The safe and high-efficiency operation of low-altitude vehicles (LAVs) is the key to supporting the rapid development of the low-altitude economy. However, the conventional space-air-ground integrated network (C-SAGIN) mainly focuses on ground users, which is difficult to provide high-quality services for LAVs. In this article, we first propose a novel architecture of low-altitude centric space-air-ground integrated network (LAC-SAGIN), where low-altitude airspace and LAVs become the communication centers. A detailed comparison is further illustrated between these two architectures in terms of their composition and performance metrics. Although LAC-SAGIN can effectively support the low-latency and continuous communication of LAVs, it still faces several key implementation challenges including insufficient low-altitude infrastructures, high mobility of LAVs and its diversified task requirements, and low transmission efficiency and energy efficiency in airspace communication. To address these challenges, the corresponding three countermeasures are proposed, which reveal the future research direction of LAC-SAGIN.

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is a promising technology garnering significant attention among the Internet of Things (IoT) community due to its superior spectral efficiency. This work addresses the rate region boundary enhancement of downlink NOMA systems under imperfect successive interference cancellation (SIC) with advanced improper Gaussian signaling (IGS), which provides additional degrees of freedom for system design. We investigate a universal scenario in which two users adopt improper signaling and their transmit powers are optimized. We first formulate the achievable rate of both users in terms of the impropriety degree of the IGS. First, the analytical expressions for the best improper transmission are characterized by jointly optimizing the users’ power and the impropriety degree for the perfect SIC case. Then, a deep Q network (DQN)-based approach is provided to find the rate region of the IGS-aided NOMA system under imperfect SIC. Simulations presented for the downlink NOMA system support the analysis, illustrating that IGS can efficiently enhance the rate region of the NOMA system compared to proper signaling.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)-assisted networks play a pivotal role in both terrestrial base stations (BSs) and non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) due to their extensive coverage and collaborative decision-making capabilities. However, the presence of diverse node types, rapidly evolving requirements, and dynamic channel conditions poses substantial challenges for ground users (GUs) access, particularly in an unknown environment within BS-UAV-NTN integrated networks. To tackle these challenges, this paper introduces a novel approach-a deep Q-learning network (DQN)-based algorithm for UAVs deployment and an adaptive and load balancing (ALB) scheme for GUs access. This paper formulates the GUs access problem in BS-UAV-NTN networks as a maximization problem, transforming it into a Markov Decision Process (MDP) problem for UAVs deployment in unknown environment. The proposed solution includes a DQN-based UAVs deployment algorithm and an access scheme that prioritizes BSs and UAVs. Simulation results convincingly show that this access scheme outperforms traditional Q-learning and random schemes in terms of rewards and the number of accessed GUs.

User scheduling and beamforming design are two crucial yet coupled topics for multiuser wireless communication systems. They are usually addressed separately with conventional optimization methods. In this paper, cross-layer optimization problem is considered, namely, the user scheduling and beamforming are jointly discussed, subjecting to the requirement of per-user quality of service and the maximum allowable transmit power for multicell multiuser joint transmission networks. To achieve the goal, a mixed discrete-continuous variables combinational optimization problem is investigated with aiming at maximizing the sum rate of the communication system. To circumvent the original non-convex problem with dynamic solution space, we first transform it into a 0–1 integer and continuous variables optimization problem, and then obtain a tractable form with continuous variables by exploiting the characteristics of the 0–1 integer constraints. Finally, the scheduled users and the optimized beamforming vectors are simultaneously calculated by an alternating optimization algorithm. We also theoretically prove that the base stations allocate zero power to the unscheduled users. Furthermore, two heuristic optimization algorithms are proposed respectively based on brute-force search and greedy search. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of our proposed methods, and the optimization approach gets relatively balanced results compared with the other two approaches.