In this paper, we investigate the outage probability of a multi-tier dual-hop terrestrial-low earth orbit (LEO) satellite-geostationary earth orbit (GEO) satellite hybrid wireless communication system. The system comprises multi-tier LEOs and one GEO act as relays in the uplink, which help the terrestrial ground station (S) transmit information to the terrestrial destination (D). In uplink transmission, we introduce a one-dimensional hardcore point process to model different altitudes of LEOs’ different tiers. We also use a generalized selection combining technique to achieve a trade-off between maximum ratio combining and selection combining. In downlink, GEO offers the maximum coverage to randomly distributed D. Moreover, the independent identically distributed Nakagami-m fading and shadowed Rician distribution are brought to model the different channels. Finally, Monte-Carlo simulations are presented to affirm the precision and accuracy of the derived analytical models and the proposed analysis. This framework offers crucial insights for system designers and network operators, enabling the optimization of resource allocation, relay strategies, and overall reliability in terrestrial-satellite hybrid networks.

Secure communication is crucial in many emerging systems enabled by uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) communication networks. To protect legitimate communication in a chaotic UAV environment, where both eavesdropping and jamming become straightforward from multiple adversaries with line-of-sight signal propagation, a new reliable and integrated physical-layer security mechanism is proposed in this article for a massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) UAV system. Particularly, a physical-layer fingerprint, also called a tag, is first embedded into each message for authentication purpose. We then propose to reuse the tag additionally as a reference to encode each message to ensure secrecy for confidentiality enhancement at a low cost. Specifically, we create a new dual-reference symmetric tag generation mechanism by inputting an encoding-insensitive feature of plaintext along with the key into a hash function. At a legitimate receiver, an expected tag, reliable for decoding, can be symmetrically regenerated based on the received ciphertext, and authentication can be performed by comparing the regenerated reference tag to the received tag. However, an illegitimate receiver can only receive the fuzzy tag which can not be used to decode the received message. Additionally, we introduce artificial noise (AN) to degrade eavesdropping to further decrease message leakage. To verify the efficiency of our proposed tag-based encoding (TBE) scheme, we formulate two optimization problems, including ergodic sum secrecy rate maximization and authentication fail probability minimization. The power allocation solutions are derived by difference-of-convex (DC) programming and the Lagrange method, respectively. The simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed TBE approach compared to the prior AN-aided tag embedding scheme.

Sparse vector coding (SVC) is emerging as a key enabler for short-packet ultrareliable and low-latency communications (URLLCs), since it displays good block error rate (BLER) performance and can achieve low transmission latency. In this article, we propose an SVC-based sparse superimposed transmission (SVC-ST) coding scheme to further enhance the BLER performance of the SVC scheme. At the encoding side, a portion of transmission bits is represented by nonzero position indices of the sparse vector. The remaining bits are equally split into multiple streams and then mapped into the nonzero positions of sparse vector via quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) with constellation rotation (CR). We afterward adopt the multipath matching pursuit-based soft decoding (MMP-SD) to recover the transmission packet. The BLER and bit error rate (BER) analyses of the SVC-ST scheme demonstrate the validity and rationality of our study. Moreover, we find from the simulation results that the proposed SVC-ST scheme outperforms SVC and its enhanced version (ESVC) schemes in terms of BLER and latency performance.

The flexible deployment without new infrastructure makes unmanned aerial vehicles employing as base stations (UAV-BS) promising for many applications. Since the signals in millimeter-wave frequencies have very small wavelengths, large antenna arrays can be placed in the UAV-BS. Thus, the UAV-BS is capable of providing abundant spatial resources. Spatial modulation (SM) is an effective technology in exploiting additional capacity of the spatial domain by transmitting antenna indices as virtual bits information. However, a limitation of the classical SM is a single transmit antenna activated at each time slot. As a result, the multiplexing gain offered by the multiple transmit antennas has a significant loss. Generalised spatial modulation (GSM) allows several antennas to be activated to overcome the problem of SM. However, GSM has an improvement in throughput, while suffers from the performance loss resulting from the channel correlation, which is generated by multiple active antennas. Thus, the grouping SM (GrSM) is utilized to offer spatial capacity for the UAV-BS in mmWave frequency. Specially, the transmit antennas of the UAV-BS are partitioned into groups based on their channel characteristics. The SM is adopted by each group, and the multiplexing gain is achieved across groups. Moreover, the deployment of the UAV-BS has significant influence on the throughput of the system. In this paper, we formulate a problem to maximize the achievable sum rate of the ground user. The GrSM scheme is utilized to obtain extra throughput in spatial domain. Since the dimension of the UAV position is not very high, a grid based exhaustive search method is adopted to solve the optimization problem. Simulation results demonstrate the proposed solution has an improvement in terms of the sum rate performance.

Sparse code multiple access (SCMA), which helps improve spectrum efficiency (SE) and enhance connectivity, has been proposed as a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme for 5G systems. In SCMA, codebook design determines system overload ratio and detection performance at a receiver. In this paper, an SCMA codebook design approach is proposed based on uniquely decomposable constellation group (UDCG). We show that there are N+1 ( N ≥ 1) constellations in the proposed UDCG, each of which has M (M ≥ 2) constellation points. These constellations are allocated to users sharing the same resource. Combining the constellations allocated on multiple resources of each user, we can obtain UDCG-based codebook sets. Bit error ratio (BER) performance will be discussed in terms of coding gain maximization with superimposed constellations and UDCG-based codebooks. Simulation results demonstrate that the superimposed constellation of each resource has large minimum Euclidean distance (MED) and meets uniquely decodable constraint. Thus, BER performance of the proposed codebook design approach outperforms that of the existing codebook design schemes in both uncoded and coded SCMA systems, especially for large-size codebooks.