the optimization with respect to the auxiliary variables is achieved in closed-form solutions. To illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we present three case studies: capacity maximization, latency minimization, and regularized zero-forcing precoding. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed optimization framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art schemes.

Movable antennas (MAs) have received increasing attention in wireless communications due to their capability of position adjustment to reconfigure wireless channels. However, moving MAs results in non-negligible delay, which may decrease the effective data transmission time. To reduce the movement delay, this paper investigates a new MA trajectory optimization problem. In particular, given the desired destination positions of multiple MAs, we aim to jointly optimize their associations with the initial MA positions and the corresponding movement trajectories within a two-dimensional (2D) region. The goal is to minimize the overall movement delay for all MAs subject to inter-MA minimum distance constraints and practical motor-induced moving direction constraints. However, this problem is a continuous-time mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) problem that is challenging to solve. To tackle this challenge, we first consider a special case with a one-dimensional (1D) MA array and derive the optimal trajectories for MAs in closed-form. Then, we consider another special case without the moving direction constraints and propose a two-stage optimization algorithm that sequentially optimizes the MAs’ position associations and trajectories. This algorithm first relaxes the inter-MA distance constraints and optimally solves the resulting delay minimization problem, followed by successive convex approximation (SCA) to adjust the obtained MA association and trajectory solutions. Furthermore, we extend this two-stage algorithm to the general scenario with the moving direction constraints by introducing the Manhattan distance and combining the A* and conflict-based search (CBS) algorithms. Simulation results are provided to show the effectiveness of our proposed trajectory optimization methods in reducing the movement delay as well as draw useful insights for practical design.

In this paper, we investigate the intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)/reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system based on sensing mutual information (MI). Specifically, the base station (BS) perceives the sensing target via the reflected sensing signal by the IRS, while communicating with the users simultaneously. Our aim is to maximize the sensing MI, subject to the quality of service (QoS) constraints for all communication users, the transmit power constraint at the BS, and the unit-modulus constraint on the IRS’s passive reflection. We solve this problem under two cases: one simplified case assuming a line-of-sight (LoS) channel between the BS and IRS and no clutter interference to sensing, and the other generalized case considering the Rician fading channel of the BS-IRS link and the presence of clutter interference to sensing. For the first case, we prove that the dedicated sensing beamformer is unnecessary for improving sensing MI and develop a low-complexity iterative algorithm to jointly optimize the BS and IRS active/passive beamformers. Then, for the second case, we propose an alternative iterative algorithm, which can also be applied to the first case, to solve the beamforming design problem under the general setup. Numerical results are provided to validate the performance of the proposed algorithms, as compared to various benchmark schemes.

The advent of massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology has provided new opportunities for capacity improvement via strategic antenna deployment, especially when the near-field effect is pronounced due to antenna proliferation. In this paper, we investigate the optimal antenna placement for maximizing the achievable rate of a point-to-point near-field channel, where the transmitter is deployed with massive movable antennas. First, we propose a novel design framework to explore the relationship between antenna positions and achievable data rate. By introducing the continuous antenna position function (APF) and antenna density function (ADF), we reformulate the antenna position design problem from the discrete to the continuous domain, which maximizes the achievable rate functional with respect to ADF. Leveraging functional analysis and variational methods, we derive the optimal ADF condition and propose a gradient-based algorithm for numerical solutions under general channel conditions. Furthermore, for the near-field line-of-sight (LoS) scenario, we present a closed-form solution for the optimal ADF, revealing the critical role of edge antenna density in enhancing the achievable rate. Finally, we propose a flexible antenna array-based deployment method that ensures practical implementation while mitigating mutual coupling issues. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, with uniform circular arrays emerging as a promising geometry for balancing performance and deployment feasibility in near-field communications.

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is regarded as a key enabling platform for low-altitude economy, due to its advantages such as three-dimensional (3D) maneuverability, flexible deployment, and line-of-sight (LoS) air-to-air/ground communication links. In particular, the intrinsic high mobility renders UAV especially suitable for operating as a movable antenna (MA) from the sky. In this paper, by exploiting the flexible mobility of UAV swarm and antenna position adjustment of MA, we propose a novel UAV swarm enabled two-level MA system, where UAVs not only individually deploy a local MA array, but also form a larger-scale MA system with their individual MA arrays via swarm coordination. We formulate a general optimization problem to maximize the minimum achievable rate over all ground user equipments (UEs), by jointly optimizing the 3D UAV swarm placement positions, their individual MAs’ positions (or local positions), and receive beamforming for different UEs. To gain useful insights, we first consider the special case where each UAV has only one antenna, under different scenarios of one single UE, two UEs, and arbitrary number of UEs. In particular, for the two-UE case, we derive the optimal UAV swarm placement positions in closed-form that achieves inter-UE interference (IUI)-free communication when the uniform plane wave (UPW) model holds, where the UAV swarm forms a uniform sparse array (USA) satisfying minimum safe distance constraint. While for the general case with arbitrary number of UEs, we propose an efficient alternating optimization algorithm to solve the formulated non-convex optimization problem. Then, we extend the results to the case where each UAV is equipped with multiple antennas. Numerical results verify that the proposed low-altitude UAV swarm enabled MA system significantly outperforms various benchmark schemes, thanks to the exploitation of two-level mobility to create more favorable channel conditions for multi-UE communications.

In this paper, we present a new wireless sensing system utilizing a movable antenna (MA) that continuously moves and receives sensing signals to enhance sensing performance over the conventional fixed-position antenna (FPA) sensing. We show that the angle estimation performance is fundamentally determined by the MA trajectory, and derive the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) of the mean square error (MSE) for angle-of-arrival (AoA) estimation as a function of the trajectory for both one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) antenna movement. For the 1D case, a globally optimal trajectory that minimizes the CRB is derived in closed form. Notably, the resulting CRB decreases cubically with sensing time in the time-constrained regime, whereas it decreases linearly with sensing time and quadratically with the movement line segment's length in the space-constrained regime. For the 2D case, we aim to achieve the minimum of maximum (min-max) CRBs of estimation MSE for the two AoAs with respect to the horizontal and vertical axes. To this end, we design an efficient alternating optimization algorithm that iteratively updates the MA's horizontal or vertical coordinates with the other being fixed, yielding a locally optimal trajectory. Numerical results show that the proposed 1D/2D MA-based sensing schemes significantly reduce both the CRB and actual AoA estimation MSE compared to conventional FPA-based sensing with uniform linear/planar arrays (ULAs/UPAs) as well as various benchmark MA trajectories. Moreover, it is revealed that the steering vectors of our designed 1D/2D MA trajectories have low correlation in the angular domain, thereby effectively increasing the angular resolution for achieving higher AoA estimation accuracy.

Due to the crowded spectrum occupancy and dense user terminals (UTs), the conventional fixed antenna (FA)-based access points (APs) face challenges in realizing massive access and interference cancellation. To address this issue, in this paper we develop a six-dimensional movable antenna (6DMA) enhanced multi-AP coordination system to fully exploit its maximum spatial diversity for coverage enhancement and interference mitigation. First, we model the wireless channels between the APs and UTs to characterize their variation with respect to 6DMA movement, in terms of both the three-dimensional (3D) position and 3D orientation of each distributed AP’s antenna. Then, an optimization problem is formulated to maximize the weighted sum rate of multiple UTs for their uplink transmissions by jointly optimizing the antenna position vector (APV), the antenna orientation matrix (AOM), and the receive combining matrix over all coordinated APs, subject to the constraints on local antenna movement regions. To solve this challenging non-convex optimization problem, we first transform it into a more tractable Lagrangian dual problem. Then, an alternating optimization (AO)-based algorithm is developed by iteratively optimizing the APV and AOM, which are designed by applying the successive convex approximation (SCA) technique and Riemannian manifold optimization-based algorithm, respectively. Moreover, to further reduce the overhead of antenna movement, we propose an offline solution for APV and AOM design based on statistical channel state information (CSI). In addition, we further extend the proposed scheme from uni-polarized to dual-polarized modes for all antennas. Simulation results show that the proposed 6DMA-enhanced multi-AP coordination system can significantly enhance network capacity, and both of the online and offline 6DMA schemes can attain considerable performance improvement compared to the conventional FA-based schemes.

The sixth-generation (6G) mobile communication systems are expected to provide seamless connectivity for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to support them in fulfilling various tasks. However, the line-of-sight (LoS)-dominated channels of cellular-connected UAVs expose them to severe co-channel interference from nearby base stations (BSs), which significantly degrades communication reliability. To address this challenge, this paper investigates a movable antenna (MA)-enhanced cellular-connected UAV communication system, where the additional spatial degrees of freedom (DoFs) offered by MAs are exploited for the interference-aware UAV trajectory planning. Specifically, we formulate an optimization problem to minimize the UAV mission completion time by jointly optimizing the UAV beamforming matrix, antenna position vector (APV), UAV trajectory, and UAV–BS association, subject to constraints on signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) requirements, UAV mobility, and MA mobility. To overcome the inherent challenges of the continuous-time formulation, we discretize both the flight region and trajectory of the UAV, thereby reformulating the problem into a tractable discrete optimization problem. A selective uniform cost search (SUCS) algorithm is then developed for UAV trajectory planning, where the feasibility of candidate grid points is evaluated by jointly optimizing beamforming, APV, and UAV–BS association to maximize the expected SINR. Simulation results show that, compared with benchmark schemes, the proposed MA-enhanced design significantly improves the expected SINR of cellular-connected UAVs along the optimized trajectory, thereby reducing UAV mission completion time while ensuring reliable communication links.

This paper proposes an efficient method for modeling and reconstructing the channel gain map (CGM) based on virtual scatterers. Specifically, we develop a virtual scatterer model to characterize the channel gain distribution in three-dimensional (3D) space, by capturing the multi-path propagation environment structure and exploiting the angular-domain spatial correlation of scatterer response. In this model, the CGM is represented as a function over a set of tunable parameters for virtual scatterers, including their number, positions, and scatterer response coefficients (SRCs), which can be estimated from a limited number of channel gain measurements at a given set of locations within the region of interest. This new representation offers a flexible and scalable modeling framework for efficient and accurate CGM reconstruction. Furthermore, we propose a progressive estimation algorithm to acquire the scatterers’ parameters. In this algorithm, we gradually increase the number of virtual scatterers to balance the computational complexity and reconstruction accuracy, and derive the closed-form solutions of SRCs with any given number and positions of virtual scatterers. In addition, by exploiting the spatial correlation of scatterer response, we propose a Gaussian process regression (GPR)-based inference method to predict the SRCs that cannot be directly estimated. Finally, ray-tracing-based simulation results under realistic physical environments validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, demonstrating that it achieves higher reconstruction accuracy compared to conventional CGM estimation approaches, especially for the scenario with limited channel measurements.

Movable antenna (MA) has attracted increasing attention in wireless communications recently. As compared to conventional fixed-position antennas (FPAs), the geometry of MAs can be dynamically reconfigured, such that more flexible beamforming can be achieved for different purposes. In this paper, we investigate the application of MAs to wide-beam coverage, aiming to jointly optimize the MAs’ beamforming weights and positions within a line segment to maximize the minimum beam gain among all possible directions in a target region. However, the resulting optimization problem is non-convex and difficult to be optimally solved. To tackle this difficulty, we first derive a closed-form optimal solution to this problem in the special case with two MAs. While for the case with more than two MAs, an alternating optimization (AO) algorithm is proposed to obtain a high-quality suboptimal solution, where the MAs’ beamforming weights and positions are alternately optimized by applying the successive convex approximation (SCA) technique. To reduce computational complexity, we further propose a more efficient MA position optimization method by leveraging the frequency modulation continuous wave (FMCW) design. Specifically, we construct a spatial FMCW-based continuous phase profile for the entire line segment and then select an optimal set of MA positions to optimize the wide-beam coverage performance with their FMCW-based phase profiles, thus greatly simplifying the wide-beam design. Furthermore, we extend the proposed AO and FMCW-based algorithms for the linear MA array to the planar MA array. Numerical results show that both our proposed algorithms can significantly outperform conventional FPAs even with optimized beamforming weights.

This paper proposes a new architecture for the low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite ground station aided by movable antenna (MA) array. Unlike conventional fixed-position antenna (FPA), the MA array can flexibly adjust antenna positions to reconfigure array geometry, for more effectively mitigating interference and improving communication performance in ultra-dense LEO satellite networks. To reduce movement overhead, we configure antenna positions at the antenna initialization stage, which remain unchanged during the whole communication period of the ground station. To this end, an optimization problem is formulated to maximize the average achievable rate of the ground station by jointly optimizing its antenna position vector (APV) and time-varying beamforming weights, i.e., antenna weight vectors (AWVs). To solve the resulting non-convex optimization problem, we adopt the Lagrangian dual transformation and quadratic transformation to reformulate the objective function into a more tractable form. Then, we develop an efficient block coordinate descent-based iterative algorithm that alternately optimizes the APV and AWVs until convergence is reached. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed MA scheme significantly outperforms traditional FPA by increasing the achievable rate at ground stations under various system setups, thus providing an efficient solution for interference mitigation in future ultra-dense LEO satellite communication networks.

Movable antenna (MA) is an emerging technology that can significantly improve communication performance via the continuous adjustment of the antenna positions. To unleash the potential of MAs in wideband communication systems, acquiring accurate channel state information (CSI), i.e., the channel frequency responses (CFRs) between any position pair within the transmit (Tx) region and the receive (Rx) region across all subcarriers, is a crucial issue. In this paper, we study the channel estimation problem for wideband MA systems. To start with, we express the CFRs as a combination of the field-response vectors (FRVs), delay-response vector (DRV), and path-response tensor (PRT), which exhibit sparse characteristics and can be recovered by using a limited number of channel measurements at selected position pairs of Tx and Rx MAs over a few subcarriers. Specifically, we first formulate the recovery of the FRVs and DRV as a problem with multiple measurement vectors in compressed sensing (MMV-CS), which can be solved via a simultaneous orthogonal matching pursuit (SOMP) algorithm. Next, we estimate the PRT using the least-square (LS) method. Moreover, we also devise an alternating refinement approach to further improve the accuracy of the estimated FRVs, DRV, and PRT. This is achieved by minimizing the discrepancy between the received pilots and those constructed by the estimated CSI, which can be efficiently carried out by using the gradient descent algorithm. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that both the SOMP-based channel estimation method and alternating refinement method can reconstruct the complete wideband CSI with high accuracy, where the alternating refinement method performs better despite a higher complexity.

This paper presents an end-to-end deep learning framework in a movable antenna (MA)-enabled multiuser communication system. In contrast to the conventional works assuming perfect channel state information (CSI) for MA placement or adopting a decoupled CSI acquisition and MA placement design paradigm, we address the practical CSI acquisition issue through the design of pilot signals and quantized CSI feedback, and further incorporate the joint optimization of channel estimation, MA placement, and precoding design. The proposed mechanism enables the system to learn an optimized transmission strategy from imperfect channel data, overcoming the limitations of conventional methods that conduct channel estimation and antenna position optimization separately. To balance the performance and overhead, we further extend the proposed framework to optimize the antenna placement based on the statistical CSI. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently outperforms traditional benchmarks in terms of achievable sum-rate of users, especially under limited feedback and sparse channel environments. Notably, it achieves a performance comparable to the widely-adopted gradient-based methods with perfect CSI, while maintaining significantly lower CSI feedback overhead. These results highlight the effectiveness and adaptability of learning-based MA system design for future wireless systems.

Movable antenna (MA) enhances wireless communication performance by enabling the flexibility in antenna movement. Prior works on MA usually ignore the time overhead for antenna movement in channel estimation and/or performance improvement. However, due to the mechanically constrained MA movement speed and limited channel coherence time, the antenna movement time can significantly affect the effective communication rate of MA systems in practice. To address this issue, we propose to jointly design the MA’s trajectories for channel measurements and rate-optimal repositioning to maximize the average effective communication rate of an MA-aided receiver subject to the given transmission block duration. Specifically, we propose a two-timescale optimization approach, in which the MA’s trajectory for channel measurements is optimized in the long term based on the known channel distribution, while the MA’s trajectory for moving to the rate-optimal position is adaptively designed in the short term to cater to the instantaneous channel realizations, thus simplifying the design complexity and yet providing high adaptability to channel variations. In particular, we propose a kernel-based regression (KBR) method to efficiently reconstruct the channel map over the whole antenna moving region based on the limited channel measurements, utilizing an offline-learned kernel for which closed-form expressions are theoretically derived under different multipath channel distributions. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms the fixed-position antenna (FPA) system and other benchmark MA designs that neglect the antenna movement time, and even achieves performance comparable to that of the single-input multiple-output (SIMO) beamforming system. Furthermore, the implementation cost of the proposed MA scheme is analyzed to assess its practical feasibility. Although mechanical antenna movement incurs additional energy consumption, the proposed MA scheme achieves superior energy efficiency to both the FPA and SIMO systems.

Movable antenna (MA) has been regarded as a promising technology to enhance wireless communication performance by enabling flexible antenna movement. However, the hardware cost of conventional MA systems scales with the number of movable elements due to the need for independently controllable driving components. To reduce hardware cost, we propose in this paper a novel architecture named cross-linked MA (CL-MA) array, which enables the collective movement of multiple antennas in both horizontal and vertical directions. To evaluate the performance benefits of the CL-MA array, we consider an uplink multiuser communication scenario. Specifically, we aim to minimize the total transmit power while satisfying a given minimum rate requirement for each user by jointly optimizing the horizontal and vertical antenna position vectors (APVs), the receive combining at the base station (BS), and the transmit power of users. A globally lower bound on the total transmit power is derived, with closed-form solutions for the APVs obtained under the condition of a single channel path for each user. For the more general case of multiple channel paths, we develop a low-complexity algorithm based on discrete antenna position optimization. Additionally, to further reduce antenna movement overhead, a statistical channel-based antenna position optimization approach is proposed, allowing for unchanged APVs over a long time period. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed CL-MA schemes significantly outperform conventional fixed-position antenna (FPA) systems and closely approach the theoretical lower bound on the total transmit power. Compared to the instantaneous channel-based CL-MA optimization, the statistical channel-based approach incurs a slight performance loss but achieves significantly lower movement overhead, making it an appealing solution for practical wireless systems.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a promising paradigm to reconfigure the wireless environment for enhanced communication coverage and quality. However, to compensate for the double pathloss effect, massive IRS elements are required, raising concerns on the scalability of cost and complexity. This paper introduces a new architecture of quasi-static IRS (QS-IRS), which tunes element phases via mechanical adjustment or manually re-arranging the array topology. A simple divide-and-assemble (DnA) approach is further proposed, which enables massive production/assembly of purely passive elements without diodes/controllers/bias networks, and thus is suitable for ultra low-cost and large-scale deployment to enhance long-term coverage. To achieve this end, an IRS-aided area coverage problem is formulated, which explicitly considers the element radiation pattern (ERP), with the newly introduced shape masks for the mainlobe, and the sidelobe constraints to reduce energy leakage. An alternating optimization (AO) algorithm based on the difference-of-convex (DC) and successive convex approximation (SCA) procedure is proposed, which achieves shaped beamforming with power gains close to that of the joint optimization algorithm, but with significantly reduced computational complexity.

Movable antenna (MA) has been regarded as a promising technology to enhance wireless communication performance by enabling flexible antenna movement. To reduce hardware cost, we propose in this paper a novel architecture named cross-linked MA (CL-MA) array, which enables the collective movement of multiple antennas in both horizontal and vertical directions. To evaluate the performance benefits of the CL-MA array, we consider an uplink multiuser communication scenario. Specifically, we aim to minimize the total transmit power while satisfying a given minimum rate requirement for each user by jointly optimizing the horizontal and vertical antenna position vectors (APVs), the receive combining at the base station (BS), and the transmit power of users. To solve this challenging non-convex optimization problem, we develop a low-complexity algorithm based on discrete antenna position optimization. Additionally, to further reduce antenna movement overhead, a statistical channel-based antenna position optimization approach is proposed, allowing for quasi-static APVs over a long time period. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed CL-MA schemes significantly outperform conventional fixed-position antenna (FPA) systems and closely approach the theoretical lower bound on the total transmit power. Compared to the instantaneous channel-based CL-MA optimization, the statistical channel-based approach incurs a slight performance loss but achieves significantly lower movement overhead, making it an appealing solution for practical wireless systems.

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.

In this paper, we propose a new rotatable antenna (RA) model to improve the performance of wireless communication systems. Different from conventional fixed antenna, the proposed RA system can independently and flexibly change the three-dimensional (3D) orientation/boresight of each antenna by adjusting its deflection angles to achieve desired channel realizations. Specifically, we study an RA-enabled uplink communication system, where the receive beamforming and the deflection angles of all RAs are jointly optimized to maximize the minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) among all the users. In the special single-user and free-space propagation setup, the optimal deflection angles are derived in closed form with the maximum-ratio combining (MRC) beamformer applied at the base station (BS). In the general multi-user and multi-path setup, we propose an alternating optimization (AO) algorithm to alternately optimize the receive beamforming and the deflection angles in an iterative manner. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate that the proposed RA-enabled system can significantly outperform other benchmark schemes.

In this paper, we propose an integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system enabled by movable antennas (MAs), where the base station (BS) transmitter is equipped with MAs to enhance both sensing and communication performance. To characterize the benefits of MA-enabled ISAC systems, we focus on the line-of-sight (LoS) channel scenario and derive the Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) for angle estimation error, which is then minimized by jointly optimizing the antenna position vector (APV) and beamforming design, subject to a pre-defined signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) constraint to ensure the communication performance. Despite the non-convexity of the resulting problem, we develop a boundary traversal breadth-first search (BT-BFS) algorithm to obtain the global optimal solution, along with a lower-complexity boundary traversal depth-first search (BT-DFS) algorithm to find a local optimal solution efficiently. Extensive numerical results are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms, and demonstrate the superiority of the considered MA-enabled ISAC system over conventional ISAC systems with fixed-position antennas (FPAs).

In this paper, we propose a new form of polarization reconfigurable antennas (PRAs) that can form linear, circular, and general elliptical polarizations assisted by phase shifters (PSs). With PRAs, polarforming is achieved, which enables the antenna to shape its polarization into a desired state for aligning with that of the received electromagnetic (EM) wave or reconfiguring that of the transmitted EM wave. To demonstrate the benefits of polarforming, we investigate a PRA-aided single-input single-output (SISO) communication system equipped with tunable PSs for polarization adaptation. We characterize the achievable signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the receiver as a function of the phase shifts of PS-based PRAs. Moreover, we develop an alternating optimization approach to maximize the SNR by optimizing the phase shifts at both the transmitter and receiver. Finally, comprehensive simulation results are presented, which not only validate the effectiveness of polarforming in mitigating the channel depolarization effects, but also demonstrate its substantial performance improvement over conventional systems.

The passive and frequency-flat reflection of IRS, as well as the high-dimensional IRS-reflected channels, have posed significant challenges for efficient IRS channel estimation, especially in wideband communication systems with significant multi-path channel delay spread. To address these challenges, we propose a novel neural network (NN)-empowered framework for IRS channel autocorrelation matrix estimation in wideband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. This framework relies only on the easily accessible reference signal received power (RSRP) measurements at users in existing wideband communication systems, without requiring additional pilot transmission. Based on the estimates of channel autocorrelation matrix, the passive reflection of IRS is optimized to maximize the average user received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) over all subcarriers in the OFDM system. Numerical results verify that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms existing power-measurement-based IRS reflection designs in wideband channels.

Movable antenna (MA) technology offers promising potential to enhance wireless communication by allowing flexible antenna movement. To maximize spatial degrees of freedom (DoFs), larger movable regions are required, which may render the conventional far-field assumption for channels between transceivers invalid. In light of it, we investigate in this paper MA-enabled near-field communications, where a base station (BS) with multiple movable subarrays serves multiple users, each equipped with a fixed-position antenna (FPA). First, an upper bound on the minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) across users is derived in closed form. A low-complexity algorithm based on zero-forcing (ZF) is then proposed to jointly optimize the antenna position vector (APV) and digital beamforming matrix (DBFM) to approach this bound. Moreover, we further explore the MA design strategy based on statistical channel state information (CSI), with the APV updated less frequently to reduce the antenna movement overhead. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed algorithms achieve performance close to the derived bound and also outperform the benchmark schemes using dense or sparse arrays with FPAs.

In this article, we focus on the resource allocation and autonomous aerial vehicle (AAV) 3-D trajectory design for the AAV-ground base station (GBS) coordinated multipoint nonorthogonal multiple access (CoMP-NOMA) system to maximize the sum-rate of CoMP users while maintaining users’ high Quality of Service requirements. The main contributions of this article are summarized as follows: 1) with the assistance of closed-form power allocation result, a generalized joint user scheduling and power allocation (G-USPA) algorithm is proposed to derive the optimal user scheduling solution; 2) by revealing the monotone increasing relationship between the sum transmit power and the transmit rates of non-CoMP users, the optimal rate of each non-CoMP users turns out to be its inherent minimum required rate, consequently, the optimal transmit rates and power allocation of all users can also be derived; and 3) moreover, considering the Line of Sight (LoS) and non-LoS factors in the air-ground channel, the 3-D trajectory of AAV is designed based on successive convex approximation to provide a flexible user-centric service. The proposed G-USPA algorithm is compatible with the AAV trajectory design, which is optimized alternatively and can lead to fast convergence. Numerical results verify that the 3-D AAV-GBS CoMP-NOMA model and the G-USPA scheme have a superior performance in terms of total system sum rate and the sum rate of CoMP users over the non-CoMP AAV assisted nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems.

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.

Optical intelligent reflecting surface (OIRS) has attracted increasing attention due to its capability of overcoming signal blockages in visible light communication (VLC), an emerging technology for the next-generation advanced transceivers. However, current works on OIRS predominantly assume known channel state information (CSI), while its estimation problem has not been studied yet. To bridge such a gap, this paper proposes a new and customized OIRS channel estimation protocol with joint space-time sampling under the alignment-based OIRS channel model. First, we unveil the spatial and temporal coherence characteristics and derive OIRS coherence distance and coherence time in closed form. Next, to achieve dynamic beam alignment for pilot transmission within the coherence time, we propose to tune the rotation angles of the OIRS reflecting elements following a geometric optics-based non-uniform codebook. Then, given the beam alignment within the considered coherence time, a sequential OIRS channel estimation method is proposed, where the OIRS is divided into multiple subarrays based on the coherence distance. The CSI for each subarray is estimated sequentially, followed by a space-time interpolation to retrieve full CSI for other non-aligned transceiver antennas. Numerical results validate our theoretical analyses and demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed OIRS channel estimation protocol as compared to benchmark schemes.

The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled data collection system with a rotary-wing UAV and multiple ground nodes (GNs) is investigated in this paper. The average transmission data rate is maximized through the coordinated optimization of the GNs’ transmit power and the UAV’s trajectory. In particular, the UAV dynamic constraints and physical constraints are imposed. The UAV dynamics, which are governed by a group of differential equations, are usually ignored in existing works. As a consequence, the planned trajectory cannot be fully tracked by the controller in real world applications, which could lead to severe performance degradation. Thus, a control-based method is devised to address this issue. Specifically, by adopting the state-space model from control theory, the data collection problem is established as a dynamic optimization problem subject to state constraints, in which both of the decision variables and constraints are infinite-dimensional in nature. The key idea of the solution method is to convert the infinite-dimensional dynamic program into a finite-dimensional static nonlinear problem. This is achieved by deriving the required gradients of the dynamic optimization problem based on the control parametrization scheme and an exact penalty function method. The effectiveness and superiority of the proposed design are validated via numerical experiments.

Movable antenna (MA) technology offers promising potential to enhance wireless communication by allowing flexible antenna movement. To maximize spatial degrees of freedom (DoFs), larger movable regions are required, which may render the conventional far-field assumption for channels between transceivers invalid. In light of it, we investigate in this paper MA-enabled near-field communications, where a base station (BS) with multiple movable subarrays serves multiple users, each equipped with a fixed-position antenna (FPA). First, we extend the field response channel model for MA systems to the near-field propagation scenario. Next, we examine MA-aided multiuser communication systems under both digital and analog beamforming architectures. For digital beamforming, spatial division multiple access (SDMA) is utilized, where an upper bound on the minimum achievable rate across users is derived in closed form. A low-complexity algorithm based on zero-forcing (ZF) is then proposed to jointly optimize the antenna position vector (APV) and digital beamforming matrix (DBFM) to approach this bound. For analog beamforming, orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) is employed, and an upper bound on the minimum achievable rate among users is also derived. An alternating optimization (AO) algorithm is proposed to iteratively optimize the APV, analog beamforming vector (ABFV), and power allocation until convergence. For both architectures, we further explore MA design strategies based on statistical channels, with the APV updated less frequently to reduce the antenna movement overhead. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed algorithms achieve performance close to the derived bounds and also outperform the benchmark schemes using dense or sparse arrays with FPAs.

The channel state information (CSI) of malicious users in the field of physical layer security is usually difficult to obtain due to the users’ passive listening. However, as sensing is integrating into the cellular network, it becomes feasible to acquire the CSI of passive eavesdroppers. Motivated by this, we propose a novel sensing-aided secure communication (SASC) scheme in this paper, which is implemented by a two-stage transmission protocol including beam sensing of the eavesdropper’s CSI and secure communication to the legitimate user against the eavesdropper. In the first stage, the base station (BS) needs to decide the number of sensing beams$L$, and we derive the closed-form Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) to establish the relationship between the estimated angle range for the eavesdropper’s location and$L$, where a larger$L$for beam sensing returns a tighter CRB to locate the eavesdropper. In the second stage, the BS designs the beamforming vector to transmit confidential data to the legitimate user and avoid leakage to the eavesdropper in the estimated range. As sensing affects the subsequent secure communication, we decouple the non-convex two-stage joint optimization problem into two subproblems and solve it by backward induction. In particular, in the secrecy beamforming subproblem given$L$, we investigate the worst-case information leakage by constructing a convex hull to approximate the angle range from sensing. Then we develop a semi-closed-form solution of robust secrecy beamforming vector, and use it for the other subproblem to decide initial$L$. To achieve this goal, we also obtain a semi-closed-form solution of$L$by considering all potential estimated results in the worst case. Finally, we present simulation results to show the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed SASC scheme as compared to various benchmarks.

In this paper, we consider the downlink transmission of a multi-antenna base station (BS) supported by an active simultaneously transmitting and reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) to serve single-antenna users via simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT). In this context, we formulate an energy efficiency maximisation problem that jointly optimises the gain, element selection and phase shift matrices of the active STAR-RIS, the transmit beamforming of the BS and the power splitting ratio of the users. With respect to the highly coupled and non-convex form of this problem, an alternating optimisation solution approach is proposed, using tools from convex optimisation and reinforcement learning. Specifically, semi-definite relaxation (SDR), difference of convex functions (DC), and fractional programming techniques are employed to transform the non-convex optimisation problem into a convex form for optimising the BS beamforming vector and the power splitting ratio of the SWIPT. Then, by integrating meta-learning with the modified deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) and soft actor-critical (SAC) methods, a combinatorial reinforcement learning network is developed to optimise the element selection, gain and phase shift matrices of the active STAR-RIS. Our simulations show the effectiveness of the proposed resource allocation scheme. Furthermore, our proposed active STAR-RIS-based SWIPT system outperforms its passive counterpart by 57% on average.

In this paper, we study the intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) deployment problem where a number of IRSs are optimally placed in a target area to improve its signal coverage with the serving base station (BS). To achieve this, we assume that there is a given set of candidate sites in the target area for IRS deployment and divide the area into multiple grids of identical size. Then, we derive the average channel power gains from the BS to the IRS at each candidate site and from this IRS to any grid in the target area in terms of IRS parameters, including its size, position, height, and orientation. Thus, we are able to approximate the average cascaded channel power gain from the BS to each grid via any IRS, introducing an effective IRS reflection gain based on the large-scale channel knowledge only. Next, we formulate a multi-IRS deployment optimization problem to minimize the total deployment cost by selecting a subset of candidate sites for deploying IRSs and jointly optimizing their heights, orientations, and numbers of reflecting elements while satisfying a given coverage rate performance requirement over all grids in the target area. To solve this challenging combinatorial optimization problem, we first reformulate it as an integer linear programming problem and solve it optimally using the branchand- bound (BB) algorithm. In addition, we propose an efficient successive refinement algorithm to further reduce computational complexity. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed lower-complexity successive refinement algorithm achieves near-optimal performance but with significantly reduced running time compared to the proposed optimal BB algorithm, as well as superior performance-cost trade-off compared to other baseline IRS deployment strategies.

This paper studies a near-field integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system with extremely large-scale antenna array (ELAA), in which a base station (BS) deployed with a very large number of antennas transmits wireless signals to communicate with multiple communication users (CUs) and simultaneously uses the echo signals to localize multiple point targets in the three-dimension (3D) space. To balance the performance tradeoff between near-field communication and 3D target localization, we design the transmit covariance matrix at the BS to optimize the localization performance while ensuring the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) constraints at individual CUs. In particular, we formulate three design problems by considering different 3D localization performance metrics, including minimizing the sum Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) for estimating 3D locations, maximizing the minimum target illumination power, and maximizing the minimum target echo signal power. Although the three design problems are non-convex in general, we obtain their global optimal solutions via the technique of semi-definite relaxation (SDR) by proving the tightness of such relaxations. It is rigorously shown that the optimal solutions to the three problems have low-rank structures depending on the sensing and communication channel matrices, which can be exploited to greatly reduce the computational complexity of the SDR-based solutions. Interestingly, we find that in the special case with a single collocated target/CU present towards the middle of a symmetric uniform planar array (UPA), the optimal solutions to the three problems become identical to the SINR-maximization design and have a closed form, while in other cases they can be different in general. Besides, when the target/CU moves away from the transmitter/receiver, the CRB may first decrease and then increase. These two phenomena differ from those in the far-field scenario. Numerical results show the benefits of the proposed near-field designs in optimizing both sensing and communication performance, by exploiting the beam focusing capabilities of ELAA, while the benchmark based on far-field design yields inferior results due to model mismatch.

With the access to tens of gigahertz of bandwidth, terahertz (THz) wideband communication emerges as a promising technology for the upcoming next generation mobile networks. To deal with the severe path loss and blockage of THz signals, massive multiple-input multiple-output and intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) can be jointly employed. Due to the extremely large signal bandwidth, the beams generated by the transmit hybrid beamforming may point to different directions around the target direction at different frequencies, which results in the beam splitting effect (BSE). In this paper, a new system design namelyTHzCondenseris introduced to mitigate the BSE, where the signals generated by each transmit radio frequency (RF) chain are reflected by one of the distributed IRSs in a one-to-one manner via the joint transmit and IRS beamforming design, thus creating adjustable multi-path components to achieve both high spatial multiplexing gain and array gain. Moreover, for practical scenarios when the number of transmit RF chains is more than that of IRSs, each IRS may need to reflect the signals generated by multiple RF chains in a one-to-many manner. For the above two cases, the joint beamforming design problems are efficiently solved to maximize the achievable rate. Simulations are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms for mitigating the BSE and improving the achievable rate in IRS-aided THz wideband communications.

To support the development of air-ground integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), network-level performance analysis is needed for providing an essential guide on the network design. Following the widely adopted orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) technology in existing wireless systems, a cooperative air-ground wireless network based on OFDM-ISAC is introduced in this paper, where the ISAC-enabled base stations (BSs) following the two-dimensional homogeneous Poisson point process (HPPP) distribution serve the terrestrial communication users while sensing the aerial targets. In particular, cooperative beamforming schemes are designed for mitigating the interference among ISAC BSs. First, we analyze the communication as well as sensing performances in terms of different metrics including area communication coverage probability, area communication spectral efficiency, area radar detection coverage probability, and average Cramér-Rao Bound. Simulation results are then presented to validate the theoretical analysis and illustrate the effects of key system parameters on the network performance. It is observed that both the communication and sensing (C&S) performances depend on the BS density and height, while the sensing performance also depends on the height of sensing target together with the numbers of OFDM subcarriers and symbols. Moreover, there exists a tradeoff between the C&S performances with respect to the BS density and height. The results of this paper provide useful guidance to the design and implementation of air-ground wireless network for harnessing the dual benefits of ISAC.

Passive metal reflectors for communication enhancement have appealing advantages such as ultra low cost, zero energy expenditure, maintenance-free operation, long life span, and full compatibility with legacy wireless systems. To unleash the full potential of passive reflectors for wireless communications, this paper proposes a new passive reflector architecture, termedflexible reflector(FR), for enabling the flexible adjustment of beamforming direction via the FR placement and rotation optimization. We consider the multi-FR aided area coverage enhancement and aim to maximize the minimum expected receive power over all locations within the target coverage area, by jointly optimizing the placement positions and rotation angles of multiple FRs. To gain useful insights, the special case of movable reflector (MR) with fixed rotation is first studied to maximize the expected receive power at a target location, where the optimal single-MR placement positions for electrically large and small reflectors are derived in closed-form, respectively. It is shown that the reflector should be placed at the specular reflection point for electrically large reflector. While for area coverage enhancement, the optimal placement is obtained for the single-MR case and a sequential placement algorithm is proposed for the multi-MR case. Moreover, for the general case of FR, joint placement and rotation design is considered for the single-/multi-FR aided coverage enhancement, respectively. Numerical results are presented which demonstrate significant performance gains of FRs over various benchmark schemes under different practical setups in terms of receive power enhancement.

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.

Channel state information (CSI) is essential to the performance optimization of intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided wireless communication systems. However, the passive and frequency-flat reflection of IRS, as well as the high-dimensional IRS-reflected channels, have posed practical challenges for efficient IRS channel estimation, especially in wideband communication systems with significant multi-path channel delay spread. To tackle the above challenge, we propose a novel neural network (NN)-empowered IRS channel estimation and passive reflection design framework for the wideband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) communication system based only on the user’s reference signal received power (RSRP) measurements with time-varying random IRS training reflections. As RSRP is readily accessible in existing communication systems, our proposed channel estimation method does not require additional pilot transmission in IRS-aided wideband communication systems. In particular, we show that the average received signal power over all OFDM subcarriers at the user terminal can be represented as the prediction of a single-layer NN composed of multiple subnetworks with the same structure, such that the autocorrelation matrix of the wideband IRS channel can be recovered as their weights via supervised learning. To exploit the potential sparsity of the channel autocorrelation matrix, a progressive training method is proposed by gradually increasing the number of subnetworks until a desired accuracy is achieved, thus reducing the training complexity. Based on the estimates of IRS channel autocorrelation matrix, the IRS passive reflection is then optimized to maximize the average channel power gain over all subcarriers. Numerical results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed IRS channel autocorrelation matrix estimation and passive reflection design under wideband channels, which can achieve significant performance improvement compared to the existing IRS reflection designs based on user power measurements.

Channel gain map (CGM) contains crucial large-scale fading information regarding wireless channels at specific frequency bands in wireless networks. Traditional CGM construction methods require either detailed propagation environment information or numerous channel measurements, rendering them practically cumbersome to implement. To overcome such difficulties, we propose in this paper a novel scatterer-based CGM construction framework to characterize the large-scale channel fading in a spatial region by estimating the scatterer responses from a few channel gain measurements at designated locations in the region. In particular, the region is divided into equally-spaced grids so as to smooth out the small-scale fading by averaging the channel power gain within each grid. As the average channel power gain within each grid can be expressed as a function of large-scale multi-path channel parameters such as the scatterer response coefficients and path-loss coefficients, an iterative algorithm is proposed to estimate these parameters based on only a sufficient number of channel gain measurements taken at random locations around each scatterer. Specifically, the proposed algorithm decomposes the parameter estimation problem into a set of univariate or linear estimation subproblems, which can be efficiently solved by one-dimensional (1D) line search and least-squares methods. Based on the estimated channel parameters, the CGM over the whole region can be estimated by calculating the average channel power gain for each grid. Simulation results under both the two-dimensional (2D) multipath channel model and the practical three-dimensional (3D) ray-tracing channel model verify that the proposed scatterer-based channel gain characterization can accurately capture the large-scale channel gain spatial distribution within a region, and the proposed CGM estimation framework outperforms other channel-measurement-based benchmarks in terms of estimation accuracy, while requiring a significantly reduced number of measurements.

By reconfiguring wireless channels via passive signal reflection, intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) can bring significant performance enhancement for wireless communication systems. However, such performance improvement generally relies on the knowledge of channel state information (CSI) for IRS-involved links. Prior works on IRS CSI acquisition mainly estimate IRS-cascaded channels based on the extra pilot signals received at the users/base station (BS) with time-varying IRS reflections, which, however, needs to modify the existing channel training/estimation protocols of wireless systems. To address this issue, we propose in this paper a new channel estimation scheme for IRS-assisted communication systems based on the received signal power measured at the user terminal, which is practically attainable without the need of changing the current protocol. Due to the lack of signal phase information in measured power, the autocorrelation matrix of the BS-IRS-user cascaded channel is estimated by solving an equivalent rank-minimization problem. To this end, a low-rank-approaching (LRA) algorithm is proposed by employing the fractional programming and alternating optimization techniques. To reduce computational complexity, an approximate LRA (ALRA) algorithm is also developed. Furthermore, these two algorithms are extended to be robust against the receiver noise and quantization error in power measurement. Simulation results are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed channel estimation algorithms as well as the IRS passive reflection design based on the estimated channel autocorrelation matrix.

Extremely large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (XL-MIMO) with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmission can provide unprecedented improvement in spectral efficiency and data rate. Dynamic metasurface antennas (DMAs) have been proposed as a cost-effective and power-efficient solution for realizing XL-MIMO systems. However, the extremely large number of antennas in XL-MIMO-OFDM with DMAs poses critical challenges in acquiring accurate channel state information. To address this issue, we propose in this paper a tensor-based channel estimation method for frequency-selective XL-MIMO-OFDM systems with DMAs. We first characterize the configurable property of DMAs and propose a microstrip-sequential channel training method with quasi-dynamically adjustable metamaterial elements, by representing the received frequency-domain training signals as a fourth-order tensor which admits the canonical polyadic decomposition. Then, by exploiting the sparsity of XL-MIMO channels, we propose a two-stage tensor decomposition-based channel estimation algorithm, where the four coupling factor matrices are obtained without the need of iterative refinement, and the channel multipath parameters can be extracted for reconstructing the entire high-dimensional channel matrix. In addition, we analyze the uniqueness condition for the proposed tensor-based channel estimation method, which reveals that the required channel training overhead is only proportional to the number of channel multipaths, instead of that of metamaterial elements and microstrips. Numerical results demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed design with significantly reduced training overhead as compared to various benchmark schemes.

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.

For millimeter wave (mmWave) or Terahertz (THz) communications, by leveraging the high spatial resolution offered by large antenna arrays and the multi-path sparsity of mmWave/THz channels, a novel inter-symbol interference (ISI) mitigation technique called delay alignment modulation (DAM) has been recently proposed. The key ideas of DAM aredelay pre-compensationandpath-based beamforming. However, existing research on DAM is mainly based on fully digital beamforming, which requires the number of radio frequency (RF) chains to be equal to the number of antennas. This paper proposes the hybrid analog/digital beamforming based DAM, including both fully and partially connected structures. The analog and digital beamforming matrices are designed to achieve performance close to DAM based on fully digital beamforming. While DAM was considered for the path-based channel model with integer delays in the previous work, this paper extends DAM to a more general tap-based model that accounts for fractional path delays. To further reduce the cost of channel estimation and improve the performance for wireless channels with fractional delays, DAM with codebook-based beam alignment and DAM-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DAM-OFDM) with hybrid beamforming are proposed. The effectiveness of the proposed techniques is verified by extensive simulation results.

The low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite network has been recognized as a promising technology to enable the ubiquitous coverage and massive connectivity for future sixth-generation (6G) mobile communications. Due to the ultra-dense constellation, efficient beam coverage and interference mitigation are crucial to LEO satellite communication systems, while the conventional directional antennas and fixed-position antenna (FPA) arrays both have limited degrees of freedom (DoFs) in beamforming to adapt to the time-varying coverage requirement of terrestrial users. To address this challenge, we propose in this paper utilizing movable antenna (MA) arrays to enhance the satellite beam coverage and interference mitigation. Specifically, given the satellite orbit and the coverage requirement within a specific time interval, the antenna position vector (APV) and antenna weight vector (AWV) of the satellite-mounted MA array are jointly optimized over time to minimize the average signal leakage power to the interference area of the satellite, subject to the constraints of the minimum beamforming gain over the coverage area, the continuous movement of MAs, and the constant modulus of AWV. The corresponding continuous-time decision process for the APV and AWV is first transformed into a more tractable discrete-time optimization problem. Then, an alternating optimization (AO)-based algorithm is developed by iteratively optimizing the APV and AWV, where the successive convex approximation (SCA) technique is utilized to obtain locally optimal solutions during the iterations. Moreover, to further reduce the antenna movement overhead, a low-complexity MA scheme is proposed by using an optimized common APV over all time slots. Simulation results validate that the proposed MA array-aided beam coverage schemes can significantly decrease the interference leakage of the satellite compared to conventional FPA-based schemes, while the low-complexity MA scheme can achieve a performance comparable to the continuous-movement scheme.

Optical intelligent reflecting surface (OIRS) has been considered a promising technology for visible light communication (VLC) by constructing visual line-of-sight propagation paths to address the signal blockage issue. However, the existing works on OIRSs are mostly based on perfect channel state information (CSI), whose acquisition appears to be challenging due to the passive nature of the OIRS. To tackle this challenge, this paper proposes a customized channel estimation algorithm for OIRSs. Specifically, we first unveil the OIRS spatial coherence characteristics and derive the coherence distance in closed form. Based on this property, a spatial sampling-based algorithm is proposed to estimate the OIRS-reflected channel, by dividing the OIRS into multiple subarrays based on the coherence distance and sequentially estimating their associated CSI, followed by an interpolation to retrieve the full CSI. Simulation results validate the derived OIRS spatial coherence and demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed OIRS channel estimation algorithm.

In this paper, we propose a new wireless sensing system equipped with the movable-antenna (MA) array for improving the sensing performance. First, we show that the angle estimation performance in wireless sensing is fundamentally determined by the array geometry, where the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) of the mean square error (MSE) for angle of arrival (AoA) estimation is derived as a function of the MAs’ positions. Then, we aim to achieve the minimum of maximum (min-max) CRBs of estimation MSE for the two AoAs with respect to the horizontal and vertical axes, respectively. In particular, for the special case of circular antenna movement region, an optimal solution for the MAs’ positions is derived under certain numbers of MAs and circle radii. Thereby, both the lower- and upper-bounds of the min-max CRB are obtained for the antenna movement region with arbitrary shapes. Moreover, we develop an efficient alternating optimization algorithm to obtain a locally optimal solution for MAs’ positions by iteratively optimizing one between their horizontal and vertical coordinates with the other being fixed. Numerical results demonstrate that our proposed MA arrays can significantly decrease the CRB of AoA estimation MSE as well as the actual MSE compared to conventional uniform planar arrays (UPAs) with different values of uniform inter-antenna spacing.

In this paper, we propose utilizing movable antenna (MA) arrays to enhance the low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite beam coverage and interference mitigation. Specifically, given the satellite orbit and the coverage requirement within a specific time interval, the antenna position vector (APV) and antenna weight vector (AWV) of the satellite-mounted MA array are jointly optimized over time to minimize the average signal leakage power to the interference area of the satellite, subject to the constraints of the minimum beamforming gain over the coverage area, the continuous movement of MAs, and the constant modulus of AWV. The corresponding continuous-time decision process for the APV and AWV is first transformed into a more tractable discrete-time optimization problem. Then, an alternating optimization (AO)-based algorithm is developed by iteratively optimizing the APV and AWV, where the successive convex approximation (SCA) technique is utilized to obtain locally optimal solutions during the iterations. Simulation results validate that the proposed MA array-aided beam coverage scheme can significantly decrease the interference leakage of the satellite compared to conventional fixed-position antenna (FPA)-based schemes.

We study an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled uplink heavy non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system in this paper, where the UL communication becomes extremely important in some hot spot areas such as live concerts or soccer stadiums, and investigate the joint optimization of bandwidth assignment (BA) and power allocation (PA) with UAV three-dimensional (3D) trajectory design to maximize the minimum average rate among all ground users, while meeting their heterogeneous rate requirements. More specifically, we propose a joint BA and PA algorithm by revealing that the inter-user interference in each NOMA group can be eliminated naturally while deriving the sum rate of users. The algorithm is proposed to get the optimal BA and PA solutions with the help of closed-form results and ellipsoid method. After that, in order to solve the UAV 3D trajectory design problem we introduce the elevation angle as a supplementary variable, and the successive convex approximation method is adopted to obtain the UAV 3D trajectory. The joint BA and PA algorithm and the UAV 3D trajectory design can be optimized alternatively, which leads to fast convergence and demonstrates a superior minimum average rate among users and user fairness performance over the previous methods.

While traditional electromagnetic stealth materials/metasurfaces can render a target virtually invisible to some extent, they lack flexibility and adaptability, and can only operate within a limited frequency and angle range, making it challenging to ensure the expected stealth performance. In view of this, we propose in this paper a new intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided electromagnetic stealth system mounted on targets to evade radar detection, by utilizing the tunable passive reflecting elements of IRS to achieve flexible and adaptive electromagnetic stealth in a cost-effective manner. Specifically, we optimize the IRS's reflection at the target to minimize the sum received signal power of all adversary radars. We first address the IRS's reflection optimization problem using the Lagrange multiplier method and derive a semi-closed-form optimal solution. To meet real-time processing requirements, we further propose a low-complexity closed-form solution based on the minimum mean-square error (MMSE) principle. Simulation results validate the performance advantages of our proposed IRS-aided electromagnetic stealth system with the proposed IRS reflection designs.

In this paper, we investigate the movable antenna (MA)-aided wideband communications employing orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmissions. Under the general multi-tap field-response channel model, the wireless chan-nel variations in both space and frequency are characterized with different positions of the MAs at the transmitter (Tx) and receiver (Rx) sides. We reveal that the MA positioning can balance between the amplitude and phase over different channel taps. Then, an upper bound on the OFDM achievable rate is derived in closed form when the size of the TxlRx region for antenna movement can be arbitrarily large. Furthermore, we develop a parallel greedy ascent (PGA) algorithm to obtain locally optimal solutions to the MAs' positions for OFDM rate maximization subject to finite-size TxlRx regions. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm closely approaches the OFDM rate upper bound with the increase of TxlRx region sizes and outperforms the conventional system with fixed-position antennas (FPAs).

In this paper, we propose an uplink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) based hybrid long-packet and short-packet frame structure for data collection in industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSNs) with heterogeneous quality of service (QoS) requirements of sensors. The proposed NOMA-based hybrid frame structure allows the superimposition between a number of short packets and a long packet during data collection, where the short packets can be firstly decoded to maintain the low-latency requirement, and the long packet is decoded later to achieve a high signal-noise-ratio (SNR). In addition, a joint short packet scheduling and pilot and block length optimization (JSLO) algorithm is proposed to minimize the maximum block error probabilities among short packets while maintaining a high SNR of long packet, with the assistance of optimal closed-form short packet scheduling results and pilot and block length expressions. The JSLO algorithm achieves near-optimal performance and a dramatic complexity reduction compared to exhaustive search and can lead to fast convergence. Numerical results demonstrate the proposed NOMA-based hybrid frame structure and JSLO algorithm can significantly reduce the maximum error probability among short packets and maintain a high level of fairness.

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), which contains different types of devices with heterogeneous Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements, has encountered significant challenges on guaranteeing the needs of heterogeneous data collection utilizing limited resources. In this article, we investigate the joint frame structure and resource optimization for the hybrid long- and short-packet nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-based data collection with imperfect successive interference cancellation (SIC) in IIoT, where a number of short and long packets can multiplex the same time-frequency resource simultaneously to guarantee their respective heterogeneous QoS requirements. Specifically, the short packet is first decoded to guarantee low latency, afterward the superposed long packet can be decoded to maintain high signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) performance. A joint short-packet scheduling, pilot length, blocklength, and dynamic power allocation (JSLP) algorithm is proposed to minimize the maximum block error probability among short packets and mitigate the impact of SIC error propagation in NOMA transmission while maintaining a high SINR of long packet, with the assistance of the derived optimal closed-form short-packet scheduling results and pilot and block length expressions. Thanks to the closed-form expressions, the proposed JSLP algorithm demonstrates near-optimal performance and a significant complexity reduction compared to the exhaustive search, leading to fast convergence. Numerical results demonstrate that the designed hybrid NOMA-based frame structure and JSLP algorithm are robust against the SIC error propagation, and can maintain a high level of fairness by significantly mitigating the maximum block error probability gap among short packets.

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.

This paper considers an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted communication system for data collection in urban areas, where multiple UAVs are dispatched to harvest data from multiple ground user equipments (UEs). We adopt a blockage-aware channel model to characterize the practical blockage effects for air-to-ground (A2G) links caused by buildings. Aiming to minimize the mission completion time while satisfying the data collection requirements of UEs, we formulate a problem by jointly optimizing the UAV three-dimensional (3-D) trajectory and resource allocation, including the UE scheduling and subcarrier assignment. To solve the formulated non-convex combinatorial programming problem, we propose a suboptimal algorithm that solves two subproblems iteratively. Specifically, in each iteration, the trajectory design subproblem jointly optimizes the UAVs’ waypoints and time slot length to decrease the mission completion time, which is solved by employing block successive convex approximation (BSCA). For the resource allocation subproblem, we develop a heuristic algorithm for UE scheduling and subcarrier assignment to increase the collected data volume for a given time duration. Simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed algorithm in terms of mission completion time compared to benchmark schemes.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is an emerging technology for wireless communications, thanks to its powerful capability to engineer the radio environment. However, in practice, this benefit is attainable only when the passive IRS is of sufficiently large size, for which the conventional uniform plane wave (UPW)-based far-field model may become invalid. In this paper, we pursue a near-field modelling and performance analysis for wireless communications with extremely large-scale IRS (XL-IRS). By taking into account the directional gain pattern of IRS’s reflecting elements and the variations in signal amplitude across them, we derive both the lower- and upper-bounds of the resulting signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for the generic uniform planar array (UPA)-based XL-IRS. Our results reveal that, instead of scaling quadratically and unboundedly with the number of reflecting elementsMas in the conventional UPW-based model, the SNR under the new non-uniform spherical wave (NUSW)-based model increases withMwith a diminishing return and eventually converges to a certain limit. To gain more insights, we further study the special case of uniform linear array (ULA)-based XL-IRS, for which a closed-form SNR expression in terms of the IRS size and locations of the base station (BS) and the user is derived. Our result shows that the SNR is mainly determined by the two geometric angles formed by the BS/user locations with the IRS, as well as the dimension of the IRS. Numerical results validate our analysis and demonstrate the necessity of proper near-field modelling for wireless communications aided by XL-IRS.

High-speed train (HST) communication plays a crucial role in providing reliable data services to passengers inside the trains. However, due to the train’s high mobility, a fast time-varying channel generally exists between the static BS and high-speed users, resulting in severe communication performance degradation. To address this issue, we propose in this paper an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided HST relaying system, where an IRS is integrated with the relay to aid the data transmission from the BS to the relay. Specifically, an optimization problem is formulated to maximize the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the relay by jointly optimizing the active transmit beamforming at the BS, the active receive beamforming at the relay, and the passive reflect beamforming at the IRS. To solve this problem, we first decouple it into two simpler sub-problems by leveraging the low-dimensional channel decomposition of the high-dimensional BS-relay channel matrix, and then solve them in closed-form with low complexity. Additionally, an efficient transmission protocol tailored for HST communication systems is proposed to implement channel estimation and beam tracking with low complexity. Simulation results verify the performance gains of the proposed IRS-aided HST relaying system, compared with the traditional relaying scheme without IRS and other benchmark schemes.

Both passive and active intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) can be deployed in complex environments to enhance wireless network coverage by creating multiple blockage-free cascaded line-of-sight (LoS) links. In this paper, we study a multi-passive/active-IRS (PIRS/AIRS) aided wireless network with a multi-antenna base station (BS) in a given region. First, we divide the region into multiple non-overlapping cells, each of which may contain one candidate location that can be deployed with a single PIRS or AIRS. Then, we show several trade-offs between minimizing the total IRS deployment cost and enhancing the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) performance over all cells via direct/cascaded LoS transmission with the BS. To reconcile these trade-offs, we formulate a joint multi-PIRS/AIRS deployment problem to select an optimal subset of all candidate locations for deploying IRS and also optimize the number of passive/active reflecting elements deployed at each selected location to satisfy a given SNR target over all cells, such that the total deployment cost is minimized. However, due to the combinatorial optimization involved, the formulated problem is difficult to be solved optimally. To tackle this difficulty, we first optimize the reflecting element numbers with given PIRS/AIRS deployed locations via sequential refinement, followed by a partial enumeration to determine the PIRS/AIRS locations. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm achieves better cost-performance trade-offs than other baseline deployment strategies.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has emerged as a promising technique to control wireless propagation wireless environment for improving the communication performance cost-effectively and extending the wireless signal coverage of access point (AP). In order to reduce the path-loss of the cascaded user-IRS-AP channels, the IRS-integrated AP architecture has been proposed to deploy the antenna array of the AP and the IRSs within the same antenna radome. To reduce the pilot overhead for estimating all IRS-involved channels, in this paper, we propose a novel codebook-based IRS reflection design for the IRS-integrated AP to enhance the coverage performance in a given area. In particular, the codebook consisting of a small number of codewords is designed offline by employing an efficient sector division strategy based on the azimuth angle. To ensure the performance of each sector, we optimize its corresponding codeword for IRS reflection pattern to maximize the sector-min-average-effective-channel-power (SMAECP) by applying the alternating optimization (AO) and semidefinite relaxation (SDR) methods. With the designed codebook, the AP performs the IRS reflection training by sequentially applying all codewords and selects the one achieving the best communication performance for data transmission. Numerical results show that our proposed codebook design can enhance the average channel power of the whole coverage area, as compared to the system without IRS. Moreover, the proposed codebook-based IRS reflection design is compared with several benchmark schemes, which achieves significant performance gain in both single-user and multi-user transmissions.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has emerged as a promising technology to enhance the wireless communication network coverage and capacity by dynamically controlling the radio signal propagation environment. In contrast to the existing works that considered active or passive IRS only, we propose in this paper a new hybrid active-passive IRS architecture that consists of both active and passive reflecting elements, thus achieving their combined advantages flexibly. Under a practical channel setup with Rician fading where only the statistical channel state information (CSI) is available, we study the hybrid IRS design in a multi-user communication system. Specifically, we formulate an optimization problem to maximize the achievable ergodic capacity of the worst-case user by designing the hybrid IRS beamforming and active/passive elements allocation based on the statistical CSI, subject to various practical constraints on the active-element amplification factor and amplification power consumption, as well as the total active and passive elements deployment budget. To solve this challenging problem, we first approximate the ergodic capacity in a simpler form and then propose an efficient algorithm to solve the problem optimally. Moreover, we show that for the special case with all channels to be line-of-sight (LoS), only active elements need to be deployed when the total deployment budget is sufficiently small, while both active and passive elements should be deployed with a decreasing number ratio when the budget increases and exceeds a certain threshold. Finally, numerical results are presented which demonstrate the performance gains of the proposed hybrid IRS architecture and its optimal design over the conventional schemes with active/passive IRS only under various practical system setups.

In this paper, we investigate multi-user modular extremely large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (XL-MIMO) communication systems, where modular extremely large-scale uniform linear array (XL-ULA) is deployed at the base station (BS) to serve multiple single-antenna users. By exploiting the unique modular array architecture and considering the potential near-field propagation, we develop sub-array based uniform spherical wave (USW) models for distinct versus common angles of arrival/departure (AoAs/AoDs) with respect to different sub-arrays/modules, respectively. Under such USW models, we analyze the beam focusing patterns at the near-field observation location by using near-field beamforming. The analysis reveals that compared to the conventional XL-MIMO with collocated antenna elements, modular XL-MIMO can provide better spatial resolution by benefiting from its larger array aperture. However, it also incurs undesired grating lobes due to the large inter-module separation. Moreover, it is found that for multi-user modular XL-MIMO communications, the achievable signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) for users may be degraded by the grating lobes of the beam focusing pattern. To address this issue, an efficient user grouping method is proposed for multi-user transmission scheduling, so that users located within the grating lobes of each other are not allocated to the same time-frequency resource block (RB) for their communications. Numerical results are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed user grouping method, as well as the superior performance of modular XL-MIMO over its collocated counterpart with densely distributed users.

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.

This paper investigates a covariance-based approach for intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) aided activity detection in massive machine-type communications (mMTC). In the conventional scenario without IRS, the covariance-based approach, which exploits the probability density function (PDF) of the received signals at the base station (BS), has been demonstrated to outperform the compressed sensing approach. However, when taking the impact of the IRS into account, due to the newly introduced cascaded channels, it is difficult to obtain the exact PDF of the received signals at the BS. To tackle this challenge, we propose an approximation for the intended PDF with tunable parameters in the covariance matrix of the received signals. Based on the proposed tractable reformulation, an analytic framework is established to reveal the guideline for the phase shift design. Moreover, to determine the optimal correlation parameters, a deep unfolding approach is further leveraged by regarding them as trainable parameters. Simulation results validate the theoretical analysis and demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed learning approach.

Delay alignment modulation (DAM) is a promising technology to achieve inter-symbol interference (ISI)-free single-carrier communication, by leveragingdelay compensationandpath-based beamforming, rather than the conventional channel equalization or multi-carrier transmission. In particular, when there exist a few strong time-dispersive channel paths, DAM is able to effectively align different propagation delays and achieve their constructive superposition, thus especially appealing for intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs)-aided communications with controllable multi-paths. In this paper, we apply single-carrier DAM to multi-IRS aided communication and study its design and achievable performance. We first provide an asymptotic analysis showing that when the number of base station (BS) antennas is much larger than the number of IRSs, an ISI-free channel can be established from the BS to the user with appropriate delay pre-compensation and the simple path-based maximal-ratio transmission (MRT) beamforming. We then consider the general system setup and study the problem of joint path-based beamforming design at the BS and phase shifts design at the IRSs for DAM transmission, by considering the three classical beamforming techniques on a per-path basis, namely the low-complexity path-based MRT beamforming to maximize the desired signal power, the path-based zero-forcing (ZF) beamforming for ISI-free DAM communication, and the optimal path-based minimum mean-square error (MMSE) beamforming to maximize the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR). As a comparison, orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM)-based multi-IRS aided communication is considered for benchmarking. Simulation results are provided which demonstrate the significant performance gain of DAM over OFDM, in terms of spectral efficiency and bit error rate (BER), as well as its lower peak-to-average-power ratio (PAPR).

In this paper, we propose a new multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication system with movable antennas (MAs) to exploit the antenna position optimization for enhancing the capacity. Different from conventional MIMO systems with fixed-position antennas (FPAs), the proposed system can flexibly change the positions of transmit/receive MAs, such that the MIMO channel between them is reconfigured to achieve higher capacity. We aim to characterize the capacity of MA-enabled point-to-point MIMO communication systems, by jointly optimizing the positions of transmit and receive MAs as well as the covariance of transmit signals. First, we develop an efficient alternating optimization algorithm to find a locally optimal solution by iteratively optimizing the transmit covariance matrix and the position of each transmit/receive MA with the other variables being fixed. Next, we propose alternative algorithms of lower complexity for capacity maximization in the low-SNR regime and for the multiple-input single-output (MISO) and single-input multiple-output (SIMO) cases. Numerical results show that our proposed MA systems significantly improve the MIMO channel capacity compared to traditional FPA systems as well as various benchmark schemes, and useful insights are drawn into the capacity gains of MA systems.

In this paper, we propose a new wireless sensing system equipped with the movable-antenna (MA) array, which can flexibly adjust the positions of antenna elements for improving the sensing performance over conventional antenna arrays with fixed-position antennas (FPAs). First, we show that the angle estimation performance in wireless sensing is fundamentally determined by the array geometry, where the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) of the mean square error (MSE) for angle of arrival (AoA) estimation is derived as a function of the antennas’ positions for both one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) MA arrays. Then, for the case of 1D MA array, we obtain a globally optimal solution for the MAs’ positions in closed form to minimize the CRB of AoA estimation MSE. While in the case of 2D MA array, we aim to achieve the minimum of maximum (min-max) CRBs of estimation MSE for the two AoAs with respect to (w.r.t.) the horizontal and vertical axes, respectively. In particular, for the special case of circular antenna movement region, an optimal solution for the MAs’ positions is derived under certain numbers of MAs and circle radii. Thereby, both the lower- and upper-bounds of the min-max CRB are obtained for the antenna movement region with arbitrary shapes. Moreover, we develop an efficient alternating optimization algorithm to obtain a locally optimal solution for MAs’ positions by iteratively optimizing one between their horizontal and vertical coordinates with the other being fixed. Numerical results demonstrate that our proposed 1D/2D MA arrays can significantly decrease the CRB of AoA estimation MSE as well as the actual MSE compared to conventional uniform linear arrays (ULAs)/uniform planar arrays (UPAs) with different values of uniform inter-antenna spacing. Furthermore, it is revealed that the steering vectors of our designed 1D/2D MA arrays exhibit low correlation in the angular domain, thus effectively reducing the ambiguity of angle estimation.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) can be densely deployed in complex environments to create cascaded line-of-sight (LoS) links between base stations (BSs) and users, which significantly enhance the signal coverage for both wireless information transfer and wireless power transfer (WPT). In this paper, we consider the WPT from a multi-antenna BS to multiple energy users (EUs) by exploiting the signal beam routing via multi-IRS reflections. First, we present a baseline beam routing scheme with each IRS serving at most one EU, where the BS transmits wireless power to all EUs simultaneously while the signals to different EUs undergo disjoint sets of multi-IRS reflection paths. Under this setup, we aim to tackle the joint beam routing and resource allocation optimization problem by jointly optimizing the reflection paths for all EUs, the active/passive beamforming at the BS/each involved IRS, as well as the BS’s power allocation for different EUs to maximize the minimum received signal power among all EUs. Next, to further improve the WPT performance, we propose two new beam routing schemes, namely dynamic beam routing and subsurface-based beam routing, where each IRS can serve multiple EUs via different time slots and different subsurfaces, respectively. In particular, we prove that dynamic beam routing outperforms subsurface-based beam routing in terms of minimum harvested power among all EUs. In addition, we show that the optimal performance of dynamic beam routing is achieved by assigning all EUs with orthogonal time slots for WPT. A clique-based optimization approach is also proposed to solve the joint beam routing and resource allocation problems for the baseline beam routing and proposed dynamic beam routing schemes. Numerical results are finally presented, which demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed dynamic beam routing scheme to the baseline scheme.

The codebook-based analog beamforming is appealing for future terahertz (THz) communications since it can generate high-gain directional beams with low-cost phase shifters via low-complexity beam training. However, conventional beamforming codebook design based on array response vectors for narrowband communications may suffer from severe performance loss in wideband systems due to the “beam squint” effect over frequency. To tackle this issue, we propose in this paper a new codebook design method for analog beamforming in wideband THz systems. In particular, to characterize the analog beamforming performance in wideband systems, we propose a new metric termed wideband beam gain, which is given by the minimum beamforming gain over the entire frequency band given a target angle. Based on this metric, a wideband analog beamforming codebook design problem is formulated for optimally balancing the beamforming gains in both the spatial and frequency domains, and the performance loss of conventional narrowband beamforming in wideband systems is analyzed. To solve the new wideband beamforming codebook design problem, we divide the spatial domain into orthogonal angular zones each associated with one beam, thereby decoupling the codebook design into a zone division sub-problem and a set of beamforming optimization sub-problems each for one zone. For the zone division sub-problem, we propose a bisection method to obtain the optimal boundaries for separating adjacent zones. While for each of the per-zone-based beamforming optimization sub-problems, we further propose an efficient augmented Lagrange method (ALM) to solve it. Numerical results demonstrate the performance superiority of our proposed codebook design for wideband analog beamforming to the narrowband beamforming codebook and also validate our performance analysis.

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.

This paper investigates an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) enabled multiuser integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) system, which consists of one multi-antenna base station (BS), one IRS, multiple single-antenna communication users (CUs), and one target at the non-line-of-sight (NLoS) region of the BS. The IRS is deployed to not only assist the communication from the BS to the CUs, but also enable the BS’s NLoS target sensing based on the echo signals from the BS-IRS-target-IRS-BS link. We consider two types of targets, namely the extended and point targets, for which the BS aims to estimate the complete target response matrix and the target’s direction-of-arrival (DoA) with respect to the IRS, respectively. To provide full degrees of freedom for sensing, we consider that the BS sends dedicated sensing signals in addition to the communication signals. Accordingly, we model two types of CU receivers, namely Type-I and Type-II CU receivers, which do not have and have the capability of canceling the interference from the sensing signals, respectively. Under each setup, we jointly optimize the transmit beamforming at the BS and the reflective beamforming at the IRS to minimize the Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) for target estimation, subject to the minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) constraints at the CUs and the maximum transmit power constraint at the BS. We present efficient algorithms to solve the highly non-convex SINR-constrained CRB minimization problems, by using the techniques of alternating optimization, semi-definite relaxation, and successive convex approximation. Numerical results show that the proposed design achieves lower estimation CRB than other benchmark schemes, and the sensing signal interference cancellation at Type-II CU receivers is beneficial when the number of CUs is greater than one.

Although the multi-antenna or so-called multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission is an enabling technology for past generations of wireless communication systems, its application to visible light communication (VLC) still faces a critical challenge due to the strong spatial correlation of VLC channels, which makes it difficult to achieve sufficient spatial multiplexing gain. This paper proposes to use optical intelligent reflecting surfaces (OIRS) to tackle this challenge. Firstly, we characterize the extremely near-field channel condition in the optical frequency range and reveal a peculiar “inter-element interference (IEI) free” property of the OIRS-reflected channel, where the OIRS reflecting elements can be individually configured to align with one pair of transmitter and receiver antennas without causing interference to each other. Next, we characterize the OIRS-assisted MIMO VLC capacities under different power constraints at the transmitter antennas, and then proceed to maximize them by jointly optimizing the OIRS element alignment and transmitter emission power. In particular, we propose two algorithms for the OIRS optimization, namely, location-aided interior-point algorithm and log-det-based alternating optimization algorithm, to balance the performance versus complexity trade-off; while the optimal transmitter emission power is derived in closed form. Numerical results are provided to validate the capacity improvement of OIRS-assisted MIMO VLC against the VLC without OIRS and demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed algorithms compared to baseline schemes.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has been recognized as a transformative technology for enabling smart and reconfigurable radio environment cost-effectively by leveraging its controllable passive reflection. In this paper, we study an IRS-assisted coverage enhancement problem for a given region, aiming to optimize the passive reflection of the IRS for improving the average communication performance in the region by accounting for both deterministic and random channels in the environment. To this end, we first derive the closed-form expression of the average received signal power in terms of the deterministic base station (BS)-IRS-user cascaded channels over all user locations, and propose an IRS-aided coverage enhancement framework to facilitate the estimation of such deterministic channels for IRS passive reflection design. Specifically, to avoid the exorbitant overhead of estimating the cascaded channels at all possible user locations, a location selection method is first proposed to select only a set of typical user locations for channel estimation by exploiting the channel spatial correlation in the region. To estimate the deterministic cascaded channels at the selected user locations, conventional IRS channel estimation methods require additional pilot signals, which not only results in high system training overhead but also may not be compatible with the existing communication protocols. To overcome this issue, we further propose a single-layer neural network (NN)-enabled IRS channel estimation method in this paper, based on only the average received signal power measurements at each selected location corresponding to different IRS random training reflections, which can be offline implemented in current wireless systems. Based on the estimated channels, the IRS passive reflection is then optimized to maximize the average received signal power over the selected locations. Numerical results demonstrate that our proposed scheme can significantly improve the coverage performance of the target region and outperform the existing power-measurement-based IRS reflection designs.

In this paper, we propose and study a multi-functional reconfigurable intelligent surface (MF-RIS) architecture. In contrast to conventional single-functional RIS (SF-RIS) that only reflects signals, the proposed MF-RIS simultaneously supports multiple functions with one surface, including reflection, refraction, amplification, and energy harvesting of wireless signals. As such, the proposed MF-RIS is capable of significantly enhancing RIS signal coverage by amplifying the signal reflected/refracted by the RIS with the energy harvested. We present the signal model of the proposed MF-RIS, and formulate an optimization problem to maximize the sum-rate of multiple users in an MF-RIS-aided non-orthogonal multiple access network. We jointly optimize the transmit beamforming, power allocations as well as the operating modes and parameters for different elements of the MF-RIS and its deployment location, via an efficient iterative algorithm. Simulation results are provided which show significant performance gains of the MF-RIS over SF-RISs with only some of its functions available. Moreover, we demonstrate that there exists a fundamental trade-off between sum-rate maximization and harvested energy maximization. In contrast to SF-RISs which can be deployed near either the transmitter or receiver, the proposed MF-RIS should be deployed closer to the transmitter for maximizing its communication throughput with more energy harvested.

Hybrid analog/digital beamforming is a promising technique to realize millimeter wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems cost-effectively. However, existing hybrid beamforming designs mainly rely on real-time channel training or beam sweeping to find the desired beams, which incurs prohibitive overhead due to a large number of antennas at both the transmitter and receiver with only limited radio frequency (RF) chains. To resolve this challenging issue, in this paper, we propose a newenvironment-awarehybrid beamforming technique that requires only light real-time training, by leveraging the useful tool of channel knowledge map (CKM) with the user’s location information. CKM is a site-specific database, which offers location-specific channel-relevant information to facilitate or even obviate the acquisition of real-time channel state information (CSI). Two specific types of CKM are proposed in this paper for hybrid beamforming design in mmWave massive MIMO systems, namelychannel angle map(CAM) andbeam index map(BIM). It is shown that compared with existing environment-unaware schemes, the proposed environment-aware hybrid beamforming scheme based on CKM can drastically improve the effective communication rate, even under moderate user location errors, thanks to its great saving of the prohibitive real-time training overhead.

Movable antenna (MA) is a new technology with great potential to improve communication performance by enabling local movement of antennas for pursuing better channel conditions. In particular, the acquisition of complete channel state information (CSI) between the transmitter (Tx) and receiver (Rx) regions is an essential problem for MA systems to reap performance gains. In this paper, we propose a general channel estimation framework for MA systems by exploiting the multi-path field response channel structure. Specifically, the angles of departure (AoDs), angles of arrival (AoAs), and complex coefficients of the multi-path components (MPCs) are jointly estimated by employing the compressed sensing method, based on multiple channel measurements at designated positions of the Tx-MA and Rx-MA. Under this framework, the Tx-MA and Rx-MA measurement positions fundamentally determine the measurement matrix for compressed sensing, of which the mutual coherence is analyzed from the perspective of Fourier transform. Moreover, two criteria for MA measurement positions are provided to guarantee the successful recovery of MPCs. Then, we propose several MA measurement position setups and compare their performance. Finally, comprehensive simulation results show that the proposed framework is able to estimate the complete CSI between the Tx and Rx regions with a high accuracy.

Movable antenna (MA) is an innovative technology that facilitates the repositioning of antennas within the transmitter/receiver area to enhance channel conditions and communication performance. This paper proposes a new base station (BS) architecture employing multiple MAs for improving the multiuser network performance. First, the uplink multiple access channel (MAC) is modeled to capture the characteristics of the variation of wireless channels caused by the movement of MAs at the BS. Subsequently, we propose to maximize the minimum achievable rate among multiple users for MA-aided multiuser uplink transmissions by joint optimization of the MAs’ positions, their receive combining at the BS, and the transmit power of users, subject to the MAs’ positions-related constraints and the maximum transmit power of each user. To tackle this highly non-convex max-min fairness problem, we propose a two-loop iterative algorithm based on the particle swarm optimization (PSO). Specifically, the outer-loop updates the positions of a set of particles, where each particle’s position corresponds to one realization of the antenna position vector (APV) of all MAs. The inner-loop conducts the fitness evaluation for each particle, determining the max-min achievable rate for multiple users based on the current APV. Therein, for given APV, the receive combining matrix at the BS and the transmit power for each user are optimized using the block coordinate descent (BCD) technique. To further reduce the computational complexity, we develop an alternating optimization (AO)-based algorithm via iteratively updating the APV, combining matrix, and transmit power. Finally, extensive simulations demonstrate that the antenna position optimization for MAs-aided BSs can significantly improve the rate performance as compared to conventional BSs with fixed-position antennas (FPAs).

In this paper, we propose to deploy multiple unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) mounted base stations to serve ground users in outdoor environments with obstacles. In particular, the geographic information is employed to capture the blockage effects for air-to-ground (A2G) links caused by buildings, and a realistic blockage-aware A2G channel model is proposed to characterize the continuous variation of the channels at different locations. Based on the proposed channel model, we formulate the joint optimization problem of UAV three-dimensional (3-D) positioning and resource allocation, by power allocation, user association, and subcarrier allocation, to maximize the minimum achievable rate among users. To solve this non-convex combinatorial programming problem, we introduce a penalty term to relax it and develop a suboptimal solution via a penalty-based double-loop iterative optimization framework. The inner loop solves the penalized problem by employing the block successive convex approximation (BSCA) technique, where the UAV positioning and resource allocation are alternately optimized in each iteration. The outer loop aims to obtain proper penalty multipliers to ensure the solution of the penalized problem converges to that of the original problem. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm over other benchmark schemes in terms of the minimum achievable rate.

Movable antenna (MA) is a promising technology to improve wireless communication performance by varying the antenna position in a given finite area at the transceivers to create more favorable channel conditions. In this paper, we investigate the MA-enhanced multiple-access channel (MAC) for the uplink transmission from multiple users each equipped with a single MA to a base station (BS) with a fixed-position antenna (FPA) array. A field-response based channel model is used to characterize the multi-path channel between the antenna array of the BS and each user’s MA with a flexible position. To evaluate the MAC performance gain provided by MAs, we formulate an optimization problem for minimizing the total transmit power of users, subject to a minimum-achievable-rate requirement for each user, where the positions of MAs and the transmit powers of users, as well as the receive combining matrix of the BS are jointly optimized. To solve this non-convex optimization problem involving intricately coupled variables, we develop two algorithms based on zero-forcing (ZF) and minimum mean square error (MMSE) combining methods, respectively. Specifically, for each algorithm, the combining matrix of the BS and the total transmit power of users are expressed as a function of the MAs’ position vectors, which are then optimized by using the proposed multi-directional descent (MDD) framework. It is shown that the proposed ZF-based and MMSE-based MDD algorithms can converge to high-quality suboptimal solutions with low computational complexities. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed solutions for MA-enhanced multiple access systems can significantly decrease the total transmit power of users as compared to conventional FPA systems employing antenna selection under both perfect and imperfect field-response information.

Movable antenna (MA) has emerged as a promising technology to enhance wireless communication performance by enabling the local movement of antennas at the transmitter (Tx) and/or receiver (Rx) for achieving more favorable channel conditions. As the existing studies on MA-aided wireless communications have mainly considered narrow-band transmission in flat fading channels, we investigate in this paper the MA-aided wideband communications employing orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) in frequency-selective fading channels. Under the general multi-tap field-response channel model, the wireless channel variations in both space and frequency are characterized with different positions of the MAs. Unlike the narrow-band transmission where the optimal MA position at the Tx/Rx simply maximizes the single-tap channel amplitude, the MA position in the wideband case needs to balance the amplitudes and phases over multiple channel taps in order to maximize the OFDM transmission rate over multiple frequency subcarriers. First, we derive an upper bound on the OFDM achievable rate in closed form when the size of the Tx/Rx region for antenna movement is arbitrarily large. Next, we develop a parallel greedy ascent (PGA) algorithm to obtain locally optimal solutions to the MAs’ positions for OFDM rate maximization subject to finite-size Tx/Rx regions. To reduce computational complexity, a simplified PGA algorithm is also provided to optimize the MAs’ positions more efficiently. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed PGA algorithms can approach the OFDM rate upper bound closely with the increase of Tx/Rx region sizes and outperform conventional systems with fixed-position antennas (FPAs) under the wideband channel setup.

In this paper, we propose a novel antenna architecture called movable antenna (MA) to improve the performance of wireless communication systems. Different from conventional fixed-position antennas (FPAs) that undergo random wireless channel variation, the MAs with the capability of flexible movement can be deployed at positions with more favorable channel conditions to achieve higher spatial diversity gains. To characterize the general multi-path channel in a given region or field where the MAs are deployed, a field-response model is developed by leveraging the amplitude, phase, and angle of arrival/angle of departure (AoA/AoD) information on each of the multiple channel paths under the far-field condition. Based on this model, we then analyze the maximum channel gain achieved by a single receive MA as compared to its FPA counterpart in both deterministic and stochastic channels. First, in the deterministic channel case, we show the periodic behavior of the multi-path channel gain in a given spatial field, which can be exploited for analyzing the maximum channel gain of the MA. Next, in the case of stochastic channels, the expected value of an upper bound on the maximum channel gain of the MA in an infinitely large receive region is derived for different numbers of channel paths. The approximate cumulative distribution function (CDF) for the maximum channel gain is also obtained in closed form, which is useful to evaluate the outage probability of the MA system. Moreover, our results reveal that higher performance gains by the MA over the FPA can be acquired when the number of channel paths increases due to more pronounced small-scale fading effects in the spatial domain. Numerical examples are presented which validate our analytical results and demonstrate that the MA system can reap considerable performance gains over the conventional FPA systems with/without antenna selection (AS), and even achieve comparable performance to the single-input multiple-output (SIMO) beamforming system.

In this paper, we investigate the near-field modelling and analyze the beam focusing pattern for modular extremely large-scale array (XL-array) communications. As modular XL-array is physically and electrically large in general, the accurate characterization of amplitude and phase variations across its array elements requires the non-uniform spherical wave (NUSW) model, which, however, is difficult for performance analysis and optimization. To address this issue, we first present two ways to simplify the NUSW model by exploiting the unique regular structure of modular XL-array, termed sub-array based uniform spherical wave (USW) models with different or common angles, respectively. Based on the developed models, the near-field beam focusing patterns of XL-array communications are derived. It is revealed that compared to the existing collocated XL-array with the same number of array elements, modular XL-array can significantly enhance the spatial resolution, but at the cost of generating undesired grating lobes. Fortunately, different from the conventional far-field uniform plane wave (UPW) model, the near-field USW model for modular XL-array exhibits a higher grating lobe suppression capability, thanks to the non-linear phase variations across the array elements. Finally, simulation results are provided to verify the near-field beam focusing pattern and grating lobe characteristics of modular XL-array.

This paper investigates a covariance-based learning approach for intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) aided activity detection in massive machine-type communications (mMTC). In the conventional scenario without IRS, the covariance-based approach has been demonstrated to outperform the compressed sensing approach, as the covariance-based approach can well exploit the probability density function (PDF) of the received signals at the base station (BS). However, when taking the impact of the IRS into account, due to the newly introduced cascaded channels, it is quite difficult to obtain the exact PDF of the received signals at the BS. To tackle this challenge, we propose an approximation for the intended PDF by modeling a correlation parameter in the covariance matrix of the received signals. Based on the covariance-based formulation, a learning approach is further proposed to automatically learn the correlation parameter. Simulation results demonstrate the performance of the covariance-based activity detection, and the superiority of the proposed covariance-based learning approach.

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.

One main challenge for implementing intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) aided communications lies in the difficulty to obtain the channel knowledge for the base station (BS)-IRS-user cascaded links, which is needed to design high-performance IRS reflection in practice. Traditional methods for estimating IRS cascaded channels are usually based on the additional pilot signals received at the BS/users, which increase the system training overhead and also may not be compatible with the current communication protocols. To tackle this challenge, we propose in this paper a new single-layer neural network (NN)-enabled IRS channel estimation method based on only the knowledge of users' individual received signal power measurements corresponding to different IRS random training reflections, which are easily accessible in current wireless systems. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed channel estimation method, we design the IRS reflection for data transmission based on the estimated cascaded channels in an IRS-aided multiuser communication system. Numerical results show that the proposed IRS channel estimation and reflection design can significantly improve the minimum received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) among all users, as compared to existing power measurement based designs.

Extremely large-scale array (XL-array) has emerged as a promising technology to enhance the spectrum efficiency and spatial resolution in future wireless networks, leading to a fundamental paradigm shift from conventional far-field communications towards the near-field communications. Different from the existing works that mostly considered simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) in the far field, we consider in this paper a new and practical scenario, called mixed near- and far-field SWIPT, in which energy harvesting (EH) and information decoding (ID) receivers are located in the near- and far-field regions of the XL-array base station (BS), respectively. Specifically, we formulate an optimization problem to maximize the weighted sum-power harvested at all EH receivers by jointly designing the BS beam scheduling and power allocation, under the constraints on the ID sum-rate and BS transmit power. To solve this non-convex optimization problem, an efficient algorithm is proposed to obtain a suboptimal solution by leveraging the binary variable elimination and successive convex approximation methods. Numerical results demonstrate that our proposed joint design achieves substantial performance gain over other benchmark schemes.

This paper proposes a novel antenna architecture called movable antenna (MA) to improve the performance of wireless communication systems. With thecapability of flexiblemovement, MAs can be deployed at positions with more favorable channel conditions to achieve higher spatial diversity gains. Based on our proposed field-response channel model, we analyze the maximum channel gain achieved by a single receive MA as compared to its fixed-position antenna (FPA) counterpart in both deterministic and stochastic channels. In the deterministic channel case, we show the periodic behavior of the multi-path channel gain in a given spatial field. In the stochastic channels, the expected value and the approximate cumulative distribution function of an upper bound on the maximum channel gain of the MA are derived. Numerical examples validate our analytical results and demonstrate that a single MA can reap considerable performance gains over the conventional FPA systems with/without antenna selection, and even achieve comparable performance to the single-input multiple-output beamforming system.

In this paper, we propose a new multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication system with movable antennas (MAs) to exploit more degrees of freedom (DoFs) in the spatial domain for enhancing the capacity. Different from conventional MIMO systems with fixed-position antennas (FPAs), the proposed system can flexibly change the positions of MAs, such that the MIMO channel between the transmit and receive antennas is reconfigured for achieving higher capacity. We aim to achieve the maximum capacity of MA-enabled point-to-point MIMO communication systems, by jointly optimizing the positions of the receive MAs and the covariance of the transmit signals. We develop an efficient alternating optimization algorithm to find a locally optimal solution by iteratively optimizing the transmit covariance matrix and the position of each MA with the other variables being fixed. Numerical results show that our proposed scheme substantially improves the MIMO capacity compared to traditional FPA systems.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) can be densely deployed in complex environment to create cascaded line-of-sight (LoS) paths between the base station (BS) and multiple users via tunable single/multiple signal reflections, thereby significantly enhancing the BS's coverage performance. To achieve this goal, we present an optimization framework for multi-IRS deployment in this paper and study its efficient design. In particular, we assume that a set of candidate locations for deploying IRSs are given in an area of interest, and show that there exists a fundamental trade-off between maximizing the BS's coverage in the area and minimizing the total cost in multi-IRS deployment design. Specifically, the more IRSs deployed over those candidate locations, the smaller number of IRS reflections on average required for achieving a LoS link between the BS and any user location in the area, which helps reduce the cascaded path loss and thus enhance the communication performance. To optimally characterize this trade-off, we formulate the multi-IRS deployment problem based on graph theory and propose a new successive removal algorithm to efficiently solve this problem by iteratively removing IRSs from the candidate locations while satisfying a given communication performance constraint. Simulation results are provided to show the efficacy of the proposed design approach and algorithm for multi-IRS deployment.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has been widely recognized as an efficient technique to reconfigure the electro-magnetic environment in favor of wireless communication performance. In this paper, we propose a new application of IRS for device-free target sensing via joint location and orientation estimation. In particular, different from the existing works that use IRS as an additional anchor node for localization/sensing, we consider mounting IRS on the sensing target, thus estimating the IRS's location and orientation as that of the target by leveraging IRS's controllable signal reflection. To this end, we first propose a three-dimensional beam training method to acquire essential angle information between the IRS and the sensing transmitter as well as a set of distributed sensing receivers. Next, based on the estimated angle information, we formulate two optimization problems to estimate the location and orientation of the IRS/target, respectively, which are solved by invoking the Taylor-series expansion and manifold optimization. Simulation results show that the proposed method can achieve high estimation accuracy and draw useful insights into the performance of target-mounted IRS sensing systems.

This paper proposes to deploy multiple unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) mounted base stations to serve ground users collaboratively in outdoor environments with obstacles. In particular, the geographic information is employed to capture the blockage effects for air-to-ground (A2G) links caused by buildings, and a realistic blockage-aware A2G channel model is proposed to characterize the continuous variation of the channel at different locations. Based on the proposed channel model, we formulate a joint design problem of UAV three-dimensional (3-D) positioning and resource allocation, including the user association and subcarrier allocation, to maximize the minimum achievable rate among users. We propose a suboptimal iterative algorithm to solve the mixed-integer non-convex optimization problem. Specifically, the UAV positioning and resource allocation are alternately optimized in each iteration by employing the successive convex approximation (SCA) and matching theory, respectively. Simulation results reveal that the proposed algorithm outperforms several benchmark schemes in terms of the minimum achievable rate.

We consider a three-dimensional (3D) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-terrestrial base station (TBS) coordinated multi-point non-orthogonal multiple access (CoMP-NOMA) scheme where UAV coordinates with TBS to allow joint transmission for the terrestrial users. With the assistance of closed-form power allocation derivations, a joint user scheduling and power allocation (J-USPA) algorithm is proposed to obtain the optimal user scheduling solution, with the consideration of imperfect channel estimation. Moreover, considering the line of sight (LoS) and non-LoS factors in the air-ground channel, the 3D trajectory of UAV is designed to provide a flexible user-centric service. Numerical results verify that the 3D UAV-TBS CoMP-NOMA model and the J-USPA scheme have a superior performance in terms of sum rate of users over the TBS CoMP-NOMA and the UAV assisted NOMA systems without CoMP transmission.

In this paper, we consider a unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled uplink (UL) heavy non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system where the UL communication becomes increasingly important in some hot spot regions such as live concerts or football stadiums, and study the maximization of the minimum average rate among all users by jointly optimizing bandwidth assignment (BA) and power allocation (PA) alongside UAV trajectory design, while meeting their specified heterogeneous rate requirements. Specifically, by revealing that the inter-user interference can be naturally eliminated while deriving the sum rate of users in each NOMA group, an one-step BA and PA algorithm is proposed, with the assistance of closed-form results. Afterwards, the elevation angle is introduced as an auxiliary variable to help solve the UAV trajectory design problem. The joint BA and PA algorithm and the UAV trajectory design can be optimized alternatively, which leads to fast convergence and demonstrates a superior minimum average rate among users and user fairness performance over the previous methods.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has been widely recognized as an efficient technique to reconfigure the electromagnetic environment in favor of wireless communication performance. In this paper, we propose a new application of IRS for device-free target sensing via joint location and orientation estimation. In particular, different from the existing works that use IRS as an additional anchor node for localization/sensing, we consider mounting IRS on the sensing target, whereby estimating the IRS’s location and orientation as that of the target by leveraging IRS’s controllable signal reflection. To this end, we first propose a tensor-based method to acquire essential angle information between the IRS and the sensing transmitter as well as a set of distributed sensing receivers. Next, based on the estimated angle information, we formulate two optimization problems to estimate the location and orientation of the IRS/target, respectively, and obtain the locally optimal solutions to them by invoking two iterative algorithms, namely, gradient descent method and manifold optimization. In particular, we show that the orientation estimation problem admits a closed-form solution in a special case that usually holds in practice. Furthermore, theoretical analysis is conducted to draw essential insights into the proposed sensing system design and performance. Simulation results verify our theoretical analysis and demonstrate that the proposed methods can achieve high estimation accuracy which is close to the theoretical bound.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has emerged as a cost-efficient technique to improve the wireless network’s capacity and performance. Existing works on IRS have mainly considered IRS being deployed in the environment to dynamically control the wireless channels between the base station (BS) and its served users in favor of their communications. In contrast, we propose in this paper a new integrated IRS-BS architecture by deploying IRSs inside the BS’s antenna radome to directly reconfigure the signal radiation to/from the BS’s antennas. In other words, the IRSs can be considered as auxiliary passive arrays with real-time reconfigurability equipped at the BS to enhance its communication performance cost-effectively. Since the distance between the integrated IRSs and BS’s antenna array is practically small (in the order of several to tens of wavelengths), the path loss among them is significantly reduced as compared to conventional IRS deployed much farther away from the BS, while the real-time control of the IRS’s reflection by the BS becomes easier to implement. However, the resultant near-field channel model also becomes drastically different from its far-field counterpart for conventional far-away IRSs in the literature. Thus, we propose an element-wise channel model for IRS to characterize the channel vector between each single-antenna user and the antenna array of the BS, which includes the direct (without any IRS’s reflection) as well as the single and double IRS-reflection channel components. Based on this channel model, we formulate a problem to optimize the reflection coefficients of all IRS reflecting elements for maximizing the uplink sum-rate of the users. By considering two typical cases with/without perfect channel state information (CSI) at the BS, the formulated problem is solved efficiently by adopting the successive refinement method and iterative random phase algorithm (IRPA), respectively. Numerical results validate the substantial capacity gain of the integrated IRS-BS architecture over the conventional multi-antenna BS without integrated IRS. Moreover, the proposed algorithms significantly outperform other benchmark schemes in terms of sum-rate, and the IRPA without CSI can approach the performance upper bound with perfect CSI as the training overhead increases.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has emerged as a promising technique to control wireless propagation environment for enhancing the communication performance cost-effectively. However, the rapidly time-varying channel in high-mobility communication scenarios such as vehicular communication renders it challenging to obtain the instantaneous channel state information (CSI) efficiently for IRS with a large number of reflecting elements. In this paper, we propose a new roadside IRS-aided vehicular communication system to tackle this challenge. Specifically, by exploiting the symmetrical deployment of IRSs with inter-laced equal intervals on both sides of the road and the cooperation among nearby IRS controllers, we propose a new two-stage channel estimation scheme with off-line and online training, respectively, to obtain the static/time-varying CSI required by the proposed low-complexity passive beamforming scheme efficiently. The proposed IRS beamforming and online channel estimation designs leverage the existing uplink pilots in wireless networks and do not require any change of the existing transmission protocol. Moreover, they can be implemented by each of IRS controllers independently, without the need of any real-time feedback from the user’s serving BS. Simulation results show that the proposed designs can efficiently achieve the high IRS passive beamforming gain and thus significantly enhance the achievable communication throughput for high-speed vehicular communications.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) can be densely deployed in complex environment to create cascaded line-of-sight (LoS) paths between multiple base stations (BSs) and users via tunable IRS reflections, thereby significantly enhancing the coverage performance of wireless networks. To achieve this goal, it is vital to optimize the deployed locations of BSs and IRSs in the wireless network, which is investigated in this paper. Specifically, we divide the coverage area of the network into multiple non-overlapping cells and decide whether to deploy a BS/IRS in each cell given a total number of BSs/IRSs available. We show that to ensure the network coverage/communication performance, i.e., each cell has a direct/cascaded LoS path with at least one BS, as well as such LoS paths have the average number of IRS reflections less than a given threshold, there is a fundamental trade-off with the deployment cost or the number of BSs/IRSs needed. To optimally characterize this trade-off, we formulate a joint BS and IRS deployment problem based on graph theory, which, however, is difficult to be optimally solved due to the combinatorial optimization involved. To circumvent this difficulty, we first consider a simplified problem with given BS deployment and propose the optimal as well as an efficient suboptimal IRS deployment solution to it, by applying the branch-and-bound method and iteratively removing IRSs from the candidate locations, respectively. Next, an efficient sequential update algorithm is proposed for solving the joint BS and IRS deployment problem. Numerical results are provided to show the efficacy of the proposed design approach and optimization algorithms for the joint BS and IRS deployment. The trade-off between the network coverage performance and the number of deployed BSs/IRSs with different cost ratios is also unveiled.

Reconfigurable surfaces (RS) have recently emerged as an enabler for smart radio environments where they are used to actively tailor/control the radio propagation (e.g., to support users under adverse channel conditions). If multiple RSs are deployed (e.g., coated on various buildings) to support different groups of users, it is critical to jointly optimize the phase-shifts of all the RSs to mitigate interference amongst them as well as to leverage the secondary reflections amongst them. Motivated by these considerations, this paper considers the uplink transmissions of multiple users that are grouped and supported by multiple RSs to communicate with a multi-antenna base station (BS). We first formulate two optimization problems: the weighted sum-rate maximization and the minimum achievable rate (from all users) maximization. Unlike existing works that considered single user or single RS or multiple RSs without inter-RS reflections, the considered problems require the joint optimization of the phase-shifts of all RS elements and all beamformers at the multi-antenna BS. The two problems turn out to be non-convex and thus are difficult to be solved in general. Moreover, the inter-RS reflections give rise to the coupling of the phase-shifts amongst the RSs, making the optimization problems even more challenging to solve. To tackle them, we design alternating optimization algorithms that provably converge to locally optimal solutions. Simulation results reveal that by effectively mitigating interference and leveraging the secondary reflections amongst the RSs, there is a great benefit of deploying more RSs to support different groups of users so as to achieve a higher rate per user. This gain is even more significant with a larger number of elements per RS. Without properly dealing with the secondary reflections, by contrast, increasing the number of RSs can adversely impact the network throughput, especially for high transmit power.

With the capability of reconfiguring the wireless electromagnetic environment, intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) becomes a new paradigm for designing future wireless communication systems. In this paper, we consider optical IRS for improving the performance of visible light communication (VLC) under a multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) setting, where the mean square error (MSE) of the IRS-aided MIMO VLC is minimized by jointly designing the IRS and transceiver signal processing. To this end, the MIMO channel gains of the IRS-aided VLC are first derived under the point source assumption, based on which the MSE minimization problem is formulated subject to the emission power constraints and the IRS configuration constraints. Next, we propose an alternating optimization algorithm, which decomposes the original problem into three subproblems, to iteratively optimize the IRS configuration, the precoding and detection matrices for minimizing the MSE. Moreover, theoretical analysis on the performance of the proposed algorithm in high and low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regimes is investigated, revealing that the joint optimization process can be simplified in such special cases, and the algorithm’s convergence property and computational complexity are also discussed. Finally, numerical results show that IRS-aided schemes significantly reduce the MSE as compared to their counterparts without IRS, and the proposed algorithm outperforms other baseline schemes.

This paper investigates a new concept of employing intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) to enhance the monitoring performance of wireless information surveillance system, where a full-duplex legitimate monitor is employed to eavesdrop the suspicious transmission from a transmitter to a receiver with the help of an IRS. Under this setup, we consider three IRS deployment strategies, where the IRS is placed near the suspicious transmitter, the suspicious receiver and the legitimate monitor, respectively. First, the monitoring rate achievable by the IRS-aided surveillance system under each deployment strategy is analyzed, which reveals that deploying the IRS near the suspicions transmitter achieves the maximum rate with an asymptotically large number of IRS reflecting elements. Next, efficient algorithms are proposed to maximize the monitoring rate by jointly optimizing the receive and jamming beamforming vectors at the legitimate monitor and the reflection coefficients at the IRS. In particular, a performance upper bound is obtained via properly characterizing the upper and lower bounds of the jamming signal power and using semidefinite relaxation (SDR), while low-complexity algorithms based on the penalty dual decomposition (PDD) framework are also presented to achieve near-optimal performance. Finally, numerical results are presented to validate our analysis as well as the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms, and useful insights are drawn.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has emerged as a cost-effective solution to enhance wireless communication performance via passive signal reflection. Existing works on IRS have mainly focused on investigating IRS’s passive beamforming/reflection design to boost the communication rate for users assuming that their channel state information (CSI) is fully or partially known. However, how to exploit IRS to improve the wireless transmission reliability without any CSI, which is typical in high-mobility/delay-sensitive communication scenarios, remains largely open. In this paper, we study a new IRS-aided communication system with the IRS integrated to its aided access point (AP) to achieve both functions of transmit diversity and passive beamforming simultaneously. Specifically, we first show an interesting result that the IRS’s passive beamforming gain in any channel direction is invariant to the common phase-shift applied to all of its reflecting elements. Accordingly, we design the common phase-shift of IRS elements to achieve transmit diversity at the AP side without the need of any CSI of the users. In addition, we propose a practical method for the users to estimate the CSI at the receiver side for information decoding. Meanwhile, we show that the conventional passive beamforming gain of IRS can be retained for the other users with their CSI known at the AP. Furthermore, we derive the asymptotic performance of both IRS-aided transmit diversity and passive beamforming in closed-form, by considering the large-scale IRS with an infinite number of elements. Numerical results validate our analysis and show the performance gains of the proposed IRS-aided simultaneous transmit diversity and passive beamforming scheme over other benchmark schemes.

In this paper, we consider a new unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted oblique image acquisition system where a UAV is dispatched to take images of multiple ground targets (GTs). To study the three-dimensional (3D) UAV trajectory design for image acquisition, we first propose a novel UAV-assisted oblique photography model, which characterizes the image resolution with respect to the UAV’s 3D image-taking location. Then, we formulate a 3D UAV trajectory optimization problem to minimize the UAV’s traveling distance subject to the image resolution constraints. The formulated problem is shown to be equivalent to a modified 3D traveling salesman problem with neighbourhoods, which is NP-hard in general. To tackle this difficult problem, we propose an iterative algorithm to obtain a high-quality suboptimal solution efficiently, by alternately optimizing the UAV’s 3D image-taking waypoints and its visiting order for the GTs. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm significantly reduces the UAV’s traveling distance as compared to various benchmark schemes, while meeting the image resolution requirement.

In this article, we study the waveform scheduling problem for a wireless power transfer (WPT) system consisting of a power beacon (PB) and multiple energy-harvesting-empowered Internet of Things (EH-IoT) devices. In each time slot, each device requests power to the PB if it needs power, and the PB transmits a WPT signal for which the waveform is designed based on the harvested power satisfaction rate of the power-requesting devices. Under this setup, we formulate an optimization problem that maximizes the average number of EH-IoT devices whose power requests are satisfied. We first solve this problem, assuming that the perfect channel state information (CSI) of all devices is known at the PB. Since the problem is difficult to solve even with perfect CSI, we transform it into a more tractable problem via proper approximations and propose an efficient algorithm to solve it. Next, to tackle the issue that it is practically difficult for the PB to acquire the perfect CSI of each device, we propose a contextual learning-based WPT waveform scheduling algorithm, requiring only 1-bit feedback from each device at one time. Numerical results show that our proposed waveform scheduling algorithm provides a higher satisfaction rate than existing algorithms under perfect CSI, and that with limited CSI feedback achieves performance close to the case with perfect CSI.

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.

Low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite communication plays an important role in assisting/complementing terrestrial communications by providing worldwide coverage, especially in harsh environments such as high seas, mountains, and deserts which are uncovered by terrestrial networks. Traditionally, the passive reflect-array with fixed phase shifts has been applied in satellite communications to compensate for the high path loss due to long propagation distance with low-cost directional beamforming; however, it is unable to flexibly adapt the beamforming direction to dynamic channel conditions. In view of this, we consider in this paper a new intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided LEO satellite communication system, by utilizing the controllable phase shifts of massive passive reflecting elements to achieve flexible beamforming, which copes with the time-varying channel between the high-mobility satellite (SAT) and ground node (GN) cost-effectively. In particular, we propose a new architecture for IRS-aided LEO satellite communication where IRSs are deployed at both sides of the SAT and GN, and study their cooperative passive beamforming (CPB) design over line-of-sight (LoS)-dominant single-reflection and double-reflection channels. Specifically, we jointly optimize the active transmit/receive beamforming at the SAT/GN as well as the CPB at two-sided IRSs to maximize the overall channel gain from the SAT to each GN. Interestingly, we show that under LoS channel conditions, the high-dimensional SAT-GN channel can be decomposed into the outer product of two low-dimensional vectors. By exploiting the decomposed SAT-GN channel, we decouple the original beamforming optimization problem into two simpler subproblems corresponding to the SAT and GN sides, respectively, which are both solved in closed-form. Furthermore, we propose an efficient transmission protocol to conduct channel estimation and beam tracking, which only requires independent processing of the SAT and GN in a distributed manner, thus substantially reducing the implementation complexity. Simulation results validate the performance advantages of the proposed IRS-aided LEO satellite communication system with two-sided cooperative IRSs, as compared to various baseline schemes such as the conventional reflect-array and one-sided IRS.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has emerged as a promising technique for wireless communication networks. By dynamically tuning the reflection amplitudes/phase shifts of a large number of passive elements, IRS enables flexible wireless channel control and configuration and thereby enhances the wireless signal transmission rate and reliability significantly. Despite the vast literature on designing and optimizing assorted IRS-aided wireless systems, prior works have mainly focused on enhancing wireless links with single signal reflection only by one or multiple IRSs, which may be insufficient to boost the wireless link capacity under some harsh propagation conditions (e.g., indoor environment with dense blockages/obstructions). This issue can be tackled by employing two or more IRSs to assist each wireless link and jointly exploiting their single as well as multiple signal reflections over them. However, the resultant double-/multi-IRS-aided wireless systems face more complex design issues as well as new practical challenges for implementation compared to the conventional single-IRS counterpart, in terms of IRS reflection optimization, channel acquisition, as well as IRS deployment and association/selection. As such, a new paradigm for designing multi-IRS cooperative passive beamforming and joint active/passive beam routing arises, which calls for innovative design approaches and optimization methods. In this article, we give a tutorial overview of multi-IRS-aided wireless networks, with an emphasis on addressing the new challenges due to multi-IRS signal reflection and routing. Moreover, we point out important directions worthy of research and investigation in the future.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a promising technology for achieving spectrum and energy-efficient wireless networks cost-effectively. Most existing works on IRS have focused on exploiting IRS to enhance the performance of wireless communication or wireless information transmission (WIT), while its potential for boosting the efficiency of radio frequency (RF) wireless energy transmission (WET) still remains largely open. Although IRS-aided WET shares similar characteristics with IRS-aided WIT, they differ fundamentally in terms of design objective, receiver architecture, practical constraints, and so on. In this article, we provide a tutorial overview on how to efficiently design IRS-aided WET systems as well as IRS-aided systems with both WIT and WET, namely, IRS-aided simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) and IRS-aided wireless powered communication network (WPCN), from a communication and signal processing perspective. In particular, we present state-of-the-art solutions to tackle the unique challenges in operating these systems, such as IRS passive reflection optimization, channel estimation, and deployment. In addition, we propose new solution approaches and point out important directions for future research and investigation.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a promising technology to extend the wireless signal coverage and support the high performance communication. By intelligently adjusting the reflection coefficients of a large number of passive reflecting elements, the IRS can modify the wireless propagation environment in favour of signal transmission. Different from most of the prior works which did not consider any cooperation between IRSs, in this work we propose and study a cooperative double-IRS aided multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication system under the line-of-sight (LoS) propagation channels. We investigate the capacity maximization problem by jointly optimizing the transmit covariance matrix and the passive beamforming matrices of the two cooperative IRSs. Although the above problem is non-convex and difficult to solve, we transform and simplify the original problem by exploiting a tractable characterization of the LoS channels. Then we develop a novel low-complexity algorithm whose complexity is independent of the number of IRS elements. Moreover, we analyze the capacity scaling orders of the double-IRS aided MIMO system with respect to an asymptotically large number of IRS elements or transmit power, which significantly outperform those of the conventional single-IRS aided MIMO system, thanks to the cooperative power gain brought by the double-reflection link and the spatial multiplexing gain harvested from the two single-reflection links. Extensive numerical results are provided to show that by exploiting the LoS channel properties, our proposed algorithm can achieve a desirable performance with low computational time. Also, our capacity scaling analysis is validated, and the double-IRS system is shown to achieve a much higher rate than its single-IRS counterpart as long as the number of IRS elements or the transmit power is not small.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has emerged as a promising technique to enhance wireless communication performance cost-effectively. The existing literature has mainly considered IRS being deployed near user terminals to improve their performance. However, this approach may incur a high cost if IRSs need to be densely deployed in the network to cater to random user locations. To avoid such high deployment cost, in this paper we consider a new IRS aided wireless network architecture, where IRSs are deployed in the vicinity of each base station (BS) to assist in its communications with distributed users regardless of their locations. Besides significantly enhancing IRSs’ signal coverage, this scheme helps reduce the IRS-associated channel estimation overhead as compared to conventional user-side IRSs, by exploiting the nearly static BS-IRS channels over short distance. For this scheme, we propose a new two-stage transmission protocol to achieve IRS channel estimation and reflection optimization for uplink data transmission efficiently. In addition, we propose effective methods for solving the user-IRS association problem based on long-term/statistical channel knowledge and the selected user-IRS-BS cascaded channel estimation problem. Finally, all IRSs’ passive reflections are jointly optimized with the BS’s multi-antenna receive combining to maximize the minimum achievable rate among all users for data transmission. Numerical results show that the proposed co-site-IRS empowered BS scheme can achieve significant performance gains over the conventional BS without co-site IRS and existing schemes for IRS channel estimation and reflection optimization, thus enabling an appealing low-cost and high-performance BS design for future wireless networks.

This paper investigates the passive beamforming and deployment design for an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) aided full-duplex (FD) wireless system, where an FD access point (AP) communicates with an uplink (UL) user and a downlink (DL) user simultaneously over the same time-frequency dimension with the help of IRS. Under this setup, we consider three deployment cases: 1) two distributed IRSs placed near the UL user and DL user, respectively; 2) one centralized IRS placed near the DL user; 3) one centralized IRS placed near the UL user. In each case, we aim to minimize the weighted sum transmit power consumption of the AP and UL user by jointly optimizing their transmit power and the passive reflection coefficients at the IRS (or IRSs), subject to the UL and DL users’ rate constraints and the uni-modulus constraints on the IRS reflection coefficients. First, we analyze the minimum transmit power required in the IRS-aided FD system under each deployment scheme, and compare it with that of the corresponding half-duplex (HD) system. We show that the FD system outperforms its HD counterpart for all IRS deployment schemes, while the distributed deployment further outperforms the other two centralized deployment schemes. Next, we transform the challenging power minimization problem into an equivalent but more tractable form and propose an efficient algorithm to solve it based on the block coordinate descent (BCD) method. Finally, numerical results are presented to validate our analysis as well as the efficacy of the proposed passive beamforming design.

Different from the existing works that focus on transceiver design of over-the-air computation (AirComp) over static networks, we in this paper consider an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) aided AirComp system, where the UAV as a flying base station aggregates data from mobile sensors. The trajectory design of the UAV provides an additional degree of freedom to improve the performance of AirComp. We aim to minimize the time-averaged mean-squared error (MSE) of AirComp by jointly optimizing the UAV trajectory, receive normalizing factors, and sensors’ transmit power. To this end, we first propose a novel and equivalent problem transformation by introducing intermediate variables. This reformulation leads to a convex subproblem when fixing any other two blocks of variables, thereby enabling efficient algorithm design based on the principle of block coordinate descent and alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) techniques. In particular, we derive the optimal closed-form solutions for normalizing factors and intermediate variables optimization subproblems. We also recast the convex trajectory design subproblem into an ADMM form and obtain the closed-form expressions for each variable updating. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves a smaller time-averaged MSE while reducing the simulation time by orders of magnitude compared to state-of-the-art algorithms.

Channel estimation is a practical challenge for intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) aided wireless communication. As the number of IRS reflecting elements or IRS-aided users increases, the channel training overhead becomes excessively high, which results in long delay and low throughput in data transmission. To tackle this challenge, we propose in this paper a new anchor-assisted channel estimation approach, where two anchor nodes, namely A1 and A2, are deployed near the IRS for facilitating its aided base station (BS) in acquiring the cascaded BS-IRS-user channels required for data transmission. Specifically, in the first scheme, the partial channel state information (CSI) on the element-wise channel gain square of the common BS-IRS link for all users is first obtained at the BS via the anchor-assisted training and feedback. Then, by leveraging such partial CSI, the cascaded BS-IRS-user channels are efficiently resolved at the BS with additional training by the users. While in the second scheme, the BS-IRS-A1 and A1-IRS-A2 channels are first estimated via the training by A1. Then, with additional training by A2, all users estimate their individual cascaded A2-IRS-user channels simultaneously. Based on the CSI fed back from A2 and all users, the BS resolves the cascaded BS-IRS-user channels efficiently. In both schemes, the channels among the fixed BS, IRS, and two anchors are estimated in a large timescale, which greatly reduces the real-time training overhead. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed anchor-assisted channel estimation schemes achieve superior performance as compared to existing IRS channel estimation schemes, under various practical setups. In addition, the first proposed scheme outperforms the second one when the number of antennas at the BS is sufficiently large, and vice versa.

In this paper, we propose a novel semi-passive elements-aided channel estimation framework for intelligent reflecting surface (IRS), where a small portion of IRS reflecting elements are able to process the received signal for facilitating the channel estimation. Specifically, the BS-IRS channel is estimated by applying the estimation of signal parameters via rotational invariance technique (ESPRIT), while the user-IRS channels are estimated by combining the use of total least square (TLS) ESPRIT and multiple signal classification (MUSIC) methods. The required training time of the proposed channel estimation scheme is irrelevant to the number of IRS reflecting elements, thus substantially reducing the training overhead. Simulation results show the great advantages of our proposed scheme over both the conventional compressed sensing (CS)-based channel estimation and cascaded channel estimation schemes.

Intelligent reflecting/refracting surface (IRS) has recently emerged as a promising solution to reconfigure wireless propagation environment for enhancing the communication performance by tuning passive signal reflection or refraction. In this paper, we study a new IRS-aided high-mobility communication system by employing the intelligentrefractingsurface with a high-speed vehicle to aid its passenger’s communication with a remote base station (BS). Due to the environment’s random scattering and vehicle’s high mobility, a rapidly time-varying channel is typically resulted between the static BS and fast-moving IRS/user, which renders the channel estimation for IRS with a large number of passive refracting elements more challenging, as compared to that for the conventional slow fading IRS channels with low-mobility users. In order to reap the high IRS passive beamforming gain with low channel training overhead, we propose a new and efficient two-stage transmission protocol to achieve both IRS channel estimation and refraction optimization for data transmission. Specifically, by exploiting the quasi-static channel between the IRS and user both moving at the same high speed as well as the line-of-sight (LoS) dominant channel between the BS and IRS, the user first estimates the LoS component of the cascaded BS-IRS-user channel in Stage I, based on which IRS passive refraction is designed to maximize the corresponding IRS-refracted channel gain. Then, the user estimates the resultant IRS-refracted channel as well as the non-IRS-refracted channel in Stage II for setting an additional common phase shift at all IRS refracting elements so as to align these two channels for maximizing the overall channel gain for data transmission. Simulation results show that the proposed design can efficiently achieve the full IRS passive beamforming gain in the high-mobility communication scenario, which also converts the overall BS-user channel from fast to slow fading for more reliable transmission. The proposed on-vehicle IRS system is further compared with a baseline scheme of deploying fixed IRSs (intelligent reflecting surfaces) on the roadside to assist high-speed vehicular communications, which achieves significant rate improvement due to its greatly saved channel training time.

This paper studies the three-dimensional (3D) trajectory optimization problem for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) aided wireless communication. Existing works mainly rely on the kinematic equations for UAV’s mobility modeling, while its dynamic equations are usually missing. As a result, the planned UAV trajectories are piece-wise line segments in general, which may be difficult to implement in practice. By leveraging the concept of state-space model, a control-based UAV trajectory design is proposed in this paper, which takes into account both of the UAV’s kinematic equations and the dynamic equations. Consequently, smooth trajectories that are amenable to practical implementation can be obtained. Moreover, the UAV’s controller design is achieved along with the trajectory optimization, where practical roll angle and pitch angle constraints are considered. Furthermore, a new energy consumption model is derived for quad-rotor UAVs, which is based on the voltage and current flows of the electric motors and thus captures both the consumed energy for motion and the energy conversion efficiency of the motors. Numerical results are provided to validate the derived energy consumption model and show the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is envisioned to play a significant role in future wireless communication systems as an effective means of reconfiguring the radio signal propagation environment. In this paper, we study a new multi-IRS aided massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system, where a multi-antenna BS transmits independent messages to a set of remote single-antenna users using orthogonal beams that are subsequently reflected by different groups of IRSs via their respective multi-hop passive beamforming over pairwise line-of-sight (LoS) links. We aim to select optimal IRSs and their beam routing path for each of the users, along with the active/passive beamforming at the BS/IRSs, such that the minimum received signal power among all users is maximized. This problem is particularly difficult to solve due to a new type of path separation constraints for avoiding the IRS-reflected signal induced interference among different users. To tackle this difficulty, we first derive the optimal BS/IRS active/passive beamforming solutions based on their practical codebooks given the reflection paths. Then we show that the resultant multi-beam multi-hop routing problem can be recast as an equivalent graph-optimization problem, which is however NP-complete. To solve this challenging problem, we propose an efficient recursive algorithm to partially enumerate the feasible routing solutions, which is able to effectively balance the performance-complexity trade-off. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves near-optimal performance with low complexity and outperforms other benchmark schemes. Useful insights into the optimal multi-beam multi-hop routing design are also drawn under different setups of the multi-IRS aided massive MIMO network.

In this paper, we propose to employ multiple unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) base stations to serve ground users in the millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequency bands. To improve the spectrum efficiency, uniform planar arrays are equipped at the UAVs and users for compensation of the high path loss and for mitigation of interference. We formulate a problem to jointly optimize the UAV positioning, user clustering, and hybrid analog-digital beamforming (BF) for the maximization of user achievable sum rate (ASR), subject to a minimum rate constraint for each user. Since the problem is highly non-convex and involves high-dimensional variable matrices and combinatorial programming variables, we develop a suboptimal solution via alternating optimization, successive convex optimization, and combinatorial optimization. First, we design the UAV positioning and user clustering under the assumption of ideal beam patterns, which significantly decouples the UAV positioning and directional BF. Then, the transmit and receive BF variables are successively optimized to approach the ideal beam patterns. Our simulation results verify the convergence and superiority of the proposed algorithm. Significant performance gains can be obtained compared to some benchmark schemes in terms of the ASR, and the proposed hybrid BF solution closely approaches a performance bound given by fully-digital BF.

In this paper, we study a new intelligent refracting surface (IRS)-assisted high-mobility communication with the IRS deployed in a high-speed moving vehicle to assist its passenger’s communication with a static base station (BS) on the roadside. The vehicle’s high Doppler frequency results in a fast fading channel between the BS and the passenger/user, which renders channel estimation for the IRS with a large number of refracting elements a more challenging task as compared to the conventional case with low-mobility users only. In order to mitigate the Doppler effect and reap the full IRS passive beamforming gain with low training overhead, we propose a new and efficient transmission protocol to execute channel estimation and IRS refraction design for data transmission. Specifically, by exploiting the quasi-static channel between the IRS and user both moving at the same high speed, we first estimate the cascaded BS-IRS-user channel with the Doppler effect compensated. Then, we estimate the instantaneous BS-user fast fading channel (without IRS refraction) and tune the IRS refraction over time accordingly to align the cascaded channel with the BS-user direct channel, thus maximizing the IRS’s passive beamforming gain as well as converting their combined channel from fast to slow fading. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed channel estimation scheme and passive beamforming design as compared to various benchmark schemes.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is envisioned to play a significant role in future wireless communication systems thanks to its powerful capability of enabling smart and reconfigurable radio environment. In this paper, we study the multi-IRS aided downlink communication in a massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system, where a multi-antenna BS simultaneously serves multiple remote single-antenna users with orthogonal beams reflected by multiple IRSs. By exploiting the line-of-sight (LoS) link between each pair of selected IRSs, a multi-hop cascaded LoS link can be established between the BS and each user via their cooperative beam routing. Under this setup, we optimize the selected IRSs and their beam routing path for each user, along with the BS/IRS active/passive beamforming such that the minimum received signal power among all users is maximized, subject to a new multi-beam routing path separation constraint for avoiding the inter-user/route interference. To tackle this problem, we first derive the optimal BS/IRS active/passive beamforming in closed-form for any given beam routes and show the beam routing optimization is NP-complete by recasting it as an equivalent graph-optimization problem. To solve this challenging problem, we then propose an efficient recursive algorithm to partially enumerate the feasible solutions, which effectively balances the performance-complexity trade-off by tuning its design parameter. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve near-optimal performance with low enumeration complexity and also outperform other benchmark schemes.

To achieve the more promising passive beamforming gains in the double-intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) assisted system over the conventional single-IRS system, channel estimation is practically indispensable but also a more challenging problem to tackle, due to the presence of not only the single-but also double-reflection links that are intricately coupled. In this paper, we propose a new and efficient channel estimation scheme for the double-IRS assisted uplink multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication system to resolve the cascaded channel state information (CSI) of both its single- and double-reflection links. First, for the single-user case, the higher-dimensional double-reflection channel is efficiently estimated at the multi-antenna base station (BS) with low training overhead by exploiting the fact that its cascaded channel coefficients are scaled versions of those of a lower-dimensional single-reflection channel. Then, the proposed channel estimation scheme is extended to the multi-user case, where given an arbitrary user’s cascaded channel estimated as in the single-user case, the other users’ cascaded channels are scaled versions of it and thus can be estimated with reduced training overhead. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed channel estimation scheme as compared to the benchmark scheme.

The performance optimization of UAV communication systems requires the joint design of UAV trajectory and communication efficiently. To tackle the challenge of infinite design variables arising from the continuous-time UAV trajectory optimization, a commonly adopted approach in the existing literature is by approximating the UAV trajectory with piecewise-linear path segments connected via a finite number of waypoints in three-dimensional (3D) space. However, this approach may still incur prohibitive computational complexity in practice when the UAV flight period/distance becomes long, as the distance between consecutive waypoints needs to be kept sufficiently small to retain high approximation accuracy. To resolve this fundamental issue, we propose in this paper anewandgeneralframework for UAV trajectory and communication co-design with flexible number of waypoint optimization variables (calleddesignablewaypoints) or theirsub-pathrepresentations. First, we propose aflexible path discretizationscheme that optimizes only a number of selected waypoints (designable waypoints) along the UAV path for complexity reduction, while all the designable and non-designable waypoints are used in calculating the approximated communication utility along the UAV trajectory for ensuring high trajectory discretization accuracy. Next, we propose a novelpath compressionscheme, which treats the UAV trajectory as a signal and compresses its path representation based on the basis decomposition. Specifically, the UAV 3D path is first decomposed into three one-dimensional (1D) sub-paths and each sub-path is then approximated by superimposing a number of selected basis paths (which are generally less than the number of designable waypoints) weighted by their corresponding path coefficients, thus further reducing the path design complexity. Finally, we provide a case study on UAV trajectory design for aerial data harvesting from distributed sensors, and numerically show that the proposed flexible path discretization and path compression schemes can significantly reduce the UAV trajectory design complexity yet achieve favorable rate performance as compared to conventional path/time discretization schemes.

In this paper, we consider an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) enabled relaying system where multiple UAVs are deployed as aerial relays to support simultaneous communications from a set of source nodes to their destination nodes on the ground. An optimization problem is formulated under practical channel models to maximize the minimum achievable expected rate among all pairs of ground nodes by jointly designing UAVs' three-dimensional (3D) placement as well as the bandwidth-and-power allocation. This problem, however, is non-convex and thus difficult to solve. As such, we propose a new method, called iterative Gibbs-sampling and block- coordinate-descent (IGS-BCD), to efficiently obtain a high-quality suboptimal solution by synergizing the advantages of both the deterministic (BCD) and stochastic (GS) optimization methods. Specifically, our proposed method alternates between two optimization phases until convergence is reached, namely, one phase that uses the BCD method to find locally-optimal UAVs' 3D placement and the other phase that leverages the GS method to generate new UAVs' 3D placement for exploration. Moreover, we present an efficient method for properly initializing UAVs' placement that leads to faster convergence of the proposed IGS-BCD algorithm. Numerical results show that the proposed IGS-BCD and initialization methods outperform the conventional BCD or GS method alone in terms of convergence-and-performance trade-off, as well as other benchmark schemes.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is deemed as a promising solution to improve the spectral and energy efficiency of wireless communications cost-effectively. In this paper, we consider a wireless network where multiple base stations (BSs) serve their respective users with the aid of distributed IRSs in the downlink communication. Specifically, each IRS assists in the transmission from its associated BS to user via passive beamforming, while in the meantime, it also randomly scatters the signals from other co-channel BSs, thus resulting in additional signal as well as interference paths in the network. As such, a new IRS-user/BS association problem arises pertaining to optimally balance the passive beamforming gains from all IRSs among different BS-user communication links. To address this new problem, we first derive a tractable lower bound of the average signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) at the receiver of each user, termed average-signal-to-average-interference-plus-noise ratio (ASAINR), based on which two ASAINR balancing problems are formulated to maximize the minimum ASAINR among all users by optimizing the IRS-user associations without and with BS transmit power control, respectively. We also characterize the scaling behavior of user ASAINRs with the increasing number of IRS reflecting elements to investigate the different effects of IRS-reflected signal versus interference power. Moreover, to solve the two ASAINR balancing problems that are both non-convex optimization problems, we propose an optimal solution to the problem without BS power control and low-complexity suboptimal solutions to both problems by applying the branch-and-bound method and exploiting new properties of the IRS-user associations, respectively. Numerical results verify our performance analysis and also demonstrate significant performance gains of the proposed solutions over benchmark schemes.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is an enabling technology to engineer the radio signal propagation in wireless networks. By smartly tuning the signal reflection via a large number of low-cost passive reflecting elements, IRS is capable of dynamically altering wireless channels to enhance the communication performance. It is thus expected that the new IRS-aided hybrid wireless network comprising both active and passive components will be highly promising to achieve a sustainable capacity growth cost-effectively in the future. Despite its great potential, IRS faces new challenges to be efficiently integrated into wireless networks, such as reflection optimization, channel estimation, and deployment from communication design perspectives. In this paper, we provide a tutorial overview of IRS-aided wireless communications to address the above issues, and elaborate its reflection and channel models, hardware architecture and practical constraints, as well as various appealing applications in wireless networks. Moreover, we highlight important directions worthy of further investigation in future work.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a new promising technology that is able to reconfigure the wireless propagation channel via smart and passive signal reflection. In this paper, we investigate the capacity region of a two-user communication network with one access point (AP) aided by M IRS elements for enhancing the user-AP channels, where the IRS incurs negligible delay, thus the user-AP channels via the IRS follow the classic discrete memoryless channel model. In particular, we consider two practical IRS deployment strategies that lead to different effective channels between the users and AP, namely, the distributed deployment where the M elements form two IRSs, each deployed in the vicinity of one user, versus the centralized deployment where all the M elements are deployed in the vicinity of the AP. First, we consider the uplink multiple-access channel (MAC) and derive the capacity/achievable rate regions for both deployment strategies under different multiple access schemes. It is shown that the centralized deployment generally outperforms the distributed deployment under symmetric channel setups in terms of achievable user rates. Next, we extend the results to the downlink broadcast channel (BC) by leveraging the celebrated uplink-downlink (or MAC-BC) duality framework, and show that the superior rate performance of centralized over distributed deployment also holds. Numerical results are presented that validate our analysis, and reveal new and useful insights for optimal IRS deployment in wireless networks.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a promising new paradigm to achieve high spectral and energy efficiency for future wireless networks by reconfiguring the wireless signal propagation via passive reflection. To reap the promising gains of IRS, channel state information (CSI) is essential, whereas channel estimation errors are inevitable in practice due to limited channel training resources. In this paper, in order to optimize the performance of IRS-aided multiuser communications with imperfect CSI, we propose to jointly design the active transmit precoding at the access point (AP) and passive reflection coefficients of the IRS, each consisting of not only the conventional phase shift and also the newly exploited amplitude variation. First, the achievable rate of each user is derived assuming a practical IRS channel estimation method, which shows that the interference due to CSI errors is intricately related to the AP transmit precoders, the channel training power and the IRS reflection coefficients during both channel training and data transmission. Next, for the single-user case, by combining the benefits of the penalty method, Dinkelbach method and block successive upper-bound minimization (BSUM) method, a new penalized Dinkelbach-BSUM algorithm is proposed to optimize the IRS reflection coefficients for maximizing the achievable data transmission rate subjected to CSI errors; while for the multiuser case, a new penalty dual decomposition (PDD)-based algorithm is proposed to maximize the users' weighted sum-rate. Finally, simulation results are presented to validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms as compared to benchmark schemes. In particular, useful insights are drawn to characterize the effect of IRS reflection amplitude control (with/without the conventional phase-shift control) on the system performance under imperfect CSI.

To achieve the more significant passive beamforming gain in the double-intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) aided system over the conventional single-IRS counterpart, channel state information (CSI) is indispensable in practice but also more challenging to acquire, due to the presence of not only the single- but also double-reflection links that are intricately coupled and also entail more channel coefficients for estimation. In this paper, we propose a new and efficient channel estimation scheme for the double-IRS aided multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication system to resolve the cascaded CSI of both its single- and double-reflection links. First, for the single-user case, the single- and double-reflection channels are efficiently estimated at the multi-antenna base station (BS) with both the IRSs turned ON (for maximal signal reflection), by exploiting the fact that their cascaded channel coefficients are scaled versions of their superimposed lower-dimensional CSI. Then, the proposed channel estimation scheme is extended to the multi-user case, where given an arbitrary user's cascaded channel (estimated as in the single-user case), the other users' cascaded channels can also be expressed as lower-dimensional scaled versions of it and thus efficiently estimated at the BS. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed channel estimation scheme and joint training reflection design for double IRSs, as compared to various benchmark schemes.

Wireless power transfer (WPT) technology enables a cost-effective and sustainable energy supply in wireless networks. However, the broadcast nature of wireless signals makes them non-excludable public goods, which leads to potential free-riders among energy receivers. In this study, we formulate the wireless power provision problem as a public goods provision problem, aiming to maximize the social welfare of a system of an energy transmitter (ET) and all the energy users (EUs), while considering their heterogeneous valuations, private information, and self-interested behaviors. We propose a two-phase all-or-none scheme involving a low-complexity Power And Taxation (PAT) mechanism, which ensures voluntary participation, truthfulness, budget balance, and social optimality at every Nash equilibrium (NE). We propose a distributed PAT (D-PAT) algorithm to reach an NE, and prove its convergence by connecting the structure of NEs and that of the optimal solution to a related optimization problem. We further extend the analysis to a multi-channel system, which brings a further challenge of non-strictly concave agents' payoffs. We propose a Multi-Channel PAT (M-PAT) mechanism and a distributed M-PAT (D-MPAT) algorithm to address the challenge. Simulation results show that, our design is most beneficial when there are more EUs and more homogeneous channel gains.

In the existing cellular networks, it remains a challenging problem to communicate with and control an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm with both high reliability and low latency. Due to the UAV swarm's high working altitude and strong ground-to-air channels, it is generally exposed to multiple ground base stations (GBSs), while the GBSs that are serving ground users (occupied GBSs) can generate strong interference to the UAV swarm. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel two-phase transmission protocol by exploiting cellular plus device-to-device (D2D) communication for the UAV swarm. In Phase I, one swarm head is chosen for ground-to-air channel estimation, and all the GBSs that are not serving ground users (available GBSs) transmit a common control message to the UAV swarm simultaneously, using the same cellular frequency band. Both the swarm head and other swarm members can utilize the high power gain from multiple available GBSs' transmission, to combat the strong interference from occupied GBSs, while some UAVs may fail to decode the message due to uncorrelated ground-to-air channels. In Phase II, all the UAVs that have decoded the message in Phase I further relay it to the other UAVs in the swarm via D2D communication, by exploiting the less interfered D2D frequency band and the proximity among UAVs. In this paper, we aim to characterize the reliability performance of the above two-phase transmission protocol, i.e., the expected percentage of UAVs in the swarm that can decode the common control message, which is a non-trivial problem due to the complex system setup and the intricate coupling between the two transmission phases. Nevertheless, we manage to obtain an approximated expression of the reliability performance of interest, under reasonable assumptions and with the aid of the Pearson distributions. Numerical results validate the accuracy of our analytical results and show the effectiveness of our proposed protocol over other benchmark protocols. We also study the effect of key system parameters on the reliability performance, to reveal useful insights on the practical design of cellular-connected UAV swarm communication.

In this paper, we consider a mmWave massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication system with one static base station (BS) serving a fast-moving user, both equipped with a very large array. The transmitted signal arrives at the user through multiple paths, each with a different angle-of-arrival (AoA) and hence Doppler frequency offset (DFO), thus resulting in a fast time-varying multipath fading MIMO channel. In order to mitigate the Doppler-induced channel aging for reduced pilot overhead, we propose a new angular-domain selective channel tracking and Doppler compensation scheme at the user side. Specifically, we formulate the joint estimation of partial angular-domain channel and DFO parameters as a dynamic compressive sensing (CS) problem. Then we propose a Doppler-aware-dynamic variational Bayesian inference (DD-VBI) algorithm to solve this problem efficiently. Finally, we propose a practical DFO compensation scheme which selects the dominant paths of the fast time-varying channel for DFO compensation and thereby converts it into a slow time-varying effective channel. Compared with the existing methods, the proposed scheme can enjoy the huge array gain provided by the massive MIMO and also balance the tradeoff between the CSI signaling overhead and spatial multiplexing gain. Simulation results verify the advantages of the proposed scheme over various baseline schemes.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a promising technology to reconfigure wireless channels, which brings a new degree of freedom for the design of future wireless networks. This article proposes a new three-dimensional (3D) wireless system architecture enabled by aerial IRS (AIRS). Compared to the conventional terrestrial IRS, AIRS enjoys more deployment flexibility as well as wider-view signal reflection, thanks to its high altitude and thus more likelihood of establishing line-of-sight (LoS) links with ground source/destination nodes. We aim to maximize the worst-case signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) over all locations in a target area by jointly optimizing the transmit beamforming for the source node, as well as the placement and 3D passive beamforming for the AIRS. The formulated problem is non-convex and difficult to solve. To gain useful insights, we first consider the special case of maximizing the SNR at a given target location, for which the optimal solution is obtained in closed-form. The result shows that the optimal horizontal AIRS placement only depends on the ratio between the source-destination distance and the AIRS altitude. Then for the general case of AIRS-enabled area coverage, we propose an efficient solution by decoupling the AIRS passive beamforming design to maximize the worst-case array gain, from its placement optimization by balancing the resulting angular span and the cascaded channel path loss. Our proposed solution is based on a novel 3D beam broadening and flattening technique, where the passive array of the AIRS is divided into sub-arrays of appropriate size, and their phase shifts are designed to form a flattened beam pattern with adjustable beamwidth catering to the size of the coverage area. Both uniform linear array (ULA)-based and uniform planar array (UPA)-based AIRSs are considered in our design, which enable two-dimensional (2D) and 3D passive beamforming, respectively. Numerical results show that the proposed designs achieve significant performance gains over the benchmark schemes.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a new and promising paradigm to substantially improve the spectral and energy efficiency of wireless networks, by constructing favorable communication channels via tuning massive low-cost passive reflecting elements. Despite recent advances in the link-level performance optimization for various IRS-aided wireless systems, it still remains an open problem whether the large-scale deployment of IRSs in wireless networks can be a cost-effective solution to achieve their sustainable capacity growth in the future. To address this problem, we study in this paper a new hybrid wireless network comprising both active base stations (BSs) and passive IRSs, and characterize its achievable spatial throughput in the downlink as well as other pertinent key performance metrics averaged over both channel fading and random locations of the deployed BSs/IRSs therein based onstochastic geometry. Compared to prior works on characterizing the performance of wireless networks with active BSs only, our analysis needs to derive the power distributions of both the signal and interference reflected by distributed IRSs in the network under spatially correlated channels, which exhibit channel hardening effects when the number of IRS elements becomes large. Extensive numerical results are presented to validate our analysis and demonstrate the effectiveness of deploying distributed IRSs in enhancing the hybrid network throughput against the conventional network without IRS, whichsignificantly boosts the signal powerbut results in onlymarginally increased interferencein the network. Moreover, it is unveiled that there exists anoptimal IRS/BS density ratiothat maximizes the hybrid network throughput subject to a total deployment cost given their individual costs, while the conventional network without IRS (i.e., zero IRS/BS density ratio) is generally suboptimal in terms of throughput per unit cost.

Cellular-connected unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is a promising technology to unlock the full potential of UAVs in the future by reusing the cellular base stations (BSs) to enable their air-ground communications. However, how to achieve ubiquitous three-dimensional (3D) communication coverage for the UAVs in the sky is a new challenge. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by a new coverage-aware navigation approach, which exploits the UAV's controllable mobility to design its navigation/trajectory to avoid the cellular BSs' coverage holes while accomplishing their missions. To this end, we formulate an UAV trajectory optimization problem to minimize the weighted sum of its mission completion time and expected communication outage duration, which, however, cannot be solved by the standard optimization techniques due to the lack of an accurate and tractable end-to-end communication model in practice. To overcome this difficulty, we propose a new solution approach based on the technique of deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Specifically, by leveraging the state-of-the-art dueling double deep Q network (dueling DDQN) with multi-step learning, we first propose a UAV navigation algorithm based on direct RL, where the signal measurement at the UAV is used to directly train the action-value function of the navigation policy. To further improve the performance, we propose a new framework called simultaneous navigation and radio mapping (SNARM), where the UAV's signal measurement is used not only for training the DQN directly, but also to create a radio map that is able to predict the outage probabilities at all locations in the area of interest. This enables the generation of simulated UAV trajectories and predicting their expected returns, which are then used to further train the DQN via Dyna technique, thus greatly improving the learning efficiency.

In this paper, we study the three-dimensional (3D) path planning for a cellular-connected unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to minimize its flying distance from given initial to final locations, while ensuring a target link quality in terms of the expected signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) at the UAV receiver with each of its associated ground base stations (GBSs) during the flight. To exploit the location-dependent and spatially varying channel as well as interference over the 3D space, we propose a new radio map based path planning framework for the UAV. Specifically, we consider the channel gain map of each GBS that provides its large-scale channel gains with uniformly sampled locations on a 3D grid, which are due to static and large-size obstacles (e.g., buildings) and thus assumed to be time-invariant. Based on the channel gain maps of GBSs as well as their loading factors, we then construct an SINR map that depicts the expected SINR levels over the sampled 3D locations. By leveraging the obtained SINR map, we proceed to derive the optimal UAV path by solving an equivalent shortest path problem (SPP) in graph theory. We further propose a grid quantization approach where the grid points in the SINR map are more coarsely sampled by exploiting the spatial channel/interference correlation over neighboring grids. Then, we solve an approximate SPP over the reduced-size SINR map (graph) with reduced complexity. Numerical results show that the proposed solution can effectively minimize the flying distance/time of the UAV subject to its communication quality constraint, and a flexible trade-off between performance and complexity can be achieved by adjusting the grid quantization ratio in the SINR map. Moreover, the proposed solution significantly outperforms various benchmark schemes without fully exploiting the channel/interference spatial distribution in the network.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is an emerging technology that is able to reconfigure the wireless channel via tunable passive signal reflection and thereby enhance the spectral/energy efficiency of wireless networks cost-effectively. In this paper, we study an IRS-aided multiuser multiple-input single-output (MISO) wireless system and adopt the two-timescale (TTS) transmission to reduce the signal processing complexity and channel training overhead as compared to the existing schemes based on the instantaneous channel state information (I-CSI), and at the same time, exploit the multiuser channel diversity in transmission scheduling. Specifically, the long-term passive beamforming (i.e., IRS phase shifts) is designed based on the statistical CSI (S-CSI) of all links, while the short-term active beamforming (i.e., transmit precoding vectors at the access point (AP)) is designed to cater to the I-CSI of all users' reconfigured channels with optimized IRS phase shifts. We aim to minimize the average transmit power at the AP, subject to the users' individual quality of service (QoS) constraints on the achievable long-term average rate. The formulated stochastic optimization problem is non-convex and difficult to solve since the long-term and short-term design variables are complicatedly coupled in the QoS constraints. To tackle this problem, we propose an efficient algorithm, called the primal-dual decomposition based TTS joint active and passive beamforming (PDD-TJAPB), where the original problem is decomposed into a long-term passive beamforming problem and a family of short-term active beamforming problems, and the deep unfolding technique is employed to extract gradient information from the short-term problems to construct a convex surrogate problem for the long-term problem. We show that both the long-term and short-term problems can be efficiently solved and the proposed algorithm is proved to converge to a stationary solution of the original problem almost surely. Simulation results are presented which demonstrate the advantages and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm as compared to benchmark schemes.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has drawn a lot of attention recently as a promising new solution to achieve high spectral and energy efficiency for future wireless networks. By utilizing massive low-cost passive reflecting elements, the wireless propagation environment becomes controllable and thus can be made favorable for improving the communication performance. Prior works on IRS mainly rely on the instantaneous channel state information (I-CSI), which, however, is practically difficult to obtain for IRS-associated links due to its passive operation and large number of reflecting elements. To overcome this difficulty, we propose in this paper a new two-timescale (TTS) transmission protocol to maximize the achievable average sum-rate for an IRS-aided multiuser system under the general correlated Rician channel model. Specifically, the passive IRS phase shifts are first optimized based on the statistical CSI (S-CSI) of all links, which varies much slowly as compared to their I-CSI; while the transmit beamforming/precoding vectors at the access point (AP) are then designed to cater to the I-CSI of the users' effective fading channels with the optimized IRS phase shifts, thus significantly reducing the channel training overhead and passive beamforming design complexity over the existing schemes based on the I-CSI of all channels. Besides, for ease of practical implementation, we consider discrete phase shifts at each reflecting element of the IRS. For the single-user case, an efficient penalty dual decomposition (PDD)-based algorithm is proposed, where the IRS phase shifts are updated in parallel to reduce the computational time. For the multiuser case, we propose a general TTS stochastic successive convex approximation (SSCA) algorithm by constructing a quadratic surrogate of the objective function, which cannot be explicitly expressed in closed-form. Simulation results are presented to validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms and evaluate the impact of S-CSI and channel correlation on the system performance.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has emerged as an enabling technology to achieve smart and reconfigurable wireless communication environment cost-effectively. Prior works on IRS mainly consider its passive beamforming design and performance optimization without the inter-IRS signal reflection, which thus do not unveil the full potential of multi-IRS assisted wireless networks. In this paper, we study a double-IRS assisted multi-user communication system with the cooperative passive beamforming design that captures the multiplicative beamforming gain from the inter-IRS channel. Under the general channel setup with the co-existence of both double- and single-reflection links, we jointly optimize the (active) receive beamforming at the base station (BS) and the cooperative (passive) reflect beamforming at the two distributed IRSs (deployed near the BS and users, respectively) to maximize the minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of all users. Moreover, for the single-user and multi-user setups, we analytically show the superior performance of the double-IRS cooperative system over the conventional single-IRS system in terms of the maximum signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and multi-user effective channel rank, respectively. Simulation results validate our analytical results and show the practical advantages of the proposed double-IRS system with cooperative passive beamforming designs.

Due to the passive nature of Intelligent Reflecting Surface (IRS), channel estimation is a fundamental challenge in IRS-aided wireless networks. Particularly, as the number of IRS reflecting elements and/or that of IRS-served users increase, the channel training overhead becomes excessively high. To tackle this challenge, we propose in this paper a new anchor-assisted two-phase channel estimation scheme, where two anchor nodes, namely A1 and A2, are deployed near the IRS for helping the base station (BS) to acquire the cascaded BS-IRS-user channels. Specifically, in the first phase, the partial channel state information (CSI), i.e., the element-wise channel gain square, of the BS-IRS link is obtained by estimating the BS-IRS-A1/A2 channels and the A1-IRS-A2 channel, separately. Then, in the second phase, by leveraging such partial knowledge of the BS-IRS channel that is common to all users, the individual cascaded BS-IRS-user channels are efficiently estimated. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed anchor-assisted channel estimation scheme is able to achieve comparable mean-squared error (MSE) performance as compared to the conventional scheme, but with significantly reduced channel training time.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a revolutionizing approach for achieving low-cost yet spectral and energy efficient wireless communications. By properly tuning its massive reflecting elements, IRS is able to construct favorable channels and thereby significantly improve the wireless communication performance in various setups. In this paper, we consider the general wireless network consisting of multiple base stations (BSs), users and IRSs, and investigate their joint association optimization in the downlink communication. Specifically, each IRS assists in the communication from its associated BS to user and in the meanwhile randomly scatters the signals from the other non-associated BSs. As such, the joint BS-IRS-user association is more involved as compared to the BS-user association in conventional wireless networks without IRS. To address this new problem, we first derive the average signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of each user in closed-form and then formulate the joint association problem to maximize the users' utility in the downlink communication. Both the optimal and low-complexity suboptimal solutions are proposed for the formulated problem. Numerical results demonstrate significant performance gains of the proposed solutions over benchmark schemes.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a promising new paradigm to achieve high spectral and energy efficiency for future wireless networks by reconfiguring the wireless signal propagation via passive reflection. To reap the potential gains of IRS, channel state information (CSI) is essential, whereas channel estimation errors are inevitable in practice due to limited channel training resources. In this paper, in order to optimize the performance of IRS-aided communications with imperfect CSI, we propose to jointly design the active transmit precoding at the access point (AP) and passive reflection coefficients of IRS, each consisting of not only the conventional phase shift and also the newly exploited amplitude variation. First, the user's achievable rate is derived assuming a practical IRS channel estimation method, which shows that the interference due to CSI errors is intricately related to the AP transmit precoder, the channel training power and the IRS reflection coefficients during both channel training and data transmission. Next, by combining the benefits of the penalty method, Dinkelbach method and block successive upper-bound minimization (BSUM) method, a new penalized Dinkelbach-BSUM algorithm is proposed to optimize the IRS reflection coefficients for maximizing the achievable data transmission rate subjected to CSI errors. Finally, simulation results are presented to validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm as compared to benchmark schemes. In particular, useful insights are drawn to characterize the effect of IRS reflection amplitude control (with/without the conventional phase-shift control) on the system performance under imperfect CSI.

As an important role in achieving seamless world-wide coverage for the maritime communication, the VDE satellite component (VDE-SAT) aims to provide efficient services to a large number of ship terminals each with only a limited satellite coverage time, which requires efficient resource allocation strategies. In this paper, we investigate the downlink VDE-SAT system consisting of a low-earth orbiting (LEO) satellite communicating with multiple randomly distributed ship terminals. As the LEO satellite orbits the Earth at a fixed altitude and speed, ship terminals are served in a periodic manner with known but periodically time-varying channel gains from the satellite. By exploiting the periodic channel gain variations in the line-of-sight (LoS) dominant satellite-ship channels, we propose an angle partition based time division multiple access (TDMA) scheme to schedule downlink communications from the satellite to ship terminals based on the moving satellite's real-time position. Specifically, time resources allocated to different ship terminals are optimized via the partition of the satellite's azimuth angle range to maximize their minimum/common throughput. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed angle partition-based TDMA scheme and show its performance improvement over benchmark schemes.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) that enables the control of wireless propagation environment has recently emerged as a promising cost-effective technology for boosting the spectral and energy efficiency of future wireless communication systems. Prior works on IRS are mainly based on the ideal phase shift model assuming full signal reflection by each of its elements regardless of the phase shift, which, however, is practically difficult to realize. In contrast, we propose in this paper a practical phase shift model that captures the phase-dependent amplitude variation in the element-wise reflection design. Based on the proposed model and considering an IRS-aided multiuser system with one IRS deployed to assist in the downlink communications from a multi-antenna access point (AP) to multiple single-antenna users, we formulate an optimization problem to minimize the total transmit power at the AP by jointly designing the AP transmit beamforming and the IRS reflect beamforming, subject to the users' individual signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) constraints. Iterative algorithms are proposed to find suboptimal solutions to this problem efficiently by utilizing the alternating optimization (AO) as well as penalty-based optimization techniques. Moreover, to draw essential insight, we analyze the asymptotic performance loss of the IRS-aided system that employs practical phase shifters but assumes the ideal phase shift model for beamforming optimization, as the number of IRS elements goes to infinity. Simulation results unveil substantial performance gains achieved by the proposed beamforming optimization based on the practical phase shift model as compared to the conventional ideal model.

In this paper, we consider a multi-unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) relaying system where the UAVs are deployed to assist data relaying from multiple ground source nodes to their corresponding destination nodes. An optimization problem is formulated to maximize the minimum achievable rate among all pairs of nodes, by jointly designing the UAV placement and communication resource allocation. To solve this non-convex problem, we first reformulate it into two sub-problems, corresponding to a slave problem for the resource allocation given fixed UAV placement and a master problem for the UAV placement optimization. Then for the non-convex slave problem, we sub-optimally solve it by using the successive convex approximation method. The master problem, however, is intractable due to the lack of a closed-form expression for the max-min rate with respect to the UAV placement. We thus propose a new solution approach, called Gibbs-sampling-based (GSB) placement learning, to gradually learn a sub-optimal UAV placement by generating a sequence of samples for the UAV placement that constitute a Markov chain, where the transition probabilities are determined by the max-min rates of different configurations of UAV placement. Furthermore, a high-quality UAV-placement initialization scheme is proposed to accelerate the convergence speed of the proposed GSB algorithm. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the significant rate improvement and fast convergence speed of the proposed scheme as compared to various benchmark schemes.

In this paper, we consider an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided single-user system where an IRS with discrete phase shifts is deployed to assist the uplink communication. A practical transmission protocol is proposed to execute channel estimation and passive beamforming successively. To minimize the mean square error (MSE) of channel estimation, we first formulate an optimization problem for designing the IRS reflection pattern in the training phase under the constraints of unit-modulus, discrete phase, and full rank. This problem, however, is NP-hard and thus difficult to solve in general. As such, we propose a low-complexity yet efficient method to solve it sub-optimally, by constructing a near-orthogonal reflection pattern based on either discrete Fourier transform (DFT)-matrix quantization or Hadamard-matrix truncation. Based on the estimated channel, we then formulate an optimization problem to maximize the achievable rate by designing the discrete-phase passive beamforming at the IRS with the training overhead and channel estimation error taken into account. To reduce the computational complexity of exhaustive search, we further propose a low-complexity successive refinement algorithm with a properly-designed initialization to obtain a high-quality suboptimal solution. Numerical results are presented to show the significant rate improvement of our proposed IRS training reflection pattern and passive beamforming designs as compared to other benchmark schemes.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a promising solution to enhance the wireless communication capacity both cost-effectively and energy-efficiently, by properly altering the signal propagation via tuning a large number of passive reflecting units. In this paper, we aim to characterize the fundamental capacity limit of IRS-aided point-to-point multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems with multi-antenna transmitter and receiver in general, by jointly optimizing the IRS reflection coefficients and the MIMO transmit covariance matrix. We consider narrowband transmission under frequency-flat fading channels, and develop an efficient alternating optimization algorithm to find a locally optimal solution by iteratively optimizing the transmit covariance matrix or one of the reflection coefficients with the others being fixed. Numerical results show that our proposed algorithm achieves substantially increased capacity compared to traditional MIMO channels without the IRS, and also outperforms various benchmark schemes.

In this article, a symbiotic radio (SR) system is proposed to support passive Internet of Things (IoT), in which a backscatter device (BD), also called IoT device, is parasitic in a primary transmission. The primary transmitter (PT) is designed to assist both the primary and BD transmissions, and the primary receiver (PR) is used to decode the information from the PT as well as the BD. The symbol period for BD transmission is assumed to be either equal to or much greater than that of the primary one, resulting in parasitic SR (PSR) or commensal SR (CSR) setup. We consider a basic SR system which consists of three nodes: 1) a multiantenna PT; 2) a single-antenna BD; and 3) a single-antenna PR. We first derive the achievable rates for the primary and BD transmissions for each setup. Then, we formulate two transmit beamforming optimization problems, i.e., the weighted sum-rate maximization (WSRM) problem and the transmit power minimization (TPM) problem, and solve these nonconvex problems by applying the semidefinite relaxation (SDR) technique. In addition, a novel transmit beamforming structure is proposed to reduce the computational complexity of the solutions. The simulation results show that for CSR setup, the proposed solution enables the opportunistic transmission for the BD via energy-efficient passive backscattering without any loss in spectral efficiency, by properly exploiting the additional signal path from the BD.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a new and revolutionizing technology for achieving spectrum and energy efficient wireless networks. By leveraging massive low-cost passive elements that are able to reflect radio-frequency (RF) signals with adjustable phase shifts, IRS can achieve high passive beamforming gains, which are particularly appealing for improving the efficiency of RF-based wireless power transfer. Motivated by the above, we study in this paper an IRS-assisted simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) system. Specifically, a set of IRSs are deployed to assist in the information/power transfer from a multi-antenna access point (AP) to multiple single-antenna information users (IUs) and energy users (EUs), respectively. We aim to minimize the transmit power at the AP via jointly optimizing its transmit precoders and the reflect phase shifts at all IRSs, subject to the quality-of-service (QoS) constraints at all users, namely, the individual signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) constraints at IUs and the energy harvesting constraints at EUs. However, this optimization problem is non-convex with intricately coupled variables, for which the existing alternating optimization approach is shown to be inefficient as the number of QoS constraints increases. To tackle this challenge, we first apply proper transformations on the QoS constraints and then propose an efficient iterative algorithm by applying the penalty-based optimization method. Moreover, by exploiting the short-range coverage of IRS, we further propose a more computationally efficient algorithm by optimizing the phase shifts at all IRSs in parallel. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of employing multiple IRSs for enhancing the performance of SWIPT systems as well as the significant performance gains achieved by our proposed algorithms over benchmark schemes. The impact of IRS on the transmitter/receiver design for SWIPT is also unveiled.

Prior studies on intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) have mostly assumed perfect channel state information (CSI) available for designing the IRS passive beamforming as well as the continuously adjustable phase shift at each of its reflecting elements, which, however, have simplified two challenging issues for implementing IRS in practice, namely, its channel estimation and passive beamforming designs both under the constraint of discrete phase shifts. To address them, we consider in this paper an IRS-aided single-user communication system and design the IRS training reflection matrix for channel estimation as well as the passive beamforming for data transmission, both subject to the new constraint of discrete phase shifts. We show that the training reflection matrix design with discrete phase shifts greatly differs from that with continuous phase shifts, and the corresponding passive beamforming design should take into account the correlated IRS channel estimation errors due to discrete phase shifts. Moreover, a novel hierarchical training reflection design is proposed to progressively estimate IRS elements' channels over multiple time blocks by exploiting the IRS-elements grouping and partition. Based on the resolved IRS channels in each block, we further design the progressive passive beamforming at the IRS with discrete phase shifts to improve the achievable rate for data transmission over the blocks. Extensive numerical results are presented, which demonstrate the significant performance improvement of proposed channel estimation and passive beamforming designs as compared to various benchmark schemes.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a promising solution to enhance the wireless communication capacity both cost-effectively and energy-efficiently, by properly altering the signal propagation via tuning a large number of passive reflecting units. In this paper, we aim to characterize the fundamental capacity limit of IRS-aided point-to-point multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems with multi-antenna transmitter and receiver in general, by jointly optimizing the IRS reflection coefficients and the MIMO transmit covariance matrix. First, we consider narrowband transmission under frequency-flat fading channels, and develop an efficient alternating optimization algorithm to find a locally optimal solution by iteratively optimizing the transmit covariance matrix or one of the reflection coefficients with the others being fixed. Next, we consider capacity maximization for broadband transmission in a general MIMO orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system under frequency-selective fading channels, where transmit covariance matrices are optimized for different subcarriers while only one common set of IRS reflection coefficients is designed to cater to all the subcarriers. To tackle this more challenging problem, we propose a new alternating optimization algorithm based on convex relaxation to find a high-quality suboptimal solution. Numerical results show that our proposed algorithms achieve substantially increased capacity compared to traditional MIMO channels without the IRS, and also outperform various benchmark schemes. In particular, it is shown that with the proposed algorithms, various key parameters of the IRS-aided MIMO channel such as channel total power, rank, and condition number can be significantly improved for capacity enhancement.

The line-of-sight (LoS) dominant air-ground channels have posed critical interference issues in cellular-connected unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications. In this paper, we propose a new base station (BS) cooperative beamforming (CB) technique for the cellular downlink to mitigate the strong interference caused by the co-channel terrestrial transmissions to the UAV. Besides the conventional CB by cooperatively transmitting the UAV's message, the serving BSs of the UAV exploit a novel CB-based interference transmission scheme to effectively suppress the terrestrial interference to the UAV. Specifically, the co-channel terrestrial users' messages are shared with the UAV's serving BSs and transmitted via CB so as to cancel their resultant interference at the UAV's receiver. To optimally balance between the CB gains for UAV signal enhancement and terrestrial interference cancellation, we formulate a new problem to maximize the UAV's receive signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) by jointly optimizing the power allocations at all of its serving BSs for transmitting the UAV's and co-channel terrestrial users' messages. First, we derive the closed-form optimal solution to this problem in the special case of one serving BS for the UAV and draw useful insights. Then, we propose an algorithm to solve the problem optimally in the general case. As the optimal solution requires centralized implementation with exorbitant message/channel information exchanges among the BSs, we further propose a distributed algorithm that is amenable to practical implementation, based on a new divide-and-conquer approach, whereby each co-channel BS divides its perceived interference to the UAV into multiple portions, each to be canceled by a different serving BS of the UAV with its best effort. Numerical results show that the proposed centralized and distributed CB schemes with interference transmission and cancellation (ITC) can both significantly improve the UAV's downlink performance as compared to the conventional CB without applying ITC.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a cost-effective solution for achieving high spectrum and energy efficiency in future wireless networks by leveraging massive low-cost passive elements that are able to reflect the signals with adjustable phase shifts. Prior works on IRS mainly consider continuous phase shifts at reflecting elements, which are practically difficult to implement due to the hardware limitation. In contrast, we study in this paper an IRS-aided wireless network, where an IRS with only a finite number of phase shifts at each element is deployed to assist in the communication from a multi-antenna access point (AP) to multiple single-antenna users. We aim to minimize the transmit power at the AP by jointly optimizing the continuous transmit precoding at the AP and the discrete reflect phase shifts at the IRS, subject to a given set of minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) constraints at the user receivers. The considered problem is shown to be a mixed-integer non-linear program (MINLP) and thus is difficult to solve in general. To tackle this problem, we first study the single-user case with one user assisted by the IRS and propose both optimal and suboptimal algorithms for solving it. Besides, we analytically show that as compared to the ideal case with continuous phase shifts, the IRS with discrete phase shifts achieves the same squared power gain in terms of asymptotically large number of reflecting elements, while a constant proportional power loss is incurred that depends only on the number of phase-shift levels. The proposed designs for the single-user case are also extended to the general setup with multiple users among which some are aided by the IRS. Simulation results verify our performance analysis as well as the effectiveness of our proposed designs as compared to various benchmark schemes.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a promising new technology for achieving both spectrum and energy efficient wireless communication systems in the future. However, existing works on IRS mainly consider frequency-flat channels and assume perfect knowledge of channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter. Motivated by the above, in this paper we study an IRS-enhanced orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system under frequency-selective channels and propose a practical transmission protocol with channel estimation. First, to reduce the overhead in channel training as well as exploit the channel spatial correlation, we propose a novel IRS elements grouping method, where each group consists of a set of adjacent IRS elements that share a common reflection coefficient. Based on this method, we propose a practical transmission protocol where only the combined channel of each group needs to be estimated, thus substantially reducing the training overhead. Next, with any given grouping and estimated CSI, we formulate the problem to maximize the achievable rate by jointly optimizing the transmit power allocation and the IRS passive array reflection coefficients. Although the formulated problem is non-convex and thus difficult to solve, we propose an efficient algorithm to obtain a high-quality suboptimal solution for it, by alternately optimizing the power allocation and the passive array coefficients in an iterative manner, along with a customized method for the initialization. Simulation results show that the proposed design significantly improves the OFDM link rate performance as compared to the case without using IRS. Moreover, it is shown that there exists an optimal size for IRS elements grouping which achieves the maximum achievable rate due to the practical trade-off between the training overhead and IRS passive beamforming flexibility.

This paper investigates the optimal transmit beamforming design of simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) in the multiuser multiple-input-single-output (MISO) downlink with specific absorption rate (SAR) constraints. We consider the power splitting technique for SWIPT, where each receiver divides the received signal into two parts: one for information decoding and the other for energy harvesting with a practical non-linear rectification model. The problem of interest is to maximize as much as possible the received signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and the energy harvested for all receivers, while satisfying the transmit power and the SAR constraints by optimizing the transmit beamforming at the transmitter and the power splitting ratios at different receivers. The optimal beamforming and power splitting solutions are obtained with the aid of semidefinite programming and bisection search. Low-complexity fixed beamforming and hybrid beamforming techniques are also studied. Furthermore, we study the effect of imperfect channel information and radiation matrices, and design robust beamforming to guarantee the worst-case performance. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed algorithms can effectively deal with the radio exposure constraints and significantly outperform the conventional transmission scheme with power backoff.

This paper considers an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled wireless sensor network (WSN) in urban areas, where a UAV is deployed to collect data from distributed sensor nodes (SNs) within a given duration. To characterize the occasional building blockage between the UAV and SNs, we construct the probabilistic line-of-sight (LoS) channel model for a Manhattan-type city by using the combined simulation and data regression method, which is shown in the form of a generalized logistic function of the UAV-SN elevation angle. We assume that only the knowledge of SNs' locations and the probabilistic LoS channel model is known a priori, while the UAV can obtain the instantaneous LoS/Non-LoS channel state information (CSI) with the SNs in real time along its flight. Our objective is to maximize the minimum (average) data collection rate from all the SNs for the UAV. To this end, we formulate a new rate maximization problem by jointly optimizing the UAV three-dimensional (3D) trajectory and transmission scheduling of SNs. Although the optimal solution is intractable due to the lack of complete UAV-SNs CSI, we propose in this paper a novel and general design method, called hybrid offline-online optimization, to obtain a suboptimal solution to it, by leveraging both the statistical and real-time CSI. Essentially, our proposed method decouples the joint design of UAV trajectory and communication scheduling into two phases: namely, an offline phase that determines the UAV path prior to its flight based on the probabilistic LoS channel model, followed by an online phase that adaptively adjusts the UAV flying speeds along the offline optimized path as well as communication scheduling based on the instantaneous UAV-SNs CSI and SNs' individual amounts of data received accumulatively. Extensive simulation results are provided to show the significant rate performance improvement of our proposed design as compared to various benchmark schemes.

This paper studies a new and challenging wireless surveillance problem where a legitimate monitor attempts to eavesdrop two suspicious communication links simultaneously. To facilitate concurrent eavesdropping, our multi-antenna legitimate monitor employs a proactive eavesdropping via jamming approach, by selectively jamming suspicious receivers to lower the transmission rates of the target links. In particular, we are interested in characterizing the achievable eavesdropping rate region for the minimum-mean-squared-error (MMSE) receiver case, by optimizing the legitimate monitor's jamming transmit covariance matrix subject to its power budget. As the monitor cannot hear more than what suspicious links transmit, the achievable eavesdropping rate region is essentially the intersection of the achievable rate region for the two suspicious links and that for the two eavesdropping links. The former region can be purposely altered by the monitor's jamming transmit covariance matrix, whereas the latter region is fixed when the MMSE receiver is employed. Therefore, we first analytically characterize the achievable rate region for the two suspicious links via optimizing the jamming transmit covariance matrix and then obtain the achievable eavesdropping rate region for the MMSE receiver case. In addition, we also consider the MMSE with successive interference cancellation (MMSE-SIC) receiver case and characterize the corresponding achievable eavesdropping rate region by jointly optimizing the time-sharing factor between different decoding orders. Furthermore, extensions to the imperfect channel state information case and the more than two suspicious links scenario are also examined. Finally, numerical results are provided to corroborate our analysis and evaluate the eavesdropping performance.

To achieve the full passive beamforming gains of intelligent reflecting surface (IRS), accurate channel state information (CSI) is indispensable but practically challenging to acquire, due to the excessive amount of channel parameters to be estimated which increases with the number of IRS reflecting elements as well as that of IRS-served users. To tackle this challenge, we propose in this paper two efficient channel estimation schemes for different channel setups in an IRS-assisted multi-user broadband communication system employing the orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA). The first channel estimation scheme, which estimates the CSI of all users in parallel simultaneously at the access point (AP), is applicable for arbitrary frequency-selective fading channels. In contrast, the second channel estimation scheme, which exploits a key property that all users share the same (common) IRS-AP channel to enhance the training efficiency and support more users, is proposed for the typical scenario with line-of-sight (LoS) dominant user-IRS channels. For the two proposed channel estimation schemes, we further optimize their corresponding training designs (including pilot tone allocations for all users and IRS time-varying reflection pattern) to minimize the channel estimation error. Moreover, we derive and compare the fundamental limits on the minimum training overhead and the maximum number of supportable users of these two schemes. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed channel estimation schemes and training designs, and show their significant performance improvement over various benchmark schemes.

The line-of-sight (LoS) dominant air-ground channels have posed critical interference issues in cellular-connected unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications. In this paper, we propose a new base station (BS) cooperative beamforming (CB) technique for the cellular downlink to mitigate the strong interference caused by the co-channel terrestrial transmissions to the UAV. Besides the conventional CB by cooperatively transmitting the UAV's message, the serving BSs of the UAV exploit a novel CB-based interference transmission scheme to effectively suppress the terrestrial interference to the UAV. Specifically, the co-channel terrestrial users' messages are shared with the UAV's serving BSs and transmitted via CB so as to cancel their resultant interference at the UAV receiver. To optimally balance between the CB gains for UAV signal enhancement and terrestrial interference cancellation, we formulate a new problem to maximize the UAV's receive signal-to-interference- plus-noise ratio (SINR) by jointly optimizing the power allocations at all of its serving BSs for transmitting the UAV's and co-channel terrestrial users' messages. First, we derive the closed-form optimal solution to this problem in the special case of one serving BS for the UAV and draw useful insights. Then, we propose an algorithm to solve the problem optimally in the general case. Simulation results show that the proposed CB scheme with interference transmission and cancellation (ITC) significantly improves the UAV's downlink SINR as compared to the conventional CB without applying ITC.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a promising new technology for achieving spectrum and energy efficient wireless communication systems in the future. By adaptively varying the incident signals' phases/amplitudes and thereby establishing favorable channel responses through a large number of reconfigurable passive reflecting elements, IRS is able to enhance the communication performance of mobile users in its vicinity cost- effectively. In this paper, we study an IRS- enhanced orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system in which an IRS is deployed to assist the communication between a nearby user and its associated base station (BS). We aim to maximize the downlink achievable rate for the user by jointly optimizing the transmit power allocation at the BS and the passive array reflection coefficients at the IRS. Although the formulated problem is non-convex and thus difficult to solve, we propose an efficient algorithm to obtain a high-quality suboptimal solution for it, by alternately optimizing the BS's power allocation and the IRS's passive array coefficients in an iterative manner, along with a customized method for the initialization. Simulation results show that the proposed design significantly improves the OFDM link rate performance as compared to the cases without the IRS or with other heuristic IRS designs.

In this paper, we consider a UAV-enabled wireless sensor network (WSN), where a UAV is dispatched to collect data from multiple sensor nodes (SNs) at known locations within a given duration. In urban areas, the signal propagation between the UAV and SNs can be occasionally blocked (or at least severely attenuated) by high and dense buildings. To address this issue, we first establish a probabilistic line-of-sight (LoS) channel model for a Manhattan-type city by using simulation and data regression methods, which is shown in the form of a generalized logistic function of the UAV-SN elevation angle. Based on the obtained channel model, an off-line optimization problem is then formulated to maximize the minimum expected (average) data-collection rate from all SNs by jointly designing the UAV three-dimensional (3D) trajectory and transmission scheduling of SNs. Since the expected rate is a highly complex function of the 3D UAV trajectory, we approximate it by a tractable lower bound based on the dominant rate in the LoS channel state. The resultant optimization problem is still non-convex and thus difficult to solve. As such, we further propose an efficient algorithm to solve it sub- optimally by applying the techniques of block coordination descent and successive convex approximation. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and reveal useful properties of the optimized 3D UAV trajectory for data harvesting in WSNs.

In this paper, we study the path planning for a cellular-connected unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to minimize its flying distance from given initial to final locations, while ensuring a target link quality in terms of the large-scale channel gain with each of its associated ground base stations (GBSs) during the flight. To this end, we propose the use of radio map that provides the information on the large-scale channel gains between each GBS and uniformly sampled locations on a three- dimensional (3D) grid over the region of interest, which are assumed to be time-invariant due to the generally static and large-size obstacles therein (e.g., buildings). Based on the given radio maps of the GBSs, we first obtain the optimal UAV path by solving an equivalent shortest path problem (SPP) in graph theory. To reduce the computation complexity of the optimal solution, we further propose a grid quantization method whereby the grid points in each GBS's radio map are more coarsely sampled by exploiting the spatial channel correlation over neighboring grids. Then, we solve the approximate SPP over the reduced-size radio map (graph) more efficiently. Numerical results show that the proposed solutions can effectively minimize the flying distance of the UAV subject to its communication quality constraint. Moreover, a flexible trade-off between performance and complexity can be achieved by adjusting the quantization ratio for the radio map.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a cost-effective solution for achieving high spectrum and energy efficiency in future wireless communication systems by leveraging massive low-cost passive elements that are able to reflect the signals with adjustable phase shifts. Prior works on IRS mostly consider continuous phase shifts at each reflecting element, which however, is practically difficult to realize due to the hardware limitation. In contrast, we study in this paper an IRS-aided wireless network, where an IRS with only a finite number of phase shifts at each element is deployed to assist in the communication from a multi-antenna access point (AP) to a single-antenna user. We aim to minimize the transmit power at the AP by jointly optimizing the continuous transmit beamforming at the AP and discrete reflect beamforming at the IRS, subject to a given signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) constraint at the user receiver. We first propose a suboptimal and low-complexity solution to the problem by applying the alternating optimization technique. Then, we analytically show that as compared to the ideal case with continuous phase shifts, the IRS with discrete phase shifts achieves the same squared power gain in terms of asymptotically large number of reflecting elements, while a constant performance loss is incurred that depends only on the number of phase-shift levels. Simulation results verify our analytical result as well as the effectiveness of our proposed design as compared to different benchmark schemes.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are expected to be an important new class of users in the fifth generation (5G) and beyond 5G cellular networks. In particular, there are emerging UAV applications such as aerial photograph and data relaying that require high-speed communications between the UAVs and the ground base stations (GBSs). Due to the high UAV altitude, the strong line-of-sight (LoS) links generally dominate the channels between the UAVs and GBSs, which brings both opportunities and challenges in the design of future wireless networks supporting both terrestrial and aerial users. Although each UAV can associate with more GBSs for communication as compared to terrestrial users thanks to the LoS-dominant channels, it also causes/suffers more severe interference to/from the terrestrial communications in the uplink/downlink. This paper studies the uplink communication from a multi-antenna UAV to a set of GBSs within its signal coverage by considering a practical yet challenging scenario when the number of antennas at the UAV is smaller than that of co-channel GBSs. To achieve high-rate transmission yet avoid interfering with any of the existing terrestrial communications at the co-channel GBSs, we propose a novel multi-beam transmission strategy by exploiting the nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique. Specifically, the UAV sends each data stream to a selected subset of the GBSs, which can decode the UAV's signals and then cancel them before decoding the messages of their served terrestrial users, and in the meanwhile nulls its interference at the other GBSs via zero-forcing (ZF) beamforming. To draw essential insight, we first characterize in closed-form the degrees-of-freedom (DoF) achievable for the UAV's sum-rate maximization under the proposed strategy. Then, we propose an efficient algorithm to jointly optimize the number of UAV data streams, the data stream-GBS association, and the transmit beamforming to maximize the UAV's transmit rate subject to the interference avoidance constraints for protecting the terrestrial users. Numerical examples are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed NOMA-based multi-beam transmission strategy.

In this paper, we study the trajectory design for a cellular-connected unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with given initial and final locations, while communicating with the ground base stations (GBSs) along its flight. We consider delay-limited communications between the UAV and its associated GBSs, where a given signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) target needs to be satisfied at the receiver. However, in practice, due to various factors such as quality-of-service (QoS) requirement, GBSs' availability and UAV mobility constraints, the SNR target may not be met at certain time periods during the flight, each termed as an outage duration. In this paper, we aim to optimize the UAV trajectory to minimize its mission completion time, subject to a constraint on the maximum tolerable outage duration in its flight. To tackle this non-convex problem, we first transform it into a more tractable form and thereby reveal some useful properties of the optimal trajectory solution. Based on these properties, we then further simplify the problem and propose efficient algorithms to check the feasibility of the problem as well as to obtain its optimal and high-quality suboptimal solutions, by leveraging graph theory and convex optimization techniques. Numerical results show that our proposed trajectory designs outperform the conventional method based on dynamic programming, in terms of both performance and complexity.

This paper studies a new and challenging wireless surveillance problem where a legitimate monitor (e.g., the National Security Agency in the USA) attempts to eavesdrop more than one suspicious communication links simultaneously to maximally protect public security. To facilitate concurrent eavesdropping, our multi-antenna monitor employs a proactive eavesdropping via jamming approach, by purposely jamming suspicious receivers to lower the transmission rates of the target links. In particular, we are interested in characterizing the monitor's achievable eavesdropping signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) region of two suspicious links, by optimizing the legitimate monitor's transmit covariance matrix for jamming the two suspicious receivers. As the monitor cannot hear more than what suspicious links transmit, the achievable eavesdropping SINR region is essentially the intersection of the achievable region for the two suspicious links and that for the two eavesdropping links, and the former region can be purposely altered by the monitor's jamming transmit covariance matrix subject to its power budget. As both suspicious links' SINRs are affected by monitor's jamming covariance matrix, we first analyze the achievable region bounds for both suspicious links and then characterize the achievable eavesdropping SINR region. Finally, numerical results are provided to corroborate our analysis.

This paper proposes a novel user cooperation approach in both computation and communication for mobile edge computing (MEC) systems to improve the energy efficiency for latency-constrained computation. We consider a basic three-node MEC system consisting of a user node, a helper node, and an access point (AP) node attached with an MEC server, in which the user has latency-constrained and computation-intensive tasks to be executed. We consider two different computation offloading models, namely, the partial and binary offloading, respectively. For partial offloading, the tasks at the user are divided into three parts that are executed at the user, helper, and AP, respectively; while for binary offloading, the tasks are executed as a whole only at one of three nodes. Under this setup, we focus on a particular time block and develop an efficient four-slot transmission protocol to enable the joint computation and communication cooperation. Besides the local task computing over the whole block, the user can offload some computation tasks to the helper in the first slot, and the helper cooperatively computes these tasks in the remaining time; while in the second and third slots, the helper works as a cooperative relay to help the user offload some other tasks to the AP for remote execution in the fourth slot. For both cases with partial and binary offloading, we jointly optimize the computation and communication resources allocation at both the user and the helper (i.e., the time and transmit power allocations for offloading, and the central process unit frequencies for computing), so as to minimize their total energy consumption while satisfying the user's computation latency constraint. Although the two problems are nonconvex in general, we develop efficient algorithms to solve them optimally. Numerical results show that the proposed joint computation and communication cooperation approach significantly improves the computation capacity and energy efficiency at the user and helper, as compared to other benchmark schemes without such a joint design.

With growing popularity, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are pivotally extending conventional terrestrial Internet of Things (IoT) into the sky. To enable high-performance two-way communications of UAVs with their ground pilots/users, cellular network-connected UAV has drawn significant interests recently. Among others, an important issue is whether the existing cellular network, designed mainly for terrestrial users, is also able to effectively cover the new UAV users in the three-dimensional (3-D) space for both uplink and downlink communications. Such 3-D coverage analysis is challenging due to the unique air-ground channel characteristics, the resulted interference issue with terrestrial communication, and the nonuniform 3-D antenna gain pattern of ground base station (GBS) in practice. Particularly, high-altitude UAV often possesses a high probability of line-of-sight (LoS) channels with a large number of GBSs, while their random binary (LoS/non-LoS) channel states and (on/off) activities give rise to exponentially large number of discrete UAV-GBS association/interference states, rendering coverage analysis more difficult. This paper presents a new 3-D system model to incorporate UAV users and proposes an analytical framework to characterize their uplink/downlink 3-D coverage performance. To tackle the above exponential complexity, we introduce a generalized Poisson multinomial (GPM) distribution to model the discrete interference states, and a novel lattice approximation (LA) technique to approximate the nonlattice GPM variable and obtain the interference distribution efficiently with high accuracy. The 3-D coverage analysis is validated by extensive numerical results, which also show effects of key system parameters, such as cell loading factor, GBS antenna downtilt, UAV altitude, and antenna beamwidth.

This paper studies an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled wireless powered communication network (WPCN), in which a UAV is dispatched as a mobile access point (AP) to serve a set of ground users periodically. The UAV employs the radio frequency (RF) wireless power transfer (WPT) to charge the users in the downlink, and the users use the harvested RF energy to send independent information to the UAV in the uplink. Unlike the conventional WPCN with fixed APs, the UAV-enabled WPCN can exploit the mobility of the UAV via trajectory design, jointly with the wireless resource allocation optimization, to maximize the system throughput. In particular, we aim to maximize the uplink common (minimum) throughput among all ground users over a finite UAV's flight period, subject to its maximum speed constraint and the users' energy neutrality constraints. The resulted problem is nonconvex and thus difficult to be solved optimally. To tackle this challenge, we first consider an ideal case without the UAV's maximum speed constraint, and obtain the optimal solution to the relaxed problem. The optimal solution shows that the UAV should successively hover above a finite number of ground locations for downlink WPT, as well as above each of the ground users for uplink communication. Next, we consider the general problem with the UAV's maximum speed constraint. Based on the above multilocation-hovering solution, we first propose an efficient successive hover-and-fly trajectory design, jointly with the downlink and uplink wireless resource allocation, and then propose a locally optimal solution by applying the techniques of alternating optimization and successive convex programming (SCP). Numerical results show that the proposed UAV-enabled WPCN achieves significant throughput gains over the conventional WPCN with fixed-location AP.

This paper considers an ambient backscatter communication network in which a full-duplex access point (FAP) simultaneously transmits downlink orthogonal frequency division multiplexing signals to its legacy user (LU) and receives uplink signals backscattered from multiple backscatter devices (BDs) in a time-division-multiple-access manner. To maximize the system throughput and ensure fairness, we aim to maximize the minimum throughput among all BDs by jointly optimizing the backscatter time and reflection coefficients of the BDs, and the FAP's subcarrier power allocation, subject to the LU's throughput constraint, the BDs' harvested-energy constraints, and other practical constraints. For the case with a single BD, we obtain closed-form solutions and propose an efficient algorithm by using the Lagrange duality method. For the general case with multiple BDs, we propose an iterative algorithm by leveraging the block coordinated decent and successive convex optimization techniques. In addition, we study the throughput region which characterizes the Pareto-optimal throughput tradeoffs among all BDs. Finally, extensive simulation results show that the proposed joint design achieves significant throughput gain as compared to the benchmark schemes.

Wireless transmission of information and power has received growing attention in the research community in the past few years. In two consecutive special issues, a total of thirty papers present state-of-the-art results in the broad area of wireless transmission of information and power.

Radio waves carry both energy and information simultaneously. Nevertheless, radio-frequency (RF) transmissions of these quantities have traditionally been treated separately. Currently, the community is experiencing a paradigm shift in wireless network design, namely, unifying wireless transmission of information and power so as to make the best use of the RF spectrum and radiation as well as the network infrastructure for the dual purpose of communicating and energizing. In this paper, we review and discuss recent progress in laying the foundations of the envisioned dual purpose networks by establishing a signal theory and design for wireless information and power transmission (WIPT) and identifying the fundamental tradeoff between conveying information and power wirelessly. We start with an overview of WIPT challenges and technologies, namely, simultaneous WIPT (SWIPT), wirelessly powered communication networks (WPCNs), and wirelessly powered backscatter communication (WPBC). We then characterize energy harvesters and show how WIPT signal and system designs crucially revolve around the underlying energy harvester model. To that end, we highlight three different energy harvester models, namely, one linear model and two nonlinear models, and show how WIPT designs differ for each of them in single-user and multi-user deployments. Topics discussed include rate-energy region characterization, transmitter and receiver architectures, waveform design, modulation, beamforming and input distribution optimizations, resource allocation, and RF spectrum use. We discuss and check the validity of the different energy harvester models and the resulting signal theory and design based on circuit simulations, prototyping, and experimentation. We also point out numerous directions that are promising for future research.

This second of the two issues on wireless transmission of information and power starts with some works on Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer (SWIPT), then switches to Wirelessly Powered Communication Networks (WPCNs), and finishes with a few works on Wirelessly Powered Backscatter Communication (WPBC).

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have found numerous applications and are expected to bring fertile business opportunities in the next decade. Among various enabling technologies for UAVs, wireless communication is essential and has drawn significantly growing attention in recent years. Compared to the conventional terrestrial communications, UAVs' communications face new challenges due to their high altitude above the ground and great flexibility of movement in the 3-D space. Several critical issues arise, including the line-of-sight (LoS) dominant UAV-ground channels and induced strong aerial-terrestrial network interference, the distinct communication quality-of-service (QoS) requirements for UAV control messages versus payload data, the stringent constraints imposed by the size, weight, and power (SWAP) limitations of UAVs, as well as the exploitation of the new design degree of freedom (DoF) brought by the highly controllable 3-D UAV mobility. In this article, we give a tutorial overview of the recent advances in UAV communications to address the above issues, with an emphasis on how to integrate UAVs into the forthcoming fifth-generation (5G) and future cellular networks. In particular, we partition our discussion into two promising research and application frameworks of UAV communications, namely UAV-assisted wireless communications and cellular-connected UAVs, where UAVs are integrated into the network as new aerial communication platforms and users, respectively. Furthermore, we point out promising directions for future research.

This paper investigates a new scenario of spectrum sharing between unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and terrestrial wireless communication, in which a cognitive/secondary UAV transmitter communicates with a ground secondary receiver (SR), in the presence of a number of primary terrestrial communication links that operate over the same frequency band. We exploit the UAV’s mobility in three-dimensional (3D) space to improve its cognitive communication performance while controlling the co-channel interference at the primary receivers (PRs), such that the received interference power at each PR is below a prescribed threshold termed as interference temperature (IT). First, we consider the quasi-stationary UAV scenario, where the UAV is placed at a static location during each communication period of interest. In this case, we jointly optimize the UAV’s 3D placement and power control to maximize the SR’s achievable rate, subject to the UAV’s altitude and transmit power constraints, as well as a set of IT constraints at the PRs to protect their communications. Second, we consider the mobile UAV scenario, in which the UAV is dispatched to fly from an initial location to a final location within a given task period. We propose an efficient algorithm to maximize the SR’s average achievable rate over this period by jointly optimizing the UAV’s 3D trajectory and power control, subject to the additional constraints on UAV’s maximum flying speed and initial/final locations. Finally, numerical results are provided to evaluate the performance of the proposed designs for different scenarios, as compared to various benchmark schemes. It is shown that in the quasi-stationary scenario the UAV should be placed at its minimum altitude while in the mobile scenario the UAV should adjust its altitude along with horizontal trajectory, so as to maximize the SR’s achievable rate in both scenarios.

Driven by the recent advancement in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology, this paper proposes a new wireless network architecture of coordinate multipoint (CoMP) in the sky to harness both the benefits of interference mitigation via CoMP and high mobility of UAVs. Specifically, we consider uplink communications in a multi-UAV enabled multi-user system, where each UAV forwards its received signals from all ground users to a central processor (CP) for joint decoding. Moreover, we consider the case where the users may move on the ground, thus the UAVs need to adjust their locations in accordance with the user locations over time to maximize the network throughput. Utilizing random matrix theory, we first characterize, in closed form, a set of approximated upper and lower bounds of the user's achievable rate in each time epoch under the practical Rician fading channel model, which is shown to be very tight, both analytically and numerically. UAV placement and movement over different epochs are then optimized based on the derived bounds to maximize the minimum of user average achievable rates over all epochs for both cases of full information (of current and future epochs) and current information on the user's movement. Interestingly, it is shown that the optimized location of each UAV at any particular epoch is the weighted average of the ground user locations at the current epoch as well as its own location at the previous and/or next epoch. Finally, simulation results are provided to validate and compare the performance of the proposed UAV placement and movement designs under different practical application scenarios.

Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) and single-carrier frequency-domain equalization (SC-FDE) are the two commonly adopted modulation schemes for frequency-selective channels. Compared to SC-FDE, OFDM generally achieves higher data rates but at the cost of higher transmit signal peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), which leads to lower power-amplifier efficiency. This paper studies a multi-group single carrier modulation scheme, termed flexible multi-group single carrier (FMG-SC), which encapsulates both OFDM and SC-FDE as special cases, thus achieving more flexible rate-PAPR tradeoffs between them. Specifically, in FMG-SC, the total bandwidth is divided into a set of orthogonal subcarriers that, based on the channel gains, are flexibly mapped to multiple non-overlapping groups, and SC-FDE is applied over each group independently to send multiple data streams in parallel. We investigate the joint subcarrier grouping and power allocation optimization problem to maximize the achievable rate of our proposed FMG-SC scheme for both the cases with Gaussian signaling and with practical modulation constellation (e.g., quadrature amplitude modulation), respectively. For both cases, the optimization problem is non-convex in general, for which we propose a two-step approach for finding a high-quality approximate solution efficiently. First, with any given subcarrier grouping, we show that the optimal power allocation can be obtained via convex optimization techniques. Second, with fixed power allocation, we propose low-complexity algorithms for the subcarrier grouping design catering to the SC-FDE receiver. Numerical results show that our proposed algorithms perform close to the optimal solution obtained via exhaustive search over all subcarrier groupings yet with substantially reduced complexity. Moreover, the achievable rate of our proposed FMG-SC scheme with Gaussian signaling approaches the OFDM channel capacity and significantly outperforms that of SC-FDE. Furthermore, with practical modulation constellation, numerical results show that our proposed FMG-SC scheme greatly outperforms the existing single carrier frequency-division multiple access in terms of achievable rate but with moderately increased PAPR.

Integrating the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into the cellular network is envisioned to be a promising technology to significantly enhance the communication performance of both UAVs and existing terrestrial users. In this paper, we first provide an overview on the two main research paradigms in cellular UAV communications, namely, cellular-enabled UAV communication with UAVs as new aerial users served by the ground base stations (GBSs), and UAV-assisted cellular communication with UAVs as new aerial communication platforms serving the terrestrial users. Then, we focus on the former paradigm and study a new UAV trajectory design problem subject to practical communication connectivity constraints with the GBSs. Specifically, we consider a cellular-connected UAV in the mission of flying from an initial location to a final location that are given, during which it needs to maintain reliable communication with the cellular network by associating with one of the available GBSs at each time instant that has the best line-of-sight channel (or shortest distance) with it. We aim to minimize the UAV's mission completion time by optimizing its trajectory, subject to a quality-of-connectivity constraint of the GBS-UAV link specified by a minimum receive signal-to-noise ratio target, which needs to be satisfied throughout its mission. To tackle this challenging non-convex optimization problem, we first propose an efficient method to verify its feasibility via checking the connectivity between two given vertices on an equivalent graph. Next, by examining the GBS-UAV association sequence over time, we obtain useful structural results on the optimal UAV trajectory, based on which two efficient methods are proposed to find high-quality approximate trajectory solutions by leveraging the techniques from graph theory and convex optimization. The proposed methods are analytically shown to be capable of achieving a flexible tradeoff between complexity and performance, and yielding a solution in polynomial time with the performance arbitrarily close to that of the optimal solution. Numerical results further validate the effectiveness of our proposed designs against benchmark schemes. Finally, we make concluding remarks and point out promising directions for future work.

Unlike passive eavesdropping, proactive eavesdropping is recently proposed to use jamming to moderate a suspicious link's communication rate for facilitating simultaneous eavesdropping. This paper advances the proactive eavesdropping research by considering a practical half-duplex mode for the legitimate monitor (e.g., a government agency) and dealing with the challenging case that the suspicious link opportunistically communicates over parallel fading channels. To increase eavesdropping success probability, we propose cognitive jamming for the monitor to change the suspicious link's long-term belief on the parallel channels' distributions and thereby induce it to transmit more likely over a smaller subset of unjammed channels with a lower transmission rate. As the half-duplex monitor cannot eavesdrop the channel that it is simultaneously jamming to, our jamming design should also control the probability of such “own goal” that occurs when the suspicious link chooses one of the jammed (uneavesdroppable) channels to transmit. We formulate the optimal jamming design problem as a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) and show that it is non-convex. Nevertheless, we prove that the monitor should optimally use the maximum jamming power if it decides to jam, for maximally reducing the suspicious link's communication rate and driving the suspicious link out of the jammed channels. Then we manage to simplify the MINLP to integer programming and reveal a fundamental trade-off in deciding the number of jammed channels: jamming more channels helps reduce the suspicious link's communication rate for overhearing more clearly but increases own goal probability and thus decreases eavesdropping success probability. Finally, we extend our study to the two-way suspicious communication scenario and show that there is another interesting trade-off in deciding the common jammed channels for balancing bidirectional eavesdropping performances. Numerical results show that our optimized jamming-assisted eavesdropping schemes greatly increase eavesdropping success probability as compared with the conventional passive eavesdropping.

Internet-of-Things (IoT) is a promising technology to connect massive machines and devices in the future communication networks. In this paper, we study a wireless-powered IoT network (WPIN) with short packet communication (SPC), in which a hybrid access point (HAP) first transmits power to the IoT devices wirelessly, then the devices in turn transmit their short data packets achieved by finite blocklength codes to the HAP using the harvested energy. Different from the long packet communication in conventional wireless network, SPC suffers from transmission rate degradation and a significant packet error rate. Thus, conventional resource allocation in the existing literature based on Shannon capacity achieved by the infinite blocklength codes is no longer optimal. In this paper, to enhance the transmission efficiency and reliability, we first define effective-throughput and effective-amount-of-information as the performance metrics to balance the transmission rate and the packet error rate, and then jointly optimize the transmission time and packet error rate of each user to maximize the total effective-throughput or minimize the total transmission time subject to the users' individual effective-amount-of-information requirements. To overcome the non-convexity of the formulated problems, we develop efficient algorithms to find high-quality suboptimal solutions for them. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithms can achieve similar performances as that of the optimal solution via exhaustive search, and outperform the benchmark schemes.

Integrating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into the cellular network as new aerial users is a promising solution to meet their ever-increasing communication demands in a plethora of applications. Due to the high UAV altitude, the channels between UAVs and the ground base stations (GBSs) are dominated by the strong line-of-sight (LoS) links, which brings both opportunities and challenges. On one hand, a UAV can communicate with a large number of GBSs at the same time, leading to a higher macro-diversity gain as compared to terrestrial users. However, on the other hand, severe interference may be generated to/from the GBSs in the uplink/downlink, which renders the interference management with coexisting terrestrial and aerial users a more challenging problem to solve. To deal with the above new trade-off, this paper studies the uplink communication from a multi-antenna UAV to a set of GBSs in its signal coverage region. Among these GBSs, we denote available GBSs as the ones that do not serve any terrestrial users at the assigned resource block (RB) of the UAV, and occupied GBSs as the rest that are serving their respectively associated terrestrial users in the same RB. We propose a new cooperative interference cancellation strategy for the multi-beam UAV uplink communication, which aims to eliminate the co-channel interference at each of the occupied GBSs and in the meanwhile maximize the sum-rate to the available GBSs. Specifically, the multi-antenna UAV sends multiple data streams to selected available GBSs, which in turn forward their decoded data streams to their backhaul-connected occupied GBSs for interference cancellation. To draw useful insights and facilitate our proposed design, the maximum degrees-of-freedom (DoF) achievable by the multi-beam UAV communication for sum-rate maximization in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime is first characterized, subject to the stringent constraint that all the occupied GBSs do not suffer from any interference in the UAV's uplink transmission. Then, based on the DoF-optimal design, the achievable sum-rate at finite SNR is maximized, subject to given maximum allowable interference power constraints at each of the occupied GBSs. The numerical examples validate the DoF and sum-rate performance of our proposed designs, as compared to benchmark schemes with fully cooperative, local, or no interference cancellation at the GBSs.

The line-of-sight (LoS) air-to-ground channel brings both opportunities and challenges in cellular-connected unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications. On one hand, the LoS channels make more cellular base stations (BSs) visible to a UAV as compared to the ground users, which leads to a higher macro-diversity gain for UAV-BS communications. On the other hand, they also render the UAV to impose/suffer more severe uplink/downlink interference to/from the BSs, thus requiring more sophisticated inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) techniques with more BSs involved. In this paper, we consider the uplink transmission from a UAV to cellular BSs, under spectrum sharing with the existing ground users. To investigate the optimal ICIC design and air-ground performance trade-off, we maximize the weighted sum-rate of the UAV and existing ground users by jointly optimizing the UAV's uplink cell associations and power allocations over multiple resource blocks. However, this problem is non-convex and difficult to be solved optimally. We first propose a centralized ICIC design to obtain a locally optimal solution based on the successive convex approximation (SCA) method. As the centralized ICIC requires global information of the network and substantial information exchange among an excessively large number of BSs, we further propose a decentralized ICIC scheme of significantly lower complexity and signaling overhead for implementation, by dividing the cellular BSs into small-size clusters and exploiting the LoS macro-diversity for exchanging information between the UAV and cluster-head BSs only. Numerical results show that the proposed centralized and decentralized ICIC schemes both achieve a near-optimal performance, and draw important design insights based on practical system setups.

In this paper, we investigate the secrecy capacity of a point-to-point, full-duplex (FD) wirelesly powered communication system in the presence of a passive eavesdropper (EVE). The considered system is comprised of an energy transmitter (ET), an energy harvesting user (EHU), and a passive EVE. The ET transmits radio-frequency energy, which is used for powering the EHU as well as for generating interference at the EVE. The EHU uses the energy harvested from the ET to transmit confidential messages back to the ET. As a consequence of the FD mode of operation, both the EHU and the ET are subjected to self-interference, which has different effects at the two nodes. In particular, the self-interference impairs the decoding of the received message at the ET, whilst it serves as an additional energy source at the EHU. For this system model, we derive an upper and a lower bound on the secrecy capacity. For the lower bound, we propose a simple achievability scheme. Our numerical results show significant improvements in terms of achievable secrecy rate when the proposed communication scheme is employed against its half-duplex counterpart, even for practical self-interference values at the ET.

This paper studies a general multi-user wireless powered interference channel (IFC) under the harvest-then-transmit protocol, where the communication in channel coherence time consists of two phases, namely wireless energy transfer (WET) and wireless information transfer (WIT). In the first phase, all energy transmitters (ETs) transmit energy signals to information transmitters (ITs) via the collaborative waveform design, while in the second phase, each IT transmits an information signal to its intended ET using the harvested energy in the previous phase. The aim is to jointly design the WET-WIT time allocation, the (deterministic) transmit signal at the first phase, and the transmit power of ITs in the second phase to optimize the network throughput. The design problems are non-convex and hence difficult to solve globally. To deal with them, we propose efficient iterative algorithms based on alternating projections; then, the majorization-minimization technique is used to tackle the non-convex sub-problems in each iteration. We also extend the devised design methodology by considering imperfect channel state information and non-linearity in energy harvesting circuit. The proposed algorithms are locally convergent and can provide high-quality suboptimal solutions to the design problems. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms under various setups.

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as an aerial base station is a promising technology to rapidly provide wireless connectivity to ground users. Given UAV's agility and mobility, a key question is how to adapt UAV deployment to the best cater to instantaneous wireless traffic in a territory. In this paper, we propose an adaptive deployment scheme for a UAV-aided communication network, where the UAV adapts its displacement direction and distance to serve randomly moving users' instantaneous traffic in the target cell. In our adaptive scheme, the UAV does not need to learn users' exact locations in real time, but chooses its displacement direction based on a simple majority rule by flying to the spatial sector with the greatest number of users in the cell. To balance the service qualities of the users in different sectors, we further optimize the UAV's displacement distance in the chosen sector to maximize the average throughput and the successful transmission probability, respectively. We prove that the optimal displacement distance for average throughput maximization decreases with the user density: the UAV moves to the center of the chosen sector when the user density is small and the UAV displacement becomes mild when the user density is large. In contrast, the optimal displacement distance for success probability maximization does not necessarily decrease with the user density and further depends on the target signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) threshold. The extensive simulations show that the proposed adaptive deployment scheme outperforms the traditional non-adaptive scheme, especially when the user density is not large.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a revolutionary and transformative technology for achieving spectrum and energy efficient wireless communication cost-effectively in the future. Specifically, an IRS consists of a large number of low-cost passive elements each being able to reflect the incident signal independently with an adjustable phase shift so as to collaboratively achieve three-dimensional (3D) passive beamforming without the need of any transmit radio-frequency (RF) chains. In this paper, we study an IRS-aided single-cell wireless system where one IRS is deployed to assist in the communications between a multi-antenna access point (AP) and multiple single-antenna users. We formulate and solve new problems to minimize the total transmit power at the AP by jointly optimizing the transmit beamforming by active antenna array at the AP and reflect beamforming by passive phase shifters at the IRS, subject to users' individual signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) constraints. Moreover, we analyze the asymptotic performance of IRS's passive beamforming with infinitely large number of reflecting elements and compare it to that of the traditional active beamforming/relaying. Simulation results demonstrate that an IRS-aided MIMO system can achieve the same rate performance as a benchmark massive MIMO system without using IRS, but with significantly reduced active antennas/RF chains. We also draw useful insights into optimally deploying IRS in future wireless systems.

Dispatching unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to harvest sensing-data from distributed sensors is expected to significantly improve the data collection efficiency in conventional wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this paper, we consider a UAV-enabled WSN, where a flying UAV is employed to collect data from multiple sensor nodes (SNs). Our objective is to maximize the minimum average data collection rate from all SNs subject to a prescribed reliability constraint for each SN by jointly optimizing the UAV communication scheduling and three-dimensional (3D) trajectory. Different from the existing works that assume the simplified line-of-sight (LoS) UAV-ground channels, we consider the more practically accurate angle-dependent Rician fading channels between the UAV and SNs with the Rician factors determined by the corresponding UAV-SN elevation angles. However, the formulated optimization problem is intractable due to the lack of a closed-form expression for a key parameter termed effective fading power that characterizes the achievable rate given the reliability requirement in terms of outage probability. To tackle this difficulty, we first approximate the parameter by a logistic (“S” shape) function with respect to the 3D UAV trajectory by using the data regression method. Then, the original problem is reformulated to an approximate form, which, however, is still challenging to solve due to its non-convexity. As such, we further propose an efficient algorithm to derive its suboptimal solution by using the block coordinate descent technique, which iteratively optimizes the communication scheduling, the UAV's horizontal trajectory, and its vertical trajectory. The latter two subproblems are shown to be non-convex, while locally optimal solutions are obtained for them by using the successive convex approximation technique. Finally, extensive numerical results are provided to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm and draw new insights on the 3D UAV trajectory under the Rician fading as compared to conventional LoS channel models.

This paper studies unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled wireless communication, where a rotary-wing UAV is dispatched to communicate with multiple ground nodes (GNs). We aim to minimize the total UAV energy consumption, including both propulsion energy and communication related energy, while satisfying the communication throughput requirement of each GN. To this end, we first derive a closed-form propulsion power consumption model for rotary-wing UAVs, and then formulate the energy minimization problem by jointly optimizing the UAV trajectory and communication time allocation among GNs, as well as the total mission completion time. The problem is difficult to be optimally solved, as it is non-convex and involves infinitely many variables over time. To tackle this problem, we first consider the simple fly-hover-communicate design, where the UAV successively visits a set of hovering locations and communicates with one corresponding GN while hovering at each location. For this design, we propose an efficient algorithm to optimize the hovering locations and durations, as well as the flying trajectory connecting these hovering locations, by leveraging the travelling salesman problem with neighborhood and convex optimization techniques. Next, we consider the general case, where the UAV also communicates while flying. We propose a new path discretization method to transform the original problem into a discretized equivalent with a finite number of optimization variables, for which we obtain a high-quality suboptimal solution by applying the successive convex approximation technique. The numerical results show that the proposed designs significantly outperform the benchmark schemes.

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication is anticipated to be widely applied in the forthcoming fifth-generation wireless networks, due to its many advantages such as low cost, high mobility, and on-demand deployment. However, the broadcast and line-of-sight nature of air-to-ground wireless channels give rise to a new challenge on how to realize secure UAV communications with the destined nodes on the ground. This paper aims to tackle this challenge by applying the physical layer security technique. We consider both the downlink and uplink UAV communications with a ground node, namely, UAV-to-ground (U2G) and ground-to-UAV (G2U) communications, respectively, subject to a potential eavesdropper on the ground. In contrast to the existing literature on the wireless physical layer security only with the ground nodes at fixed or quasi-static locations, we exploit the high mobility of the UAV to proactively establish favorable and degraded channels for the legitimate and eavesdropping links, through its trajectory design. We formulate new problems to maximize the average secrecy rates of the U2G and G2U transmissions, by jointly optimizing the UAV's trajectory, and the transmit power of the legitimate transmitter over a given flight period of the UAV. Although the formulated problems are non-convex, we propose iterative algorithms to solve them efficiently by applying the block coordinate descent and successive convex optimization methods. Specifically, both the transmit power and UAV trajectory are optimized, with the other being fixed in an alternating manner, until the algorithms converge. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithms can improve the secrecy rates for both U2G and G2U communications, as compared to other benchmark schemes without power control and/or trajectory optimization.

The peculiar line-of-sight (LoS) propagation in air-to-ground channel provides both opportunities and challenges for the emerging cellular-connected unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications. On one hand, the LoS channels make more cellular base stations (BSs) visible to a UAV as compared to ground users, which leads to a higher macro-diversity gain as compared to the ground users. On the other hand, the LoS channels also render the UAV to generate/receive more severe uplink/downlink interference to/from the BSs, thus requiring more sophisticated inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) techniques with more BSs involved. To draw essential insight, this paper studies the uplink transmission from a UAV to cellular BSs. To mitigate the UAV's interference effect, we aim to maximize the sum-rate of the UAV and all ground users in its resulted ICIC region by jointly optimizing the UAV's cell association, resource block (RB) allocation, and transmit power. We first propose a centralized ICIC design that achieves the optimal performance. As the centralized ICIC requires global information of the network and substantial information exchange among an excessively large number of BSs, we further propose a decentralized ICIC scheme of significantly lower complexity and overhead for implementation. Specifically, we divide the cellular BSs into clusters, each with a dedicated cluster head for collecting information from its cluster BSs and exchanging information with the UAV by exploiting the LoS-induced macro-diversity. Numerical results show that the proposed decentralized ICIC scheme achieves a performance close to the optimal centralized design, and also outperforms the traditional ICIC scheme for cellular networks with terrestrial interference only.

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can be used as an aerial base station to provide rapid wireless connectivity to ground users. Given UAV's agility and mobility, a key problem is how to adapt UAV deployment to best cater to the instantaneous wireless traffic in a territory. In this paper, we propose a traffic-aware adaptive UAV deployment scheme in a UAV-aided communication network, where the UAV initiated at the cell center adapts its displacement direction and distance to the spatial randomness of the Poisson distributed mobile users within its target cell. In each realization, the UAV chooses its displacement direction based on a simple majority rule, i.e., to fly to the sector that has the greatest number of users. To balance the service for the users in different sectors, we further optimize the UAV's displacement distance in the chosen sector to maximize the average throughput. We show that the optimal displacement distance under the proposed scheme decreases with the user density. Extensive simulations illustrate that the proposed adaptive deployment scheme outperforms the traditional non-adaptive scheme, where the performance gain is especially significant for small user density.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is envisioned to have abundant applications in future wireless networks by smartly reconfiguring the signal propagation for performance enhancement. Specifically, an IRS consists of a large number of low-cost passive elements each reflecting the incident signal with a certain phase shift to collaboratively achieve beamforming and suppress interference at one or more designated receivers. In this paper, we study an IRS-enhanced point-to-point multiple-input single-output (MISO) wireless system where one IRS is deployed to assist in the communication from a multi-antenna access point (AP) to a single-antenna user. As a result, the user simultaneously receives the signal sent directly from the AP as well as that reflected by the IRS. We aim to maximize the total received signal power at the user by jointly optimizing the (active) transmit beamforming at the AP and (passive) reflect beamforming by the phase shifters at the IRS. We first propose a centralized algorithm based on the technique of semidefinite relaxation (SDR) by assuming the global channel state information (CSI) available at the IRS. Since the centralized implementation requires excessive channel estimation and signal exchange overheads, we further propose a low-complexity distributed algorithm where the AP and IRS independently adjust the transmit beamforming and the phase shifts in an alternating manner until the convergence is reached. Simulation results show that significant performance gains can be achieved by the proposed algorithms as compared to benchmark schemes. Moreover, it is verified that the IRS is able to drastically enhance the link quality and/or coverage over the conventional setup without the IRS.

This paper studies a wireless communication system with a rotary-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) dispatched to communicate with multiple ground nodes (GNs). With limited on-board energy available at the UAV, we aim to maximize the weighted minimum of the communication throughput of the GNs, by jointly designing the UAV trajectory and communication resource allocation. The formulated problem is difficult to be directly solved, as it is non-convex and involves infinitely many variables over time. To tackle this problem, we first propose a simple fly-hover-communicate protocol, where the UAV successively visits a set of hovering locations and at each of them communicates with one corresponding GN. By leveraging the classic travelling salesman problem (TSP) and convex optimization techniques, we propose an efficient algorithm to optimize the hovering locations and durations, as well as the flying trajectory connecting these hovering locations. To further improve the performance, we consider the general scenario where the UAV also communicates while flying, and under a given UAV path, we find the optimal time allocation by solving a linear programming (LP) problem. Numerical results show the significant performance gains of the proposed designs over benchmark schemes.

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and single-carrier frequency domain equalization (SC-FDE) are two commonly adopted modulation schemes for frequency-selective channels. Compared to SC-FDE, OFDM generally achieves higher data rate, but at the cost of higher transmit signal peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) that leads to lower power amplifier efficiency. This paper proposes a new modulation scheme, called flexible multi-group single-carrier (FMG-SC), which encapsulates both OFDM and SC-FDE as special cases, thus achieving more flexible rate-PAPR trade-offs between them. Specifically, a set of frequency subcarriers are flexibly divided into orthogonal groups based on their channel gains, and SC-FDE is applied over each of the groups to send different data streams in parallel. We aim to maximize the achievable sum-rate of all groups by optimizing the subcarrier-group mapping. We propose two low-complexity subcarrier grouping methods and show via simulation that they perform very close to the optimal grouping by exhaustive search. Simulation results also show the effectiveness of the proposed FMG-SC modulation scheme with optimized subcarrier grouping in improving the rate-PAPR trade-off over conventional OFDM and SC-FDE.

This paper studies an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled multicast channel, in which a UAV serves as a mobile transmitter to deliver common information to a set of ground users. We aim to characterize the capacity of this channel over a finite UAV mission/communication period, subject to its maximum speed constraint and an average transmit power constraint. To achieve the capacity, the UAV should use a sufficiently long code that spans over its whole mission/communication period. Accordingly, the multicast channel capacity is achieved via maximizing the minimum achievable time-averaged rates of the users, by jointly optimizing the UAV's trajectory and transmit power allocation over time. However, this problem is non-convex and difficult to be solved optimally. To tackle this problem, we first consider a relaxed problem by ignoring the maximum UAV speed constraint, and obtain its globally optimal solution via the Lagrange dual method. The optimal solution reveals that the UAV should hover above a finite number of ground locations, with the optimal hovering duration and transmit power at each location. Next, based on such a multi-location-hovering solution, we present a successive hover-and-fly trajectory design and obtain the corresponding optimal transmit power allocation for the case with the maximum UAV speed constraint. Numerical results show that our proposed joint UAV trajectory and transmit power optimization significantly improves the achievable rate of the UAV-enabled multicast channel, and also greatly outperforms the conventional multicast channel with a fixed-location transmitter.

In this paper, we study a cellular-enabled unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication system consisting of one UAV and multiple ground base stations (GBSs). The UAV has a mission of flying from an initial location to a final location, during which it needs to maintain reliable wireless connection with the cellular network by associating with one of the GBSs at each time instant. We aim to minimize the UAV mission completion time by optimizing its trajectory, subject to a quality of connectivity constraint of the GBS-UAV link specified by a minimum received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) target, which needs to be satisfied throughout the mission. This problem is non-convex and difficult to be optimally solved. We first propose an effective approach to check its feasibility based on graph connectivity verification. Then, by examining the GBS-UAV association sequence during the UAV mission, we obtain useful insights on the optimal UAV trajectory, based on which an efficient algorithm is proposed to find an approximate solution to the trajectory optimization problem by leveraging techniques in convex optimization and graph theory. Numerical results show that our proposed trajectory design achieves near-optimal performance.

This paper studies an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled wireless powered communication network (WPCN), in which a UAV is dispatched as a mobile access point (AP) to serve a set of ground users periodically. The UAV employs the radio frequency (RF) wireless power transfer (WPT) to charge the users in the downlink, and the users use the harvested RF energy to send independent information to the UAV in the uplink. Unlike the conventional WPCN with fixed APs, the UAV-enabled WPCN can exploit the mobility of the UAV via periodic trajectory design, jointly with the transmission resource allocation optimization, to improve the system performance. In particular, we aim to maximize the uplink common (minimum) throughput among all ground users over a finite UAV's flight period, subject to its maximum speed constraint and the users' energy neutrality constraints. The resulting problem is non-convex and thus difficult to be solved optimally. To tackle this challenge, we first consider an ideal case without the maximum UAV speed constraint, and obtain the optimal solution to the relaxed problem. The optimal solution shows that the UAV should successively hover above a finite number of ground locations for downlink WPT, as well as above each of the ground users for uplink communication. Next, based on the above multi-location-hovering solution, we propose a successive hover-and-fly trajectory, jointly with the downlink and uplink power allocations, to find an efficient suboptimal solution to the problem with the maximum UAV speed constraint. Numerical results show that the proposed UAV-enabled WPCN achieves significant common throughput gain over the conventional WPCN with a fixed-location AP.

This paper proposes a novel channel estimation method and a cluster-based opportunistic scheduling policy, for a wireless energy transfer (WET) system consisting of multiple low-complex energy receivers (ERs) with limited processing capabilities. Firstly, in the training stage, the energy transmitter (ET) obtains a set of Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) feedback values from all ERs, and these values are used to estimate the channels between the ET and all ERs. Next, based on the channel estimates, the ERs are grouped into clusters, and the cluster that has its members closest to its centroid in phase is selected for dedicated WET. The beamformer that maximizes the minimum harvested energy among all ERs in the selected cluster is found by solving a convex optimization problem. All ERs have the same chance of being selected regardless of their distances from the ET, and hence, this scheduling policy can be considered to be opportunistic as well as fair. It is shown that the proposed method achieves significant performance gains over benchmark schemes.

This paper proposes a joint computation and communication cooperation approach in mobile edge computing (MEC) systems for improving the energy efficiency in mobile computing. In particular, we consider a basic three-node MEC system that consists of a user node, a helper node, and an access point (AP) node attached with an MEC server. We focus on the user's latency-constrained computation over a finite-length block and develop a four-slot protocol for implementing the joint computation and communication cooperation. Under this setup, we jointly optimize the task partition and time allocation, and the transmit power for offloading and central processing unit (CPU) frequencies of local computing at the user and the helper, so as to minimize their total energy consumption subject to the user's computation latency constraint. This problem is optimally solved via convex optimization techniques. Numerical results show that the proposed approach significantly improves the computation capacity and the energy efficiency for the user, as compared to other benchmark schemes without such a joint design.

Wireless power transfer (WPT) technology enables a cost-effective and sustainable energy supply in wireless networks, where energy users (EUs) can remotely harvest energy from the wireless signal transmitted by energy transmitters (ETs). However, the broadcast nature of wireless signal makes wireless power a non-excludable public good, which renders the traditional market mechanisms inefficient due to the possibility of the free-riders. In this study, we formulate the transmit power provision problem in a single-channel WPT network as a public good provision problem, aiming to maximize the social welfare of all the ET and EUs considering their private information and selfish behaviors. The considered problem also brings both economic and technical challenges in ensuring voluntary participation and distributed algorithm design. To this end, we propose a two- phase all-or-none procedure involving a low-complexity Power And Taxation (PAT) Nash mechanism, which ensures voluntary participation, incentive compatibility, and budget balance, and yields the socially optimal transmit power at all Nash equilibria. We further propose a distributed D-PAT Algorithm and prove its convergence by exploiting the connection between the structure of Nash equilibria and that of the optimal solutions to a related optimization problem. Finally, our simulation results validate the PAT Mechanism and the practical algorithm. We show that our design can significantly improve the social welfare compared to the benchmark market mechanism, especially when there are many and relatively comparable EUs.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have recently gained growing popularity in wireless communications owing to their many advantages such as swift and cost-effective deployment, line-of-sight (LoS) aerial-to-ground link, and controllable mobility in three-dimensional (3D) space. Although prior works have exploited the UAV's mobility to enhance the wireless communication performance under different setups, the fundamental capacity limits of UAV-enabled/aided multiuser communication systems have not yet been characterized. To fill this gap, we consider, in this paper, a UAV-enabled two-user broadcast channel (BC), where a UAV flying at a constant altitude is deployed to send independent information to two users at different fixed locations on the ground. We aim to characterize the capacity region of this new type of BC over a given UAV flight duration, by jointly optimizing the UAV's trajectory and transmit power/rate allocations over time, subject to the UAV's maximum speed and maximum transmit power constraints. First, to draw essential insights, we consider two special cases with asymptotically large/low UAV flight duration/speed, respectively. For the former case, it is shown that a simple hover-fly-hover (HFH) UAV trajectory with time division multiple access (TDMA)-based orthogonal multiuser transmission is capacity-achieving; while in the latter case, the UAV should hover at a fixed location that is nearer to the user with larger achievable rate and in general superposition coding (SC)-based non-orthogonal transmission with interference cancellation at the receiver of the nearer user is required. Next, we consider the general case with finite UAV speed and flight duration. We show that the optimal UAV trajectory should follow a general HFH structure, i.e., the UAV successively hovers at a pair of optimal initial and final locations above the line segment connecting the two users each with a certain amount of time and flies unidirectionally between them at the maximum speed, and SC is generally needed. Furthermore, when TDMA-based transmission is considered for low-complexity implementation, we show that the optimal UAV trajectory still follows an HFH structure, but the hovering locations can only be those above the two users. Extensive simulation results are provided to verify our analysis, which also reveal useful guidelines to the practical design of UAV trajectory and communication jointly.

Wireless communication enabled by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has emerged as an appealing technology for many application scenarios in future wireless systems. However, the limited endurance of UAVs greatly hinders the practical implementation of UAV-enabled communications. To overcome this issue, this paper proposes a novel scheme for UAV-enabled communications by utilizing the promising technique of proactive caching at the users. Specifically, we focus on content-centric communication systems, where a UAV is dispatched to serve a group of ground nodes (GNs) with random and asynchronous requests for files drawn from a given set. With the proposed scheme, at the beginning of each operation period, the UAV pro-actively transmits the files to a subset of selected GNs that cooperatively cache all the files. As a result, when requested, a file can be retrieved by each GN either directly from its local cache or from its nearest neighbor that has cached the file via device-to-device communications. It is revealed that there exists a fundamental trade-off between the file caching cost, which is the total time required for the UAV to transmit the files to their designated caching GNs, and the file retrieval cost, which is the average time required for serving one file request. To characterize this trade-off, we formulate an optimization problem to minimize the weighted sum of the two costs, via jointly designing the file caching policy, the UAV trajectory, and communication scheduling. As the formulated problem is NP-hard in general, we propose efficient algorithms to find high-quality approximate solutions for it. Numerical results are provided to corroborate our study and show the great potential of proactive caching for overcoming the endurance issue in UAV-enabled communications.

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication and network densification hold great promise for achieving high-rate communication in next-generation wireless networks. Cloud radio access network (CRAN), in which low-complexity remote radio heads (RRHs) coordinated by a central unit (CU) are deployed to serve users in a distributed manner, is a cost-effective solution to achieve network densification. However, when operating over a large bandwidth in the mmWave frequencies, the digital fronthaul links in a CRAN would be easily saturated by the large amount of sampled and quantized signals to be transferred between the RRHs and the CU. To tackle this challenge, we propose in this paper a new architecture for the mmWave-based CRAN with advanced lens antenna arrays at the RRHs. Due to the energy focusing property, the lens antenna arrays are effective in exploiting the angular sparsity of mmWave channels, and thus help in substantially reducing the fronthaul rate and simplifying the signal processing at the multi-antenna RRHs and the CU, even when the channels are frequency-selective. We consider the uplink transmission in a mmWave CRAN with lens antenna arrays and propose a low-complexity quantization bit allocation scheme for multiple antennas at each RRH to meet the given fronthaul rate constraint. Furthermore, we propose a channel estimation technique that exploits the energy focusing property of the lens array and can be implemented at the CU with low complexity. Finally, we compare the proposed mmWave CRAN using lens antenna arrays with a conventional CRAN using uniform planar arrays at the RRHs, and show that the proposed design achieves significant throughput gains, yet with much lower complexity.

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as communication platforms is of great significance in future wireless networks, especially for on-demand deployment in temporary events and emergency situations. Although prior works have shown the performance improvement by exploiting the UAV's mobility, they mainly focus on delay-tolerant applications. As delay requirements fundamentally limit the UAV's mobility, it remains unknown whether the UAV is able to provide any performance gain in delay-constrained communication scenarios. Motivated by the above, we study, in this paper, an UAV-enabled orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) network where an UAV is dispatched as the mobile base station (BS) to serve a group of users on the ground. We consider a minimum-rate ratio (MRR) for each user, defined as the minimum instantaneous rate required over the average achievable throughput, to flexibly adjust the percentage of its delay-constrained data traffic. Under a given set of constraints on the users' MRRs, we aim to maximize the minimum average throughput of all users by jointly optimizing the UAV trajectory and OFDMA resource allocation. First, we show that the max-min throughput in general decreases as the users' MRRs become larger, which reveals a fundamental throughput-delay tradeoff in UAV-enabled communications. Next, we propose an iterative parameter-assisted block coordinate descent method to optimize the UAV trajectory and OFDMA resource allocation alternately, by applying the successive convex optimization and the Lagrange duality, respectively. Furthermore, an efficient and systematic UAV trajectory initialization scheme is proposed based on the simple circular trajectory. Finally, simulation results are provided to verify our theoretical findings and demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed designs.

Ambient backscatter communication (AmBC) enables radio-frequency (RF) powered backscatter devices (BDs) (e.g., sensors and tags) to modulate their information bits over ambient RF carriers in an over-the-air manner. This technology, also called “modulation in the air,” has emerged as a promising solution to achieve green communication for future Internet of Things. This paper studies an AmBC system by leveraging the ambient orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulated signals in the air. We first model such AmBC system from a spread-spectrum communication perspective, upon which a novel joint design for BD waveform and receiver detector is proposed. The BD symbol period is designed as an integer multiplication of the OFDM symbol period, and the waveform for BD bit “0” maintains the same state within the BD symbol period, while the waveform for BD bit “1” has a state transition in the middle of each OFDM symbol period within the BD symbol period. In the receiver detector design, we construct the test statistic that cancels out the direct-link interference by exploiting the repeating structure of the ambient OFDM signals due to the use of cyclic prefix. For the system with a single-antenna receiver, the maximum-likelihood detector is proposed to recover the BD bits, for which the optimal threshold is obtained in closed-form expression. For the system with a multi-antenna receiver, we propose a new test statistic which is a linear combination of the per-antenna test statistics and derive the corresponding optimal detector. The proposed optimal detectors require only knowing the strength of the backscatter channel, thus simplifying their implementation. Moreover, practical timing synchronization algorithms are proposed for the designed AmBC system, and we also analyze the effect of various system parameters on the transmission rate and detection performance. Finally, extensive numerical results are provided to verify that the proposed transceiver design can improve the system bit-error-rate performance and the operating range significantly and achieve much higher data rate, as compared with the conventional design.

Constant envelope (CE) precoding is an appealing transmission technique, which enables highly efficient power amplification, and is realizable with a single radio frequency (RF) chain at the multiantenna transmitter.In this paper, we study the transceiver design for a point-to-point multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system with CE precoding.Both single-stream transmission (i.e., beamforming) and multi-stream transmission (i.e., spatial multiplexing) are considered.For single-stream transmission, we optimize the receive beamforming vector to minimize the symbol error rate (SER) for any given channel realization and desired constellation at the combiner output.By reformulating the problem as an equivalent quadratically constrained quadratic program (QCQP), we propose an efficient semi-definite relaxation (SDR) based algorithm to find an approximate solution.Next, for multi-stream transmission, we propose a new scheme based on antenna grouping at the transmitter and minimum mean squared error (MMSE) or zero-forcing (ZF) based beamforming at the receiver.The transmit antenna grouping and receive beamforming vectors are then jointly designed to minimize the maximum SER over all data streams.Finally, the error-rate performance of single-versus multi-stream transmission is compared via simulations under different setups.

In conventional terrestrial cellular networks, mobile terminals (MTs) at the cell edge often pose a performance bottleneck due to their long distances from the serving ground base station (GBS), especially in the hotspot period when the GBS is heavily loaded. This paper proposes a new hybrid network architecture that leverages use of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as an aerial mobile base station, which flies cyclically along the cell edge to offload data traffic for cell-edge MTs. We aim to maximize the minimum throughput of all MTs by jointly optimizing the UAV's trajectory, bandwidth allocation, and user partitioning. We first consider orthogonal spectrum sharing between the UAV and GBS, and then extend to spectrum reuse where the total bandwidth is shared by both the GBS and UAV with their mutual interference effectively avoided. Numerical results show that the proposed hybrid network with optimized spectrum sharing and cyclical multiple access design significantly improves the spatial throughput over the conventional GBS-only network; while the spectrum reuse scheme provides further throughput gains at the cost of slightly higher complexity for interference control. Moreover, compared with the conventional small-cell offloading scheme, the proposed UAV offloading scheme is shown to outperform in terms of throughput, besides saving the infrastructure cost.

Due to the high maneuverability, flexible deployment, and low cost, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have attracted significant interest recently in assisting wireless communication. This paper considers a multi-UAV enabled wireless communication system, where multiple UAV-mounted aerial base stations are employed to serve a group of users on the ground. To achieve fair performance among users, we maximize the minimum throughput over all ground users in the downlink communication by optimizing the multiuser communication scheduling and association jointly with the UAV's trajectory and power control. The formulated problem is a mixed integer nonconvex optimization problem that is challenging to solve. As such, we propose an efficient iterative algorithm for solving it by applying the block coordinate descent and successive convex optimization techniques. Specifically, the user scheduling and association, UAV trajectory, and transmit power are alternately optimized in each iteration. In particular, for the nonconvex UAV trajectory and transmit power optimization problems, two approximate convex optimization problems are solved, respectively. We further show that the proposed algorithm is guaranteed to converge. To speed up the algorithm convergence and achieve good throughput, a low-complexity and systematic initialization scheme is also proposed for the UAV trajectory design based on the simple circular trajectory and the circle packing scheme. Extensive simulation results are provided to demonstrate the significant throughput gains of the proposed design as compared to other benchmark schemes.

With recent developments in wireless communication technologies, malicious users can use them to commit crimes or launch terror attacks, thus imposing new threats on public security. To quickly respond to these attacks, authorized parities need to intervene in the malicious communication links over the air. This paper investigates the emerging wireless communication intervention problem at the physical layer. Unlike prior studies using jamming to disrupt or disable the targeted wireless communications, we propose a new physical-layer spoofing approach to change their communicated information. Consider an abstract three-node model over additive white Gaussian noise channels, in which a legitimate spoofer aims to spoof a malicious communication link from a malicious transmitter to a malicious receiver, such that the received message at the receiver is changed from the transmitter's originally sent message to the one desired by the spoofer. We propose a new symbol-level spoofing scheme, where the spoofer designs the spoofing signal by exploiting the symbol-level relationship between each original constellation point of the transmitter and the desirable one of the spoofer. In particular, the spoofer aims to minimize the average spoofing-symbol-error-rate (SSER), which is defined as the average probability that the symbols decoded by the malicious receiver fail to be changed or spoofed, by designing its spoofing signals over symbols subject to the average transmit power constraint. By considering two cases when the malicious transmitter employs the widely-used binary phase-shift keying and quadrature phase-shift keying modulations, we obtain the respective optimal solutions to the two average SSER minimization problems. Numerical results show that the symbol-level spoofing scheme with optimized transmission achieves a much lower average SSER, as compared with other benchmark schemes.

This paper studies a new unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled wireless power transfer system, where a UAV-mounted mobile energy transmitter is dispatched to deliver wireless energy to a set of energy receivers (ERs) at known locations on the ground. We investigate how the UAV should optimally exploit its mobility via trajectory design to maximize the amount of energy transferred to all ERs during a finite charging period. First, we consider the maximization of the sum energy received by all ERs by optimizing the UAV's trajectory subject to its maximum speed constraint. Although this problem is non-convex, we obtain its optimal solution, which shows that the UAV should hover at one single fixed location during the whole charging period. However, the sum-energy maximization incurs a “near-far” fairness issue, where the received energy by the ERs varies significantly with their distances to the UAV's optimal hovering location. To overcome this issue, we consider a different problem to maximize the minimum received energy among all ERs, which, however, is more challenging to solve than the sum-energy maximization. To tackle this problem, we first consider an ideal case by ignoring the UAV's maximum speed constraint, and show that the relaxed problem can be optimally solved via the Lagrange dual method. The obtained trajectory solution implies that the UAV should hover over a set of fixed locations with optimal hovering time allocations among them. Then, for the general case with the UAV's maximum speed constraint considered, we propose a new successive hover-and-fly trajectory motivated by the optimal trajectory in the ideal case and obtain efficient trajectory designs by applying the successive convex programing optimization technique. Finally, numerical results are provided to evaluate the performance of the proposed designs under different setups, as compared with benchmark schemes.

Wireless power transfer (WPT) via dedicated radio frequency (RF) transmission is an appealing technology to provide cost-effective energy supply to low-power devices in the future era of Internet of Things. To achieve efficient power delivery over moderate distance, WPT usually relies on highly directional power transmission from the energy transmitter (ET) to the energy receiver (ER). To this end, the ET needs to be equipped with a large number of antennas and employ adaptive energy beamforming to flexibly control the energy focusing directions to the ER based on the multipath channels between them. However, this renders the conventional fully digital beamforming with one dedicated RF chain for each transmit antenna too costly, in terms of both hardware implementation and energy consumption. To overcome this issue, we study in this paper, a new WPT system based on the hybrid analog or digital beamforming technique, where the number of RF chains is in general significantly less than that of transmit antennas. We first show that for a general point-to-point multiple-input multiple-output WPT system over frequency-selective channels, hybrid beamforming is able to achieve the optimal performance as the fully digital beamforming, as long as the number of RF chains at the ET is no less than twice the number of sub-bands used or twice the number of channel paths. Furthermore, for the special cases of line-of-sight channel or multiple-input single-output WPT, the required number of RF chains can be further reduced to equal the number of channel paths only. Finally, for the scenarios when the given number of RF chains is insufficient to achieve the fully digital beamforming performance, we propose efficient algorithms for the hybrid beamforming design to maximize its efficiency. Numerical results are provided to validate our analytical results and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid beamforming design.

Mobile-edge computation offloading (MECO) is an emerging technology for enhancing mobiles' computation capabilities and prolonging their battery lifetime by offloading intensive computation from mobiles to nearby servers, such as base stations. In this paper, we study the energy-efficient resource-management policy for the asynchronous MECO system, where the mobiles have heterogeneous input-data arrival time instants and computation deadlines. First, we consider the general case with arbitrary arrival-deadline orders. Based on the monomial energy-consumption model for data transmission, an optimization problem is formulated to minimize the total mobile-energy consumption under the time-sharing and computation-deadline constraints. The optimal resource-management policy for data partitioning (for offloading and local computing) and time division (for transmissions) is obtained in (semi-)closed-form expression by using the block coordinate decent method. To gain further insight, we study the optimal resource-management design for two special cases. First, consider the case of identical arrival-deadline orders, i.e., a mobile with input data arriving earlier also needs to complete computation earlier. The optimization problem is reduced to two sequential problems corresponding to the optimal scheduling order and joint data-partitioning and time-division given the optimal order. It is found that the optimal time-division policy tends to equalize the defined effective computing power among offloading mobiles via time sharing. Furthermore, this solution approach is extended to the case of reverse arrival-deadline orders. The corresponding time-division policy is derived by a proposed transformation-and-scheduling approach that first determines the total offloading duration and data size for each mobile in the transformation phase and then specifies the offloading intervals for each mobile in the scheduling phase.

This paper studies an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled multicasting system, where a UAV is dispatched to disseminate a common file to a set of ground terminals (GTs). We aim to design the UAV trajectory to minimize its mission completion time, while ensuring that each GT successfully recovers the file with a desired high probability. The formulated problem is nonconvex and difficult to be solved in its original form. Therefore, we first derive an effective lower bound for the success file recovery probability of each GT. The problem is then reformulated in a more tractable form, where the UAV trajectory only needs to be designed to ensure the minimum connection time constraint with each GT, during which their distance is below a certain threshold. We show that without loss of optimality, the UAV trajectory consists of connected line segments only, which can be obtained by determining the optimal set of waypoints as well as the UAV speed along the path connecting the waypoints. We propose efficient schemes for the waypoint design based on a novel concept of virtual base station placement and by applying convex optimization. Furthermore, for fixed waypoints, the optimal UAV speed is efficiently obtained by solving a linear programming problem. Numerical results show that the proposed UAV-enabled multicasting with optimized trajectory design achieves significant performance gains over other benchmark schemes.

Millimeter wave (mm-wave) communication using lens antenna arrays is a promising technique for realizing cost-effective large multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with only limited radio frequency chains. This paper studies a multi-user mm-wave single-sided lens MIMO system, where the base station (BS) is equipped with a full-dimensional lens antenna array and each mobile station employs the conventional antenna arrays. By exploiting the angle-dependent energy focusing property of lens antenna array and the multi-path sparsity of mm-wave channels, we propose a low-complexity single-carrier (SC)-based path-division multiple access (PDMA) scheme for the general wide-band frequency-selective channels. To this end, a new technique called path delay compensation is proposed at the BS to transform the multi-user frequency-selective MIMO channels to parallel frequency-flat small-size MIMO channels. In addition, we propose an efficient channel estimation scheme tailored for the SC-based PDMA, which requires negligible training overhead in practical mm-wave systems and yet leads to comparable performance as that with perfect channel state information. Numerical results show that the proposed design achieves comparable performance as the state-of-the-art benchmark systems in terms of spectrum efficiency, but with significantly reduced hardware/power consumption cost and signal processing complexity.

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as aerial base stations (BSs) is of great practical significance in future wireless networks, especially for on-demand deployment during a temporary event and emergency situation. Although prior works have demonstrated the performance improvement brought by the UAV mobility, they mainly focus on the delay-tolerant applications such as file transfer and data collection. As such, it is unknown if the UAV mobility is able to provide performance gain for delay-constrained applications, such as video conferencing and online gaming. Motivated by this, we study in this paper a UAV-enabled downlink orthogonal division multiple access (OFDMA) network where a UAV is dispatched to serve two ground users within a given flight period. By taking into account the delay-specified minimum-rate-ratio constraints of the users, our goal is to maximize the minimum user throughput by jointly optimizing the UAV trajectory and communication resource allocation. We show that the max-min user throughput in general decreases as the minimum-rate-ratio constraints become more stringent, which reveals a fundamental tradeoff between the throughput gain by exploiting the UAV mobility and the user delay requirement. Simulation results verify our theoretical findings and also demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed design.

This paper investigates an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled multiuser wireless power transfer (WPT) system, where a UAV-mounted energy transmitter (ET) is dispatched to broadcast wireless energy to charge multiple energy receivers (ERs) on the ground. To ensure efficient and fair WPT, we maximize the minimum of the energy harvested by all ERs during a given charging period, by optimizing the UAV's trajectory subject to its maximum speed constraints. Such a min-energy maximization problem, however, is non-convex, and thus is challenging to be directly solved. To tackle this problem, we first consider an ideal case by ignoring the UAV's maximum speed constraint, and show that the relaxed problem can be optimally solved via the Lagrange dual method. The obtained trajectory solution implies that the UAV should hover over a set of fixed locations with optimal allocation of the hovering time among them. Then, for the general case with the UAV's maximum speed constraint considered, we propose a new successive hover-and-fly trajectory motivated by the optimal trajectory in the ideal case, and obtain efficient trajectory designs by applying the successive convex programing (SCP) optimization technique. Numerical results show that our proposed trajectory designs significantly improve the min-energy transferred to all ERs, as compared to other benchmark schemes.

Ambient backscatter communication (AmBC) enables a tag to modulate its information bits over ambient RF carriers by intentionally changing its reflection coefficient, thus has emerged as a promising technique to achieve green communications for future Internet-of-Things. In this paper, we model a cooperative AmBC system from a spectrum- sharing perspective, where a cooperative receiver (C-RX) decodes the information from both a multi-antenna primary transmitter (PT) and a single-antenna secondary transmitter (i.e., tag). We consider two scenarios: first, the tag-symbol period equals the PT-symbol period; second, the tag-symbol period is an integer multiple of the PT-symbol period. For each scenario, we analyze the data rate via successive- interference-cancellation (SIC) based decoding, and formulate a problem to maximize the sum rate by optimizing the beamforming vector at the PT. The problems are transformed into semi-definite programming (SDP), and solved by using the technique of semi-definite relaxation (SDR). Furthermore, a novel transmit beamforming structure is proposed to reduce the computational complexity of beamforming optimization. Numerical results show that the cooperative AmBC system can achieve a higher sum rate than a conventional point-to-point system without a backscatter tag.

In conventional terrestrial cellular systems, mobile terminals (MTs) at the cell edge often pose the performance bottleneck due to their long distance from the ground base station (GBS), especially in hotspot areas. This paper proposes a new hybrid network architecture by leveraging the use of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as an aerial mobile base station, which flies cyclically along the cell edge to serve the cell-edge MTs and help offloading the traffic from the GBS. To achieve user fairness, we aim to maximize the minimum throughput of all MTs in a single cell by jointly optimizing the UAV's trajectory, as well as the bandwidth allocation and user partitioning between the UAV and GBS. Numerical results show that the proposed hybrid network with optimized spectrum sharing and cyclical multiple access design significantly improves the spatial throughput over the conventional cellular network with the GBS only.

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication has emerged as a promising candidate for next-generation wireless systems due to the availability of large bandwidth, while cloud radio access network (CRAN), in which low-complexity remote radio heads (RRHs) are deployed to serve users in a distributed manner, is a cost-effective solution to achieve network densification. However, for a CRAN operating over a large bandwidth in the mmWave frequencies, the fronthaul links would be easily saturated by the large amount of sampled and quantized signals to be transferred between RRHs and the central processor. To tackle this problem, we propose in this paper a new architecture for mmWave CRAN with advanced lens antenna arrays at the RRHs. With the energy focusing property, lens antenna arrays are effective in exploiting the angular sparsity of the mmWave channel to simplify the signal processing required to achieve high data rates with multiple antennas, even when the channel is frequency selective. We consider the uplink transmission in a mmWave CRAN with lens antenna arrays and propose a low-complexity quantization bit allocation scheme for multiple antennas at each RRH to meet the stringent fronthaul rate constraint. We compare the proposed mmWave CRAN using lens antenna arrays, with a conventional CRAN using uniform planar arrays at the RRHs, and show that the proposed design achieves significant throughput gains with much lower complexity.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have attracted significant interest recently in wireless communication due to their high maneuverability, flexible deployment, and low cost. This paper studies a UAV-enabled wireless network where the UAV is employed as an aerial mobile base station (BS) to serve a group of users on the ground. To achieve fair performance among users, we maximize the minimum throughput over all ground users by jointly optimizing the multiuser communication scheduling and UAV trajectory over a finite horizon. The formulated problem is shown to be a mixed integer non-convex optimization problem that is difficult to solve in general. We thus propose an efficient iterative algorithm by applying the block coordinate descent and successive convex optimization techniques, which is guaranteed to converge. To achieve fast convergence and stable throughput, we further propose a low-complexity initialization scheme for the UAV trajectory design based on the simple circular trajectory. Extensive simulation results are provided which show significant throughput gains of the proposed design as compared to other benchmark schemes.

This paper studies the wireless surveillance of a hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) based suspicious communication link over Rayleigh fading channels. We propose a proactive eavesdropping approach, where a half-duplex monitor can opportunistically jam the suspicious link to exploit its potential retransmissions for overhearing more efficiently. In particular, we consider that the suspicious link uses at most two HARQ rounds for transmitting the same data packet, and we focus on two cases without and with HARQ combining at the monitor receiver. In both cases, we aim to maximize the successful eavesdropping probability at the monitor, by adaptively allocating the jamming power in the first HARQ round according to fading channel conditions, subject to an average jamming power constraint. For both cases, we show that the optimal jamming power allocation follows a threshold-based policy, and the monitor jams with constant power when the eavesdropping channel gain is less than the threshold. Numerical results show that the proposed proactive eavesdropping scheme achieves higher successful eavesdropping probability than the conventional passive eavesdropping, and HARQ combining can help further improve the eavesdropping performance.

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications has drawn significant interest recently due to many advantages such as low cost, high mobility, and on-demand deployment. This paper addresses the issue of physical-layer security in a UAV communication system, where a UAV sends confidential information to a legitimate receiver in the presence of a potential eavesdropper which are both on the ground. We aim to maximize the secrecy rate of the system by jointly optimizing the UAV's trajectory and transmit power over a finite horizon. In contrast to the existing literature on wireless security with static nodes, we exploit the mobility of the UAV in this paper to enhance the secrecy rate via a new trajectory design. Although the formulated problem is non-convex and challenging to solve, we propose an iterative algorithm to solve the problem efficiently, based on the block coordinate descent and successive convex optimization methods. Specifically, the UAV's transmit power and trajectory are each optimized with the other fixed in an alternating manner until convergence. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm significantly improves the secrecy rate of the UAV communication system, as compared to benchmark schemes without transmit power control or trajectory optimization.

Millimeter wave (mmWave) communication with advanced lens antenna arrays is a promising technology for achieving cost-effective 5G wireless systems. This paper studies a multi-user mmWave single-sided lens multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system in the uplink communication, where the base station (BS) is equipped with a full-dimensional (FD) lens antenna array with both elevation and azimuth angle resolution capabilities, and each mobile station (MS) has the conventional uniform planar array (UPA). With limited radio frequency (RF) chains at the BS and one single RF chain at each MS, we propose a low-complexity path division multiple access (PDMA) scheme to enable virtually interference-free multiuser communications, by exploiting the angle-dependent energy focusing property of the lens antenna array at the BS as well as the multi-path sparsity of mmWave channels. Besides, a new technique called path delay compensation is proposed at the BS to effectively transform the frequency-selective MIMO channel to parallel frequency-flat small-size MIMO channels, for each of which the low-complexity single-carrier (SC) transmission can be applied. Numerical results show significant sum-rate gain with the proposed design over benchmark systems.

In this paper, we study a single-user multiple-input single-output (MISO) system with constant envelope (CE) transmission. To enable the nonlinear mapping from a fixed receiver signal constellation to the transmitter CE signal vectors, the availability of perfect channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) is assumed in existing literature. However, traditionally, CSIT needs to be acquired at the cost of additional channel training and feedback overhead, which increases with the number of transmit antennas. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive online signal constellation design for MISO CE transmission with significantly reduced training time and feedback complexity compared to the traditional training with fixed constellation set. Numerical results show that our proposed scheme outperforms the traditional scheme in terms of average throughput and yet with less training time required.

Wireless communication by leveraging the use of low-altitude unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has received significant interests recently due to its low-cost and flexibility in providing wireless connectivity in areas without infrastructure coverage. This paper studies a UAV-enabled mobile relaying system, where a high-mobility UAV is deployed to assist in the information transmission from a ground source to a ground destination with their direct link blocked. By assuming that the UAV adopts the energy-efficient circular trajectory and employs time-division duplexing (TDD) based decode-and-forward (DF) relaying, we maximize the spectrum efficiency (SE) in bits/second/Hz as well as energy efficiency (EE) in bits/Joule of the considered system by jointly optimizing the time allocations for the UAV's relaying together with its flying speed and trajectory. It is revealed that for UAV-enabled mobile relaying with the UAV propulsion energy consumption taken into account, there exists a trade-off between the maximum achievable SE and EE by exploiting the new degree of freedom of UAV trajectory design.

Wireless powered communication network (WPCN) is a novel networking paradigm that uses radio frequency (RF) wireless energy transfer (WET) technology to power the information transmissions of wireless devices (WDs). When energy and information are transferred in the same frequency band, a major design issue is transmission scheduling to avoid interference and achieve high communication performance. Commonly used centralized scheduling methods in WPCN may result in high control signaling overhead and thus are not suitable for wireless networks constituting a large number of WDs with random locations and dynamic operations. To tackle this issue, we propose in this paper a distributed scheduling protocol for energy and information transmissions in WPCN. Specifically, we allow a WD that is about to deplete its battery to broadcast an energy request buzz (ERB), which triggers WET from its associated hybrid access point (HAP) to recharge the battery. If no ERB is sent, the WDs contend to transmit data to the HAP using the conventional p-persistent CSMA (carrier sensing multiple access). In particular, we propose an energy queueing model based on an energy decoupling property to derive the throughput performance. Our analysis is verified through simulations under practical network parameters, which demonstrate good throughput performance of the distributed scheduling protocol and reveal some interesting design insights that are different from conventional contention-based communication network assuming the WDs are powered with unlimited energy supplies.

Local caching is an effective scheme for leveraging the memory of the mobile terminal (MT) and short range communications to save the bandwidth usage and reduce the download delay in the cellular communication system. In particular, the MTs first cache in their local memories in off-peak hours and then exchange the requested files with each other in the vicinity during peak hours. However, prior works largely overlook MTs' heterogeneity in file preferences and their selfish behaviors. In this paper, we practically categorize the MTs into different interest groups according to the MTs' preferences. Each group of MTs aims to increase the probability of successful file discovery from the neighboring MTs (from the same or different groups). Hence, we define the groups' utilities as the probability of successfully discovering the file in the neighboring MTs, which should be maximized by deciding the caching strategies of different groups. By modeling MTs' mobilities as homogeneous Poisson point processes, we analytically characterize MTs' utilities in the closed form. We first consider the fully cooperative case where a centralizer helps all groups to make caching decisions. We formulate the problem as a weighted-sum utility maximization problem, through which the maximum utility tradeoffs of different groups are characterized. Next, we study two benchmark cases under selfish caching, namely, partial and no cooperation, with and without inter-group file sharing, respectively. The optimal caching distributions for these two cases are derived. Finally, numerical examples are presented to compare the utilities under different cases and show the effectiveness of the fully cooperative local caching compared with the two benchmark cases.

Ultra-dense (UD) wireless networks and cloud radio access networks (CRAN) are two promising network architectures for the emerging fifth-generation wireless communication systems. By jointly employing them, a new appealing network solution is proposed in this paper, termed UD-CRAN. In a UD-CRAN, millimeter-wave (mmWave) wireless fronthaul is preferred for information exchange between the central processor and the distributed remote radio heads (RRHs), due to its lower cost and higher flexibility in deployment, compared with fixed optical links. This motivates our study in this paper on the downlink transmission in a mmWave fronthaul enabled, orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA)-based UD-CRAN. In particular, the fronthaul is shared among the RRHs via time division multiple access (TDMA), while the RRHs jointly transmit to the users on orthogonal frequency sub-channels using OFDMA. The joint resource allocation over the TDMA-based mmWave fronthaul and OFDMA-based wireless transmission is investigated to maximize the weighted sum rate of all users. Although the problem is non-convex, we propose a Lagrange duality-based solution, which can be efficiently computed with good accuracy. To further reduce the complexity, we also propose a greedy search-based heuristic, which achieves close to optimal performance under practical setups. Finally, we show the significant throughput gains of the proposed joint resource allocation approach compared with other benchmark schemes by simulations.

Radiative wireless power transfer (WPT) is a promising technology to provide cost-effective and real-time power supplies to wireless devices. Although radiative WPT shares many similar characteristics with the extensively studied wireless information transfer or communication, they also differ significantly in terms of design objectives, transmitter/receiver architectures and hardware constraints, and so on. In this paper, we first give an overview on the various WPT technologies, the historical development of the radiative WPT technology and the main challenges in designing contemporary radiative WPT systems. Then, we focus on the state-of-the-art communication and signal processing techniques that can be applied to tackle these challenges. Topics discussed include energy harvester modeling, energy beamforming for WPT, channel acquisition, power region characterization in multi-user WPT, waveform design with linear and non-linear energy receiver model, safety and health issues of WPT, massive multiple-input multiple-output and millimeter wave enabled WPT, wireless charging control, and wireless power and communication systems co-design. We also point out directions that are promising for future research.

To enhance the national security, there is a growing need for authorized parties to legitimately monitor suspicious communication links for preventing intended crimes and terror attacks. In this paper, we propose a new wireless information surveillance paradigm by investigating a scenario, where a legitimate monitor aims to intercept a suspicious wireless link over fading channels. The legitimate monitor can successfully eavesdrop (decode) the information of the suspicious link at each fading state only when its achievable data rate is no smaller than that at the suspicious receiver. We propose a new approach, namely, proactive eavesdropping via cognitive jamming, in which the legitimate monitor purposely jams the receiver in a full-duplex mode so as to change the suspicious communication (e.g., to a smaller data rate) for overhearing more efficiently. By assuming perfect self-interference cancelation (SIC) and global channel state information (CSI) at the legitimate monitor, we characterize the fundamental information-theoretic limits of proactive eavesdropping. We consider both delay-sensitive and delay-tolerant applications for the suspicious communication, under which the legitimate monitor maximizes the eavesdropping non-outage probability (for event-based monitoring) and the relative eavesdropping rate (for content analysis), respectively, by optimizing the jamming power allocation over different fading states subject to an average power constraint. Numerical results show that the proposed proactive eavesdropping via cognitive jamming approach greatly outperforms other benchmark schemes. Furthermore, by extending to a more practical scenario with residual SI and local CSI, we design an efficient online cognitive jamming scheme inspired by the optimal cognitive jamming with perfect SIC and global CSI.

Wireless communication with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is a promising technology for future communication systems. In this paper, assuming that the UAV flies horizontally with a fixed altitude, we study energy-efficient UAV communication with a ground terminal via optimizing the UAV's trajectory, a new design paradigm that jointly considers both the communication throughput and the UAV's energy consumption. To this end, we first derive a theoretical model on the propulsion energy consumption of fixed-wing UAVs as a function of the UAV's flying speed, direction, and acceleration. Based on the derived model and by ignoring the radiation and signal processing energy consumption, the energy efficiency of UAV communication is defined as the total information bits communicated normalized by the UAV propulsion energy consumed for a finite time horizon. For the case of unconstrained trajectory optimization, we show that both the rate-maximization and energy-minimization designs lead to vanishing energy efficiency and thus are energy-inefficient in general. Next, we introduce a simple circular UAV trajectory, under which the UAV's flight radius and speed are jointly optimized to maximize the energy efficiency. Furthermore, an efficient design is proposed for maximizing the UAV's energy efficiency with general constraints on the trajectory, including its initial/final locations and velocities, as well as minimum/maximum speed and acceleration. Numerical results show that the proposed designs achieve significantly higher energy efficiency for UAV communication as compared with other benchmark schemes.

Cloud radio access network (CRAN) is a promising candidate for the next-generation wireless communication systems. In CRAN, remote radio heads (RRHs) are deployed to serve users in a target area, which are connected to a central processor (CP) via limited-capacity links termed the fronthaul. In practice, the large amount of information transferred between each RRH and the CP for centralized processing can easily exceed its fronthaul capacity. This motivates our study in this paper on a new hybrid decoding scheme here the RRHs can either locally decode-and-forward the user messages to save the fronthaul capacity, or quantize and forward their signals to the CP for joint decoding as in the conventional CRAN (i.e., forward-and-decode). We consider the uplink transmission in an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based CRAN with multiple RRHs to serve a single user, where the proposed hybrid decoding is performed on each OFDM sub-channel (SC). We consider a joint optimization of the processing mode selections (decode-and-forward or forward-and-decode) along with the user's power allocation over all SCs to maximize the sum-rate for the user subject to the RRHs' individual fronthaul capacity constraints and the user's total power constraint. Although the problem is non-convex, we propose a Lagrange duality based solution, which can be efficiently computed with good accuracy. We also compare the performance of the proposed hybrid decoding with existing schemes that perform either decode-and-forward or forward-and-decode processing at all SCs, which shows promising throughput gains.

In this paper, we study wireless power transfer in a multiuser multiple-input single-output (MISO) system, where a base station equipped with N antennas wirelessly transfers power to distributed single-antenna users. To reduce the implementation cost, we propose a constant-envelope analog beamforming scheme to simultaneously transfer power to multiple users which requires only a single radio frequency (RF) chain at the multi-antenna transmitter. We show that the proposed constant-envelope beamforming design only incurs about 1 dB power loss under homogeneous and independent Rayleigh fading, as compared with the optimal variable-envelope digital beamforming design that however requires N RF chains, one for each transmit antenna.

This paper studies a full-duplex filter-and-forward (FD-FF) relay system in frequency-selective channels. Conventionally, the loop-back signal at the FD relay is treated as harmful self- interference and needs to be significantly suppressed via both analog- and digital-domain cancellation. However, the performance of the conventional self-interference cancellation approach is fundamentally limited due to the quantization error induced by the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) with limited dynamic range. In this paper, we consider an analog filter-and-forward design to help avoid the quantization error, and surprisingly show that the maximum achievable rate of such an FD-FF relay system is in fact regardless of the loop- back channel at the FD relay. We characterize the maximum achievable rate of this channel by jointly optimizing the transmit power allocation over frequency at the source and the frequency response of the filter at the relay, subject to their individual power constraints. Although this problem is non- convex, we obtain its optimal solution by applying the Lagrange duality method. By simulations it is shown that the proposed joint source and relay optimization achieves rate gains over other heuristic designs, and is also advantageous over the conventional approach by cancelling the relay loop- back signal as self-interference, especially when the residual self-interference after cancellation is still significant.

Cloud radio access network (C-RAN) with centralized baseband processing is envisioned as a promising candidate for the next-generation wireless communication network. However, the joint processing gain of C-RAN is fundamentally constrained by the finite-capacity fronthaul links between the central unit (CU) where joint processing is implemented and distributed access points known as remote radio heads (RRHs). In this paper, we consider the downlink communication in a C-RAN with multi-antenna RRHs and single-antenna users, and investigate the joint RRH beamforming and user-RRH association problem to maximize the minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of all users subject to each RRH's individual fronthaul capacity constraint. The formulated problem is in general NP-hard due to the fronthaul capacity constraints and thus is difficult to be solved optimally. In this paper, we propose a new iterative method for this problem which decouples the design of beamforming and user association, where the number of users served by each RRH is iteratively reduced until the obtained beamforming and user association solution satisfies the fronthaul capacity constraints of all RRHs. A monotonic convergence is proved for the proposed algorithm, and it is shown by simulation that the algorithm achieves significant performance improvement over other heuristic solutions.

Magnetic resonant coupling (MRC) is an efficient method for realizing the near-field wireless power transfer (WPT). The use of multiple transmitters (TXs) each with one coil can be applied to enhance the WPT performance by coherently combining the magnetic fields induced by all TX coils in a beam toward the receiver (RX) coil, a technique termed "magnetic beamforming". In this paper, we study the optimal magnetic beamforming design for an MRC-WPT system with multiple TXs and a single RX. We formulate a problem to jointly optimize the currents flowing through different TXs so as to minimize the total power drawn from their voltage sources, subject to the minimum power required by the RX load as well as the practical constraints on the peak voltage and current at all TXs. For the special case of identical TX resistances and without the peak voltage and current constraints, we show that the optimal current at each TX should be proportional to the mutual inductance between its TX coil and the RX coil. In general, the problem is a non-convex quadratically constrained quadratic programming (QCQP), which is reformulated as a semidefinite programming (SDP) with rank-one constraint. We show that the semidefinite relaxation (SDR) of the reformulated problem is tight and hence the problem is solved optimally. Numerical results show that the optimal magnetic beamforming design significantly enhances the deliverable power as well as the power efficiency over the uncoordinated WPT benchmark with equal current allocation over TXs.

This paper studies a new active eavesdropping technique via the so-called spoofing relay attack, which could be launched by the eavesdropper to significantly enhance the information leakage rate from the source over conventional passive eavesdropping. With this attack, the eavesdropper acts as a relay to spoof the source to vary transmission rate in favor of its eavesdropping performance by either enhancing or degrading the effective channel of the legitimate link. The maximum information leakage rate achievable by the eavesdropper and the corresponding optimal operation at the spoofing relay are obtained. It is shown that such a spoofing relay attack could impose new challenges from a physical-layer security perspective since it leads to significantly higher information leakage rate than conventional passive eavesdropping.

Local caching with device-to-device (D2D) communications has been recently introduced as an effective scheme for reducing the average download time of the mobile terminals (MTs). The MTs first cache the files in their local memories and then exchange the files with each other within the vicinity via D2D communications. Prior works have largely overlooked MTs' heterogeneity in file preferences and assume unselfish caching behaviors of the MTs. In this work, we practically divide the MTs into different groups according to their individual preferences over the files and propose optimal file caching strategies for self-interested MTs to reduce the average file download time. Assuming the knowledge of the social file preference for an intelligent group, we develop the optimal caching strategy for this group by formulating and solving a convex optimization problem. Closed-form solution for the problem is obtained, which is shown to follow a water-filling structure over the files. Finally, numerical examples are presented to show that the selfish caching of a group can be detrimental to both itself and the other intelligent groups.

There is a growing need for government agencies to monitor suspicious communication links to prevent crimes and terror attacks. In this paper, we study a legitimate surveillance scenario where a legitimate monitor aims to intercept the suspicious communication between a transmitter and a receiver over fading channels. The legitimate monitor can eavesdrop (decode) the information of the suspicious link only when its achievable data rate is no smaller than that at the suspicious receiver. In practice, the legitimate eavesdropping is challenging, especially when the legitimate monitor is far from the suspicious transmitter. To overcome this issue, we propose a new approach, namely proactive eavesdropping via cognitive jamming, in which the legitimate monitor purposely jams the receiver and changes the suspicious communication (e.g., to a smaller data rate) in order to overhear easily. In particular, we consider delay-sensitive and delay-insensitive applications for the suspicious transmission, under which the legitimate monitor maximizes the eavesdropping non-outage probability and the relative eavesdropping rate, respectively, by optimizing its jamming power allocation over different fading states subject to an average power constraint. We present efficient algorithms for optimally solving the formulated problems. Numerical results show that thanks to the cognitive jamming, the proposed proactive eavesdropping scheme greatly outperforms the conventional passive eavesdropping without jamming.

In this paper, an efficient channel estimation scheme is proposed for the point-to-point lens-antenna-array enabled millimeter wave (mmWave) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system with limited number of radio frequency (RF) chains at both source and destination. By exploiting the energy focusing property of lens antenna arrays at both the transmitter and receiver, as well as the multi-path sparsity of mmWave channels, the proposed scheme employs two-way training to achieve energy-based antenna selections at both the source and destination, thus significantly reducing the number of RF chains required. The proposed scheme has low complexity for implementation and yet does not require any prior knowledge of the channel. It is shown by simulations that compared to the traditional channel training method for MIMO systems without lens antenna, the effective data rate achieved by the lens array enabled mmWave MIMO system can be significantly improved, thanks to the energy focusing capability of lens antenna arrays and the matching efficient channel estimation scheme proposed.

In this paper, we study the receive beamforming design to minimize the symbol error rate (SER) in a point-to-point multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system with constant envelope (CE) precoding. In this case, a constellation is feasible at the combiner output of the receiver if and only if it can be scaled to lie in an annular region, whose boundaries are determined by channel realization, receive beamforming and per-antenna transmit power. By approximating the exact SER with its union bound, we aim to optimize the receive beamforming weights to maximize the minimum Euclidean distance (MED) between any two signal points at the combiner output for any desired constellation and given channel realization, subject to the feasibility constraint of the constellation. We first show that under the assumption of independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) Rayleigh fading channel, this problem is feasible as long as there are no more transmit antennas than receive antennas. Then, we assume the aforementioned condition holds and reformulate this problem into an equivalent quadratically constrained quadratic program (QCQP), for which we find an approximate solution by applying the semidefinite relaxation (SDR) technique and a customized Gaussian randomization method. Numerical results show that our proposed receive beamforming scheme achieves significantly improved SER performance than other benchmark schemes.

Energy beamforming (EB) is a key technique for achieving efficient radio-frequency (RF) transmission enabled wireless energy transfer (WET). By optimally designing the waveforms from multiple energy transmitters (ETs) over the wireless channels, they are constructively combined at the energy receiver (ER) to achieve an EB gain that scales with the number of ETs. However, the optimal design of transmit waveforms requires accurate channel state information (CSI) at the ETs, which is challenging to obtain in practical WET systems. In this paper, we propose a new channel training scheme to achieve optimal EB gain in a distributed WET system, where multiple separated ETs adjust their transmit phases to collaboratively send power to a single ER in an iterative manner, based on one-bit feedback from the ER per training interval which indicates the increase/decrease of the received power level from one particular ET over two preassigned transmit phases. The proposed EB algorithm can be efficiently implemented in practical WET systems even with a large number of distributed ETs, and is analytically shown to converge quickly to the optimal EB design as the number of feedback intervals per ET increases. Numerical results are provided to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm as compared to other distributed EB designs.

Wireless power transfer (WPT) technology provides a cost-effective solution to achieve a sustainable energy supply in wireless networks, where WPT-enabled energy nodes (ENs) can charge wireless devices (WDs) remotely without interruption to the use. However, in a heterogeneous WPT network with distributed ENs and WDs, some WDs may quickly deplete their batteries due to the lack of timely wireless power supply by the ENs, thus resulting in short network operating lifetime. In this paper, we exploit frequency diversity in a broadband WPT network and study the distributed charging control by ENs to maximize network lifetime. In particular, we propose a practical voting-based distributed charging control framework, where each WD simply estimates the broadband channel, casts its votes for some strong sub-channels, and sends to the ENs along with its battery state information, based on which the ENs independently allocate their transmit power over the sub-channels without the need of centralized control. Under this framework, we aim to design lifetime-maximizing power allocation and efficient voting-based feedback methods. Toward this end, we first derive the general expression of the expected lifetime of a WPT network and draw the general design principles for lifetime-maximizing charging control. Based on the analysis, we then propose a distributed charging control protocol with voting-based feedback, where the power allocated to sub-channels at each EN is a function of the weighted sum vote received from all WDs. Besides, the number of votes cast by a WD and the weight of each vote are related to its current battery state. Simulation results show that the proposed distributed charging control protocol could significantly increase the network lifetime under stringent transmit power constraint in a broadband WPT network. Reciprocally, it also consumes lower transmit power to achieve nearly perpetual network operation.

Traditional macrocell networks are experiencing an upsurge of data traffic, and small-cells are deployed to help offload the traffic from macrocells. Given the massive deployment of small-cells in a macrocell, the aggregate power consumption of small-cells (though being low individually) can be larger than that of the macrocell. Compared to the macrocell base station (MBS) whose power consumption increases significantly with its traffic load, the power consumption of a small-cell base station (SBS) is relatively flat and independent of its load. To reduce the total power consumption of the heterogeneous networks (HetNets), we dynamically change the operating states (on and off) of the SBSs, while keeping the MBS on to avoid any service failure outside active small-cells. First, we consider that the wireless users are uniformly distributed in the network, and propose an optimal location-based operation scheme by gradually turning off the SBSs closer to the MBS. We then extend the operation problem to a more general case where users are nonuniformly distributed in the network. Although this problem is NP-hard, we propose a joint location and user density based operation scheme to achieve near-optimum (with less than 1% performance loss in our simulations) in polynomial time.

In this paper, to minimize the on-grid energy cost in a large-scale green cellular network, we jointly design the optimal base station (BS) ON/OFF operation policy and the on-grid energy purchase policy from a network-level perspective. We consider that the BSs are aggregated as a microgrid with hybrid energy supplies and an associated central energy storage, which can store the harvested renewable energy and the purchased on-grid energy over time. Due to the fluctuations of the on-grid energy prices, the harvested renewable energy, and the network traffic loads over time, as well as the BS coordination to hand over the traffic offloaded from the inactive BSs to the active BSs, it is generally NP-hard to find a network-level optimal adaptation policy that can minimize the on-grid energy cost over a long-term and yet assures the downlink transmission quality at the same time. Aiming at the network-level dynamic system design, we jointly apply stochastic geometry (Geo) for large-scale green cellular network analysis and dynamic programming (DP) for adaptive BS ON/OFF operation design and on-grid energy purchase design, and thus propose a new Geo-DP design approach. By this approach, we obtain the optimal BS ON/OFF policy, which shows that the optimal BSs' active operation probability in each horizon is just sufficient to assure the required downlink transmission quality with time-varying load in the large-scale cellular network. However, due to the curse of dimensionality of the DP, it is of high complexity to obtain the optimal on-grid energy purchase policy. We thus propose a suboptimal on-grid energy purchase policy with low complexity, where the low-price on-grid energy is over purchased in the current horizon only when the current storage level and the future renewable energy level are both low. Simulation results show that the suboptimal on-grid energy purchase can achieve near-optimal performance. We also compare the proposed policy with the existing schemes to show that our proposed policy can more efficiently save the on-grid energy cost over time.

Wireless power transfer (WPT) prolongs the lifetime of wireless sensor network by providing sustainable power supply to the distributed sensor nodes (SNs) via electromagnetic waves. To improve the energy transfer efficiency in a large WPT system, this paper proposes an adaptively directional WPT (AD-WPT) scheme, where the power beacons (PBs) adapt the energy beamforming strategy to SNs' locations by concentrating the transmit power on the nearby SNs within the efficient charging radius. With the aid of stochastic geometry, we derive the expressions of the distribution metrics of the aggregate received power at a typical SN. To design the charging radius for the optimal AD-WPT operation, we exploit the tradeoff between the power intensity of the energy beams and the number of SNs to be charged. Depending on different SN task requirements, the optimal AD-WPT can maximize the average received power or the active probability of the SNs, respectively. It is shown that both the maximum average received power and the maximum sensor active probability increase with the increased deployment density and transmit power of the PBs, and decrease with the increased density of the SNs and the energy beamwidth. Finally, we show that the optimal AD-WPT can significantly improve the energy transfer efficiency compared with the traditional omnidirectional WPT.

In the emerging hybrid electricity market, mobile network operators (MNOs) of cellular networks can make day-ahead energy purchase commitments at low prices and real-time flexible energy purchase at high prices. To minimize electricity bills, it is essential for MNOs to jointly optimize the day-ahead and real-time energy purchase based on their time-varying wireless traffic load. In this paper, we consider two different MNOs coexisting in the same area, and exploit their collaboration in both energy purchase and wireless load sharing for energy cost saving. Specifically, we propose a new approach named energy group buying with load sharing, in which the two MNOs are aggregated as a single group to make the day-ahead and real-time energy purchase, and their base stations (BSs) share the wireless traffic to maximally turn lightly-loaded BSs into sleep mode. When the two MNOs belong to the same entity and aim to minimize their total energy cost, we use the two-stage stochastic programming to obtain the optimal day-ahead and real-time energy group buying jointly with wireless load sharing. When the two MNOs belong to different entities and are self-interested in minimizing their individual energy costs, we propose a novel repeated Nash bargaining scheme for them to negotiate and share their energy costs under energy group buying and load sharing. Our proposed repeated Nash bargaining scheme is shown to achieve Pareto-optimal and fair energy cost reductions for both MNOs.

Millimeter wave (mmWave) communication is a promising technology for future wireless systems, while one practical challenge is to achieve its large-antenna gains with only limited radio frequency (RF) chains for cost-effective implementation. To this end, we study in this paper a new lens antenna array enabled mmWave multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication system. We first show that the array response of lens antenna arrays follows a “sinc” function, where the antenna element with the peak response is determined by the angle of arrival (AoA)/departure (AoD) of the received/transmitted signal. By exploiting this unique property along with the multi-path sparsity of mmWave channels, we propose a novel low-cost and capacity-achieving spatial multiplexing scheme for both narrow-band and wide-band mmWave communications, termed path division multiplexing (PDM), where parallel data streams are transmitted over different propagation paths with simple per-path processing. We further propose a simple path grouping technique with group-based small-scale MIMO processing to effectively mitigate the inter-stream interference due to similar AoAs/AoDs. Numerical results are provided to compare the performance of the proposed mmWave lens MIMO against the conventional MIMO with uniform planar arrays (UPAs) and hybrid analog/digital processing. It is shown that the proposed design achieves significant throughput gains as well as complexity and cost reductions, thus leading to a promising new paradigm for mmWave MIMO communications.

In this paper, we consider a novel mobile relaying technique, where the relay nodes are mounted on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and hence are capable of moving at high speed. Compared with conventional static relaying, mobile relaying offers a new degree of freedom for performance enhancement via careful relay trajectory design. We study the throughput maximization problem in mobile relaying systems by optimizing the source/relay transmit power along with the relay trajectory, subject to practical mobility constraints (on the UAV's speed and initial/final relay locations), as well as the information-causality constraint at the relay. It is shown that for the fixed relay trajectory, the throughput-optimal source/relay power allocations over time follow a “staircase” water filling structure, with non-increasing and non-decreasing water levels at the source and relay, respectively. On the other hand, with given power allocations, the throughput can be further improved by optimizing the UAV's trajectory via successive convex optimization. An iterative algorithm is thus proposed to optimize the power allocations and relay trajectory alternately. Furthermore, for the special case with free initial and final relay locations, the jointly optimal power allocation and relay trajectory are derived. Numerical results show that by optimizing the trajectory of the relay and power allocations adaptive to its induced channel variation, mobile relaying is able to achieve significant throughput gains over the conventional static relaying.

The applications of wireless power transfer technology to wireless communications can help build a wireless powered communication network (WPCN) with more reliable and sustainable power supply compared to the conventional battery-powered network. However, due to the fundamental differences in wireless information and power transmissions, many important aspects of conventional battery-powered wireless communication networks need to be redesigned for efficient operations of WPCNs. In this paper, we study the placement optimization of energy and information access points in WPCNs, where the wireless devices (WDs) harvest the radio frequency energy transferred by dedicated energy nodes (ENs) in the downlink, and use the harvested energy to transmit data to information access points (APs) in the uplink. In particular, we are interested in minimizing the network deployment cost with minimum number of ENs and APs by optimizing their locations, while satisfying the energy harvesting and communication performance requirements of the WDs. Specifically, we first study the minimum-cost placement problem when the ENs and APs are separately located, where an alternating optimization method is proposed to jointly optimize the locations of ENs and APs. Then, we study the placement optimization when each pair of EN and AP is colocated and integrated as a hybrid access point, and propose an efficient algorithm to solve this problem. Simulation results show that the proposed methods can effectively reduce the network deployment cost and yet guarantee the given performance requirements, which is a key consideration in future applications of WPCNs.

Cooperative communications has long been proposed as an effective method for reducing the energy consumption of the mobile terminals (MTs) in wireless cellular networks. However, it is hard to implement due to the lack of incentives for the MTs to cooperate. In this paper, we propose a pricing mechanism to incentivize the uplink cooperative communications for the energy saving of MTs. We first consider the ideal case of MTs' full cooperation under complete information. For this scenario as the benchmark case, where the private information of the helping MTs such as the channel and battery conditions is completely known by the source MT, the problem is formulated as a relay selection problem. Then, for the practical case of partial cooperation with incomplete information, the MTs need to cooperate under the uncertainties of the helping MTs' channel and battery conditions. For this scenario, we propose a partial cooperation scheme with pricing where a source MT in low-battery level or bad channel condition is allowed to select and pay another MT in proximity to help forward its data to the base station (BS). We formulate the source MT's pricing and load sharing problem as an optimization problem. Efficient algorithms based on dichotomous search and alternative optimization are proposed to solve the problem for the cases of splittable and nonsplittable data at the source MT, respectively. Finally, extensive numerical results are provided to show that our proposed cooperative communications scheme with pricing can significantly decrease both the communications and battery outages for the MTs, and can also increase the average battery level during the MTs' operation.

Mobile data services are becoming the main driver of a wireless service provider's (WSPs) revenue growth, and two-part tariff data plans (each including a lump-sum fee and a per-unit charge) are usually provided to wireless users. Some users can easily use up their monthly data quota and may pay for costly data over-usage. Motivated by users' diverse usage behavior (more or less than the subscribed data quotas), this paper proposes a new type of user-initiated network for cellular users to trade data plans by leveraging personal hotspots (PHs) with users' smartphones. A user with data surplus can set up a PH and share the cellular data connection to another user with data deficit in the vicinity. Due to users' randomness in data usage, incentive to trade, and user mobility to enter or leave the PH connection range, the analysis on the secondary trading market is challenging. To overcome these issues, we propose a PH-market for users with diverse data usage behaviors and random user mobility to directly trade data as sellers and buyers, by designing a market-clearing price. It is shown that the PH-market greatly saves all users' expected costs when the existence condition of the PH-market is met. Finally, as this PH-market will challenge the WSP's revenue collection (especially the surcharge from users' data over-usage), we analyze the WSP's response to the PH-market and propose two effective countermeasure strategies by either reducing the selling users' data quota in their data plans (the PH-market's supply) or increasing the buying users' data quota (the PH-market's demand). When we have more than one WSP and they are competitive, we show that one WSP can take advantage of the PH-market by indirectly selling more data to the other WSP's users.

This paper studies secrecy transmission with the aid of a group of wireless energy harvesting-enabled amplify-and-forward (AF) relays performing cooperative jamming (CJ) and relaying. The source node in the network does simultaneous wireless information and power transfer with each relay employing a power splitting receiver in the first phase; each relay further divides its harvested power for forwarding the received signal and generating artificial noise for jamming the eavesdroppers in the second transmission phase. In the centralized case with global channel state information (CSI), we provide the closed-form expressions for the optimal and/or suboptimal AF-relay beamforming vectors to maximize the achievable secrecy rate subject to individual power constraints of the relays, using the technique of semidefinite relaxation (SDR), which is proved to be tight. A fully distributed algorithm utilizing only local CSI at each relay is also proposed as a performance benchmark. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed multi-AF relaying with CJ over other suboptimal designs.

Constant envelope (CE) precoding is an appealing transmission technique, which enables the realization of high power amplifier efficiency. For CE precoding in a single-user multiple-input single-output (MISO) channel, a desired constellation is feasible at the receiver if and only if it can be scaled to lie in an annulus, whose boundaries are characterized by the instantaneous channel realization. Therefore, if a fixed receiver constellation is used for CE precoding in a fading channel, where the annulus is time-varying, there is in general a non-zero probability of encountering a channel that makes CE precoding infeasible, thereby causing a high probability of error. To tackle this problem, this paper studies the adaptive receiver constellation design for CE precoding in a single-user MISO flat-fading channel with an arbitrary number of antennas at the transmitter. We first investigate the fixed-rate adaptive receiver constellation design to minimize the symbol error rate (SER). Specifically, an efficient algorithm is proposed to find the optimal amplitude-and-phase shift keying (APSK) constellation with two rings that is both feasible and of the maximum minimum Euclidean distance, for any given constellation size and instantaneous channel realization. Numerical results show that by using the optimized fixed-rate adaptive receiver constellation, our proposed scheme achieves significantly improved SER performance over CE precoding with a fixed receiver constellation. Furthermore, based on the family of optimal fixed-rate adaptive two-ring APSK constellation sets, a variable-rate CE transmission scheme is proposed and numerically examined.

In this paper, we study simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) in orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems with the coexistence of information receivers (IRs) and energy receivers (ERs). The IRs are served with best-effort secrecy data and the ERs harvest energy with minimum required harvested power. To enhance the physical layer security for IRs and yet satisfy energy harvesting requirements for ERs, we propose a new frequency-domain artificial noise (AN) aided transmission strategy. With the new strategy, we study the optimal resource allocation for the weighted sum secrecy rate maximization for IRs by power and subcarrier allocation at the transmitter. The studied problem is shown to be a mixed integer programming problem and thus nonconvex, while we propose an efficient algorithm for solving it based on the Lagrange duality method. To further reduce the computational complexity, we also propose a suboptimal algorithm of lower complexity. The simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of proposed algorithms as compared against other heuristic schemes.

This paper investigates an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based wireless powered communication system, where one user harvests energy from an energy access point (EAP) to power its information transmission to a data access point (DAP). The channels from the EAP to the user, i.e., the wireless energy transfer (WET) link, and from the user to the DAP, i.e., the wireless information transfer (WIT) link, vary over both time slots and subchannels (SCs) in general. To avoid interference at DAP, WET and WIT are scheduled over orthogonal SCs at any slot. Our objective is to maximize the achievable rate at the DAP by jointly optimizing the SC allocation over time, and the power allocation over time and SCs, for both WET and WIT links. Assuming availability of full channel state information (CSI), the structural results for the optimal SC/power allocation are obtained and an offline algorithm is proposed to solve the problem. Furthermore, we propose a low-complexity online algorithm when causal CSI is available.

In this paper, we study the optimal node placement problem in wireless powered communication networks (WPCNs), where the wireless devices (WDs) harvest the radio frequency energy transferred by dedicated energy nodes (ENs) in the downlink, and use the harvested energy to transmit data to information access points (APs) in the uplink. In particular, we are interested in minimizing the deployment cost on ENs and APs, while satisfying the energy harvesting and communication performance requirements of the WDs. Specifically, we first study the optimal placement of ENs given fixed AP locations, where an efficient greedy algorithm is proposed to tackle the non-convexity of the problem. Based on the obtained results, we further propose an alternating optimization method that jointly optimizes the placements of ENs and APs. Simulation results show that the proposed methods can effectively reduce the network deployment cost to guarantee the given performance requirements, which is a key consideration in the future applications of WPCNs.

Wireless power transfer (WPT) prolongs the lifetime of wireless sensor network by providing sustainable power supply to the distributed sensor nodes (SNs) via electromagnetic waves. To improve the energy transfer efficiency in a large WPT system, this paper proposes an adaptively directional WPT (AD-WPT) scheme, where the power beacons (PBs) adapt the energy beamforming strategy to SNs' locations by concentrating the transmit power on the nearby SNs within the efficient charging radius. With the aid of stochastic geometry, we derive the closed-form expressions of the distribution metrics of the aggregate received power at a typical SN. We analyze the optimal charging radius that maximizes the average received power. It is shown that both the optimal charging radius and maximized average received power decrease with the increased density of the SNs and the energy beamwidth. Finally, we show that the optimal AD-WPT can significantly improve the energy transfer efficiency compared to the traditional omnidirectional WPT.

In this paper, we consider simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) in orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems with the coexistence of information receivers (IRs) and energy receivers (ERs). The IRs are served with best- effort secrecy data and the ERs harvest energy with minimum required harvested power. To enhance physical- layer security and yet satisfy energy harvesting requirements, we introduce a new frequency-domain artificial noise based approach. We study the optimal resource allocation for the weighted sum secrecy rate maximization via transmit power and subcarrier allocation. The considered problem is nonconvex, while we propose an efficient algorithm for solving it based on Lagrange duality method. Simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm as compared against other heuristic schemes.

Constant envelope (CE) precoding is an appealing transmission technique which enables the use of highly efficient nonlinear radio frequency (RF) power amplifiers (PAs). For CE precoding in a single-user multiple-input single-output (MISO) channel, a desired constellation is feasible at the receiver if and only if it can be scaled to lie in an annulus, whose boundaries are characterized by the instantaneous channel realization. Therefore, if a fixed receiver constellation is used for CE precoding in fading channel, where the annulus is time-varying, there is a non-zero probability of encountering a channel that makes CE precoding infeasible. To tackle this problem, we study the fixed-rate adaptive receiver constellation design for CE precoding to minimize symbol error rate (SER) in a single-user MISO flat-fading channel with an arbitrary number of antennas at the transmitter. Specifically, this paper proposes an efficient algorithm to find the optimal two-ring amplitude-and-phase shift keying (APSK) constellation that is both feasible and of the maximum minimum Euclidean distance (MED), for any given constellation size and instantaneous channel realization. Numerical results show that by using the optimized adaptive receiver constellation, our proposed scheme achieves significantly improved SER performance than CE precoding with fixed receiver constellation. Furthermore, with the PA efficiency gain achieved by CE precoding, our proposed scheme requires less transmitter power consumption to achieve a desired SER level than linear precoding schemes under the less-stringent average per-antenna power constraint (PAPC).

Magnetic resonant coupling (MRC) is a practically appealing method for realizing the near-field wireless power transfer (WPT). The MRC-WPT system with a single pair of transmitter and receiver has been extensively studied in the literature, while there is limited work on the general setup with multiple transmitters and/or receivers. In this paper, we consider a point-to-multipoint MRC-WPT system with one transmitter sending power wirelessly to a set of distributed receivers simultaneously. We derive the power delivered to the load of each receiver in closed-form expression, and reveal a “near-far” fairness issue in multiuser power transmission due to users' distance-dependent mutual inductances with the transmitter. We also show that by designing the receivers' load resistances, the near-far issue can be optimally solved. Specifically, we propose a centralized algorithm to jointly optimize the load resistances to minimize the power drawn from the energy source at the transmitter under given power requirements for the loads. We also devise a distributed algorithm for the receivers to adjust their load resistances iteratively, for ease of practical implementation.

This paper studies the energy management problem for two self-interested microgrids with integrated renewable energy and energy storage systems, which can exchange energy with each other through the transmission line connecting them. Microgrids are willing to cooperate if and only if both can benefit from the energy cooperation, e.g. achieve lower energy costs as compared to the without energy cooperation case, while sharing limited information due to privacy considerations. We thus propose an iterative algorithm for the partially cooperative energy management problem, which aims to reduce energy costs of both microgrids simultaneously, while sharing limited information. To provide performance benchmark, we also consider the fully cooperative energy management problem, for which we ideally assume that microgrids share all their information to minimize their total energy cost. Last, we evaluate our proposed algorithms for the partially and fully cooperative energy management via simulations based on the Tucson power system data.

WiFi offloading helps serve ever-increasing data traffic in cellular networks and mitigate the network congestion. Yet it can only apply to cellular users within WiFi coverage. Recently, delayed WiFi offloading is proposed to exploit users' mobility to purposely travel to WiFi coverage for data offloading. Its successful implementation depends on users' willingness to delay ongoing cellular data services until entering WiFi coverage. This paper proposes an incentive mechanism to allow a network operator to optimally reward his users to participate in delayed WiFi offloading, so as to reduce the network congestion. We formulate the design problem as a two-stage Stackelberg game: in Stage I, the operator announces a uniform reward to users to delay their existing cellular services; and in Stage II, each user decides to join the delayed offloading or not, depending on the reward, the network congestion, and his estimation of waiting cost for WiFi connection. The operator and users may or may not know all users' mobility and waiting cost information; thus, we propose optimal reward mechanisms under various information availability scenarios. Interestingly, we show that the optimal reward does not always increase with the cellular traffic load, as the increased network congestion can also help motivate users to switch to WiFi networks.

This paper studies a multiple-input single-output (MISO) broadcast channel (BC) featuring simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT), where a multi-antenna access point (AP) delivers both information and energy via radio signals to multiple single-antenna receivers simultaneously, and each receiver implements either information decoding (ID) or energy harvesting (EH). We characterize the capacity region for ID receivers under given energy requirements for EH receivers, by solving a sequence of weighted sum-rate (WSR) maximization (WSRMax) problems subject to a maximum sum-power constraint for the AP, and a set of minimum harvested power constraints for individual EH receivers. The problem corresponds to a new form of WSRMax problem in MISO-BC with combined maximum and minimum linear transmit covariance constraints (MaxLTCCs and MinLTCCs), which has not been addressed in the literature and is challenging to solve. By extending the general BC-multiple access channel (MAC) duality, which is only applicable to WSRMax problems with MaxLTCCs, and applying the ellipsoid method, we propose an efficient algorithm to solve this problem globally optimally. Numerical results are presented to validate our proposed algorithm.

This paper studies the optimized training design for multiple-input single-output (MISO) wireless energy transfer (WET) systems in frequency-selective channels, where the frequency-diversity and energy-beamforming gains can be both reaped by properly learning the channel state information (CSI) at the energy transmitter (ET). By exploiting channel reciprocity, a two-phase channel training scheme is proposed to achieve the diversity and beamforming gains, respectively. In the first phase, pilot signals are sent from the energy receiver (ER) over a selected subset of the available frequency sub-bands, through which the sub-band that exhibits the largest sum-power over all the antennas at the ET is determined and its index is sent back to the ER. In the second phase, the selected sub-band is further trained by the ER, so that the ET obtains an estimation for the MISO channel and implement energy beamforming. We propose to maximize the net energy harvested at the ER, which is the total harvested energy offset by that used for the two-phase channel training. The optimal training design, including the number of sub-bands trained and the energy allocated for each of the two training phases, is derived.

Wireless charging is a promising way to power wireless nodes' transmissions. This paper considers new dual-function access points (APs), which are able to support the energy/information transmission to/from wireless nodes. We focus on a large-scale wireless powered communication network (WPCN), and use stochastic geometry to analyze the wireless nodes' performance tradeoff between energy harvesting and information transmission. We study two cases with battery-free and battery-deployed wireless nodes. For both cases, we consider a harvest-then-transmit protocol by partitioning each time frame into a downlink (DL) phase for energy transfer, and an uplink (UL) phase for information transfer. By jointly optimizing frame partition between the two phases and the wireless nodes' transmit power, we maximize the wireless nodes' spatial throughput subject to a successful information transmission probability constraint. For the battery-free case, we show that the wireless nodes prefer to choose small transmit power to obtain large transmission opportunity. For the battery-deployed case, we first study an ideal infinite-capacity battery scenario for wireless nodes, and show that the optimal charging design is not unique, due to the sufficient energy stored in the battery. We then extend to the practical finite-capacity battery scenario. Although the exact performance is difficult to be obtained analytically, it is shown to be upper and lower bounded by those in the infinite-capacity battery scenario and the battery-free case, respectively. Finally, we provide numerical results to corroborate our study.

This paper studies a wireless-energy-transfer (WET) enabled massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) system (MM) consisting of a hybrid data-and-energy access point (H-AP) and multiple single-antenna users. In the WET-MM system, the H-AP is equipped with a large number M of antennas and functions like a conventional AP in receiving data from users, but additionally supplies wireless power to the users. We consider frame-based transmissions. Each frame is divided into three phases: the uplink channel estimation (CE) phase, the downlink WET phase, as well as the uplink wireless information transmission (WIT) phase. Firstly, users use a fraction of the previously harvested energy to send pilots, while the H-AP estimates the uplink channels and obtains the downlink channels by exploiting channel reciprocity. Next, the H-AP utilizes the channel estimates just obtained to transfer wireless energy to all users in the downlink via energy beamforming. Finally, the users use a portion of the harvested energy to send data to the H-AP simultaneously in the uplink (reserving some harvested energy for sending pilots in the next frame) . To optimize the throughput and ensure rate fairness, we consider the problem of maximizing the minimum rate among all users. In the large-M regime, we obtain the asymptotically optimal solutions and some interesting insights for the optimal design of WET-MM system.

The performance of cloud radio access network (C-RAN) is constrained by the limited fronthaul link capacity under future heavy data traffic. To tackle this problem, extensive efforts have been devoted to design efficient signal quantization/compression techniques in the fronthaul to maximize the network throughput. However, most of the previous results are based on information-theoretical quantization methods, which are hard to implement practically due to the high complexity. In this paper, we propose using practical uniform scalar quantization in the uplink communication of an orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) based C-RAN system, where the mobile users are assigned with orthogonal sub-carriers for transmission. In particular, we study the joint wireless power control and fronthaul quantization design over the sub-carriers to maximize the system throughput. Efficient algorithms are proposed to solve the joint optimization problem when either information-theoretical or practical fronthaul quantization method is applied. We show that the fronthaul capacity constraints have significant impact to the optimal wireless power control policy. As a result, the joint optimization shows significant performance gain compared with optimizing only wireless power control or fronthaul quantization. Besides, we also show that the proposed simple uniform quantization scheme performs very close to the throughput performance upper bound, and in fact overlaps with the upper bound when the fronthaul capacity is sufficiently large. Overall, our results reveal practically achievable throughput performance of C-RAN for its efficient deployment in the next-generation wireless communication systems.

This paper studies a multiple-input–single-output (MISO) broadcast channel (BC) featuring simultaneous wireless information and power transfer, where a multiantenna access point (AP) delivers both information and energy via radio signals to multiple single-antenna receivers simultaneously, and each receiver implements either information decoding (ID) or energy harvesting (EH). In particular, pseudorandom sequences that area prioriknown and therefore can be cancelled at each ID receiver are used as the energy signals, and the information-theoretically optimal dirty paper coding is employed for the information transmission. We characterize the capacity region for ID receivers by solving a sequence of weighted sum-rate (WSR) maximization (WSRMax) problems subject to a maximum sum-power constraint for the AP, and a set of minimum harvested power constraints for individual EH receivers. The problem corresponds to a new form of WSRMax problem in MISO-BC with combined maximum and minimum linear transmit covariance constraints (MaxLTCCs and MinLTCCs), which differs from the celebrated capacity region characterization problem for MISO-BC under a set of MaxLTCCs only and is challenging to solve. By extending the general BC–multiple-access-channel duality, which is only applicable to WSRMax problems with MaxLTCCs, and applying the ellipsoid method, we propose an efficient iterative algorithm to solve this problem globally optimally. Furthermore, we also propose two suboptimal algorithms with lower complexity by assuming that the information and energy signals are designed separately. Finally, numerical results are provided to validate our proposed algorithms.

The rate maximization for the K-user interference channels (ICs) has been investigated extensively in the literature. However, the practical problem of minimizing the error probability with given signal modulations and/or data rates of the users is less studied. In this paper, by utilizing additional degrees of freedom from the improper signaling (versus the conventional proper signaling) , we seek to optimize the precoding matrices for the K-user single-input single-output (SISO) ICs to minimize pair-wise error probability (PEP) and symbol error rate (SER) with two proposed algorithms, respectively. Compared with conventional proper signaling and other state-of-the-art improper signaling designs, our proposed improper signaling schemes achieve notable error rate improvement in SISO-ICs under both the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and cellular system setups with or without channel coding. Our study provides another viewpoint for optimizing transmissions in ICs and further justifies the practical benefit of improper signaling in interference-limited communication systems.

Radio-frequency (RF) enabled wireless energy transfer (WET), as a promising solution to provide cost-effective and reliable power supplies for energy-constrained wireless networks, has drawn growing interests recently. To overcome the significant propagation loss over distance, employing multi-antennas at the energy transmitter (ET) to more efficiently direct wireless energy to desired energy receivers (ERs), termed energy beamforming, is an essential technique for enabling WET. However, the achievable gain of energy beamforming crucially depends on the available channel state information (CSI) at the ET, which needs to be acquired practically. In this paper, we study the design of an efficient channel acquisition method for a point-to-point multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) WET system by exploiting the channel reciprocity, i.e., the ET estimates the CSI via dedicated reverse-link training from the ER. Considering the limited energy availability at the ER, the training strategy should be carefully designed so that the channel can be estimated with sufficient accuracy, and yet without consuming excessive energy at the ER. To this end, we propose to maximize the net harvested energy at the ER, which is the average harvested energy offset by that used for channel training. An optimization problem is formulated for the training design over MIMO Rician fading channels, including the subset of ER antennas to be trained, as well as the training time and power allocated. Closed-form solutions are obtained for some special scenarios, based on which useful insights are drawn on when training should be employed to improve the net transferred energy in MIMO WET systems.

This paper studies the training design problem for multiple-input single-output (MISO) wireless energy transfer (WET) systems in frequency-selective channels, where the frequency-diversity and energy-beamforming gains can be both reaped to maximize the transferred energy by efficiently learning the channel state information (CSI) at the energy transmitter (ET). By exploiting channel reciprocity, a new two-phase channel training scheme is proposed to achieve the diversity and beamforming gains, respectively. In the first phase, pilot signals are sent from the energy receiver (ER) over a selected subset of the available frequency sub-bands, through which the ET determines a certain number of “strongest” sub-bands with largest antenna sum-power gains and sends their indices to the ER. In the second phase, the selected sub-bands are further trained by the ER, so that the ET obtains a refined estimate of the corresponding MISO channels to implement energy beamforming for WET. A training design problem is formulated and optimally solved, which takes into account the channel training overhead by maximizing thenetharvested energy at the ER, defined as the average harvested energy offset by that consumed in the two-phase training. Moreover, asymptotic analysis is obtained for systems with a large number of antennas or a large number of sub-bands to gain useful insights on the optimal training design. Finally, numerical results are provided to corroborate our analysis and show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme that optimally balances the diversity and beamforming gains in MISO WET systems with limited-energy training.

This paper studies the simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) in a multiuser wireless system, in which distributed transmitters send independent messages to their respective receivers, and at the same time cooperatively transmit wireless power to the receivers via energy beamforming. Accordingly, from the wireless information transmission (WIT) perspective, the system of interest can be modeled as the classic interference channel, while it also can be regarded as a distributed multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system for collaborative wireless energy transmission (WET). To enable both information decoding (ID) and energy harvesting (EH) in SWIPT, we adopt the low-complexity time switching operation at each receiver to switch between the ID and EH modes over scheduled time. For the hybrid system, we aim to characterize the achievable rate-energy (R-E) trade-offs by various transmitter-side collaboration schemes. Specifically, to facilitate the collaborative energy beamforming, we propose a new signal splitting scheme at the transmitters, where each transmit signal is generally split into an information signal and an energy signal for WIT and WET, respectively. With this new scheme, first, we study the two-user SWIPT system over the fading channel and derive the optimal mode switching rule at the receivers as well as the corresponding transmit signal optimization to achieve various R-E trade-offs. We also compare the R-E performance of our proposed scheme with transmit energy beamforming and signal splitting against two existing schemes with partial or no cooperation of the transmitters. Next, the general case of SWIPT systems with more than two users is studied, for which we propose a practical transmit collaboration scheme by extending the result for the two-user case: we group users into different pairs and apply the cooperation schemes obtained in the two-user case to each paired group. Furthermore, we present a benchmarking scheme based on joint cooperation of all the transmitters inspired by the principle of interference alignment, against which the performance of the proposed scheme is compared.

The cloud radio access network (C-RAN) concept, in which densely deployed access points (APs) are empowered by cloud computing to cooperatively support mobile users (MUs), to improve mobile data rates, has been recently proposed. However, the high density of active APs results in severe interference and also inefficient energy consumption. Moreover, the growing popularity of highly interactive applications with stringent uplink (UL) requirements, e.g., network gaming and real-time broadcasting by wireless users, means that the UL transmission is becoming more crucial and requires special attention. Therefore in this paper, we propose a joint downlink (DL) and UL MU-AP association and beamforming design to coordinate interference in the C-RAN for energy minimization, a problem which is shown to be NP hard. Due to the new consideration of UL transmission, it is shown that the two state-of-the-art approaches for finding computationally efficient solutions of joint MU-AP association and beamforming considering only the DL, i.e., group-sparse optimization and relaxed-integer programming, cannot be modified in a straightforward way to solve our problem. Leveraging on the celebrated UL-DL duality result, we show that by establishing a virtual DL transmission for the original UL transmission, the joint DL and UL optimization problem can be converted to an equivalent DL problem in C-RAN with two inter-related subproblems for the original and virtual DL transmissions, respectively. Based on this transformation, two efficient algorithms for joint DL and UL MU-AP association and beamforming design are proposed, whose performances are evaluated and compared with other benchmarking schemes through extensive simulations.

This paper studies the design of an estimation system where a remotely observed source sequence is to be communicated through a noisy channel to an estimator. The remote node is assumed to have the capability of harvesting, and, subject to a capacity limit, storing energy from its ambient environment. The focus is on various transmit power-allocation strategies that minimize the mean square error at the estimator for such an energy harvesting estimation system as the fluctuation of harvested energy presents a unique challenge compared with a traditional battery powered system. We first establish the optimality of uncoded transmission for such a system. Two types of side information (SI) at the transmitter are then considered in this paper: noncausal SI (energy harvested in the past, present, and future) and causal SI (energy harvested in the past). For the case where noncausal SI is available and battery storage is unlimited, it is shown that the optimal power allocation amounts to a simple “staircase-climbing” procedure, where the power level follows a nondecreasing staircase function. For the case where battery storage has a finite capacity, the optimal power-allocation policy can also be obtained via standard convex optimization techniques. Dynamic programming (DP) is used to optimize the allocation policy when only causal SI is available. The issue of unknown transmit power at the receiver is also addressed for both the causal and noncausal SI cases. Finally, to make the proposed solutions practically more meaningful, two heuristic schemes are proposed; these schemes are largely motivated by the structure of the solution to the DP formulation but with much reduced computational complexity. Numerical examples are provided to examine the complexity-performance tradeoff of various power-allocation strategies.

This paper studies user cooperation in the emerging wireless powered communication network (WPCN) for throughput optimization. For the purpose of exposition, we consider a two-user WPCN, in which one hybrid access point (H-AP) broadcasts wireless energy to two distributed users in the downlink (DL) and the users transmit their independent information using their individually harvested energy to the H-AP in the uplink (UL) through time-division-multiple-access (TDMA). We propose user cooperation in the WPCN where the user that is nearer to the H-AP and in general has a better channel for DL energy harvesting as well as UL information transmission uses part of its allocated UL time and DL harvested energy to help relay the far user's information to the H-AP, in order to achieve more balanced throughput. We maximize the weighted sum-rate (WSR) of the two users by jointly optimizing the time and power allocations in the network for both wireless energy transfer in the DL and wireless information transmission and relaying in the UL. Simulation results show that the proposed user cooperation scheme can effectively improve the achievable throughput in the WPCN with desired user fairness.

The rate maximization for the K-user interference channels (ICs) has been investigated extensively in the literature. However, the dual problem of minimizing the error probability with given signal constellations and/or data rates of the users is less exploited. In this paper, by utilizing the additional degrees of freedom attained from the improper signaling (versus the conventional proper signaling), we optimize the precoding matrices for the K-user single-input single-output (SISO) ICs to achieve minimal transmission symbol error rate (SER). Compared to conventional proper signaling as well as other state-of-the-art improper signaling designs, our proposed improper signaling scheme is shown to achieve notable SER improvement in SISO-ICs by simulations. Our study provides another viewpoint for optimizing transmissions in ICs and further justifies the practical benefit of improper signaling in interference-limited communication systems.

This paper studies the energy management in the coordinated multi-point (CoMP) systems powered by smart grids, where each base station (BS) with local renewable energy generation is allowed to implement the two-way energy trading with the grid. Due to the unevenly generated renewable energy over distributed BSs and the difference in the prices for buying/selling energy from/to the gird, it is in general beneficial for the cooperative BSs to jointly manage their energy trading with the grid and energy consumption in CoMP based communication for reducing the total energy cost. We consider the downlink transmission in one CoMP cluster by jointly optimizing the BSs' purchased/sold energy units from/to the grid and their cooperative transmit beamforming, so as to minimize the total energy cost subject to the given quality of service (QoS) constraints for the users. By applying techniques from convex optimization and uplink-downlink duality, we propose an efficient algorithm to solve this problem optimally. Through simulations, we show the performance gain achieved by our proposed joint energy trading and communication cooperation scheme in terms of cost reduction, as compared to a baseline scheme with the separate designs of communication cooperation and energy trading.

Wireless energy transfer (WET) is potentially a promising solution to provide convenient and reliable energy supplies for energy-constrained networks, and has drawn growing interests recently. To overcome the significant propagation loss over distance, employing multi-antennas at the energy transmitter (ET) to more efficiently direct wireless energy to desired energy receivers (ERs), termed energy beamforming, is an essential technique for WET. However, the achievable gain of energy beamforming crucially depends on the available channel state information (CSI) at the ET, which needs to be acquired practically. In this paper, we study the optimal design of one efficient channel-acquisition method for a point-to-point multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) WET system, by exploiting the channel reciprocity based on which the ET estimates the CSI via dedicated reverse-link training from the ER. Considering the limited energy availability at the ER, the training strategy should be carefully designed so that the channel can be estimated with sufficient accuracy, and yet without consuming excessive energy at the ER. To this end, we propose to maximize the net energy at the ER, which is the total energy harvested offset by that used for channel training. The optimal training design, including the number of receive antennas to be trained, as well as the training time and power allocated, is derived. Our result shows that training helps only when the following conditions are satisfied: (i) the channel coherence time is sufficiently large; (ii) the number of antennas at the ET is large enough; and (iii) the effective signal-to-noise ratio (ESNR) is sufficiently high; otherwise, no training should be applied and isotropic energy transmission is optimal.

Cloud radio access network (C-RAN) has been recently proposed, in which densely deployed access points (APs) are empowered by cloud computing, to achieve enormous mobile data rates. However, close proximity of many active APs results in more severe interference and also inefficient energy consumption. To tackle this problem, we propose a joint downlink (DL) and uplink (UL) user-AP association and beamforming design in this paper to coordinate interference in the C-RAN for energy minimization. The design problem is shown to be NP hard, but exhibits an interesting “group-sparse” property. By establishing a virtual DL transmission for the original UL transmission based on the celebrated UL-DL duality result, we convert the problem to an equivalent DL problem in C-RAN with two inter-related subproblems for the original and virtual DL transmissions, respectively, and obtain an efficient solution through “group-sparse” optimization.

This paper investigates the real-time energy management in power system with distributed microgrids, which are independently operated and each is modeled to comprise of a renewable generation system, an energy storage system and an aggregated load. We jointly optimize the energy charged/discharged to/from the storage system and that drawn from the main grid over a finite horizon to minimize the total energy cost of conventional generation subject to given load and storage constraints. We assume that the renewable energy offset by the load over time, named net energy profile, is predictable but with finite errors. First, we consider the “off-line” optimization under an idealized assumption that the net energy profile is known ahead of time, and derive its optimal closed-form solution. Next, by applying the off-line solution combined with a sliding-window based sequential optimization, we propose a new “online” algorithm for real-time energy management under the practical setup with noisy predicted net energy profile subject to arbitrary errors. Finally, through simulations, we compare the performance of our proposed online algorithm against the conventional dynamic programming based solution as well as a heuristically designed myopic algorithm under a practical setup.

Wireless energy transfer (WET) via far-field radio signal has emerged as a new solution for powering wireless networks. To overcome the significant path loss in wireless channels, multi-antenna or multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) techniques have been proposed to enhance the transmission efficiency and distance for WET. However, in order to reap the large energy beamforming gain in WET, acquiring channel state information (CSI) at the energy transmitter (ET) is an essential task. This task is particularly challenging for WET systems, since existing channel training and feedback methods used for communication receivers cannot be implemented at the energy receiver (ER) due to the hardware limitation. To tackle this problem, in this paper we consider a point-to-point MIMO WET system with transmit energy beamforming, and propose a new channel learning method that requires only one feedback bit from the ER to ET per feedback interval. Each feedback bit indicates the increase or decrease of the harvested energy by the ER between the present and previous intervals, which can be measured without changing the existing hardware at the ER. Based on such feedback information, the ET adjusts transmit energy beamforming in different intervals and at the same time obtains an improved estimate of the MIMO channel by applying the analytic center cutting plane method (AC-CPM). By numerical examples, we show the performance of our proposed new channel learning algorithm for MIMO WET systems in terms of convergence speed and energy transfer efficiency, as compared to existing algorithms.

Powered by renewable energy sources, cellular communication systems usually have different traffic loads and resource availabilities over time. It is helpful for two neighbouring systems to cooperate in resource sharing when one is excessive in one resource (e.g., spectrum), while the other is sufficient in another resource (e.g., energy). In this paper, we propose a joint energy and spectrum sharing scheme between different cellular systems to save their operational costs. When the two systems are fully cooperative (e.g., belonging to the same entity), we formulate their cooperation problem to minimize the weighted sum cost as a convex optimization problem and obtain its closed-form optimal solution. We also study another partially cooperative scenario where the two systems have their own interests. We show that the two systems seek for partial cooperation when they find complementarity between the spectrum and energy resources. Under the partial cooperation conditions, we propose a distributed algorithm for the two systems to gradually and simultaneously reduce their costs from a non-cooperation benchmark to the Pareto optimum. This distributed algorithm also takes fairness into consideration, by reducing each system's cost proportionally. Finally, numerical results are presented to demonstrate the improvement made by our proposed schemes.

Simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) has recently drawn significant interests for its dual use of radio signals to provide wireless data and energy access at the same time. However, a challenging secrecy communication problem arises in the SWIPT system since the messages sent to information receivers (IRs) may be eavesdropped by energy receivers (ERs), which are presumed to receive energy from the same signals broadcast by the transmitter. To tackle this problem, we propose in this paper an artificial noise (AN) aided transmission scheme to facilitate the secrecy information transmission to IRs and yet meet the energy harvesting requirement for ERs, under the assumption that the AN can be cancelled at IRs but not at ERs. Specifically, the proposed scheme splits the power at the transmitter into two parts, to send the confidential message to the IR and an AN to interfere with the ER against eavesdropping, respectively. Under a simplified three-node wiretap channel setup, the transmit power allocations and power splitting ratios over fading channels are jointly optimized to maximize the average secrecy information rate for the IR subject to a combination of average and peak power constraints at the transmitter as well as an average energy harvesting constraint at the ER. The formulated problem is shown to be non-convex, for which we propose an efficient algorithm by iteratively optimizing the transmit power allocations and power splitting ratios over fading channels. Finally, the performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated by simulations and compared against other heuristic schemes in terms of achievable (secrecy) rate-energy trade-off.

Modern smart buildings are envisioned to have both passive and active design components, which are managed by building operating systems. A building operating system consists of different functional modules which help handle the resources of the building and contribute towards the goal of efficient energy management. This paper investigates the functional part of building operating system which aims to achieve optimal demand side management, through designed scheduling of electrical appliances in a residential setting or in office buildings. The problem is formulated and solved based on the techniques of convex optimization and stochastic optimization.

In this paper, we provide an overview of the recent advances in microwave-enabled wireless energy transfer (WET) technologies and their applications in wireless communications. Specifically, we divide our discussions into three parts. First, we introduce the state-of-the-art WET technologies and the signal processing techniques to maximize the energy transfer efficiency. Then, we discuss an interesting paradigm named simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT), where energy and information are jointly transmitted using the same radio waveform. At last, we review the recent progress in wireless powered communication networks (WPCN), where wireless devices communicate using the power harvested by means of WET. Extensions and future directions are also discussed in each of these areas.

This paper develops a unified approach to obtain optimal transmission schedule for an energy-harvesting node with non-ideal circuit power consumption. For both time-invariant and time-varying fading channels, we show that the optimal transmission between any two consecutive channel or energy state changing time, termed epoch, can only take one of the three strategies: (i) no transmission, (ii) transmission with an energy-efficiency (EE) maximizing power over part of the epoch, or (iii) transmission with a power greater than the EE-maximizing power over the whole epoch. Taking into account this structure, we develop efficient algorithms capable of computing the optimal scheduling schemes with a low complexity. The proposed approach can provide the optimal benchmarks for practical schemes in energy-harvesting powered transmissions, and can be employed to develop efficient online scheduling schemes.

This paper studies the opportunistic spectrum access (OSA) of the secondary users in a large-scale overlay cognitive radio (CR) network. Two threshold-based OSA schemes, namely the primary receiver assisted (PRA) protocol and the primary transmitter assisted (PTA) protocol, are investigated. Under the PRA/PTA protocols, a secondary transmitter (ST) is allowed to access the spectrum only when the maximum signal power of the received beacons/pilots sent from the active primary receivers/transmitters (PRs/PTs) is lower than a certain threshold. To measure the resulting transmission opportunity for the secondary users by the proposed OSA protocols, the concept of spatial opportunity, which is defined as the probability that an arbitrary location in the primary network is detected as a spatial spectrum hole, is introduced and then evaluated by applying tools from stochastic geometry. Based on spatial opportunity, the coverage (non-outage transmission) performance in the overlay CR network is analyzed. With the obtained results of spatial opportunity and coverage probability, we finally characterize the spatial throughput, which is defined as the average spatial density of successful transmissions in the primary/secondary network, under the PRA and PTA protocols, respectively.

Characterizing the fundamental tradeoffs for maximizing energy efficiency (EE) versus spectrum efficiency (SE) is a key problem in wireless communication. In this paper, we address this problem for a point-to-point additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel with the transmitter powered solely via energy harvesting from the environment. In addition, we assume a practical on-off transmitter model with non-ideal circuit power, i.e., when the transmitter is on, its consumed power is the sum of the transmit power and a constant circuit power. Under this setup, we study the optimal transmit power allocation to maximize the average throughput over a finite horizon, subject to the time-varying energy constraint and the non-ideal circuit power consumption. First, we consider the off-line optimization under the assumption that the energy arrival time and amount are a priori known at the transmitter. Although this problem is non-convex due to the non-ideal circuit power, we show an efficient optimal solution that in general corresponds to a two-phase transmission: the first phase with an EE-maximizing on-off power allocation, and the second phase with a SE-maximizing power allocation that is non-decreasing over time, thus revealing an interesting result that both the EE and SE optimizations are unified in an energy harvesting communication system. We then extend the optimal off-line algorithm to the case with multiple parallel AWGN channels, based on the principle of nested optimization. Finally, inspired by the off-line optimal solution, we propose a new online algorithm under the practical setup with only the past and present energy state information (ESI) known at the transmitter.

Massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) techniques have been recently advanced to tremendously improve the performance of wireless communication networks. However, the use of very large antenna arrays at the base stations brings new issues, such as the significantly increased hardware and signal processing costs. In order to reap the performance gains of massive MIMO and yet reduce its cost, this paper proposes a novel system design by integrating an electromagnetic (EM) lens with the large antenna array, termed the EM-lens enabled MIMO. The EM lens has the capability of focusing the power of an incident wave to a small area of the antenna array, whereas the location of the focal area varies with the angle of arrival (AoA) of the wave. Hence, in scenarios where the arriving signals from geographically separated users have different AoAs, the EM-lens enabled receiver provides two new benefits, namely, energy focusing and spatial interference rejection. By taking into account the effects of imperfect channel estimation via pilot-assisted training, in this paper, we analytically show that the average received signal-to-noise ratio in both the single-user and multiuser uplink transmissions can be improved by the EM-lens enabled system. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the proposed design makes it possible to considerably reduce the hardware and signal processing costs with only slight degradations in performance. To this end, two complexity/cost reduction schemes are proposed, which are small-MIMO processing with parallel receiver filtering applied over subgroups of antennas to reduce the computational complexity, and channel covariance based antenna selection to reduce the required number of radio frequency chains. Numerical results are provided to corroborate our analysis and show the great potential advantages of our proposed EM-lens enabled MIMO system for next generation cellular networks.

Powered by renewable energy sources, cellular communication systems usually have different wireless traffic loads and available resources over time. To match their traffics, it is beneficial for two neighboring systems to cooperate in resource sharing when one is excessive in one resource (e.g., spectrum), while the other is sufficient in another (e.g., energy). In this paper, we propose a joint energy and spectrum cooperation scheme between different cellular systems to reduce their operational costs. When the two systems are fully cooperative in nature (e.g., belonging to the same entity), we formulate the cooperation problem as a convex optimization problem to minimize their weighted sum cost and obtain the optimal solution in closed form. We also study another partially cooperative scenario where the two systems have their own interests. We show that the two systems seek for partial cooperation as long as they find inter-system complementarity between the energy and spectrum resources. Under the partial cooperation conditions, we propose a distributed algorithm for the two systems to gradually and simultaneously reduce their costs from the non-cooperative benchmark to the Pareto optimum. This distributed algorithm also has proportional fair cost reduction by reducing each system's cost proportionally over iterations. Finally, we provide numerical results to validate the convergence of the distributed algorithm to the Pareto optimality and compare the centralized and distributed cost reduction approaches for fully and partially cooperative scenarios.

This paper studies optimal resource allocation in the wireless-powered communication network (WPCN), where one hybrid access point (H-AP) operating in full duplex (FD) broadcasts wireless energy to a set of distributed users in the downlink (DL) and, at the same time, receives independent information from the users via time-division multiple access in the uplink (UL). We design an efficient protocol to support simultaneous wireless energy transfer (WET) in the DL and wireless information transmission (WIT) in the UL for the proposed FD-WPCN. We jointly optimize the time allocations to the H-AP for DL WET and different users for UL WIT and the transmit power allocations over time at the H-AP to maximize the users' weighted sum rate of UL information transmission with harvested energy. We consider both the cases with perfect and imperfect self-interference cancellation (SIC) at the H-AP, for which we obtain optimal and suboptimal time and power allocation solutions, respectively. Furthermore, we consider the half-duplex (HD) WPCN as a baseline scheme and derive its optimal resource allocation solution. Simulation results show that the FD-WPCN outperforms the HD-WPCN when effective SIC can be implemented and more stringent peak power constraint is applied at the H-AP.

The newly emerging wireless powered communication networks (WPCNs) have recently drawn significant attention, where radio signals are used to power wireless terminals for information transmission. In this paper, we study a WPCN where one multi-antenna access point (AP) coordinates energy transfer and information transfer to/from a set of single-antenna users. A harvest-then-transmit protocol is assumed where the AP first broadcasts wireless power to all users via energy beamforming in the downlink (DL), and then, the users send their independent information to the AP simultaneously in the uplink (UL) using their harvested energy. To optimize the users' throughput and yet guarantee their rate fairness, we maximize the minimum throughput among all users by a joint design of the DL-UL time allocation, the DL energy beamforming, and the UL transmit power allocation, as well as receive beamforming. We solve this nonconvex problem optimally by two steps. First, we fix the DL-UL time allocation and obtain the optimal DL energy beamforming, UL power allocation, and receive beamforming to maximize the minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio of all users. This problem is shown to be still nonconvex; however, we convert it equivalently to a spectral radius minimization problem, which can be solved efficiently by applying the alternating optimization based on the nonnegative matrix theory. Then, the optimal time allocation is found by a one-dimensional search to maximize the minimum rate of all users. Furthermore, two suboptimal designs of lower complexity are also proposed, and their throughput performance is compared against that of the optimal solution.

In this paper, we formulate and solve a weighted-sum transmitter and receiver energy minimization (WSTREMin) problem in the downlink of an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based multiuser wireless system. The proposed approach offers the flexibility of assigning different levels of importance to base station (BS) and mobile terminal (MT) power consumption, with the BS being connected to the grid and the MT relying on batteries. To obtain insights into the problem, we first consider two extreme cases separately, i.e., weighted-sum receiver-side energy minimization (WSREMin) for MTs and transmitter-side energy minimization (TEMin) for the BS. It is shown that Dynamic TDMA (D-TDMA), where MTs are scheduled for single-user OFDM transmissions over orthogonal time slots, is the optimal transmission strategy for WSREMin at MTs, while OFDMA is optimal for TEMin at the BS. As a hybrid of the two extreme cases, we further propose a new multiple access scheme, i.e., Time-Slotted OFDMA (TS-OFDMA) scheme, in which MTs are grouped into orthogonal time slots with OFDMA applied to users assigned within the same slot. TS-OFDMA can be shown to include both D-TDMA and OFDMA as special cases. Numerical results confirm that the proposed schemes enable a flexible range of energy consumption tradeoffs between the BS and MTs.

This paper studies spatial capacity in a stochastic wireless ad hoc network. We propose a novel signal-to-interference-ratio (SIR) threshold based scheduling scheme with multi-stage probing and data transmission, where each transmitter iteratively decides to further probe or stay idle, depending on whether the estimated SIR in the proceeding probing is no smaller than a predefined threshold. Though the locations of the initial transmitters can be modeled as a homogeneous Poisson Point Process (PPP), the SIR based scheduling makes the PPP model no longer applicable in the subsequent probing and data transmission phases. We first focus on single-stage probing and find that when the SIR threshold is set sufficiently small to assure an acceptable network interference level, the proposed scheme can greatly outperform the reference scheme without any transmission scheduling in terms of spatial capacity. We clearly characterize the spatial capacity with exact/approximate closed-form expressions, by proposing a new approximate approach to deal with the correlated SIR distributions over non-PPPs. Then, we successfully extend to multi-stage probing, by properly designing the multiple SIR thresholds to assure gradual improvement of the spatial capacity. Furthermore, we analyze the impact of multi-stage probing overhead and present a probing-capacity tradeoff in scheduling design. Finally, extensive numerical results are presented to demonstrate the scheduling performance.

In this paper, we propose a model for energy cooperation between cellular base stations (BSs) with individual hybrid power supplies (including both the conventional grid and renewable energy sources), limited energy storages, and connected by resistive power lines for energy sharing. When the renewable energy profile and energy demand profile at all BSs are deterministic or known ahead of time, we show that the optimal energy cooperation policy for the BSs can be found by solving a linear program. We show the benefits of energy cooperation in this regime. When the renewable energy and demand profiles are stochastic and only causally known at the BSs, we propose an online energy cooperation algorithm and show the optimality properties of this algorithm under certain conditions. Furthermore, the energy-saving performances of the developed offline and online algorithms are compared by simulations, and the effect of the availability of energy state information (ESI) on the performance gains of the BSs' energy cooperation is investigated. Finally, we propose a hybrid algorithm that can incorporate offline information about the energy profiles, but operates in an online manner.

This paper studies the optimal power allocation for outage probability minimization in point-to-point fading channels with the energy-harvesting constraints and channel distribution information (CDI) at the transmitter. Both the cases with non-causal and causal energy state information (ESI) are considered, which correspond to the energy-harvesting (EH) rates being known and unknown prior to the transmissions, respectively. For the non-causal ESI case, the average outage probability minimization problem over a finite horizon of N EH periods is shown to be non-convex for a large class of practical fading channels. However, the globally optimal "offline" power allocation is obtained by a forward search algorithm with at most N one-dimensional searches, and the optimal power profile is shown to be non-decreasing over time and have an interesting "save-then-transmit" structure. In particular, for the special case of N=1, our result revisits the classic outage capacity for fading channels with uniform power allocation. Moreover, for the case with causal ESI, we propose both the optimal and suboptimal "online" power allocation algorithms, by applying the technique of dynamic programming and exploring the structure of optimal offline solutions, respectively.

This paper studies the newly emerging wireless powered communication network in which one hybrid access point (H-AP) with constant power supply coordinates the wireless energy/information transmissions to/from a set of distributed users that do not have other energy sources. A "harvest-then-transmit" protocol is proposed where all users first harvest the wireless energy broadcast by the H-AP in the downlink (DL) and then send their independent information to the H-AP in the uplink (UL) by time-division-multiple-access (TDMA). First, we study the sum-throughput maximization of all users by jointly optimizing the time allocation for the DL wireless power transfer versus the users' UL information transmissions given a total time constraint based on the users' DL and UL channels as well as their average harvested energy values. By applying convex optimization techniques, we obtain the closed-form expressions for the optimal time allocations to maximize the sum-throughput. Our solution reveals an interesting "doubly near-far" phenomenon due to both the DL and UL distance-dependent signal attenuation, where a far user from the H-AP, which receives less wireless energy than a nearer user in the DL, has to transmit with more power in the UL for reliable information transmission. As a result, the maximum sum-throughput is shown to be achieved by allocating substantially more time to the near users than the far users, thus resulting in unfair rate allocation among different users. To overcome this problem, we furthermore propose a new performance metric so-called common-throughput with the additional constraint that all users should be allocated with an equal rate regardless of their distances to the H-AP. We present an efficient algorithm to solve the common-throughput maximization problem. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the common-throughput approach for solving the new doubly near-far problem in wireless powered communication networks.

Since radio signals carry both energy and information at the same time, a unified study on simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) has recently drawn a significant attention for achieving wireless powered communication networks. In this paper, we study a multiple-input single-output (MISO) multicast SWIPT network with one multi-antenna transmitter sending common information to multiple single-antenna receivers simultaneously along with opportunistic wireless energy harvesting at each receiver. From the practical consideration, we assume that the channel state information (CSI) is only known at each respective receiver but is unavailable at the transmitter. We propose a novel receiver mode switching scheme for SWIPT based on a new application of the conventional random beamforming technique at the multi-antenna transmitter, which generates artificial channel fading to enable more efficient energy harvesting at each receiver when the received power exceeds a certain threshold. For the proposed scheme, we investigate the achievable information rate, harvested average power and power outage probability, as well as their various trade-offs in quasi-static fading channels. Compared to a reference scheme of periodic receiver mode switching without random transmit beamforming, the proposed scheme is shown to be able to achieve better rate-energy trade-offs when the harvested power target is sufficiently large. Particularly, it is revealed that employing one single random beam for the proposed scheme is asymptotically optimal as the transmit power increases to infinity, and also performs the best with finite transmit power for the high harvested power regime of most practical interests, thus leading to an appealing low-complexity implementation. Finally, we compare the rate-energy performances of the proposed scheme with different random beam designs.

This paper studies a multi-user multiple-input single-output (MISO) downlink system for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT), in which a set of single-antenna mobile stations (MSs) receive information and energy simultaneously via power splitting (PS) from the signal sent by a multi-antenna base station (BS). We aim to minimize the total transmission power at BS by jointly designing transmit beamforming vectors and receive PS ratios for all MSs under their given signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) constraints for information decoding and harvested power constraints for energy harvesting. First, we derive the sufficient and necessary condition for the feasibility of our formulated problem. Next, we solve this non-convex problem by applying the technique of semidefinite relaxation (SDR). We prove that SDR is indeed tight for our problem and thus achieves its global optimum. Finally, we propose two suboptimal solutions of lower complexity than the optimal solution based on the principle of separating the optimization of transmit beamforming and receive PS, where the zero-forcing (ZF) and the SINR-optimal based transmit beamforming schemes are applied, respectively.

In this paper, we study the optimal design for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) in downlink multiuser orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems, where the users harvest energy and decode information using the same signals received from a fixed access point (AP). For information transmission, we consider two types of multiple access schemes, namely, time division multiple access (TDMA) and orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA). At the receiver side, due to the practical limitation that circuits for harvesting energy from radio signals are not yet able to decode the carried information directly, each user applies either time switching (TS) or power splitting (PS) to coordinate the energy harvesting (EH) and information decoding (ID) processes. For the TDMA-based information transmission, we employ TS at the receivers; for the OFDMA-based information transmission, we employ PS at the receivers. Under the above two scenarios, we address the problem of maximizing the weighted sum-rate over all users by varying the time/frequency power allocation and either TS or PS ratio, subject to a minimum harvested energy constraint on each user as well as a peak and/or total transmission power constraint. For the TS scheme, by an appropriate variable transformation the problem is reformulated as a convex problem, for which the optimal power allocation and TS ratio are obtained by the Lagrange duality method. For the PS scheme, we propose an iterative algorithm to optimize the power allocation, subcarrier (SC) allocation and the PS ratio for each user. The performances of the two schemes are compared numerically as well as analytically for the special case of single-user setup. It is revealed that the peak power constraint imposed on each OFDM SC as well as the number of users in the system play key roles in the rate-energy performance comparison by the two proposed schemes.

This paper studies the newly emerging wireless powered communication network in which one hybrid access point (H-AP) with a constant power supply coordinates the wireless energy/information transmissions to/from a set of distributed users that do not have fixed energy sources. A “harvest-then-transmit” protocol is proposed where all users first harvest the wireless energy broadcast by the H-AP in the downlink (DL) and then send their independent information to the H-AP in the uplink (UL) by time-division-multiple-access (TDMA). First, we study the sum-throughput maximization of all users by jointly optimizing the time allocated to the DL wireless power transfer and the UL information transmissions given a total time constraint based on the users' DL and UL channels as well as their average harvested energy values. Our result reveals an interesting “doubly near-far” phenomenon due to both the DL and UL distance-dependent signal attenuation, where a far user from the H-AP, which receives less wireless energy than the nearer users in the DL, has to transmit with more power in the UL for reliable communication. As a result, the sum-throughput maximization solution allocates substantially more time to the near users than the far users, thus resulting in unfair rate allocation among users. To overcome this problem, we furthermore propose to maximize a new metric so-called common-throughput with an additional constraint that all users should be allocated with equal rates regardless of their distances to the H-AP. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the common-throughput approach for solving the uniquely new doubly near-far problem in wireless powered communication networks.

The dual use of radio signals for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) has recently drawn significant attention. To meet the practical requirement that energy receivers (ERs) operate with much higher received power than information receivers (IRs), ERs need to be deployed closer to the transmitter than IRs. However, due to the broadcast nature of wireless channels, one critical issue is that the messages sent to IRs cannot be eavesdropped by ERs, which possess better channels from the transmitter. In this paper, we address this new secrecy communication problem in a multiuser multiple-input single-output (MISO) SWIPT system where a multi-antenna transmitter sends information and energy simultaneously to one IR and multiple ERs, each with a single antenna. By optimizing transmit beamforming vectors and their power allocation, we maximize the weighted sum-energy transferred to ERs subject to a secrecy rate constraint for the information sent to the IR. We solve this non-convex problem optimally by reformulating it into a two-stage problem. First, we fix the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) at the IR and obtain the optimal beamforming solution by applying the technique of semidefinite relaxation (SDR). Then the original problem is solved by a one-dimension search over the optimal SINR value for the IR. Furthermore, two suboptimal low-complexity beamforming schemes are proposed, and their achievable (secrecy) rate-energy (R-E) regions are compared against that by the optimal scheme.

In this paper, we pursue a unified study on energy harvesting and coordinated multi-point (CoMP) enabled wireless communication by investigating a new joint energy and communication cooperation approach. We consider a practical CoMP system with clusters of multiple-antenna base stations (BSs) each powered by hybrid power supplies (including both the conventional grid and renewable energy sources) cooperatively transmitting to multiple single-antenna mobile terminals (MTs). We propose a new design paradigm termed energy cooperation among BSs within each cluster, which share energy for more efficient cooperative transmission via injecting/drawing power to/from the grid with a zero-sum net energy transfer. We maximize the downlink sum-rate for all MTs in one particular CoMP cluster with cooperative zero-forcing precoding at BSs subject to a new type of transmit power constraints featuring energy cooperation among BSs with a given loss ratio. To jointly optimize the precoders at BSs and the amount of energy transferred among them, we propose an efficient algorithm by applying the techniques from convex optimization. By simulations, we show that the proposed joint communication and energy cooperation solution substantially improves the downlink throughput for energy harvesting CoMP systems, as compared to suboptimal designs without communication and/or energy cooperation.

In this paper, we study the optimal design for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) in downlink multiuser orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems, where the users harvest energy and decode information using the same signals received from a fixed access point (AP). For information transmission, we consider two types of multiple access schemes, namely, time division multiple access (TDMA) and orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA). At the receiver side, due to the practical limitation that circuits for harvesting energy from radio signals are not yet able to decode the carried information directly, each user applies either time switching (TS) or power splitting (PS) to coordinate the energy harvesting (EH) and information decoding (ID) processes. For the TDMA-based information transmission, we employ TS at the receivers; for the OFDMA-based information transmission, we employ PS at the receivers. Under the above two scenarios, we address the problem of maximizing the weighted sum-rate over all users by varying the time/frequency power allocation and either TS or PS ratio, subject to a minimum harvested energy constraint on each user as well as a peak and/or total transmission power constraint. For the TS scheme, by an appropriate variable transformation the problem is reformulated as a convex problem, for which the optimal power allocation and TS ratio are obtained by the Lagrange duality method. For the PS scheme, we propose an iterative algorithm to optimize the power allocation, subcarrier allocation and the PS ratio for each user. Numerical results show that the peak power constraint imposed on each OFDM subcarrier as well as the number of users in the system play a key role in the rate-energy performance comparison by the two proposed schemes.

Frequency control is essential to maintain the stability and reliability of power grids. For decades, generation side controllers, e.g., isochoronous governors and automatic generation controllers, have been used to stabilize the frequency of power systems, which, however, incur high operational costs. In smart grids, demand response can be used to control frequency and thus reduce the grids' dependency on expensive controllers. Despite of its economic advantages, the synchronization problem, which is due to the simultaneous responses of smart appliances, becomes the main barrier to implementing frequency responsive demand control in reality. In this paper, we propose a distributed control algorithm for smart appliances, based on the randomized frequency monitoring and a baseline hysteresis algorithm, to solve the synchronization problem. We provide analytical results to characterize the influence of distributed demand response on the system frequency dynamics. Finally, we validate our analysis and demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm via simulations on the Ireland power system.

This paper studies a multiuser multiple-input single-output (MISO) broadcast system for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT), where a multi-antenna access point (AP) sends information and energy simultaneously via beamforming to multiple single-antenna receivers. We maximize the weighted sum-power transferred to energy harvesting (EH) receivers subject to a set of minimum signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) constraints at information decoding (ID) receivers. In particular, we consider two types of ID receivers, namely Type I and Type II receivers, without and with the capability of cancelling the interference from energy signals, respectively. For each type of ID receivers, we formulate the joint information and energy transmit beamforming problem as a non-convex quadratically constrained quadratic program (QC-QP), for which the globally optimal solution is obtained by applying the technique of semidefinite relaxation (SDR). It is shown that for Type I ID receivers, dedicated energy beamforming is not needed to achieve the optimal solution, while for Type II ID receivers, employing no more than one energy beam is optimal.

This paper studies the achievable rate region of the K-user Gaussian multiple-input single-output interference channel (MISO-IC) with interference treated as noise, when improper or circularly asymmetric complex Gaussian signaling is applied. By exploiting the separable rate expression with improper Gaussian signaling, we propose a separate covariance and pseudo-covariance optimization algorithm, which is guaranteed to improve the users' rates over the conventional proper or circularly symmetric complex Gaussian signaling. In particular, for the pseudo-covariance optimization, the semidefinite relaxation (SDR) technique is applied to provide a high-quality approximate solution. For the special case of two-user MISO-IC, the SDR technique yields the optimal pseudo-covariance solution.

Optimal transmit power allocation strategies are proposed for an energy harvesting estimation system, where energy can be harvested from the environment and buffered in a battery for future use. With the aim of minimizing the mean squared error at the receiver, two types of side information (SI) available to the transmitter are considered: causal SI (energy harvested in the past) and non-causal SI (energy harvested in the past, present and future). For the case where non-causal SI is available and battery storage is unlimited, it is shown that the optimal power allocation can be attained by a simple water-filling-like procedure, where the water level follows a non-decreasing staircase function. Dynamic programming is used to optimize the allocation policy when causal SI is available. The issue of unknown transmit power at the receiver is also addressed.

Improving energy efficiency is key to network providers maintaining profit levels and an acceptable carbon footprint in the face of rapidly increasing data traffic in cellular networks in the coming years. The energy-saving concept studied in this paper is the adaptation of a base station's (BS's) transmit power levels and coverage area according to channel conditions and traffic load. Cell coverage is usually pre-designed based on the estimated peak traffic load. However, traffic load in cellular networks exhibits significant fluctuations in both space and time. We design short- and long-term power control (STPC and LTPC respectively) policies for the OFDMA-based downlink of a single-cell system, where bandwidth is dynamically and equally shared among a random number of mobile users (MUs). STPC is a function of all MUs' channel gains that maintains the required user-level quality of service (QoS), while LTPC is a function of traffic density that minimizes the long-term energy consumption at the BS under a minimum throughput constraint. We first develop a power scaling law that relates the (short-term) average transmit power at BS with the given cell range and MU density. Based on this result, we derive the optimal (long-term) transmit adaptation policy by considering a joint range adaptation and LTPC problem. Finally, we compare our proposed adaptation scheme with suboptimal schemes of lower complexity to demonstrate the potential energy saving in broadcast channels.

This paper studies the opportunistic spectrum access (OSA) of secondary users in a large-scale overlay cognitive radio network. Particularly, a threshold-based protocol is investigated, where the secondary transmitter is allowed to access the spectrum only if the maximum signal power of the received beacons transmitted by the primary receivers is lower than a certain threshold. To measure the resulting transmission opportunity for the secondary users by the proposed OSA protocol, the concept of spatial opportunity is introduced and evaluated by applying tools from stochastic geometry. Due to the dependency between the realizations of the active primary and secondary users, an exact calculation of the coverage probabilities of the primary and secondary networks is infeasible. To tackle this difficulty, approximation is made on the conditional distribution of the active secondary transmitters given a typical primary/secondary receiver activated at the origin. Based on this approximation, the coverage performance of the primary/secondary network under the proposed OSA protocol is characterized. To our best knowledge, this paper is the first attempt of using stochastic geometry to evaluate the performance of the threshold-based opportunistic spectrum access in large-scale cognitive radio networks.

This paper studies the transmit optimization for the K-user Gaussian single-input single-output interference channel (SISO-IC), with the interference treated as Gaussian noise and by applying improper or circularly asymmetric complex Gaussian signaling. The transmit optimization with improper Gaussian signaling involves not only the signal covariance as in the conventional proper or circularly symmetric complex Gaussian signaling, but also the signal pseudo-covariance, which is conventionally set to zero in proper Gaussian signaling. By utilizing the rate-profile method, the achievable rate region of the K-user SISO-IC is characterized by solving a sequence of minimum-weighted-rate maximization (MinWR-Max) problems, which are non-convex and thus difficult to be solved globally optimally. By applying the semidefinite relaxation (SDR) technique, we propose an efficient approximate solution, which jointly optimizes the covariance and pseudo-covariance of the transmitted signals. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm for the K-user SISO-IC with improper Gaussian signaling.

This paper studies the spatial capacity of wireless ad hoc networks. We propose a transmission scheme with threshold-based scheduling, where each transmitter decides to transmit in the data transmission phase if the signal-to-interference-ratio (SIR) at its receiver in the preceding pilot phase is no smaller than a predefined threshold. For comparison, we also consider a reference scheme, where all transmitters transmit independently in both the pilot and data transmission phases. For both schemes, we assume a homogeneous Poisson Point Process (PPP) to model the locations of transmitters that have the intention to transmit. However, for the proposed scheme, the point process formed by the retained transmitters in the data transmission phase is generally not a PPP due to the SIR-based scheduling. First, we show how to set the SIR threshold in the proposed scheme to assure that it outperforms the reference scheme in terms of network spatial capacity. Then, we present exact/approximate spatial capacity expressions for the proposed scheme with different SIR-threshold values. Finally, we provide simulation results to validate our analysis.

In this paper, we propose a model for energy cooperation between cellular base stations (BSs) with individual renewable energy sources, limited energy storages and connected by resistive power lines for energy sharing. When the renewable energy profile and energy demand profile at all BSs are deterministic or known ahead of time, we show that the optimal energy cooperation policy for the BSs can be found by solving a linear program. We show the benefits of energy cooperation in this regime. When the renewable energy and demand profiles are stochastic and only causally known at the BSs, we propose an online energy cooperation algorithm and show the optimality properties of this algorithm under certain conditions. Furthermore, the energy-saving performances of the developed offline and online algorithms are compared by simulations, and the effect of the availability of energy state information (ESI) on the performance gains of the BSs' energy cooperation is investigated.

This paper proposes a novel receiver mode switching scheme for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) and the enabling transmitter design for a point-to-point multiple-input single-output (MISO) channel when the channel state information (CSI) is not available at the transmitter. The proposed scheme employs random beamforming at the transmitter to generate artificial channel fading to enable opportunistic energy harvesting at the receiver when the channel power exceeds a certain threshold. For the proposed scheme, we investigate the achievable average information rate and average harvested energy, as well as trade-offs between them in MISO fading channels. Compared to a reference scheme of periodic receiver mode switching without random transmit beamforming, the proposed scheme is shown to be able to achieve better rate-energy trade-off's when the harvested energy target is sufficiently large. Particularly, it is revealed that employing one single random beam for the proposed scheme is asymptotically optimal as the transmit power increases to infinity, and also performs the best with finite transmit power for high energy harvesting requirements of practical interests, thus leading to an appealing low-complexity implementation.

The random beamforming (RBF) scheme, together with multi-user diversity based user scheduling, is able to achieve interference-free downlink transmission with only partial channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter. The impact of receive spatial diversity on RBF, however, is not fully characterized even under a single-cell setup. In this paper, we study a multi-cell multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) broadcast system with RBF applied at each base station and either the minimum-meansquare-error (MMSE), matched filter (MF), or antenna selection (AS) based spatial receiver applied at each mobile terminal. We investigate the effect of different spatial diversity receivers on the achievable sum-rate of the multi-cell RBF system subject to both the intra- and inter-cell interferences. We focus on the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime and for a tractable analysis assume that the number of users in each cell scales in a certain order with the per-cell SNR. Under this setup, we characterize the degrees of freedom (DoF) region for the multi-cell RBF system, which constitutes all the achievable sum-rate DoF tuples of all the cells. Our results reveal significant sum-rate DoF gains with the MMSE-based spatial receiver as compared to the case without spatial diversity or with suboptimal spatial receivers (MF or AS). This observation is in sharp contrast to the existing result that spatial diversity only yields marginal sum-rate gains based on the conventional asymptotic analysis in the regime of large number of users but with fixed SNR per cell.

This paper considers the use of energy harvesters, instead of conventional time-invariant energy sources, in wireless cooperative communication. For the purpose of exposition, we study the classic three-node Gaussian relay channel with decode-and-forward (DF) relaying, in which the source and relay nodes transmit with power drawn from energy-harvesting (EH) sources. Assuming a deterministic EH model under which the energy arrival time and the harvested amount are known prior to transmission, the throughput maximization problem over a finite horizon of N transmission blocks is investigated. In particular, two types of data traffic with different delay constraints are considered: delay-constrained (DC) traffic (for which only one-block decoding delay is allowed at the destination) and no-delay-constrained (NDC) traffic (for which arbitrary decoding delay up to N blocks is allowed). For the DC case, we show that the joint source and relay power allocation over time is necessary to achieve the maximum throughput, and propose an efficient algorithm to compute the optimal power profiles. For the NDC case, although the throughput maximization problem is non-convex, we prove the optimality of a separation principle for the source and relay power allocation problems, based upon which a two-stage power allocation algorithm is developed to obtain the optimal source and relay power profiles separately. Furthermore, we compare the DC and NDC cases, and obtain the sufficient and necessary conditions under which the NDC case performs strictly better than the DC case. It is shown that NDC transmission is able to exploit a new form of diversity arising from the independent source and relay energy availability over time in cooperative communication, termed "energy diversity", even with time-invariant channels.

Opportunistic spectrum access (OSA) is a key technique enabling the secondary users (SUs) in a cognitive radio (CR) network to transmit over the "spectrum holes" unoccupied by the primary users (PUs). In this paper, we focus on the OSA design in the presence of reactive PUs, where PU's access probability in a given channel is related to SU's past access decisions. We model the channel occupancy of the reactive PU as a 4-state discrete-time Markov chain. We formulate the optimal OSA design for SU throughput maximization as a constrained finite-horizon partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) problem. We solve this problem by first considering the conventional short-term conditional collision probability (SCCP) constraint. We then adopt a long-term PU throughput (LPUT) constraint to effectively protect the reactive PU transmission. We derive the structure of the optimal OSA policy under the LPUT constraint and propose a suboptimal policy with lower complexity. Numerical results are provided to validate the proposed studies, which reveal some interesting new tradeoffs between SU throughput maximization and PU transmission protection in a practical interaction scenario.

Energy harvesting is a promising solution to prolong the operation time of energy-constrained wireless networks. In particular, scavenging energy from ambient radio signals, namely wireless energy harvesting (WEH), has recently drawn significant attention. In this paper, we consider a point-to-point wireless link over the flat-fading channel, where the receiver has no fixed power supplies and thus needs to replenish energy via WEH from the signals sent by the transmitter. We first consider a SISO (single-input single-output) system where the single-antenna receiver cannot decode information and harvest energy independently from the same signal received. Under this practical constraint, we propose a dynamic power splitting (DPS) scheme, where the received signal is split into two streams with adjustable power levels for information decoding and energy harvesting separately based on the instantaneous channel condition that is assumed to be known at the receiver. We derive the optimal power splitting rule at the receiver to achieve various trade-offs between the maximum ergodic capacity for information transfer and the maximum average harvested energy for power transfer, which are characterized by the boundary of a so-called "rate-energy (R-E)" region. Moreover, for the case when the channel state information is also known at the transmitter, we investigate the joint optimization of transmitter power control and receiver power splitting. The achievable R-E region by the proposed DPS scheme is also compared against that by the existing time switching scheme as well as a performance upper bound by ignoring the practical receiver constraint. Finally, we extend the result for optimal DPS to the SIMO (single-input multiple-output) system where the receiver is equipped with multiple antennas. In particular, we investigate a low-complexity power splitting scheme, namely antenna switching, which achieves the near-optimal rate-energy trade-offs as compared to the optimal DPS.

In wireless networks, communication links may be subject to random fatal impacts: for example, sensor networks under sudden power losses or cognitive radio networks with unpredictable primary user spectrum occupancy. Under such circumstances, it is critical to quantify how fast and reliably the information can be collected over attacked links. For a single channel subject to random attacks, named as a dying channel, we model it as a block-fading (BF) channel with a finite and random channel length. For this channel, we first study the outage capacity and the outage probability when the data frame length is fixed and uniform power allocation is assumed. Furthermore, we discuss the optimization over the frame length and/or the power allocation over the constituting data blocks to minimize the outage probability. In addition, we extend the results from the single dying channel to the parallel multi-channel case where each sub-channel is a dying channel, and investigate the asymptotic behavior of the overall outage probability as the number of sub-channels goes to infinity with two different attack models: the independent-attack case and the m-dependent-attack case. It is shown that the asymptotic outage probability diminishes to zero for both cases as the number of sub-channels increases if the rate per unit cost is less than a certain threshold. The outage exponents are also studied to reveal how fast the outage probability improves with the number of sub-channels.

Simultaneous information and power transfer over the wireless channels potentially offers great convenience to mobile users. Yet practical receiver designs impose technical constraints on its hardware realization, as practical circuits for harvesting energy from radio signals are not yet able to decode the carried information directly. To make theoretical progress, we propose a general receiver operation, namely, dynamic power splitting (DPS), which splits the received signal with adjustable power ratio for energy harvesting and information decoding, separately. Three special cases of DPS, namely, time switching (TS), static power splitting (SPS) and on-off power splitting (OPS) are investigated. The TS and SPS schemes can be treated as special cases of OPS. Moreover, we propose two types of practical receiver architectures, namely, separated versus integrated information and energy receivers. The integrated receiver integrates the front-end components of the separated receiver, thus achieving a smaller form factor. The rate-energy tradeoff for the two architectures are characterized by a so-called rate-energy (R-E) region. The optimal transmission strategy is derived to achieve different rate-energy tradeoffs. With receiver circuit power consumption taken into account, it is shown that the OPS scheme is optimal for both receivers. For the ideal case when the receiver circuit does not consume power, the SPS scheme is optimal for both receivers. In addition, we study the performance for the two types of receivers under a realistic system setup that employs practical modulation. Our results provide useful insights to the optimal practical receiver design for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT).

There is a growing interest in energy efficient or so-called "green" wireless communication to reduce the energy consumption in cellular networks. Since today's wireless terminals are typically equipped with multiple network access interfaces such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular networks, this paper investigates user terminals cooperating with each other in transmitting their data packets to the base station (BS), by exploiting the multiple network access interfaces, called inter-network cooperation. We also examine the conventional schemes without user cooperation and with intra-network cooperation for comparison. Given target outage probability and data rate requirements, we analyze the energy consumption of conventional schemes as compared to the proposed inter-network cooperation by taking into account both physical-layer channel impairments and upper-layer protocol overheads. It is shown that distances between different network entities (i.e., user terminals and BS) have a significant influence on the energy efficiency of proposed inter-network cooperation scheme. Specifically, when the cooperating users are close to BS or the users are far away from each other, the inter-network cooperation may consume more energy than conventional schemes without user cooperation or with intra-network cooperation. However, as the cooperating users move away from BS and the inter-user distance is not too large, the inter-network cooperation significantly reduces the energy consumption over conventional schemes.

Wireless power transfer (WPT) is a promising new solution to provide convenient and perpetual energy supplies to wireless networks. In practice, WPT is implementable by various technologies such as inductive coupling, magnetic resonate coupling, and electromagnetic (EM) radiation, for short-/mid-/long-range applications, respectively. In this paper, we consider the EM or radio signal enabled WPT in particular. Since radio signals can carry energy as well as information at the same time, a unified study on simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) is pursued. Specifically, this paper studies a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless broadcast system consisting of three nodes, where one receiver harvests energy and another receiver decodes information separately from the signals sent by a common transmitter, and all the transmitter and receivers may be equipped with multiple antennas. Two scenarios are examined, in which the information receiver and energy receiver are separated and see different MIMO channels from the transmitter, or co-located and see the identical MIMO channel from the transmitter. For the case of separated receivers, we derive the optimal transmission strategy to achieve different tradeoffs for maximal information rate versus energy transfer, which are characterized by the boundary of a so-called rate-energy (R-E) region. For the case of co-located receivers, we show an outer bound for the achievable R-E region due to the potential limitation that practical energy harvesting receivers are not yet able to decode information directly. Under this constraint, we investigate two practical designs for the co-located receiver case, namely time switching and power splitting, and characterize their achievable R-E regions in comparison to the outer bound.

Wireless networks can be self-sustaining by harvesting energy from ambient radio-frequency (RF) signals. Recently, researchers have made progress on designing efficient circuits and devices for RF energy harvesting suitable for low-power wireless applications. Motivated by this and building upon the classic cognitive radio (CR) network model, this paper proposes a novel method for wireless networks coexisting where low-power mobiles in a secondary network, called secondary transmitters (STs), harvest ambient RF energy from transmissions by nearby active transmitters in a primary network, called primary transmitters (PTs), while opportunistically accessing the spectrum licensed to the primary network. We consider a stochastic-geometry model in which PTs and STs are distributed as independent homogeneous Poisson point processes (HPPPs) and communicate with their intended receivers at fixed distances. Each PT is associated with a guard zone to protect its intended receiver from ST's interference, and at the same time delivers RF energy to STs located in its harvesting zone. Based on the proposed model, we analyze the transmission probability of STs and the resulting spatial throughput of the secondary network. The optimal transmission power and density of STs are derived for maximizing the secondary network throughput under the given outage-probability constraints in the two coexisting networks, which reveal key insights to the optimal network design. Finally, we show that our analytical result can be generally applied to a non-CR setup, where distributed wireless power chargers are deployed to power coexisting wireless transmitters in a sensor network.

Energy harvesting is a promising solution to prolong the operation of energy-constrained wireless networks. In particular, scavenging energy from ambient radio signals, namely wireless energy harvesting (WEH), has recently drawn significant attention. In this paper, we consider a point-to-point wireless link over the narrowband flat-fading channel subject to time-varying co-channel interference. It is assumed that the receiver has no fixed power supplies and thus needs to replenish energy opportunistically via WEH from the unintended interference and/or the intended signal sent by the transmitter. We further assume a single-antenna receiver that can only decode information or harvest energy at any time due to the practical circuit limitation. Therefore, it is important to investigate when the receiver should switch between the two modes of information decoding (ID) and energy harvesting (EH), based on the instantaneous channel and interference condition. In this paper, we derive the optimal mode switching rule at the receiver to achieve various trade-offs between wireless information transfer and energy harvesting. Specifically, we determine the minimum transmission outage probability for delay-limited information transfer and the maximum ergodic capacity for no-delay-limited information transfer versus the maximum average energy harvested at the receiver, which are characterized by the boundary of so-called "outage-energy" region and "rate-energy" region, respectively. Moreover, for the case when the channel state information (CSI) is known at the transmitter, we investigate the joint optimization of transmit power control, information and energy transfer scheduling, and the receiver's mode switching. The effects of circuit energy consumption at the receiver on the achievable rate-energy trade-offs are also characterized. Our results provide useful guidelines for the efficient design of emerging wireless communication systems powered by opportunistic WEH.

In this paper, the design of a wireless communication device relying exclusively on energy harvesting is considered. Due to the inability of rechargeable energy sources to charge and discharge at the same time, a constraint we term the energy half-duplex constraint, two rechargeable energy storage devices (ESDs) are assumed so that at any given time, there is always one ESD being recharged. The energy harvesting rate is assumed to be a random variable that is constant over the time interval of interest. A save-then-transmit (ST) protocol is introduced, in which a fraction of time ρ (dubbed the save-ratio) is devoted exclusively to energy harvesting, with the remaining fraction 1-ρ used for data transmission. The ratio of the energy obtainable from an ESD to the energy harvested is termed the energy storage efficiency, η. We address the practical case of the secondary ESD being a battery with η <; 1, and the main ESD being a super-capacitor with η = 1. Important properties of the optimal save-ratio that minimizes outage probability are derived, from which useful design guidelines are drawn. In addition, we compare the outage performance of random power supply to that of constant power supply over the Rayleigh fading channel. The diversity order with random power is shown to be the same as that of constant power, but the performance gap can be large. Finally, we extend the proposed ST protocol to wireless networks with multiple transmitters. It is shown that the system-level outage performance is critically dependent on the number of transmitters and the optimal save-ratio for single-channel outage minimization.

Improving energy efficiency is key to network providers maintaining profit levels and an acceptable carbon footprint in the face of rapidly increasing data traffic in cellular networks in the coming years. The energy-saving concept studied in this paper is the adaptation of a base station's (BS's) transmit power levels and coverage area according to channel conditions and traffic load. Cell coverage is usually pre-designed based on the estimated static (e.g. peak) traffic load. However, traffic load in cellular networks exhibits significant fluctuations in both space and time, which can be exploited, through cell range adaptation, for energy saving. In this paper, we design short- and long-term BS power control (STPC and LTPC respectively) policies for the OFDMA-based downlink of a single-cell system, where bandwidth is dynamically and equally shared among a random number of mobile users (MUs). STPC is a function of all MUs' channel gains that maintains the required user-level quality of service (QoS), while LTPC (including BS on-off control) is a function of traffic density that minimizes the long-term energy consumption at the BS under a minimum throughput constraint. We first develop a power scaling law that relates the (short-term) average transmit power at BS with the given cell range and MU density. Based on this result, we derive the optimal (long-term) transmit adaptation policy by considering a joint range adaptation and LTPC problem. By identifying the fact that energy saving at BS essentially comes from two major energy saving mechanisms (ESMs), i.e. range adaptation and BS on-off power control, we propose low-complexity suboptimal schemes with various combinations of the two ESMs to investigate their impacts on system energy consumption. It is shown that when the network throughput is low, BS on-off power control is the most effective ESM, while when the network throughput is higher, range adaptation becomes more effective.

This paper studies the achievable rate region of the K-user Gaussian multiple-input single-output interference channel (MISO-IC) with the interference treated as noise, when improper or circularly asymmetric complex Gaussian signaling is applied. The transmit optimization with improper Gaussian signaling involves not only the signal covariance matrix as in the conventional proper or circularly symmetric Gaussian signaling, but also the signal pseudo-covariance matrix, which is conventionally set to zero in proper Gaussian signaling. By exploiting the separable rate expression with improper Gaussian signaling, we propose a separate transmit covariance and pseudo-covariance optimization algorithm, which is guaranteed to improve the users' achievable rates over the conventional proper Gaussian signaling. In particular, for the pseudo-covariance optimization, we establish the optimality of rank-1 pseudo-covariance matrices, given the optimal rank-1 transmit covariance matrices for achieving the Pareto boundary of the rate region. Based on this result, we are able to greatly reduce the number of variables in the pseudo-covariance optimization problem and thereby develop an efficient solution by applying the celebrated semidefinite relaxation (SDR) technique. Finally, we extend the result to the Gaussian MISO broadcast channel (MISO-BC) with improper Gaussian signaling or so-called widely linear transmit precoding.

This paper revisits the optimal power allocation for outage minimization in the classic point-to-point fading channels with the channel distribution information (CDI) known at the transmitter. The channel state information (CSI) is assumed to be perfectly known at the receiver, but not available at the transmitter. In particular, we consider a finite horizon of N-block transmissions subject to an average power constraint at the transmitter. Although minimizing the time-averaged per-block outage probability over each N-block transmission is shown to be a non-convex problem for a large class of practical fading channels, we show that the globally optimal power allocation is obtainable by a simple one-dimensional search. It is shown that if the average transmit power is above a certain threshold determined by the distribution of the fading channel and the target transmission rate, the uniform power allocation is optimal; otherwise, an on-off power allocation is optimal. Moreover, a suboptimal low-complexity power allocation scheme is proposed, which is shown to be asymptotically optimal as N goes to infinity. Finally, numerical results are provided to validate our analysis.

Simultaneous information and power transfer over the wireless channels potentially offers great convenience to mobile users. Yet practical receiver designs impose technical constraints on its hardware realization, as practical circuits for harvesting energy from radio signals are not yet able to decode the carried information directly. To make theoretical progress, we propose a general receiver operation, namely, dynamic power splitting (DPS), which splits the received signal with adjustable power for energy harvesting and for information decoding. Moreover, we propose two types of practical receiver architectures, namely, separated versus integrated information and energy receivers. The integrated receiver integrates the front-end components of the separated receiver, thus achieving a smaller form factor. The rate-energy tradeoff for these two architectures are characterized by a so-called rate-energy (R-E) region. Numerical results show that the R-E region of the integrated receiver is superior to that of the separated receiver when more harvested power is desired.

In this paper, we study the three-node Gaussian relay channel with decode-and-forward (DF) relaying, in which the source and relay nodes transmit with power drawn from energy-harvesting sources. Assuming a deterministic energy-harvesting model under which the energy arrival time and the harvested amount are known prior to transmission, the throughput maximization problem over a finite horizon of N transmission blocks is investigated. We consider the nodelay-constrained (NDC) traffic case, for which the relay can store the decoded information from the source with arbitrary delay before forwarding it to the destination in each N-block transmission. Although the formulated problem is non-convex, we prove the optimality of a separation principle for the source and relay power allocation over time, based upon which a two-stage algorithm is developed to obtain the optimal source and relay power profiles separately.

Random beamforming (RBF) is a practically favorable transmission scheme for multiuser multi-antenna downlink systems. This paper studies the asymptotic rates achievable with RBF in a multi-cell system subject to the inter-cell interference, by assuming that the number of users in each cell scales in a given order with the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In particular, we investigate the achievable degrees of freedom (DoF) for the sum-rate in each cell when the SNR goes to infinity, and characterize the achievable DoF region for all the cells. Our results show that to achieve the DoF-optimal transmission in a multi-cell system with RBF, the numbers of transmit beams in all the cells need to be assigned in a collaborative manner based on the user densities.

This paper considers the use of energy harvesters, instead of conventional time-invariant energy sources, in wireless cooperative communication. For the purpose of exposition, we study the classic three-node Gaussian relay channel with decode-and-forward (DF) relaying, in which the source and relay nodes transmit with power drawn from energy-harvesting sources. Assuming a deterministic energy-harvesting model under which the energy arrival time and the harvested energy amount are known prior to transmission, the throughput maximization problem over a finite horizon of N transmission blocks is investigated for the delay-constrained (DC) case (for which only one-block decoding delay is allowed at the destination). By exploiting the structures of the optimal source and relay power profiles, we show that the joint source and relay power allocation over time is necessary to achieve the maximum throughput, and propose an efficient forward two-dimensional search algorithm to compute the optimal power profiles.

This paper considers the use of energy harvesters in delay-constrained point-to-point wireless communications, where the source transmits with power drawn periodically from a device that harvests energy from the environment. In particular, the source is assumed to transmit over a block-fading channel with a constant transmission rate. It is also assumed that the channel state information (CSI) is unknown at the source but perfectly known at the destination, and the energy harvesting process is deterministic and known a priori at the source. The optimal power allocation is studied to minimize the receiver outage probability over a finite horizon of N energy-harvesting periods, each of which contains M communication blocks with independent channel fading coefficients. Although the outage minimization problem is shown to be non-convex, the optimal power allocation solution is obtained by the proposed forward search algorithm, which corresponds to an on-off transmission scheme. Moreover, a threshold-based sub-optimal low-complexity power allocation algorithm is proposed, which is shown to be asymptotically optimal as M goes to infinity. Finally, numerical results are provided to validate our analysis.

Energy harvesting is a promising solution to prolong the operation of energy-constrained wireless networks. In particular, scavenging energy from ambient radio signals, namely wireless energy harvesting (WEH), has recently drawn significant attention. In this paper, we consider a point-to-point wireless link over the flat-fading channel subject to the time-varying co-channel interference. It is assumed that the receiver has no fixed power supplies and thus needs to replenish energy via WEH from the unintended interference and/or the intended signal sent by the transmitter. We further assume a single-antenna receiver that can only decode information or harvest energy at any given time due to the practical circuit limitation. As a result, it is important to investigate when the receiver should switch between the two modes of information decoding (ID) and energy harvesting (EH), based on the instantaneous channel and interference conditions. In this paper, we derive the optimal mode switching rule at the receiver to achieve various tradeoffs between the minimum transmission outage probability for ID and the maximum average harvested energy for EH, which are characterized by the boundary of a so-called “outage-energy” region. Moreover, for the case when the channel state information (CSI) is known at the transmitter, we investigate the joint optimization of transmit power control and scheduling for information and energy transfer with the receiver's mode switching. Our results provide useful insights to the optimal design of emerging wireless communication systems powered by opportunistic WEH.

In this paper, the design of a wireless communication device relying exclusively on energy harvesting is considered. Due to the inability of rechargeable energy sources to charge and discharge at the same time, a constraint we term the energy half-duplex constraint, two rechargeable energy storage devices (ESDs) are assumed so that at any given time, there is always one ESD being recharged. The energy harvesting rate is a random variable that is constant over the time interval of interest. A save-then-transmit (ST) protocol is introduced, in which a fraction of time ρ (dubbed the save ratio) is devoted exclusively to energy harvesting, with the remaining fraction 1 - ρ used for data transmission. The ratio of the energy obtainable from an ESD to the energy harvested is termed the ESD efficiency, η. We address the practical case of the secondary ESD being a battery with η <; 1, and the main ESD being a super-capacitor with η = 1. The optimal save-ratio that minimizes outage probability is derived, from which some useful design guidelines are drawn. Numerical results are provided to validate our proposed study.

Consider a wireless network that has two tiers with different priorities: a primary tier vs. a secondary tier, which is an emerging network scenario with the advancement of cognitive radio technologies. The primary tier consists of randomly distributed legacy nodes of density n, which have an absolute priority to access the spectrum. The secondary tier consists of randomly distributed cognitive nodes of density m=nβwith β≥ 2, which can only access the spectrum opportunistically to limit the interference to the primary tier. Based on the assumption that the secondary tier is allowed to route the packets for the primary tier, we investigate the throughput and delay scaling laws of the two tiers in the following two scenarios: (i) the primary and secondary nodes are all static; (ii) the primary nodes are static while the secondary nodes are mobile. With the proposed protocols for the two tiers, we show that the primary tier can achieve a per-node throughput scaling of λp(n)=Θ(1/log n) in the above two scenarios. In the associated delay analysis for the first scenario, we show that the primary tier can achieve a delay scaling of Dp(n)=Θ(√(nβlog n λp(n))) with λp(n)=O(1/log n). In the second scenario, with two mobility models considered for the secondary nodes: an i.i.d. mobility model and a random walk model, we show that the primary tier can achieve delay scaling laws of Θ(1) and Θ(1/S), respectively, where S is the random walk step size. The throughput and delay scaling laws for the secondary tier are also established, which are the same as those for a stand-alone network.

This paper investigates price-based resource allocation strategies for two-tier femtocell networks, in which a central macrocell is underlaid with distributed femtocells, all operating over the same frequency band. Assuming that the macrocell base station (MBS) protects itself by pricing the interference from femtocell users, a Stackelberg game is formulated to study the joint utility maximization of the macrocell and femtocells subject to a maximum tolerable interference power constraint at the MBS. Two practical femtocell network models are investigated: sparsely deployed scenario for rural areas and densely deployed scenario for urban areas. For each scenario, two pricing schemes: uniform pricing and non-uniform pricing, are proposed. The Stackelberg equilibriums for the proposed games are characterized, and an effective distributed interference price bargaining algorithm with guaranteed convergence is proposed for the uniform-pricing case. Numerical examples are presented to verify the proposed studies. It is shown that the proposed schemes are effective in resource allocation and macrocell protection for both the uplink and downlink transmissions in spectrum-sharing femtocell networks.

This paper studies a multi-carrier based spectrum sharing system, in which two users iteratively update their respective transmit power allocation over parallel subcarriers (SCs) to maximize the individual transmit rate. Unlike the conventional iterative water-filling (IWF) algorithm that adopts the single-user detection (SD) at each user's receiver by treating the interference from all other users as additive noise, this paper proposes a new decentralized resource allocation scheme, namely iterative spectrum shaping (ISS), in which each receiver applies multiuser detection to opportunistically cancel the co-channel interference over selected SCs, thus termed opportunistic multiuser detection (OMD). Two coding schemes are investigated to exploit different forms of "frequency diversity" gains with OMD: carrier independent coding, which applies independent codebooks for different SCs to maximize the interference-decoding diversity; and carrier joint coding, which uses one single codebook across all the SCs to achieve the full coded diversity. For each coding scheme, the optimal transmit power allocation strategy is derived to maximize one user's transmit rate, with the power and rate allocation of the other user being fixed. Simulation results show that the converged system throughput by the proposed ISS algorithm with OMD is significantly improved over that by the conventional IWF with SD, in cognitive radio (CR) based wireless spectrum sharing networks.

Owing to the special structure of the Gaussian multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) broadcast channel (BC), the associated capacity region computation and beamforming optimization problems are typically non-convex, and thus cannot be solved directly. One feasible approach is to consider the respective dual multiple-access channel (MAC) problems, which are easier to deal with due to their convexity properties. The conventional BC-MAC duality has been established via BC-MAC signal transformation, and is applicable only for the case in which the MIMO BC is subject to a single transmit sum-power constraint. An alternative approach is based on minimax duality, which can be applied to the case of the sum-power constraint or per-antenna power constraint. In this paper, the conventional BC-MAC duality is extended to the general linear transmit covariance constraint (LTCC) case, which includes sum-power and per-antenna power constraints as special cases. The obtained general BC-MAC duality is applied to solve the capacity region computation for the MIMO BC and beamforming optimization for the multiple-input single-output (MISO) BC, respectively, with multiple LTCCs. The relationship between this new general BC-MAC duality and the minimax duality is also discussed, and it is shown that the general BC-MAC duality leads to simpler problem formulations. Moreover, the general BC-MAC duality is extended to deal with the case of nonlinear transmit covariance constraints in the MIMO BC.

Multi-antenna precoding effectively mitigates the interference in wireless networks. However, the resultant performance gains can be significantly compromised in practice if the precoder design fails to account for the inaccuracy in the channel state information (CSI) feedback. This paper addresses this issue by considering finite-rate CSI feedback from receivers to their interfering transmitters in the two-user multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) interference channel, called cooperative feedback, and proposing a systematic method for designing transceivers comprising linear precoders and equalizers. Specifically, each precoder/equalizer is decomposed into inner and outer components for nulling the cross-link interference and achieving array gain, respectively. The inner precoders/equalizers are further optimized to suppress the residual interference resulting from finite-rate cooperative feedback. Furthermore, the residual interference is regulated by additional scalar cooperative feedback signals that are designed to control transmission power using different criteria including fixed interference margin and maximum sum throughput. Finally, the required number of cooperative precoder feedback bits is derived for limiting the throughput loss due to precoder quantization.

This paper considers the blind detection for a two-way relay system in which two source nodes exchange information via a relay node by amplify-and-forward relaying. An efficient transmission scheme is first proposed to achieve unique identifications of both the transmitted symbols and channel coefficients at a noise-free receiver using the M-ary phase shift keying modulation. Blind receivers based on the generalized likelihood ratio test are then derived for both the reciprocal and nonreciprocal channels with additive Gaussian noise. The least square error-based receiver is also studied for the case without prior knowledge of the noise power for detection. Moreover, constellation selection algorithms are proposed to achieve a uniform transmission bit rate for the ease of implementation. Finally, numerical results are provided to validate the proposed schemes.

Characterizing the global maximum of weighted sum-rate (WSR) for the K-user Gaussian interference channel (GIC), with the interference treated as Gaussian noise, is a key problem in wireless communication. However, due to the users' mutual interference, this problem is in general non-convex and thus cannot be solved directly by conventional convex optimization techniques. In this paper, by jointly utilizing the monotonic optimization and rate profile techniques, we develop a new framework to obtain the globally optimal power control and/or beamforming solutions to WSR maximization problems for the GICs with single-antenna transmitters and single-antenna receivers (SISO), single-antenna transmitters and multi-antenna receivers (SIMO), or multi-antenna transmitters and single-antenna receivers (MISO). Different from prior work, this paper proposes to maximize the WSR in the achievable rate region of the GIC directly by exploiting the facts that the achievable rate region is a "normal" set and the users' WSR is a strictly increasing function over the rate region. Consequently, the WSR maximization is shown to be in the form of monotonic optimization over a normal set and thus can be solved globally optimally by the existing outer polyblock approximation algorithm. However, an essential step in the algorithm hinges on how to efficiently characterize the intersection point on the Pareto boundary of the achievable rate region with any prescribed "rate profile" vector. This paper shows that such a problem can be transformed into a sequence of signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) feasibility problems, which can be solved efficiently by applying existing techniques. Numerical results validate that the proposed algorithms can achieve the global WSR maximum for the SISO, SIMO or MISO GIC, which serves as a performance benchmark for other heuristic algorithms.

This paper studies the performance limits of multi-antenna wireless broadcasting systems for simultaneous information and power (energy) transfer. For the purpose of exposition, a three-node network is investigated, in which one receiver harvests energy and another receiver decodes information separately from the signals broadcast by a common transmitter. Two scenarios are examined, where the information receiver and energy receiver are separated and see different channels from the transmitter, or co-located and see the same channel from the transmitter. For the case of separated receivers, we derive the optimal transmission strategies to achieve different tradeoffs for maximal information rate versus energy transfer, which are characterized by the boundary of a so-called rate-energy (R-E) region. For the case of co-located receivers, we show an outer bound for the achievable R-E region, due to the potential limitation that practical circuits for harvesting energy from radio signals are not yet able to decode the carried information at the same time. Under this constraint, we propose two practical receiver designs for the co-located receivers, namely, time switching and power splitting, and characterize their achievable R-E regions in comparison with the outer bound.

This paper studies cooperative resource allocation schemes for the inter-cell interference control in multi-cell orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems. For the purpose of exposition, the downlink transmission in a simplified three-cell system is examined. It is assumed that all cells simultaneously access the same frequency band using OFDMA, which corresponds to a universal frequency reuse in cellular systems. Unlike the conventional approach that treats subcarriers as separate dimensions for user scheduling and power allocation in OFDMA, the paper exploits the interference alignment (IA) technique to formulate a new cooperative resource allocation scheme for multi-cell OFDMA by incorporating the frequency-domain precoding over parallel subcarriers. The joint optimization of frequency-domain precoders via IA, subcarrier user selection and power allocation for all cells is then investigated to maximize the system sum-throughput. Numerical results for a symmetric channel setup reveal that the IA-based scheme achieves notable throughput gains over the traditional scheme without frequency-domain precoding only when the inter-cell interference link has a comparable strength as the direct signal link, and the direct-link signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is sufficiently high. Motivated by this observation, two hybrid schemes are proposed to exploit the benefits of both traditional and IA-based schemes, for practical cellular systems with heterogenous channel conditions.

This paper investigates price-based resource allocation strategies for the uplink transmission of a spectrum-sharing femtocell network, in which a central macrocell is underlaid with distributed femtocells, all operating over the same frequency band as the macrocell. Assuming that the macrocell base station(MBS) protects itself by pricing the interference from the femtocell users, a Stackelberg game is formulated to study the joint utility maximization of the macrocell and the femtocells subject to a maximum tolerable interference power constraint at the MBS. In particular, two pricing schemes: uniform pricing and non-uniform pricing, are investigated. Then, the Stackelberg equilibriums for the proposed games are studied, and the relationship between the two pricing schemes is examined. It is shown that the nonuniform pricing scheme maximizes the revenue of the MBS, while the uniform pricing scheme maximizes the sum-rate of the femtocell users.

Opportunistic spectrum access (OSA) is a key technique for the secondary user (SU) in a Cognitive Radio network to transmit over the "spectrum holes" unoccupied by the primary user (PU). Most existing work on the design of OSA has assumed a non-reactive (NR) PU model, i.e., the PU transmission on-off status is independent of the SU access policy, which may not be practical. In this paper, we propose a new Reactive Primary User (RPU) model for the study of OSA, where the PU's access probability over a particular channel is related to the SU's past access history. We model the channel occupancy of the RPU as a 4-state memoryless Markov chain, as opposed to the conventional 2-state (on/off) counterpart, where the expanded state space and state transition probabilities are used to model the reactions of the PU subject to the SU transmit collision. Under this model, we formulate the optimal OSA design for the SU's throughput maximization as a finite-horizon partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) problem, subject to a conditional collision probability constraint for protecting the PU. Because of the high complexity of the proposed problem, we further propose a separation principle to obtain the optimal policy for the SU with implementable complexity. Numerical results show the new tradeoff between the SU's and the PU's throughput under the RPU model, as compared to the conventional NRPU model.

This paper studies the cooperative interference control in a two-cell downlink OFDMA system, which can be modeled as an interfering broadcast channel. It is assumed that each cell can simultaneously access the same frequency band, which corresponds to a universal frequency-reuse in cellular systems. We study the joint power and subcarrier allocation over the two cells to maximize their sum throughput for both centralized and decentralized implementation. Specifically, the decentralized allocation is achieved via a new interactive interference control approach, where the two cells independently implement resource allocation to maximize individual throughput, subject to mutual interference power constraints. Simulation results show that the proposed decentralized resource allocation scheme achieves the system throughput close to that with the optimal centralized scheme, and also provides significant gains via cooperative interference control as compared to existing schemes.

In this paper, we consider a cognitive radio (CR) network where a secondary (cognitive) user shares the spectrum for transmission with a primary (non-cognitive) user over block-fading (BF) channels. It is assumed that the primary user has a constant-rate, constant-power transmission, while the secondary user is able to adapt transmit power and rate allocation over different fading states based on the channel state information (CSI) of the CR network. We study a new type of constraint imposed over the secondary transmission to protect the primary user by limiting the maximum transmission outage probability of the primary user to be below a desired target. We derive the optimal power allocation strategies for the secondary user to maximize its ergodic/outage capacity, under the average/peak transmit power constraint along with the proposed primary user outage probability constraint. It is shown by simulations that the derived new power allocation strategies can achieve substantial capacity gains for the secondary user over the conventional methods based on the interference temperature (IT) constraint to protect the primary transmission, with the same resultant primary user outage probability.

This paper studies the design of decentralized multiuser (MU) multi-antenna/multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems for wireless spectrum sharing over a fixed frequency band, in which users independently update their transmit covariance matrices for individual transmit-rate maximization in an iterative manner. This design problem was usually investigated in the literature by assuming that each user treats the co-channel interference from all the other users as additional noise at the receiver and, accordingly, the conventional single-user decoder (SUD) is applied. This paper considers a more advanced decoder design approach for decentralized MU-MIMO systems, in which each user opportunistically cancels the co-channel interference from certain subset of coexisting users when their signals are jointly decodable with the desired signal at the receiver. The new decoding scheme is thus termed opportunistic multiuser detection (OMD). This paper derives the optimal transmit covariance matrix for users' iterative maximization of individual transmit rates with the proposed OMD at the receiver, and evaluates the achievable throughput gains for decentralized MU-MIMO systems against the conventional SUD. Promising applications of the OMD for achieving maximum interference mitigation gains in spectrum sharing based wireless systems such as cognitive radio networks and cellular networks are demonstrated.

We consider the use of energy harvesters, in place of conventional batteries with fixed energy storage, for point-to-point wireless communications. In addition to the challenge of transmitting in a channel with time selective fading, energy harvesters provide a perpetual but unreliable energy source. In this paper, we consider the problem of energy allocation over a finite horizon, taking into account a time varying channel and energy source, so as to maximize the throughput. Two types of side information are assumed to be available: causal side information of the immediate past channel condition and harvested energy, and full side information. We obtain structural results for the optimal energy allocation, via the use of dynamic programming and convex optimization techniques. In particular, if unlimited energy can be stored in the battery with harvested energy, we prove the optimality of a water-filling energy allocation solution with multiple, non-decreasing water levels.

Relation Based Access Control (RelBAC) is an access control model that places permissions as first class concepts. Under this model, we discuss in this paper how to formalize typical access control policies with Description Logics. Important security properties, i.e., Separation of Duties (SoD) and Chinese Wall are studied and formally represented in RelBAC. To meet the needs of automated tools for administrators, we show that RelBAC can formalize and answer queries about access control requests and administrative checks resorting to the reasoning services of the underlying Description Logic.

Cognitive beamforming (CB) is a promising technique for efficient spectrum sharing between primary users (PUs) and secondary users (SUs) in a cognitive radio network. With CB, the multi-antenna SU transmitter is able to suppress the interference to the PU receiver and maximize the SU link throughput. Existing designs on CB assume that the SU transmitter either has prior knowledge of the interference channel to the PU receiver or can acquire this knowledge by observing the PU transmission. Both assumptions may be impractical. In this paper, we propose a new and practical design paradigm for CB based on finite-rate cooperative feedback from the PU receiver to the SU transmitter. Specifically, for the case of multiple-input single-output (MISO) SU channel and single- input single-output (SISO) PU channel, the PU receiver collaboratively communicates to the SU transmitter the channel direction information (CDI), namely the quantized shape of the SU- to-PU MISO channel, and the interference power control (IPC) signal, which specifies the maximum transmit power of the SU given the interference margin at the PU receiver. We present a CB algorithm for the SU transmitter based on the finite-rate CDI and IPC feedback. The resulting outage probability of the SU MISO channel is derived and shown to be lower-bounded by a function of the number of feedback bits, which is independent of the signal- to-noise ratio. Moreover, the optimal tradeoff between CDI and IPC feedback is analyzed.

Block diagonalization (BD) is a practically favorable precoding technique that eliminates the interuser interference in downlink multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. In this paper, we apply BD to the downlink transmission in a cooperative multi-cell system, where the signals from different base stations (BSs) to all the mobile stations (MSs) are jointly designed with the perfect knowledge of the downlink channels and transmit messages. Specifically, this paper studies the BD precoder design to maximize the weighted sum-rate achievable for all the MSs. The associated optimization problem can be formulated in an auxiliary MIMO broadcast channel (BC) with a set of transmit power constraints equivalent to those for different BSs in the multi-cell system. Based on convex optimization techniques, this paper designs an efficient algorithm to solve this problem, and derives the structure of the corresponding optimal BD precoding matrix. Moreover, for the special case of single-antenna BSs and MSs, it is shown that the proposed solution leads to the optimal zero-forcing beamforming (ZF-BF) precoder design for the multiple-input single-output (MISO) BC with the per-antenna power constraints.

This paper studies the downlink beamforming for a multi-cell system, where multiple base stations (BSs) each with multiple antennas cooperatively design their respective transmit beamforming vectors to optimize the overall system performance. It is assumed that all mobile stations (MSs) are equipped with a single antenna each, and there is one active MS in each cell at one time. Accordingly, the system of interest can be modeled by a multiple-input single-output (MISO) Gaussian interference channel (IC), termed as MISO-IC, with interference treated as additive Gaussian noise. We are interested in designing a multi-cell cooperative downlink beamforming scheme to achieve different rate-tuples for active MSs on the Pareto boundary of the achievable rate region for the MISO-IC, which is in general a non-convex problem due to the coupled signal structure. By exploring the relationship between the MISO-IC and the cognitive radio (CR) MISO channel, we show that each Pareto-boundary rate-tuple of the MISO-IC can be achieved in a decentralized manner when each of the MSs attains its own channel capacity subject to a certain set of interference-power constraints (also known as interference-temperature constraints in the CR system) at the other MS receivers. Furthermore, we show that this result leads to a decentralized algorithm for implementing the multi-cell cooperative downlink beamforming, where all different pairs of BSs independently search for their mutually desirable interference-temperature constraints, under which their respective beamforming vectors are optimized to maximize the individual transmit rates. It is shown that this algorithm guarantees to improve the rates for a given pair of BSs at each iteration with those for the other BSs unaffected, and converges when there are no further incentives for all the BSs to adjust their mutual interference-temperature constraints.

Block diagonalization (BD) is a practical linear precoding technique that eliminates the inter-user interference in downlink multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. In this paper, we apply BD to the downlink transmission in a cooperative multi-cell MIMO system, where the signals from different base stations (BSs) to all the mobile stations (MSs) are jointly designed with the perfect knowledge of the downlink channels and transmit messages. Specifically, we study the optimal BD precoder design to maximize the weighted sum-rate of all the MSs subject to a set of per-BS power constraints. This design problem is formulated in an auxiliary MIMO broadcast channel (BC) with a set of transmit power constraints corresponding to those for individual BSs in the multi-cell system. By applying convex optimization techniques, this paper develops an efficient algorithm to solve this problem, and derives the closed-form expression for the optimal BD precoding matrix. It is revealed that the optimal BD precoding vectors for each MS in the per-BS power constraint case are in general non-orthogonal, which differs from the conventional orthogonal BD precoder design for the MIMO-BC under one single sum-power constraint. Moreover, for the special case of single-antenna BSs and MSs, the proposed solution reduces to the optimal zero-forcing beamforming (ZF-BF) precoder design for the weighted sum-rate maximization in the multiple-input single-output (MISO) BC with per-antenna power constraints. Suboptimal and low-complexity BD/ZF-BF precoding schemes are also presented, and their achievable rates are compared against those with the optimal schemes.

This paper studies the wireless spectrum sharing between a pair of distributed primary radio (PR) and cognitive radio (CR) links. Assuming that the PR link adapts its transmit power and/or rate upon receiving an interference signal from the CR and such transmit adaptations are observable by the CR, this results in a new form of feedback from the PR to CR, refereed to as hidden PR feedback, whereby the CR learns the PR's strategy for transmit adaptations without the need of a dedicated feedback channel from the PR. In this paper, we exploit the hidden PR feedback to design new learning and transmission schemes for spectrum sharing based CRs, namely active learning and supervised transmission. For active learning, the CR initiatively sends a probing signal to interfere with the PR, and from the observed PR transmit adaptations the CR estimates the channel gain from its transmitter to the PR receiver, which is essential for the CR to control its interference to the PR during the subsequent data transmission. This paper proposes a new transmission protocol for the CR to implement the active learning and the solutions to deal with various practical issues for implementation, such as time synchronization, rate estimation granularity, power measurement noise, and channel variation. Furthermore, with the acquired knowledge from active learning, the CR designs a supervised data transmission by effectively controlling the interference powers both to and from the PR, so as to achieve the optimum performance tradeoffs for the PR and CR links. Numerical results are provided to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes for CRs under different system setups.

This paper studies the transmit strategy for a secondary link or the so-called cognitive radio (CR) link under opportunistic spectrum sharing with an existing primary radio (PR) link. It is assumed that the CR transmitter is equipped with multi-antennas, whereby transmit precoding and power control can be jointly deployed to balance between avoiding interference at the PR terminals and optimizing performance of the CR link. This operation is named as cognitive beamforming (CB). Unlike prior study on CB that assumes perfect knowledge of the channels over which the CR transmitter interferes with the PR terminals, this paper proposes a practical CB scheme utilizing a new idea of effective interference channel (EIC), which can be efficiently estimated at the CR transmitter from its observed PR signals. Somehow surprisingly, this paper shows that the learning-based CB scheme with the EIC improves the CR channel capacity against the conventional scheme even with the exact CRto- PR channel knowledge, when the PR link is equipped with multi-antennas but only communicates over a subspace of the total available spatial dimensions. Moreover, this paper presents algorithms for the CR to estimate the EIC over a finite learning time. Due to channel estimation errors, the proposed CB scheme causes leakage interference at the PR terminals, which leads to an interesting learning-throughput tradeoff phenomenon for the CR, pertinent to its time allocation between channel learning and data transmission. This paper derives the optimal channel learning time to maximize the effective throughput of the CR link, subject to the CR transmit power constraint and the interference power constraints for the PR terminals.

In this letter, we propose multi-antenna based spectrum sensing methods for cognitive radios (CRs) using the generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) paradigm. The proposed methods utilize the eigenvalues of the sample covariance matrix of the received signal vector from multiple antennas, taking advantage of the fact that in practice, the primary user signals to be detected will either occupy a subspace of dimension strictly smaller than the dimension of the observation space, or have a non-white spatial spectrum. These methods do not require prior knowledge of the primary user signals, or the channels from the primary users to the CR. By making different assumptions on the availability of the white noise power value at the CR receiver, we derive two algorithms that are shown to outperform the standard energy detector.

This paper studies the achievable rates of the multi-antenna or multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) secrecy channel with multiple single-/multi-antenna eavesdroppers. By assuming Gaussian input, the maximum achievable secrecy rate is obtained with the optimal transmit covariance matrix that maximizes the minimum difference between the channel mutual information of the secrecy user and those of the eavesdroppers. The maximum secrecy rate computation can thus be formulated as a non-convex max-min problem, which cannot be solved efficiently by existing methods. To handle this difficulty, this paper explores a new relationship between the secrecy channel and the recently developed cognitive radio (CR) channel, in which the secondary user transmits over the same spectrum simultaneously with multiple primary users, subject to the received interference power constraints at the primary users, or the so-called "interference temperature (IT)" constraints. By constructing an auxiliary multi-antenna CR channel that has the same channel responses as the secrecy channel, this paper shows that the optimal transmit covariance to achieve the maximum secrecy rate is the same as that to achieve the CR spectrum sharing capacity with properly selected IT constraints. Thereby, finding the optimal complex transmit covariance matrix for the secrecy channel becomes equivalent to searching over a set of real IT constraints in the auxiliary CR channel. Based on this relationship, efficient algorithms are proposed to solve the non-convex secrecy rate maximization problem by transforming it into a sequence of convex CR spectrum sharing capacity computation problems, under various setups of the secrecy channel.

This paper considers a spectrum underlay network, where an OFDM-based cognitive radio (CR) system is allowed to share the subcarriers of an OFDMA-based primary system for simultaneous transmission. Instead of using the conventional interference power constraint (IPC) to protect the primary users (PUs) in the primary system, a new criterion referred to as rate loss constraint (RLC), in the form of an upper bound on the maximum rate loss of each PU due to the CR transmission, is proposed for primary transmission protection. Assuming the channel state information (CSI) of the PU link, the CR link, and their mutual interference links is available to the CR, the optimal power allocation strategy to maximize the achievable rate of the CR system is derived under RLC together with CR¿s transmit power constraint. It is shown that the CR system can achieve a significant rate gain under RLC as compared to IPC. Furthermore, the relationship between RLC and IPC is investigated, and it is shown that the rate gain is obtained by exploiting the additional CSI of the PU link. A more general case referred to as hybrid protection to PUs is then studied, by taking into account that some PU links¿ CSI is not available at CR.

Consider a wireless network of two tiers with different priorities: a primary tier and a secondary tier, which is an emerging network scenario with the advancement of cognitive radio technologies. The primary tier is constructed over static nodes of density n, which are randomly distributed and have an absolute priority to access the spectrum. The secondary tier contains mobile nodes of density m = nßwith ß ¿ 2, which can only access the spectrum opportunistically to limit the interference to the primary tier. By allowing the secondary tier to relay the packets for the primary tier, we show that the achievable per-node throughput scaling for the primary tier can be improved to ¿p(n) = ¿(1/log n). In the associated delay analysis, two mobility models are considered for the secondary nodes: an i.i.d. mobility model and a random walk model. We show that the primary tier can achieve delay scaling laws of ¿(1) and ¿(1/S) with the two mobility models, respectively, where S is the random walk step size. Furthermore, we show that the primary tier can achieve a delay-throughput tradeoff of Dp(n) = O (n¿p(n)) with ¿p(n) = O(1/log n) for the random walk model. The throughput and delay scaling laws for the secondary tier are also established, which are the same as those for a stand-alone mobile network.

This paper considers a spectrum sharing wireless environment, where an OFDM-based cognitive radio system is allowed to access the spectrum originally licensed to an OFDMA primary system. A new criterion referred to as the rate loss constraint, in the form of an upper bound on the maximum rate loss of the primary user due to the secondary transmission, is proposed for primary transmission protection. In addition, assuming that some PUs are protected by the rate loss constraint, and some PUs are protected by the interference power constraint, the optimal power allocation strategy to maximize the rate of the cognitive radio system under such a hybrid protection to PUs together with a transmit power constraint is derived. Then, the relationship between the rate loss constraint and the interference power constraint is investigated, and it is shown by simulation that the cognitive radio system can achieve a significant rate gain under the proposed constraint compared with that under the conventional interference power constraint.

This paper considers a cognitive radio network where a secondary user shares the same narrow band with a primary user for transmission. Instead of adopting the conventional interference-power/interference-temperature constraint, this paper proposes a new type of constraint for the secondary user to protect the primary transmission, which limits the maximum outage probability of the primary transmission subject to the secondary user's interference to be below a prescribed target. Under this newly proposed constraint along with the average/peak transmit power constraint, the paper derives the optimal power allocation strategies over block-fading channels for the secondary user to achieve its outage capacity. It is shown by simulations that the derived power allocation strategies achieve substantial outage capacity gains for the secondary user over the conventional power control policies based upon the interference-temperature constraint, given the same primary user's outage probability constraint.

This paper studies wireless spectrum sharing between a primary radio (PR) link and a secondary radio or so-called cognitive radio (CR) link. Assuming that the PR adapts its transmit power and/or rate upon receiving an interference signal from the CR, and such transmit adaptations are observable by the CR, this phenomenon leads to a new form of feedback from PR to CR, termed as hidden PR feedback, whereby the CR obtains the information of PR transmit adaptations without the need of a dedicated feedback channel from the PR. This interesting interaction between PR and CR is investigated in this paper to design new learning and transmission strategies for the CR, named as active learning and supervised transmission, respectively. For the active learning, this paper shows that via exploiting the hidden PR feedback, the CR is able to estimate the channel gain from the CR transmitter to the PR receiver, which is essential for the CR to predict the resulting PR performance degradation as a function of the CR transmit power level. Moreover, this paper shows that the hidden PR feedback enables the CR to design a supervised transmission to effectively control the "feedback" interference from the PR by properly setting the CR transmit power level. This paper analyzes the CR achievable rate with/without the operation of canceling the PR feedback interference at the CR receiver.

This paper studies the design of a decentralized multiuser MIMO system for spectrum sharing over a fixed bandwidth, where the coexisting users independently update their transmit covariance matrices for individual rate maximization via an iterative manner. This design problem was usually investigated in the literature by assuming that each user treats the co-channel interference from all the other users as additional noise at its receiver, i.e., the conventional single-user decoding (SUD) for the MIMO channel is applied. In this paper, we propose a new decoding method for the decentralized multiuser MIMO system, whereby each user opportunistically cancels the co-channel interference from some or all of the other users via applying multiuser detection techniques, thus named opportunistic multiuser detection (OMD). This paper studies the optimal transmit covariance matrix for each user to iteratively maximize transmit rate with the proposed OMD, and shows the resultant capacity gains over the conventional SUD.

This paper studies the robust beamforming design problem for a multiple-input single-output (MISO) secrecy channel with a single-antenna eavesdropper. Due to the illegal nature, the eavesdropper may try to hide itself from being caught; thus, it could be difficult for the secrecy transmitter (S-Tx) to obtain accurate channel state information (CSI) of the eavesdropping link between S-Tx and the eavesdropper. Assuming that the CSI of the eavesdropping link belongs to a known uncertain set, this paper designs the optimal transmit strategy for the secrecy user to maximize the transmit rate under the condition that the eavesdropper cannot decode the secrecy message for all possible channel realizations of the eavesdropping link. This robust design problem is non-convex and cannot be solved by existing algorithms in the literature. By exploiting the relationship between the secrecy MISO channel and the cognitive radio (CR) MISO channel, this problem is transformed into a robust CR beamforming design problem, which can be solved efficiently by the interior point method. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

This paper presents a multi-antenna cognitive radio (CR) system that is capable of operating concurrently with the primary radio (PR) link. The operation of the CR system consists of three stages: environmental learning, CR channel training and CR data transmission. In environmental learning stage, partial channel information between PR and CR are obtained blindly, based on which the transmit beamforming and the receive beamforming strategies are designed at CR to remove/reduce the interference to and from PR, respectively. We characterize all the interference values analytically and study the problem of learning/training tradeoff associated with the proposed scheme. The optimal balancing between learning and training is examined via the minimum mean square error (MSE) of the channel estimation. It is shown that for a given total learning/training time, there indeed exists a optimal learning time that minimizes the MSE of the channel estimation, yet the interference power to the PR is regulated.

We consider the channel estimation issues for two-way relay network (TWRN) that employs orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation. We propose a two-phase training protocol for channel estimation, which is compatible with two-phase data transmission scheme associated with TWRN. It will be seen that channel estimation in TWRN is quite different from that in the traditional point-to-point system or even that in the one-way relay network (OWRN). The identifiability issue of the channel estimation, which particularly exists for TWRN, is studied. Simulation results corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In this paper, we consider a secondary link sharing the spectrum with a primary link in a fading cognitive radio (CR) network. Instead of applying the conventional interference power constraint at the primary user (PU) receiver for the secondary user (SU) to protect the primary transmission, we propose a new constraint on the maximum tolerable outage probability for the PU due to the SU transmission. Under the assumption that perfect instantaneous channel state information (CSI) on the SU channel, the channel from the SU transmitter to PU receiver, and the PU channel is available at the SU transmitter, we derive the optimal power allocation strategies to achieve the ergodic capacity of the SU fading channel. It is shown by simulations that the proposed power allocation strategies can achieve substantial capacity gain for the SU over that based on the conventional interference power constraint, for the same PU outage probability loss.

In this paper, we investigate the optimal transmission schemes for dying channels, which were introduced in (M. Zeng et al., 2008). The dying channels are resulted in wireless networks subject to random fatal impacts, e.g., sensor networks under sudden physical attacks or cognitive radio networks with unpredictable primary user occupancy. Due to the non-ergodic and delay- limited nature of a dying channel, the outage capacity is adopted as the performance metric. Firstly, we show that the optimal power allocation profile is non-increasing when fading gains are independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.). Secondly, when the fading gains over the blocks are the same, we prove that the optimal number of blocks over which a codeword should be spanned is K = 1. At last, we consider the case where uniform power allocation is utilized and fading gains are i.i.d. In this case, we derive the upper and lower bounds for the outage probability. Moreover, for the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) case with Rayleigh fading , we derive analytical results on the optimal number of coding blocks K. For the low SNR case, we show that repetition transmissions are approximately optimal.

This paper studies the wirelesstwo-wayrelaychannel(TWRC), where two source nodes, S1 and S2, exchange information through an assisting relay node, R. It is assumed that R receives the sum signal from S1 and S2 in one time-slot, and then amplifies and forwards the received signal to both S1 and S2 in the next time-slot. By applying the principle ofanaloguenetworkcoding(ANC), each of S1 and S2 cancels the so-called "self-interference" in the received signal from R and then decodes the desired message. Assuming that S1 and S2 are each equipped with a single antenna and R with multi-antennas, this paper analyzes thecapacityregionof an ANC-based TWRC with linear processing (beamforming) at R. The capacity region contains all the achievable bidirectional rate-pairs of S1 and S2 under the given transmit power constraints at S1, S2, and R. We present the optimal relay beamforming structure as well as an efficient algorithm to compute the optimal beamforming matrix based on convex optimization techniques.

This paper considers spectrum sharing between a cognitive radio (CR) and a primary radio (PR) where the CR protects the PR transmission by regulating the resultant interference power level at the PR receiver to be below some predefined threshold. The interference-power constraint at the PR receiver is usually one of the following two types: average interference power (AIP) constraint that regulates the average power level over different fading states and peak interference power (PIP) constraint that limits the peak power level at each fading state. From CR's perspective, AIP constraint is more favorable than PIP constraint because of its more flexibility for dynamic power allocations. On the contrary, from the perspective of protecting the PR, the more restrictive PIP constraint appears at a first glance to be a better option. Some surprisingly, this paper shows that in terms of various forms of capacity limits achievable for the PR fading channel, namely, ergodic and outage capacities, AIP constraint is also superior over PIP constraint. This result is based upon an interesting interference diversity phenomenon, i.e., variable interference power levels at the PR receiver in the AIP case are more advantageous over constant ones in the PIP case for minimizing the resulted PR capacity losses. Therefore, AIP constraint leads to larger fading channel capacities over PIP constraint for both CR and PR transmissions.

This paper studies a new decentralized resource allocation strategy, named iterative spectrum shaping (ISS), for a multi-carrier-based spectrum sharing system, where two co-existing users independently and sequentially update transmit power allocation over parallel subcarriers to maximize their individual transmit rates. Unlike the conventional iterative water-filling (IWF) algorithm that applies the single-user detection (SD) at each user receiver by treating the interference from the other user as additional noise, the proposed ISS algorithm opportunistically applies multiuser detection techniques to decode both the desired user and interference user messages, thus termed as opportunistic multiuser detection (OMD). For OMD, this paper derives the optimal user power and rate allocation strategy at each iteration of transmit adaptation. Numerical examples show that the proposed ISS deploying OMD is able to achieve substantial throughput gains over the conventional IWF deploying SD in decentralized spectrum sharing systems.

Consider a static wireless network that has two tiers with different priorities: a primary tier vs. a secondary tier. The primary tier consists of randomly distributed legacy nodes of density n, which have an absolute priority to access the spectrum. The secondary tier consists of randomly distributed cognitive nodes of density m = nbetawith beta ges 2, which can only access the spectrum opportunistically to limit the interference to the primary tier. By allowing the secondary tier to route the packets for the primary tier, we show that the primary tier can achieve a throughput scaling of lambdap(n) = Theta(1/log n) per node and a delay-throughput tradeoff of Dp(n) = Theta (radic(nbetalog nlambdap(n))) for lambdap(n) = O (1/log n), while the secondary tier still achieves the same optimal delay-throughput tradeoff as a stand-alone network.