Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems employing one-bit digital-to-analog converters offer a hardware-efficient solution for wireless communications. However, the one-bit constraint poses significant challenges for precoding design, as it transforms the problem into a discrete and nonconvex optimization task. In this paper, we investigate a widely adopted ``convex-relaxation-then-quantization" approach for nonlinear symbol-level one-bit precoding. Specifically, we first solve a convex relaxation of the discrete minimum mean square error precoding problem, and then quantize the solution to satisfy the one-bit constraint. Focusing on a real-valued system with an independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.) Gaussian channel, we develop a novel analytical framework based on approximate message passing (AMP) to characterize the high-dimensional asymptotic performance of the considered scheme. The key technical ingredient is an auxiliary AMP iteration that dedicatedly incorporates the nonlinear quantization function into the state evolution analysis. With the proposed framework, we derive a closed-form expression for the symbol error probability (SEP) at the receiver side in the large-system limit, which provides a quantitative characterization of how model and system parameters affect the SEP performance. Our empirical results suggest that the $\ell_\infty^2$ regularizer, when paired with an optimally chosen regularization parameter, achieves optimal SEP performance within a broad class of convex regularization functions. As a first step towards a theoretical justification, we prove the optimality of the $\ell_\infty^2$ regularizer within the mixed $\ell_\infty^2$-$\ell_2^2$ regularization functions.

A great amount of endeavor has recently been devoted to activity detection for massive machine-type communications in cell-free multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. However, as the number of antennas at the access points (APs) increases, the Rayleigh distance that separates the near-field and far-field regions also expands, rendering the conventional assumption of sole far-field propagation impractical. To address this challenge, this paper establishes a covariance-based formulation that can effectively capture the statistical property of hybrid near-far field channels. Based on this formulation, we theoretically reveal that increasing the proportion of near-field channels enhances the detection performance. Furthermore, we propose a distributed algorithm, where each AP performs local activity detection and only exchanges the detection results to the central processing unit, thus significantly reduces the computational complexity and the communication overhead. Not only with convergence guarantee, the proposed algorithm is unified in the sense that it can handle single-cell or cell-free systems with either near-field or far-field devices as special cases. Simulation results validate the theoretical analyses and demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach compared with existing methods.

This paper studies the device activity detection problem in a massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system for near-field communications (NFC). In this system, active devices transmit their signature sequences to the base station (BS), which detects the active devices based on the received signal. In this paper, we model the near-field channels as correlated Rician fading channels and formulate the device activity detection problem as a maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) problem. Compared to the traditional uncorrelated channel model, the correlation of channels complicates both algorithm design and theoretical analysis of the MLE problem. On the algorithmic side, we present the classical exact coordinate descent (CD) algorithm for solving the MLE problem, which suffers from numerical instability when applied to correlated channels. We propose a computationally efficient inexact CD algorithm by approximating the objective function, which approximately solves the one-dimensional subproblem and improves both computational efficiency and numerical stability. Additionally, we analyze the detection performance of the MLE problem under correlated channels by comparing it with the case of uncorrelated channels. The analysis shows that when the overall number of devicesNis large or the signature sequence lengthLis small, the detection performance of MLE under correlated channels tends to be better than that under uncorrelated channels. Conversely, whenNis small orLis large, MLE performs better under uncorrelated channels than under correlated ones. Finally, we study the MLE model in the joint device activity and data detection context. Simulation results demonstrate the computational performance of the presented algorithms and verify the correctness of the analysis.

A great amount of endeavor has recently been devoted to activity detection for massive machine-type communications in cell-free massive MIMO. However, in practice, as the number of antennas at the access points (APs) increases, the Rayleigh distance that separates the near-field and far-field regions also expands, rendering the conventional assumption of far-field propagation alone impractical. To address this challenge, this paper considers a hybrid near-far field activity detection in cell-free massive MIMO, and establishes a covariance-based formulation, which facilitates the development of a distributed algorithm to alleviate the computational burden at the central processing unit (CPU). Specifically, each AP performs local activity detection for the devices and then transmits the detection result to the CPU for further processing. In particular, a novel coordinate descent algorithm based on the Sherman-Morrison-Woodbury update with Taylor expansion is proposed to handle the local detection problem at each AP. Moreover, we theoretically analyze how the hybrid near-far field channels affect the detection performance. Simulation results validate the theoretical analysis and demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach compared with existing approaches.

Consider an integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system where a base station (BS) employs a full-duplex radio to simultaneously serve multiple users and detect a target. The detection performance of the BS may be compromised by self-interference (SI) leakage. This paper investigates the feasibility of SI cancellation (SIC) through the application of symbol-level precoding (SLP). We first derive the target detection probability in the presence of the SI. We then formulate an SLP-based SIC problem, which optimizes the target detection probability while satisfying the quality of service requirements of all users. The formulated problem is a nonconvex fractional programming (FP) problem with a large number of equality and inequality constraints. We propose a penalty-based block coordinate descent (BCD) algorithm for solving the formulated problem, which allows for efficient closed-form updates of each block of variables at each iteration. Finally, numerical simulation results are presented to showcase the enhanced detection performance of the proposed SIC approach.

Chance constrained programming (CCP) is a powerful framework for addressing optimization problems under uncertainty. In this paper, we introduce a novel Gradient-Guided Diffusion-based Optimization framework, termed GGDOpt, which tackles CCP through three key innovations. First, GGDOpt accommodates a broad class of CCP problems without requiring the knowledge of the exact distribution of uncertainty—relying solely on a set of samples. Second, to address the nonconvexity of the chance constraints, it reformulates the CCP as a sampling problem over the product of two distributions: an unknown data distribution supported on a nonconvex set and a Boltzmann distribution defined by the objective function, which fully leverages both first- and second-order gradient information. Third, GGDOpt has theoretical convergence guarantees and provides practical error bounds under mild assumptions. By progressively injecting noise during the forward diffusion process to convexify the nonconvex feasible region, GGDOpt enables guided reverse sampling to generate asymptotically optimal solutions. Experimental results on synthetic datasets and a waveform design task in wireless communications demonstrate that GGDOpt outperforms existing methods in both solution quality and stability with nearly 80\% overhead reduction.

Both dual-functional radar-communication (DFRC) and massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) have been recognized as enabling technologies for 6G wireless networks. This paper considers the advanced waveform design for hardware-efficient massive MIMO DFRC systems. Specifically, the transmit waveform is imposed with the quantized constant-envelope (QCE) constraint, which facilitates the employment of low-resolution digital-to-analog converters (DACs) and power-efficient amplifiers. The waveform design problem is formulated as the minimization of the mean square error (MSE) between the designed and desired beampatterns subject to the constructive interference (CI)-based communication quality of service (QoS) constraints and the QCE constraint. To solve the formulated problem, we first utilize the penalty technique to transform the discrete problem into an equivalent continuous penalty model. Then, we propose an inexact augmented Lagrangian method (ALM) algorithm for solving the penalty model. In particular, the ALM subproblem at each iteration is solved by a custom-built block successive upper-bound minimization (BSUM) algorithm, which admits closed-form updates, making the proposed inexact ALM algorithm computationally efficient. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach over existing state-of-the-art ones. In addition, extensive simulations are conducted to examine the impact of various system parameters on the trade-off between communication and radar performances.

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) has been considered a key feature of next-generation wireless networks. This paper investigates the joint design of the radar receive filter and dual-functional transmit waveform for the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) ISAC system. While optimizing the mean square error (MSE) of the radar receive spatial response and maximizing the achievable rate at the communication receiver, besides the constraints of full-power radar receiving filter and unimodular transmit sequence, we control the maximum range sidelobe level, which is often overlooked in existing ISAC waveform design literature, for better radar imaging performance. To solve the formulated optimization problem with convex and nonconvex constraints, we propose an inexact augmented Lagrangian method (ALM) algorithm. For each subproblem in the proposed inexact ALM algorithm, we custom-design a block successive upper-bound minimization (BSUM) scheme with closed-form solutions for all blocks of the variable to enhance the computational efficiency. Convergence analysis shows that the proposed algorithm is guaranteed to provide a stationary and feasible solution. Extensive simulations are performed to investigate the impact of different system parameters on communication and radar imaging performance. Comparison with the existing works shows the superiority of the proposed algorithm.

In this paper, we consider the network slicing () problem which aims to map multiple customized virtual network requests (also called services) to a common shared network infrastructure and manage network resources to meet diverse quality of service (QoS) requirements. We propose a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) formulation for the considered NS problem that can flexibly route the traffic flow of the services on multiple paths and provide end-to-end delay and reliability guarantees for all services. To overcome the computational difficulty due to the intrinsic nonlinearity in the MINLP formulation, we transform the formulation into an equivalent mixed-integer linear programming () formulation and further show that their continuous relaxations are equivalent. In sharp contrast to the continuous relaxation of the formulation which is a nonconvex nonlinear programming problem, the continuous relaxation of the formulation is a polynomial-time solvable linear programming problem, which significantly facilitates the algorithmic design. Based on the newly proposed formulation, we develop a customized column generation () algorithm for solving the problem. The proposed algorithm is a decomposition-based algorithm and is particularly suitable for solving large-scale problems. Numerical results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed formulations and the proposed algorithm.

This paper revisits the identity detection problem under the current grant-free protocol in massive machine-type communications (mMTC) by asking the following question: for stable identity detection performance, is it enough to permit active devices to transmit preambles without any handshaking with the base station (BS)? Specifically, in the current grant-free protocol, the BS blindly allocates a fixed length of preamble to devices for identity detection as it lacks the prior information on the number of active devices K. However, in practice, K varies dynamically over time, resulting in degraded identity detection performance especially when K is large. Consequently, the current grant-free protocol fails to ensure stable identity detection performance. To address this issue, we propose a two-stage communication protocol which consists of estimation of K in Phase I and detection of identities of active devices in Phase II. The preamble length for identity detection in Phase II is dynamically allocated based on the estimated K in Phase I through a table lookup manner such that the identity detection performance could always be better than a predefined threshold. In addition, we design an algorithm for estimating K in Phase I, and exploit the estimated K to reduce the computational complexity of the identity detector in Phase II. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed two-stage communication protocol and algorithms.

In the cooperative cellular network, relay-like base stations are connected to the central processor (CP) via rate-limited fronthaul links and the joint processing is performed at the CP, which thus can effectively mitigate the multiuser interference. In this paper, we consider the joint beamforming and compression problem with perantenna power constraints in the cooperative cellular network. We first establish the equivalence between the considered problem and its semidefinite relaxation (SDR). Then we further derive the partial Lagrangian dual of the SDR problem and show that the objective function of the obtained dual problem is differentiable. Based on the differentiability, we propose two efficient projected gradient ascent algorithms for solving the dual problem, which are projected exact gradient ascent (PEGA) and projected inexact gradient ascent (PIGA). While PEGA is guaranteed to find the global solution of the dual problem (and hence the global solution of the original problem), PIGA is more computationally efficient due to the lower complexity in inexactly computing the gradient. Global optimality and high efficiency of the proposed algorithms are demonstrated via numerical experiments.

Radar systems typically employ well-designed deterministic signals for target sensing. In contrast to that, integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) systems have to use random signals to convey useful information, potentially causing sensing performance degradation. In this paper, we define a new sensing performance metric, namely, ergodic linear minimum mean square error (ELMMSE), accounting for the randomness of ISAC signals. Then, we investigate a data-dependent precoding scheme to minimize the ELMMSE, which attains the optimized sensing performance at the price of high computational complexity. To reduce the complexity, we present an alternative data-independent precoding scheme and propose a stochastic gradient projection (SGP) algorithm for ELMMSE minimization, which can be trained offline by locally generated signal samples. Finally, we demonstrate the superiority of the proposed methods by simulations.

In this paper, we propose a multi-input multi-output beamforming transmit optimization model for joint radar sensing and multi-user communications, where the design of the beamformers is formulated as an optimization problem whose objective is a weighted combination of the sum rate and the Cramér-Rao bound, subject to the transmit power budget constraint. Obtaining a global solution for the formulated problem is a challenging task, because the sum rate maximization problem itself (even without considering the sensing metric) is known to be NP-hard. In this paper, we propose an efficient global branch-and-bound algorithm for solving the formulated problem based on the McCormick envelope relaxation and the semidefinite relaxation technique. The proposed algorithm is guaranteed to find the global solution for the considered problem, and thus serves as an important benchmark for performance evaluation of the existing local or suboptimal algorithms for solving the same problem.

Fair principal component analysis (FPCA), a ubiquitous dimensionality reduction technique in signal processing and machine learning, aims to find a low-dimensional representation for a high-dimensional dataset in view of fairness. The FPCA problem involves optimizing a non-convex and non-smooth function over the Stiefel manifold. The state-of-the-art methods for solving the problem are subgradient methods and semidefinite relaxation-based methods. However, these two types of methods have their obvious limitations and thus are only suitable for efficiently solving the FPCA problem in special scenarios. This paper aims at developing efficient algorithms for solving the FPCA problem in general, especially large-scale, settings. In this paper, we first transform FPCA into a smooth non-convex linear minimax optimization problem over the Stiefel manifold. To solve the above general problem, we propose an efficient alternating Riemannian/projected gradient descent ascent (ARPGDA) algorithm, which performs a Riemannian gradient descent step and an ordinary projected gradient ascent step at each iteration. We prove that ARPGDA can find an ε-stationary point of the above problem within ${\mathcal{O}}\left( {{\varepsilon ^{ - 3}}} \right)$ iterations. Simulation results show that, compared with the state-of-the-art methods, our proposed ARPGDA algorithm can achieve a better performance in terms of solution quality and speed for solving the FPCA problems.

Mathematical optimization is now widely regarded as an indispensable modeling and solution tool for the design of wireless communications systems. While optimization has played a significant role in the revolutionary progress in wireless communication and networking technologies from 1G to 5G and onto the future 6G, the innovations in wireless technologies have also substantially transformed the nature of the underlying mathematical optimization problems upon which the system designs are based and have sparked significant innovations in the development of methodologies to understand, to analyze, and to solve those problems. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of recent advances in mathematical optimization theory and algorithms for wireless communication system design. We begin by illustrating common features of mathematical optimization problems arising in wireless communication system design. We discuss various scenarios and use cases and their associated mathematical structures from an optimization perspective. We then provide an overview of recently developed optimization techniques in areas ranging from nonconvex optimization, global optimization, and integer programming, to distributed optimization and learning-based optimization. The key to successful solution of mathematical optimization problems is in carefully choosing or developing suitable algorithms (or neural network architectures) that can exploit the underlying problem structure. We conclude the paper by identifying several open research challenges and outlining future research directions.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is an emerging technology to enhance spatial multiplexing in wireless networks. This letter considers the discrete passive beamforming design for IRS in order to maximize the minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) among multiple users in an IRS-assisted downlink network. The main design difficulty lies in the discrete phase-shift constraint. Differing from most existing works, this letter advocates a convex-hull relaxation of the discrete constraints which leads to a continuous reformulated problem equivalent to the original discrete problem. This letter further proposes an efficient alternating projection/proximal gradient descent and ascent algorithm for solving the reformulated problem. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art methods significantly.

This paper studies the quality-of-service (QoS) constrained multi-group multicast beamforming design problem, where each multicast group is composed of a number of users requiring the same content. Due to the nonconvex QoS constraints, this problem is nonconvex and NP-hard. While existing optimization-based iterative algorithms can obtain a suboptimal solution, their iterative nature results in large computational complexity and delay. To facilitate real-time implementations, this paper proposes a deep learning-based approach, which consists of a beamforming structure assisted problem transformation and a customized neural network architecture named hierarchical permutation equivariance (HPE) transformer. The proposed HPE transformer is proved to be permutation equivariant with respect to the users within each multicast group, and also permutation equivariant with respect to different multicast groups. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed HPE transformer outperforms state-of-the-art optimization-based and deep learning-based approaches for multi-group multicast beamforming design in terms of the total transmit power, the constraint violation, and the computational time. In addition, the proposed HPE transformer achieves pretty good generalization performance on different numbers of users, different numbers of multicast groups, and different signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio targets.

In this paper, we investigate the design of energy-efficient beamforming for an ISAC system, where the transmitted waveform is optimized for joint multi-user communication and target estimation simultaneously. We aim to maximize the system energy efficiency (EE), taking into account the constraints of a maximum transmit power budget, a minimum required signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) for communication, and a maximum tolerable Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) for target estimation. We first consider communication-centric EE maximization. To handle the non-convex fractional objective function, we propose an iterative quadratic-transform-Dinkelbach method, where Schur complement and semi-definite relaxation (SDR) techniques are leveraged to solve the subproblem in each iteration. For the scenarios where sensing is critical, we propose a novel performance metric for characterizing the sensing-centric EE and optimize the metric adopted in the scenario of sensing a point-like target and an extended target. To handle the nonconvexity, we employ the successive convex approximation (SCA) technique to develop an efficient algorithm for approximating the nonconvex problem as a sequence of convex ones. Furthermore, we adopt a Pareto optimization mechanism to articulate the tradeoff between the communication-centric EE and sensing-centric EE. We formulate the search of the Pareto boundary as a constrained optimization problem and propose a computationally efficient algorithm to handle it. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms compared with the baseline schemes and the obtained approximate Pareto boundary shows that there is a non-trivial tradeoff between communication-centric EE and sensing-centric EE, where the number of communication users and EE requirements have serious effects on the achievable tradeoff.

This paper focuses on the covariance-based activity detection problem in a multi-cell massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system. In this system, active devices transmit their signature sequences to multiple base stations (BSs), and the BSs cooperatively detect the active devices based on the received signals. While the scaling law for the covariance-based activity detection in the single-cell scenario has been extensively analyzed in the literature, this paper aims to analyze the scaling law for the covariance-based activity detection in the multi-cell massive MIMO system. Specifically, this paper demonstrates a quadratic scaling law in the multi-cell system, under the assumption that the path-loss exponent of the fading channel$\gamma \gt 2$. This finding shows that, in the multi-cell massive MIMO system, the maximum number of active devices that can be correctly detected in each cell increases quadratically with the length of the signature sequence and decreases logarithmically with the number of cells (as the number of antennas tends to infinity). Moreover, in addition to analyzing the scaling law for the signature sequences randomly and uniformly distributed on a sphere, the paper also establishes the scaling law for signature sequences based on a finite alphabet, which are easier to generate and store. Finally, this paper proposes two efficient accelerated coordinate descent (CD) algorithms with a convergence guarantee for solving the device activity detection problem. The first algorithm reduces the complexity of CD by using an inexact coordinate update strategy. The second algorithm avoids unnecessary computations of CD by using an active set selection strategy. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms exhibit excellent performance in terms of computational efficiency and detection error probability.

A promising approach to deal with the high hardware cost and energy consumption of massive MIMO transmitters is to use low-resolution digital-to-analog converters (DACs) at each antenna element. This leads to a transmission scheme where the transmitted signals are restricted to a finite set of voltage levels. This paper is concerned with the analysis and optimization of a low-cost quantized precoding strategy, referred to as linear-quantized precoding, for a downlink massive MIMO system under Rayleigh fading. In linear-quantized precoding, the signals are first processed by a linear precoding matrix and subsequently quantized component-wise by the DAC. In this paper, we analyze both the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and the symbol error probability (SEP) performances of such linear-quantized precoding schemes in an asymptotic framework where the number of transmit antennas and the number of users grow large with a fixed ratio. Our results provide a rigorous justification for the heuristic arguments based on the Bussgang decomposition that are commonly used in prior works. Based on the asymptotic analysis, we further derive the optimal precoder within a class of linear-quantized precoders that includes several popular precoders as special cases. Our numerical results demonstrate the excellent accuracy of the asymptotic analysis for finite systems and the optimality of the derived precoder.

This paper investigates a novel deep learning framework for the general nonconvex quality-of-service (QoS)-constrained beamforming design problems in multi-user systems. While existing deep learning-based approaches have shown great success for various power allocation and beamforming design problems, most of the considered problems are equipped with simple constraints (e.g., power budget constraints), which can be satisfied by a simple projection operation. However, it is still a challenge to tackle the more complicated QoS constraints, in which the beamformers and the wireless channels are commonly coupled. To fill this gap, this paper proposes an augmented Lagrangian based penalty-dual training algorithm, which trains two individual neural networks for inferring the beamformers and the corresponding Lagrange multipliers alternatingly. Furthermore, we apply the proposed penalty-dual learning framework to optimize the energy-efficient unicast beamformers and the power-minimized multicast beamformers, respectively. The neural network architectures are judiciously designed based on the solution structures of the two problems. Simulation results on the two applications demonstrate that the proposed penalty-dual approach outperforms state-of-the-art learning approaches and optimization-based algorithms in terms of the constraint violation and the computational time, respectively.

This paper investigates the effect of low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) on device activity detection in massive machine-type communications (mMTC). The low-resolution ADCs induce two challenges on the device activity detection compared with the traditional setup with the assumption of infinite ADC resolution. First, the codebook design for signal quantization by the low-resolution ADC is particularly important since a good design of the codebook can lead to small quantization error on the received signal, which in turn has significant influence on the activity detector performance. To this end, prior information about the received signal power is needed, which depends on the number of active devicesK. This is sharply different from the activity detection problem in traditional setups, in which the knowledge ofKis not required by the BS as a prerequisite. Second, the covariance-based approach achieves good activity detection performance in traditional setups while it is not clear if it can still achieve good performance in this paper. To solve the above challenges, we propose a communication protocol that consists of an estimator forKand a detector for active device identities: 1) For the estimator, the technical difficulty is that the design of the ADC quantizer and the estimation ofKare closely intertwined and doing one needs the information/execution from the other. We propose a progressive estimator which iteratively performs the estimation ofKand the design of the ADC quantizer; 2) For the activity detector, we propose a custom-designed stochastic gradient descent algorithm to estimate the active device identities. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the communication protocol.

In this paper, we consider the one-bit precoding problem for the multiuser downlink massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system with phase shift keying (PSK) modulation. We focus on the celebrated constructive interference (CI)-based problem formulation. We first establish the NP-hardness of the problem (even in the single-user case), which reveals the intrinsic difficulty of globally solving the problem. Then, we propose a novel negative ℓ1penalty model for the considered problem, which penalizes the one-bit constraint into the objective by a negative ℓ1-norm term, and show the equivalence between (global and local) solutions of the original problem and the penalty problem when the penalty parameter is sufficiently large. We further transform the penalty model into an equivalent min-max problem and propose an efficient alternating proximal/projection gradient descent ascent (APGDA) algorithm for solving it, which performs a proximal gradient decent over one block of variables and a projection gradient ascent over the other block of variables alternately. The APGDA algorithm enjoys a low per-iteration complexity and is guaranteed to converge to a stationary point of the min-max problem and a local minimizer of the penalty problem. To further reduce the computational cost, we also propose a low-complexity implementation of the APGDA algorithm, where the values of the variables will be fixed in later iterations once they satisfy the one-bit constraint. Numerical results show that, compared to the state-of-the-art CI-based algorithms, both of the proposed algorithms generally achieve better bit-error-rate (BER) performance with lower computational cost.

This paper proposes a deep learning-based approach for the quality-of-service (QoS) constrained multi-group mul-ticast beamforming design. The proposed method consists of a beamforming structure assisted problem transformation and a customized neural network architecture named hierarchical permutation equivariance (HPE) transformer. The proposed HPE transformer is proved to be permutation equivariant with respect to the users within each multicast group, and also permutation equivariant with respect to different multicast groups. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed HPE transformer outperforms state-of-the-art optimization-based and deep learning-based approaches for multi-group multicast beamforming design in terms of the total transmit power, the constraint violation, and the computational time. In addition, the proposed HPE transformer achieves pretty good generalization performance on different numbers of users and multicast groups.

This paper studies the covariance based activity detection problem in a multi-cell massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system, where the active devices transmit their signature sequences to multiple base stations (BSs), and the BSs cooperatively detect the active devices based on the received signals. The scaling law of covariance based activity detection in the single-cell scenario has been thoroughly analyzed in the literature. This paper aims to analyze the scaling law of covariance based activity detection in the multi-cell massive MIMO system. In particular, this paper shows a quadratic scaling law in the multi-cell system under the assumption that the exponent in the classical path-loss model is greater than 2, which demonstrates that in the multi-cell MIMO system the maximum number of active devices that can be correctly detected in each cell increases quadratically with the length of the signature sequence and decreases logarithmically with the number of cells (as the number of antennas tends to infinity). This paper also characterizes the distribution of the estimation error in the multi-cell scenario.

Quantized constant envelope (QCE) precoding, a new transmission scheme that only discrete QCE transmit signals are allowed at each antenna, has gained growing research interests due to its ability of reducing the hardware cost and the energy consumption of massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. However, the discrete nature of QCE transmit signals greatly complicates the precoding design. In this paper, we consider the QCE precoding problem for a massive MIMO system with phase shift keying (PSK) modulation and develop an efficient approach for solving the constructive interference (CI) based problem formulation. Our approach is based on a custom-designed (continuous) penalty model that is equivalent to the original discrete problem. Specifically, the penalty model relaxes the discrete QCE constraint and penalizes it in the objective with a negative ℓ2-norm term, which leads to a non-smooth nonconvex optimization problem. To tackle it, we resort to our recently proposed alternating optimization (AO) algorithm. We show that the AO algorithm admits closed-form updates at each iteration when applied to our problem and thus can be efficiently implemented. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach over the existing algorithms.

Device activity detection in the emerging cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output systems has been recognized as a crucial task in machine-type communications, in which multiple access points jointly identify the active devices from a large number of potential devices based on the received signals. Most of the existing works addressing this problem rely on the impractical assumption that different active devices transmit signals synchronously. However, in practice, synchronization cannot be guaranteed due to the low-cost oscillators, which brings additional discontinuous and nonconvex constraints to the detection problem. To address this challenge, this paper reveals an equivalent reformulation to the asynchronous activity detection problem, which facilitates the development of a distributed algorithm that satisfies the highly nonconvex constraints in a gentle fashion as the iteration number increases. To reduce the capacity requirements of the fronthauls, we further design a communication-efficient accelerated distributed algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed two distributed algorithms outperform state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, the accelerated distributed algorithm requires a very small number of quantization bits to approach the ideal detection performance.

Projection robust Wasserstein (PRW) distance is recently proposed to efficiently mitigate the curse of dimensionality in the classical Wasserstein distance. In this paper, by equivalently reformulating the computation of the PRW distance as an optimization problem over the Cartesian product of the Stiefel manifold and the Euclidean space with additional nonlinear inequality constraints, we propose a Riemannian exponential augmented Lagrangian method (REALM) for solving this problem. Compared with the existing Riemannian exponential penalty-based approaches, REALM can potentially avoid too small penalty parameters and exhibit more stable numerical performance. To solve the subproblems in REALM efficiently, we design an inexact Riemannian Barzilai-Borwein method with Sinkhorn iteration (iRBBS), which selects the stepsizes adaptively rather than tuning the stepsizes in efforts as done in the existing methods. We show that iRBBS can return an $\epsilon$-stationary point of the original PRW distance problem within $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-3})$ iterations, which matches the best known iteration complexity result. Extensive numerical results demonstrate that our proposed methods outperform the state-of-the-art solvers for computing the PRW distance.

With the rapid development of mobile Internet, the demand for multicast is growing rapidly, such as content pushing and video streaming. The multicast service is usually offered to users without interrupting their on-going unicast transmission, and thus the multicast and unicast beamformers needs to be jointly designed, which generally requires perfect channel state information (CSI). However, perfect CSI is usually unavailable due to the channel estimation error. In this paper, we propose a learning based approach to jointly design the multicast and unicast beamformers with imperfect CSI. To learn the beamforming strategy, a new graph neural network (GNN) based architecture named unicast-multicast GNN (UMGNN) is proposed, which only requires the estimated channel. UMGNN can guarantee the permutation invariance/equivalence and model the special property in the multicast transmission, i.e., the multicast rate is determined by the worst user. Moreover, by sharing the parameters across different users, UMGNN exhibits a pretty good scalability to different number of users. Numerical results show that UMGNN outperforms a fully connected neural network and a widely used sampling-based algorithm. To highlight its performance in the multicast transmission, we also show that UMGNN can find the correct worst user that determines the multicast rate.

Device activity detection in the emerging cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems has been recognized as a crucial task in machine-type communications, in which multiple access points (APs) jointly identify the active devices from a large number of potential devices based on the received signals. Most of the existing works addressing this problem rely on the impractical assumption that different active devices transmit signals synchronously. However, in practice, synchronization cannot be guaranteed due to the low-cost oscillators, which brings additional discontinuous and nonconvex constraints to the detection problem. To address this challenge, this paper reveals an equivalent reformulation to the asynchronous activity detection problem, which facilitates the development of a centralized algorithm and a distributed algorithm that satisfy the highly nonconvex constraints in a gentle fashion as the iteration number increases, so that the sequence generated by the proposed algorithms can get around bad stationary points. To reduce the capacity requirements of the fronthauls, we further design a communication-efficient accelerated distributed algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed centralized and distributed algorithms outperform state-of-the-art approaches, and the proposed accelerated distributed algorithm achieves close detection performance to that of the centralized algorithm but with a much smaller number of bits to be transmitted on the fronthaul links.

This paper investigates the downlink channel state information (CSI) sensing in 5G heterogeneous networks composed of user equipments (UEs) with different feedback capabilities. We aim to enhance the CSI accuracy of UEs only affording the low-resolution Type-I codebook. While existing works have demonstrated that the task can be accomplished by solving a phase retrieval (PR) formulation based on the feedback of precoding matrix indicator (PMI) and channel quality indicator (CQI), they need many feedback rounds. In this paper, we propose a novel CSI sensing scheme that can significantly reduce the feedback overhead. Our scheme involves a novel parameter dimension reduction design by exploiting the spatial consistency of wireless channels among nearby UEs, and a constrained PR (CPR) formulation that characterizes the feasible region of CSI by the PMI information. To address the computational challenge due to the non-convexity and the large number of constraints of CPR, we develop a two-stage algorithm that firstly identifies and removes inactive constraints, followed by a fast first-order algorithm. The study is further extended to multi-carrier systems. Extensive tests over DeepMIMO and QuaDriGa datasets showcase that our designs greatly outperform existing methods and achieve the high-resolution Type-II codebook performance with a few rounds of feedback.

Reconfigurable multiple-input multiple-output can provide performance gains over traditional MIMO by reshaping the channels, i.e., introducing more channel realizations. In this paper, we focus on the achievable rate maximization pattern design for reconfigurable MIMO systems. Firstly, we introduce the matrix representation of pattern reconfigurable MIMO (PR-MIMO), based on which a pattern design problem is formulated. To further reveal the effect of the radiation pattern on the wireless channel, we consider pattern design for both the single-pattern case where the optimized radiation pattern is the same for all the antenna elements, and the multi-pattern case where different antenna elements can adopt different radiation patterns. For the single-pattern case, we show that the pattern design is equivalent to a redistribution of gains among all scattering paths, and an eigenvalue optimization based solution is obtained. For the multi-pattern case, we propose a sequential optimization framework with manifold optimization and eigenvalue decomposition to obtain near-optimal solutions. Numerical results validate the superiority of PR-MIMO systems over traditional MIMO in terms of achievable rate, and also show the effectiveness of the proposed solutions.

In this paper, we consider the network slicing problem which attempts to map multiple customized virtual network requests (also called services) to a common shared network infrastructure and allocate network resources to meet diverse quality of service (QoS) requirements. We first propose a mixed integer nonlinear program (MINLP) formulation for this problem that optimizes the network resource consumption while jointly considers QoS requirements, flow routing, and resource budget constraints. In particular, the proposed formulation is able to flexibly route the traffic flow of the services on multiple paths and provide end-to-end (E2E) delay and reliability guarantees for all services. Due to the intrinsic nonlinearity, the MINLP formulation is computationally difficult to solve. To over-come this difficulty, we then propose a mixed integer linear program (MILP) formulation and show that the two formulations and their continuous relaxations are equivalent. Different from the continuous relaxation of the MINLP formulation which is a nonconvex nonlinear programming problem, the continuous relaxation of the MILP formulation is a polynomial time solvable linear programming problem, which makes the MILP formulation much more computationally solvable. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed formulations over existing ones.

Consider the joint beamforming and quantization problem in the cooperative cellular network, where multiple relay-like base stations (BSs) connected to the central processor (CP) via rate-limited fronthaul links cooperatively serve the users. This problem can be formulated as the minimization of the total transmit power, subject to all users’ signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) constraints and all relay-like BSs’ fronthaul rate constraints. In this paper, we first show that there is no duality gap between the considered problem and its Lagrangian dual by showing the tightness of the semidefinite relaxation (SDR) of the considered problem. Then we propose an efficient algorithm based on Lagrangian duality for solving the considered problem. The proposed algorithm judiciously exploits the special structure of the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions of the considered problem and finds the solution that satisfies the KKT conditions via two fixed-point iterations. The proposed algorithm is highly efficient (as evaluating the functions in both fixed-point iterations are computationally cheap) and is guaranteed to find the global solution of the problem. Simulation results show the efficiency and the correctness of the proposed algorithm.

This paper considers the one-bit precoding problem for the multiuser downlink massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system with phase shift keying (PSK) modulation and focuses on the celebrated constructive interference (CI)-based problem formulation. The existence of the discrete one-bit constraint makes the problem generally hard to solve. In this paper, we propose an efficient negative ℓ1penalty approach for finding a high-quality solution of the considered problem. Specifically, we first propose a novel negative ℓ1penalty model, which penalizes the one-bit constraint into the objective with a negative ℓ1-norm term, and show the equivalence between (global and local) solutions of the original problem and the penalty problem when the penalty parameter is sufficiently large. We further transform the penalty model into an equivalent min-max problem and propose an efficient alternating optimization (AO) algorithm for solving it. The AO algorithm enjoys low periteration complexity and is guaranteed to converge to the stationary point of the min-max problem. Numerical results show that, compared against the state-of-the-art CI-based algorithms, the proposed algorithm generally achieves better bit-error-rate (BER) performance with lower computational cost.

In this paper, we focus on the pattern reconfigurable multiple-input multiple-output (PR-MIMO), a technique that has the potential to bridge the gap between electro-magnetics and communications towards the emerging Electro-magnetic Information Theory (EIT). Specifically, we focus on the pattern design problem aimed at maximizing the channel capacity for reconfigurable MIMO communication systems, where we firstly introduce the matrix representation of PR-MIMO and further formulate a pattern design problem. We decompose the pattern design into two steps, i.e., the correlation modification process to optimize the correlation structure of the channel, followed by the power allocation process to improve the channel quality based on the optimized channel structure. For the correlation modification process, we propose a sequential optimization framework with eigenvalue decomposition to obtain near-optimal solutions. For the power allocation process, we provide a closed-form power allocation scheme to redistribute the transmission power among the modified subchannels. Numerical results show that the proposed pattern design scheme offers significant improvements over legacy MIMO systems, which motivates the application of PR-MIMO in wireless communication systems.

In this letter, we study the joint device activity and delay detection problem in asynchronous massive machine-type communications (mMTC), where all active devices asynchronously transmit their preassigned preamble sequences to the base station (BS) for device identification and delay detection. We first formulate this joint detection problem as a maximum likelihood estimation problem, which depends on the received signal only through its sample covariance, and then propose efficient coordinate descent type of algorithms to solve the formulated problem. Our proposed covariance-based approach is sharply different from the existing compressed sensing (CS) approach for the same problem. Numerical results show that our proposed covariance-based approach significantly outperforms the CS approach in terms of the detection performance since our proposed approach can make better use of the BS antennas than the CS approach.

This paper considers a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided millimeter wave (mmWave) downlink communication system where hybrid analog-digital beamforming is employed at the base station (BS). We formulate a power minimization problem by jointly optimizing hybrid beamforming at the BS and the response matrix at the RIS, under the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) constraints at all users. The problem is highly challenging to solve due to the non-convex SINR constraints as well as the unit-modulus phase shift constraints for both the RIS reflection coefficients and the analog beamformer. A two-layer penalty-based algorithm is proposed to decouple variables in SINR constraints, and manifold optimization is adopted to handle the non-convex unit-modulus constraints. We also propose a low-complexity sequential optimization method, which optimizes the RIS reflection coefficients, the analog beamformer, and the digital beamformer sequentially without iteration. Furthermore, the relationship between the power minimization problem and the max-min fairness (MMF) problem is discussed. Simulation results show that the proposed penalty-based algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art semidefinite relaxation (SDR)-based algorithm. Results also demonstrate that the RIS plays an important role in the power reduction.

This paper considers a massive random access problem in which a large number of sporadically active devices wish to communicate with a base station (BS) equipped with massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antennas. Each device is preassigned a unique signature sequence, and the BS identifies the active devices by detecting which sequences are transmitted. This device activity detection problem can be formulated as a maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) problem for which the sample covariance matrix of the received signal is a sufficient statistic. The goal of this paper is to characterize the feasible set of problem parameters under which this covariance based approach is able to successfully recover the device activities in the massive MIMO regime. Through an analysis of the asymptotic behaviors of MLE via its associated Fisher information matrix, this paper derives a necessary and sufficient condition on the Fisher information matrix to ensure a vanishing probability of detection error as the number of antennas goes to infinity, based on which a numerical phase transition analysis is obtained. This condition is also examined from a perspective of covariance matching, which relates the phase transition analysis to a recently derived scaling law. Further, we provide a characterization of the distribution of the estimation error in MLE, based on which the error probabilities in device activity detection can be accurately predicted. Finally, this paper studies a random access scheme with joint device activity and data detection and analyzes its performance in a similar way.

We study security solutions for dual-functional radar communication (DFRC) systems, which detect the radar target and communicate with downlink cellular users in millimeter-wave (mmWave) wireless networks simultaneously. Uniquely for such scenarios, the radar target is regarded as a potential eavesdropper which might surveil the information sent from the base station (BS) to communication users (CUs), that is carried by the radar probing signal. Transmit waveform and receive beamforming are jointly designed to maximize the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of the radar under the security and power budget constraints. We apply a Directional Modulation (DM) approach to exploit constructive interference (CI), where the known multiuser interference (MUI) can be exploited as a source of useful signal. Moreover, to further deteriorate the eavesdropping signal at the radar target, we utilize destructive interference (DI) by pushing the received symbols at the target towards the destructive region of the signal constellation. Our numerical results verify the effectiveness of the proposed design showing a secure transmission with enhanced performance against benchmark DFRC techniques.

In this paper, we consider the network slicing problem which attempts to map multiple customized virtual network requests (also called services) to a common shared network infrastructure and allocate network resources to meet diverse service requirements, and propose an efficient two-stage algorithm for solving this NP-hard problem. In the first stage, the proposed algorithm uses an iterative linear programming (LP) rounding procedure to place the virtual network functions of all services into cloud nodes while taking traffic routing of all services into consideration; in the second stage, the proposed algorithm uses an iterative LP refinement procedure to obtain a solution for traffic routing of all services with their end-to-end delay constraints being satisfied. Compared with the existing algorithms which either have an exponential complexity or return a low-quality solution, our proposed algorithm achieves a better trade-off between solution quality and computational complexity. In particular, the worst-case complexity of our proposed algorithm is polynomial, which makes it suitable for solving large-scale problems. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed algorithm.

A great amount of endeavour has recently been devoted to the joint device activity detection and channel estimation problem in massive machine-type communications. This paper targets at two practical issues along this line that have not been addressed before: asynchronous transmission from uncoordinated users and efficient algorithms for real-time implementation in systems with a massive number of devices. Specifically, this paper considers a practical system where the preamble sent by each active device is delayed by some unknown number of symbols due to the lack of coordination. We manage to cast the problem of detecting the active devices and estimating their delay and channels into a group LASSO problem. Then, a block coordinate descent algorithm is proposed to solve this problem, where the closed-form solution is available when updating each block of variables with the other blocks of variables being fixed, thanks to the special structure of our interested problem. Our analysis shows that the overall complexity of the proposed algorithm is low, making it suitable for real-time application.

This paper proposes a computationally efficient algorithm to solve the joint data and activity detection problem for massive random access with massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO). The BS acquires the active devices and their data by detecting the transmitted preassigned nonorthogonal signature sequences. This paper employs a covariance based approach that formulates the detection problem as a maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) problem. To efficiently solve the problem, this paper designs a novel iterative algorithm with low complexity in the regime where the device activity pattern is sparse - a key feature that existing algorithmic designs have not previously exploited for reducing complexity. Specifically, at each iteration, the proposed algorithm focuses on only a small subset of all potential sequences, namely the active set, which contains a few most likely active sequences (i.e., transmitted sequences by all active devices), and performs the detection for the sequences in the active set. The active set is carefully selected at each iteration based on the current detection result and the first-order optimality condition of the MLE problem. Simulation results show that the proposed active set algorithm enjoys significantly better computational efficiency (in terms of the CPU time) than the state-of-the-art algorithms.

With the explosive growth of computation-intensive and latency-sensitive vehicular applications, limited on-board computing resources can hardly satisfy these heterogeneous requirements and task offloading becomes a potential solution. However, task offloading in vehicular networks may face the dilemma of unaffordable uploading time caused by the huge amount of uploading traffic. Therefore, considering the applications which use the environmental data as their input, the sensing abilities of serving nodes (SNs) are exploited and a traffic-aware task offloading (TATO) mechanism based on convergence of communication and sensing is proposed. In the TATO mechanism, a task vehicle can adaptively upload the input data to some SNs and transmit the computation instructions to others which use the environmental data sensed by themselves as input. The objective is to minimize the overall response time (ORT) by jointly optimizing the task and wireless bandwidth ratios. Next, a binary search and feasibility check (BSFC) algorithm is designed to solve the optimization problem. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed BSFC algorithm and show that the TATO mechanism always outperforms the benchmark mechanisms (i.e., communication-based offloading and sensing-based offloading) in terms of the ORT. Specifically, when the task offloading traffic is huge and the wireless transmission capability becomes a bottleneck, TATO can reduce the ORT by 42.8% compared with that of the communication-based offloading.

Uplink-downlink duality refers to the fact that under a sum-power constraint, the capacity regions of a Gaussian multiple-access channel and a Gaussian broadcast channel with Hermitian transposed channel matrices are identical. This paper generalizes this result to a cooperative cellular network, in which remote access-points are deployed as relays in serving the users under the coordination of a central processor (CP). In this model, the users and the relays are connected over noisy wireless links, while the relays and the CP are connected over noiseless but rate-limited fronthaul links. Based on a Lagrangian technique, this paper establishes a duality relationship between such a multiple-access relay channel and broadcast relay channel, under the assumption that the relays use compression-based strategies. Specifically, we show that under the same total transmit power constraint and individual fronthaul rate constraints, the achievable rate regions of the Gaussian multiple-access and broadcast relay channels are identical, when either independent compression or Wyner-Ziv and multivariate compression strategies are used. The key observations are that if the beamforming vectors at the relays are fixed, the sum-power minimization problems under the achievable rate and fronthaul constraints in both the uplink and the downlink can be transformed into either a linear programming or a semidefinite programming problem depending on the compression technique, and that the uplink and downlink problems are Lagrangian duals of each other. Moreover, the dual variables corresponding to the downlink rate constraints become the uplink powers; the dual variables corresponding to the downlink fronthaul constraints become the uplink quantization noises. This duality relationship enables an efficient algorithm for optimizing the downlink transmission and relaying strategies based on the uplink.

Network function virtualization is a promising technology to simultaneously support multiple services with diverse characteristics and requirements in the 5G and beyond networks. In particular, each service consists of a predetermined sequence of functions, called service function chain (SFC), running on a cloud environment. To make different service slices work properly in harmony, it is crucial to appropriately select the cloud nodes to deploy the functions in the SFC and flexibly route the flow of the services such that these functions are processed in the order defined in the corresponding SFC, the end-to-end (E2E) latency constraints of all services are guaranteed, and all cloud and communication resource budget constraints are respected. In this paper, we first propose a new mixed binary linear program (MBLP) formulation of the above network slicing problem that optimizes the system energy efficiency while jointly considers the E2E latency requirement, resource budget, flow routing, and functional instantiation. Then, we develop another MBLP formulation and show that the two formulations are equivalent in the sense that they share the same optimal solution. However, since the numbers of variables and constraints in the second problem formulation are significantly smaller than those in the first one, solving the second problem formulation is more computationally efficient especially when the dimension of the corresponding network is large. Numerical results demonstrate the advantage of the proposed formulations compared with the existing ones.

Power-efficient Data Center Networks (DCNs) have been proposed to save power of DCNs using OpenFlow. In these DCNs, the OpenFlow controller adaptively turns on/off links and OpenFlow switches to form a minimum-power subnet that satisfies the traffic demand. As the subnet changes, flows are dynamically routed and rerouted to the routes composed of active switches and links. However, existing flow scheduling schemes could cause undesired results: (1) power inefficiency: due to unbalanced traffic allocation on active routes, extra switches and links may be activated to cater to bursty traffic surges on congested routes, and (2) Quality of Service (QoS) fluctuation: because of the limited flow entry processing ability, switches may not be able to timely install/delete/update flow entries to properly route/reroute flows. In this paper, we propose AggreFlow, a dynamic flow scheduling scheme that achieves power efficiency and QoS improvement using three techniques: Flow-set Routing, Lazy Rerouting, and Adaptive Rerouting. Flow-set Routing achieves load balancing with a small number of flow entry operations by routing flows in a coarse-grained flow-set fashion. Lazy Rerouting spreads rerouting operations over a relatively long period of time, reducing the burstiness of entry operation on switches. Adaptive Rerouting selectively reroutes flow-sets to maintain load balancing. We built an NS3 based fat-tree network simulation platform to evaluate AggreFlow's performance. The simulation results show that AggreFlow reduces power consumption by about 18%, yet achieving load balancing and improved QoS (low packet loss rate and reducing the number of processing entries for flow scheduling by 98%), compared with baseline schemes.

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with 1-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are promising to reduce the energy consumption. However, the serious quantization error caused by 1-bit ADCs will potentially limit the feasibility of high order modulations. This paper focuses on the analysis of the high order phase-shift keying (PSK) signal transmission in the 1-bit ADC massive MIMO system. Firstly, assuming ideal channel estimation and a single mobile station (MS), we theoretically prove that with an asymptotically large number of antennas at the base station, PSK signals with arbitrary modulation order can be recovered in the 1-bit ADC massive MIMO system. Secondly, we analyze the impact of pilot based channel estimation on the recovery of the high order PSK signals, which leads to a periodic asymptotic detection phase error (ADPE) at high signal to noise ratio (SNR). Furthermore, we also propose to optimize the pilot sequence for minimizing the cumulative absolute ADPE. Finally, the analysis is extended to the multi-MS case and the performance with different pilot patterns is discussed. Simulation results validate our analysis and show that using our proposed optimized pilot sequence can significantly improve the detection performance for both single-MS and multi-MS 1-bit ADC massive MIMO systems.

This paper investigates an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided multi-cell multiple-input single-output (MISO) network with a set of multi-antenna base stations (BSs) each communicating with multiple single-antenna users, in which an IRS is dedicatedly deployed for assisting the wireless transmission and suppressing the inter-cell interference. Under this setup, we jointly optimize the coordinated transmit beamforming vectors at the BSs and the reflective beamforming vector (with both reflecting phases and amplitudes) at the IRS, for the purpose of maximizing the minimum weighted signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) at the users, subject to the individual maximum transmit power constraints at the BSs and the reflection constraints at the IRS. To solve the non-convex min-weighted-SINR maximization problem, we first present an exact-alternating-optimization approach to optimize the transmit and reflective beamforming vectors in an alternating manner, in which the transmit and reflective beamforming optimization subproblems are solved exactly in each iteration by using the techniques of second-order-cone program (SOCP) and semi-definite relaxation (SDR), respectively. However, the exact-alternating-optimization approach has high computational complexity, and may lead to compromised performance due to the uncertainty of randomization in SDR. To avoid these drawbacks, we further propose an inexact-alternating-optimization approach, in which the transmit and reflective beamforming optimization subproblems are solved inexactly in each iteration based on the principle of successive convex approximation (SCA). In addition, to further reduce the computational complexity, we propose a low-complexity inexact-alternating-optimization design, in which the reflective beamforming optimization subproblem is solved more inexactly. Via numerical results, it is shown that the proposed three designs achieve significantly increased min-weighted-SINR values, as compared with benchmark schemes without the IRS or with random reflective beamforming. It is also shown that the inexact-alternating-optimization design outperforms the exact-alternating-optimization one in terms of both the achieved min-weighted-SINR value and the computational complexity, while the low-complexity inexact-alternating-optimization design has much lower computational complexity with slightly compromised performance. Furthermore, we show that our proposed design can be applied to the scenario with unit-amplitude reflection constraints, with a negligible performance loss.

This paper investigates an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided multi-cell multiple-input single-output (MISO) system consisting of several multi-antenna base stations (BSs) each communicating with a single-antenna user, in which an IRS is dedicatedly deployed for assisting the wireless transmission and suppressing the inter-cell interference. Under this setup, we jointly optimize the coordinated transmit beamforming at the BSs and the reflective beamforming at the IRS, for the purpose of maximizing the minimum weighted received signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) at users, subject to the individual maximum transmit power constraints at the BSs and the reflection constraints at the IRS. To solve the difficult non-convex minimum SINR maximization problem, we propose efficient algorithms based on alternating optimization, in which the transmit and reflective beamforming vectors are optimized in an alternating manner. In particular, we use the second-order-cone programming (SOCP) for optimizing the coordinated transmit beamforming, and develop two efficient designs for updating the reflective beamforming based on the techniques of semi-definite relaxation (SDR) and successive convex approximation (SCA), respectively. Numerical results show that the use of IRS leads to significantly higher SINR values than benchmark schemes with-out IRS or without proper reflective beamforming optimization; while the developed SCA-based solution outperforms the SDR-based one with lower implementation complexity.

Network virtualization is a key enabler for 5G systems to support the expected use cases of vertical markets. In this context, we study the joint optimal deployment of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) and allocation of computational resources in a hybrid cloud infrastructure by taking the requirements of the 5G services and the characteristics of the cloud architecture into consideration. The resulting mixed-integer problem is reformulated as an integer linear problem, which can be solved by using a standard solver. Our results underline the advantages of a hybrid infrastructure over a standard cloud radio access network consisting only of a central cloud, and show that the proposed mechanism to deploy VNF chains leads to high resource utilization efficiency and large gains in terms of the number of supported VNF chains. To deal with the computational complexity of optimizing a large number of clouds and VNF chains, we propose a simple low-complexity heuristic that attempts to find a feasible VNF deployment solution with a limited number of functional splits. Numerical results indicate that the performance of the proposed heuristic is close to the optimal one when the edge clouds are well dimensioned with respect to the computational requirements of the 5G services.

The multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) detection problem is a fundamental problem in modern digital communications. Semidefinite relaxation (SDR) based algorithms are a popular class of approaches to solving the problem because the algorithms have a polynomial-time worst-case complexity and generally can achieve a good detection error rate performance. In spite of the existence of various different SDRs for the MIMO detection problem in the literature, very little is known about the relationship between these SDRs. This paper aims to fill this theoretical gap. In particular, this paper shows that two existing SDRs for the MIMO detection problem, which take quite different forms and are proposed by using different techniques, are equivalent. As a byproduct of the equivalence result, the tightness of one of the above two SDRs under a sufficient condition can be obtained.

This paper considers a grant-free random access scenario for massive machine-type communications (mMTC) in which the devices are sporadically active with small payloads. Each active device transmits the identification information as well as the data symbol by selecting a sequence from a pre-assigned sequence set, and the base-station (BS) detects both the device activity and the data by detecting which sequences are transmitted. This paper makes an observation that in the massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) regime, where the BS is equipped with a large number of antennas, a covariance based detection scheme that solves a maximum likelihood estimation problem is more effective than the approximate message passing (AMP) based compressed sensing approach for sequence detection. A main contribution of this paper is an analytic framework capable of accurately predicting the performance of the proposed scheme in terms of the probabilities of false alarm and missed detection. The analysis is based on the asymptotic properties of the maximum likelihood estimator under a nonstandard condition. Simulation results validate the analysis, and demonstrate that as compared to the AMP based approach, the covariance based approach achieves lower error probabilities, especially when the sequence length is short, as is often the case for low-latency mMTC.

Network virtualization is a key enabler for the 5G systems for supporting the novel use cases related to the vertical markets. In this context, we investigate the joint optimal deployment of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) and the allocation of computational resources in a hybrid cloud infrastructure by taking into account the requirements of the 5G services and the characteristics of the cloud nodes. To achieve this goal, we analyze the relations between functional placement, computational requirements, and latency constraints, and formulate an integer linear programming problem, which can be solved by using a standard solver. Our results underline the advantages of a hybrid architecture over a standard solution with a central cloud, and show that the proposed mechanism to deploy VNFs leads to high resource utilization efficiency and large gains in terms of the number of slice chains that can be supported by the cloud-enhanced 5G networks.

To improve traffic management ability, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are gradually upgrading legacy network devices to programmable devices that support Software-Defined Networking (SDN). The coexistence of legacy and SDN devices gives rise to a hybrid SDN. Existing hybrid SDNs do not consider the potential performance issues introduced by a centralized SDN controller: flow requests processed by a highly loaded controller may experience long-tail processing delay; inappropriate multi-controller deployment could increase the propagation delay of flow requests. In this paper, we propose to jointly consider the deployment of SDN switches and their controllers for hybrid SDNs. We formulate the joint problem as an optimization problem that maximizes the number of flows that can be controlled and managed by the SDN and minimizes the propagation delay of flow requests between SDN controllers and switches under a given upgrade budget constraint. We show this problem is NP-hard. To efficiently solve the problem, we propose some techniques (e.g., strengthening the constraints and adding additional valid inequalities) to accelerate the global optimization solver for solving the problem for small networks and an efficient heuristic algorithm for solving it for large networks. The simulation results from real network topologies illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques and show that our proposed heuristic algorithm uses a small number of controllers to manage a high amount of flows with good performance.

In a full-duplex (FD) multi-user network, the system performance is not only limited by the self-interference but also by the co-channel interference due to the simultaneous uplink and downlink transmissions. Joint design of the uplink/downlink transmission direction of users and the power allocation is crucial for achieving high system performance in the FD multi-user network. In this paper, we investigate the joint uplink/downlink transmission direction assignment (TDA), user paring (UP), and power allocation problem for maximizing the system max-min fairness (MMF) rate in an FD multi-user orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) system. The problem is formulated with a two-time-scale structure, where the TDA and the UP variables are for optimizing a long-term MMF rate while the power allocation is for optimizing an instantaneous MMF rate during each channel coherence interval. We show that the studied joint MMF rate maximization problem is NP-hard in general. To obtain high-quality suboptimal solutions, we propose efficient methods based on simple relaxation and greedy rounding techniques. The simulation results are presented to show that the proposed algorithms are effective and achieve higher MMF rates than the existing heuristic methods.

The performance of cloud radio access networks (C-RAN) is limited by the finite capacities of the backhaullinks connecting the cloud with the base-stations (BSs). A promising approach to improving the performance of C-RAN is to augment the backhaul through BS caching, where the BSs pre-store some of the popular contents. In this paper, we first derive a multicast backhaul rate expression based on a joint cache-channel coding scheme, and show that, as compared to the uniform cache allocation, it is better to allocate larger cache sizes to the weaker BSs. Then, by leveraging the sample approximation method and the alternating direction method of multipliers, we develop an efficient algorithm to optimize the cache allocation by maximizing the BS expected file downloading rate from the cloud. Numerical results show considerable performance improvement of the optimized cache allocation scheme over heuristic schemes.

To support multiple on-demand services over several fixed communication networks, the network operators must allow flexible customization and fast provision of their network resources. One effective approach is network virtualization, whereby each service is mapped to a virtual subnetwork providing dedicated on-demand support. In practice, each service consists of a pre specified sequence of functions, called a service function chain (SFC). Moreover, each function in a SFC can only be provided by some given network nodes. Thus, to support a given service, we must select network function nodes according to the SFC, and determine the routing strategy through the function nodes in the specified order. A crucial problem that needs to be addressed is how to optimally allocate the network resources while satisfying multiple service requirements specified by the service function chains, subject to link and node capacity constraints. In this paper, we formulate the problem as a mixed binary linear program and establish its NP-hardness. Furthermore, we propose an efficient penalty successive upper bound minimization algorithm to solve the problem. We also present simulation results to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

The performance of cloud radio access network (C-RAN) is limited by the finite capacities of the backhaul links connecting the centralized processor (CP) with the base-stations (BSs), especially when the backhaul is implemented in a wireless medium. This paper proposes the use of wireless multicast together with BS caching, where the BSs pre-store the contents of popular files, to augment the backhaul of C-RAN. For a downlink C-RAN consisting of a single cluster of BSs and wireless backhaul, this paper studies the optimal cache size allocation strategy among the BSs and the optimal multicast beamforming transmission strategy at the CP such that the user's requested messages are delivered from the CP to the BSs in the most efficient way. We first state a multicast backhaul rate expression based on a joint cache-channel coding scheme, which implies that larger cache sizes should be allocated to the BSs with weaker channels. We then formulate a two-timescale joint cache size allocation and beamforming design problem, where the cache is optimized offline based on the long-term channel statistical information, while the beamformer is designed during the file delivery phase based on the instantaneous channel state information. By leveraging the sample approximation method and the alternating direction method of multipliers, we develop efficient algorithms for optimizing the cache size allocation among the BSs, and quantify how much more caches should be allocated to the weaker BSs. We further consider the case with multiple files having different popularities and show that it is in general not optimal to entirely cache the most popular files first. Numerical results show considerable performance improvement of the optimized cache size allocation scheme over the uniform allocation and other heuristic schemes.

The demand for providing multicast services in cellular networks is continuously and fastly increasing. In this paper, we propose a non-orthogonal transmission framework based on layered-division multiplexing (LDM) to support multicast and unicast services concurrently in cooperative multi-cell cellular networks with a limited backhaul capacity. We adopt a two-layer LDM structure where the first layer is intended for multicast services, the second layer is for unicast services, and the two layers are superposed with different beamformers. Each user decodes the multicast message first, subtracts it, and then decodes its dedicated unicast message. We formulate a joint multicast and unicast beamforming problem with adaptive base station clustering that aims to maximize the weighted sum of the multicast rate and the unicast rate under per-BS power and backhaul constraints. To solve the problem, we first develop a branch-and-bound algorithm to find its global optimum. We then reformulate the problem as a sparse beamforming problem and propose a low-complexity algorithm based on convex-concave procedure. Simulation results demonstrate the significant superiority of the proposed LDM-based non-orthogonal scheme over orthogonal schemes in terms of the achievable multicast-unicast rate region.

An important step in multi-sensor data fusion is sensor registration, namely, to estimate sensors' range and azimuth biases from their asynchronous measurements. Assuming the target moves in a straight line with an unknown constant velocity, we propose a two-stage nonlinear least square (LS) approach to this problem. More specifically, in stage I, each sensor first estimates its own range bias individually, and then in stage II, all sensors jointly estimate their azimuth biases. We show that both of the nonconvex LS problems can be solved to global optimality under mild conditions. Simulation results show that the root mean square error (RMSE) of the proposed approach is quite close to the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) when the level of the measurement noise is small.

In this paper, we consider a wireless network with one full-duplex (FD) base station (BS) and a set of half-duplex (HD) user equipments (UEs). In such scenario, in addition to the self-interference, the co-channel interference from uplink UEs to downlink UEs is the main bottleneck for the network performance. To overcome this, we consider the problem of maximizing the minimum fairness rate among all UEs by jointly determining the UE uplink/downlink directions and pairing the UEs over different resource blocks. We first show that the UE pairing problem is NP-hard in general. To develop efficient suboptimal algorithms, we formulate the considered problem as a mixed integer linear program and handle it by the iterative reweighted ℓq-norm minimization (IRM) method. In particular, we propose a two-stage IRM algorithm that determines the UE transmission directions in the first stage followed by optimizing the UE pairs in the second stage. Simulation results are presented to show the efficacy of the proposed algorithm over some heuristic methods.

To support multiple on-demand services over fixed communication networks, network operators must allow flexible customization and fast provision of their network resources. One effective approach to this end is network virtualization, whereby each service is mapped to a virtual subnetwork providing dedicated on-demand support to network users. In practice, each service consists of a prespecified sequence of functions, called a service function chain (SFC), while each service function in a SFC can only be provided by some given network nodes. Thus, to support a given service, we must select network function nodes according to the SFC and determine the routing strategy through the function nodes in a specified order. A crucial network slicing problem that needs to be addressed is how to optimally localize the service functions in a physical network as specified by the SFCs, subject to link and node capacity constraints. In this paper, we formulate the network slicing problem as a mixed binary linear program and establish its strong NP-hardness. Furthermore, we propose efficient penalty successive upper bound minimization (PSUM) and PSUM-R(ounding) algorithms, and two heuristic algorithms to solve the problem. Simulation results are shown to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

In this letter, we consider the joint power and admission control (JPAC) problem by assuming that only the channel distribution information (CDI) is available. Under this assumption, we formulate a new chance (probabilistic) constrained JPAC problem, where the signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) outage probability of the supported links is enforced to be not greater than a prespecified tolerance. To efficiently deal with the chance SINR constraint, we employ the sample approximation method to convert them into finitely many linear constraints. Then, we propose a convex approximation based deflation algorithm for solving the sample approximation JPAC problem. Compared to the existing works, this letter proposes a novel two-timescale JPAC approach, where admission control is performed by the proposed deflation algorithm based on the CDI in a large timescale and transmission power is adapted instantly with fast fadings in a small timescale. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is illustrated by simulations.

This letter shows that the flexible association of possibly multiple base stations (BSs) with each user over multiple frequency bands, along with the joint optimization of BS transmit power that encourages the BSs to turn off at off-peak time, can significantly improve the performance of a downlink heterogeneous wireless cellular network. We propose a gradient projection algorithm for optimizing BS association and an iteratively reweighting scheme together with a novel proximal gradient method for optimizing power in order to find the optimal tradeoff between network utility and power consumption. Simulation results reveal significant performance improvement as compared to the conventional single-BS association.

The task of feature selection is to find the most representative features from the original high-dimensional data. Because of the absence of the information of class labels, selecting the appropriate features in unsupervised learning scenarios is much harder than that in supervised scenarios. In this paper, we investigate the potential of locally linear embedding (LLE), which is a popular manifold learning method, in feature selection task. It is straightforward to apply the idea of LLE to the graph-preserving feature selection framework. However, we find that this straightforward application suffers from some problems. For example, it fails when the elements in the feature are all equal; it does not enjoy the property of scaling invariance and cannot capture the change of the graph efficiently. To solve these problems, we propose a new filter-based feature selection method based on LLE in this paper, which is named as LLE score. The proposed criterion measures the difference between the local structure of each feature and that of the original data. Our experiments of classification task on two face image data sets, an object image data set, and a handwriting digits data set show that LLE score outperforms state-of-the-art methods, including data variance, Laplacian score, and sparsity score.

Consider a multi-user multi-carrier communication system where multiple users share multiple discrete subcarriers. To achieve high spectrum efficiency, the users in the system must choose their transmit power dynamically in response to fast channel fluctuations. Assuming perfect channel state information, two formulations for the spectrum management (power control) problem are considered in this paper: the first is to minimize the total transmission power subject to all users' transmission data rate constraints, and the second is to maximize the min-rate utility subject to individual power constraints at each user. It is known in the literature that both formulations of the problem are polynomial time solvable when the number of subcarriers is one and strongly NP-hard when the number of subcarriers are greater than or equal to three. However, the complexity characterization of the problem when the number of subcarriers is two has been missing for a long time. This paper answers this long-standing open question: both formulations of the problem are strongly NP-hard when the number of subcarriers is two.

Crowdsourced wireless community networks can effectively alleviate the limited coverage issue of Wi-Fi access points (APs), by encouraging individuals (users) to share their private residential Wi-Fi APs with others. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive economic analysis for such a crowdsourced network, with the particular focus on the users' behavior analysis and the community network operator's pricing design. Specifically, we formulate the interactions between the network operator and users as a two-layer Stackelberg model, where the operator determining the pricing scheme in Layer I, and then users determining their Wi-Fi sharing schemes in Layer II. First, we analyze the user behavior in Layer II via a two-stage membership selection and network access game, for both small-scale networks and large-scale networks. Then, we design a partial price differentiation scheme for the operator in Layer I, which generalizes both the complete price differentiation scheme and the single pricing scheme (i.e., no price differentiation). We show that the proposed partial pricing scheme can achieve a good tradeoff between the revenue and the implementation complexity. Numerical results demonstrate that when using the partial pricing scheme with only two prices, we can increase the operator's revenue up to 124.44 percent comparing with the single pricing scheme, and can achieve an average of 80 percent of the maximum operator revenue under the complete price differentiation scheme.

Crowdsourced wireless community networks enable individual users to share their private Wi-Fi access points (APs) with each other, hence can achieve a large Wi-Fi coverage with a low deployment cost. This paper presents the first Wi-Fi sharing mechanism design for the community network operator under incomplete information, where the quality of each user-provided Wi-Fi access is his private information. Specifically, we propose a contract-based incentive mechanism, where the operator offers a set of contract items to users, each consisting of a Wi-Fi access price (that a user can charge others who access his AP) and a subscription fee (that a user needs to pay the operator). Different from prior contract mechanisms for wireless networks, here each user's best contract choice depends not only on his private information, but also on other users' choices. This greatly complicates the contract design, as the operator needs to analyze the equilibrium choices of all users, rather than the best choice of each single user. We derive the feasible contract that guarantees the user participation and truthful information disclosure under the equilibrium. Our analysis shows that a higher type user (who provides a higher quality access) is more likely to choose a higher price and subscription fee. Simulation results further show that when increasing the ratio of higher type users in the system, the operator can gain more profit, while counter-intuitively, offering lower prices and subscription fees for all users.

Mobile users’ correlated mobility and data consumption patterns often lead to severe cellular network congestion in peak hours and hot spots. This paper presents an optimal design of time and location aware mobile data pricing, which incentivizes users to smooth traffic and reduce network congestion. We derive the optimal pricing scheme through analyzing a two-stage decision process, where the operator determines the time and location aware prices by minimizing his total cost in Stage I, and each mobile user schedules his mobile traffic by maximizing his payoff (i.e., utility minus payment) in Stage II. We formulate the two-stage decision problem as a bilevel optimization problem, and propose a derivative-free algorithm to solve the problem for any increasing concave user utility functions. We further develop low complexity algorithms for the commonly used logarithmic and linear utility functions. The optimal pricing scheme ensures a win-win situation for the operator and users. Simulations show that the operator can reduce the cost by up to$97.52$percent in the logarithmic utility case and$98.70$percent in the linear utility case, and users can increase their payoff by up to$79.69$and$106.10$percent for the two types of utilities, respectively, comparing with a time and location independent pricing benchmark. Our study suggests that the operator should provide price discounts at less crowded time slots and locations, and the discounts need to be significant when the operator's cost of provisioning excessive traffic is high or users’ willingness to delay traffic is low.

We study the downlink linear precoder design problem in a multicell dense heterogeneous network (HetNet). The problem is formulated as a general sum-utility maximization (SUM) problem, which includes as special cases many practical precoder design problems such as multicell coordinated linear precoding, full and partial per-cell coordinated multipoint transmission, zero-forcing precoding, and joint BS clustering and beamforming/precoding. The SUM problem is difficult due to its nonconvexity and the tight coupling of the users' precoders. In this paper, we propose a novel convex approximation technique to approximate the original problem by a series of convex subproblems, each of which decomposes across all the cells. The convexity of the subproblems allows for efficient computation, while their decomposability leads to distributed implementation. Our approach hinges upon the identification of certain key convexity properties of the sum-utility objective, which allows us to transform the problem into a form that can be solved using a popular algorithmic framework called block successive upper-bound minimization (BSUM). Simulation experiments show that the proposed framework is effective for solving interference management problems in large HetNet.

Consider the joint power and admission control (JPAC) problem for a multiuser single-input single-output (SISO) interference channel. Most existing works on JPAC assume the perfect instantaneous channel state information (CSI). In this paper, we consider the JPAC problem with the imperfect CSI, i.e., we assume that only the channel distribution information (CDI) is available. We formulate the JPAC problem into a chance (probabilistic)-constrained program, where each link's SINR outage probability is enforced to be less than or equal to a specified tolerance. To circumvent the computational difficulty of the chance SINR constraints, we propose to use the sample (scenario) approximation scheme to convert them into finitely many simple linear constraints. Furthermore, we reformulate the sample approximation of the chance SINR-constrained JPAC problem as a composite group sparse minimization problem and then approximate it by a second-order cone program (SOCP). The solution of the SOCP approximation can be used to check the simultaneous supportability of all links in the network and to guide an iterative link removal procedure (the deflation approach). We exploit the special structure of the SOCP approximation and custom-design an efficient algorithm for solving it. Finally, we illustrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed sample approximation-based deflation approaches by simulations.

We consider the joint channel and power allocation problem for the OFDMA system. The problem is to find a joint channel and power allocation strategy to minimize the total transmission power subject to quality of service constraints and the OFDMA constraint (i.e, at most one user is allowed to access each channel). Since the problem is generally NP-hard, the idea of the existing algorithms is to heuristically allocate the channel and power resources separately. In this paper, we propose a novel iterative reweighted minimization framework based on an effective relaxation, which is beneficial by reformulating the combinatorial OFDMA constraint as an equivalent continuous optimization problem. The proposed framework simultaneously allocates the channel and power resources, and thus is sharply different from the existing ones. Simulation results show the proposed iterative reweighted minimization methods significantly outperform the existing algorithms.

A crowdsourced wireless community network can effectively alleviate the limited coverage issue of Wi-Fi access points (APs), by encouraging individuals (users) to share their private residential Wi-Fi APs with each other. This paper presents the first study on the users' joint membership selection and network access problem in such a network. Specifically, we formulate the problem as a two-stage dynamic game: Stage I corresponds to a membership selection game, in which each user chooses his membership type; Stage II corresponds to a set of network access games, in each of which each user decides his WiFi connection time on the AP at his current location. We analyze the Subgame Perfect Equilibrium (SPE) of the two-stage game, and analyze whether and how best response dynamics can reach the equilibrium. We further numerically explore how the equilibrium changes with the users' mobility patterns and network access evaluations. We show that a user with a more popular home location, a smaller travel time, or a smaller network access evaluation is more likely to choose the Bill membership type. We further demonstrate how the network operator can optimize its pricing and incentive mechanism based on the equilibrium analysis.

Mobile users' social behaviors often lead to significant temporal and spatial variations of mobile traffic. This could create severe cellular network congestion in peak hours and hot spots. This paper presents an initial study on designing the time and location aware pricing scheme to incentivize users to smooth traffic and reduce network congestion. We derive the optimal pricing scheme through analyzing a two-stage decision process, where the operator announces the time and location aware prices in Stage I, and users schedule their mobile traffic accordingly in Stage II. We can translate such a two-stage decision problem into a bilevel optimization problem, which is NP-hard and challenging to solve. We propose an easily implementable algorithm, which utilizes a penalty method and a block coordinate decent algorithm to solve the problem. The resultant pricing scheme ensures a win-win situation for both the operator and users. Our simulation shows that the operator can reduce the extra cost for provisioning the peak traffic by up to 98.70%, and users can increase their total payoff by up to 106.10%, comparing with a time and location independent pricing benchmark.

This paper considers transmit covariance optimization for a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) Gaussian wiretap channel. Specifically, we aim to maximize the MIMO secrecy capacity by judiciously designing the transmit covariance under the sum power and per-antenna power constraints. The MIMO secrecy capacity maximization (SCM) problem is nonconvex, and so far there is no tractable solution available. We propose an alternating optimization (AO) approach to handle the SCM problem. In particular, our development consists of two steps: First, we show that the SCM problem can be reexpressed to a form that can be conveniently processed by AO. Second, we develop a custom-designed fast algorithm for each AO iteration. Interestingly, with this fast implementation, the overall AO algorithm can be viewed as performing iterative reweighting and water-filling. Finally, the convergence of the proposed algorithm to a stationary solution of SCM is shown, and numerical results are provided to demonstrate its efficacy.

In an interference network, joint power and admission control aims to support a maximum number of links at their specified signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) targets while using a minimum total transmission power. In our previous work, we formulated the joint control problem as a sparse ℓ0-minimization problem and relaxed it to a ℓ1-minimization problem. In this work, we propose to approximate the ℓ0-optimization problem by a p norm minimization problem where 0p-minimization problem is strongly NP-hard and then derive a reformulation of it such that the well developed interior-point algorithms can be applied to solve it. The solution to the ℓp-minimization problem can efficiently guide the link's removals (deflation). Numerical simulations show the proposed heuristic outperforms the existing algorithms.

This paper considers transmit optimization in multi-input multi-output (MIMO) wiretap channels, wherein we aim at maximizing the secrecy capacity or rate of an MIMO channel overheard by one or multiple eavesdroppers. Such optimization problems are nonconvex, and appear to be difficult especially in the multi-eavesdropper scenario. In this paper, we propose an alternating optimization (AO) approach to tackle these secrecy optimization problems. We first consider the secrecy capacity maximization (SCM) problem in the single eavesdropper scenario. An AO algorithm is derived through a judicious SCM reformulation. The algorithm conducts some kind of reweighting and water-filling in an alternating fashion, and thus is computationally efficient to implement. We also prove that the AO algorithm is guaranteed to converge to a Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) point of the SCM problem. Then, we turn our attention to the multiple eavesdropper scenario, where the artificial noise (AN)-aided secrecy rate maximization (SRM) problem is considered. Although the AN-aided SRM problem has a more complex problem structure than the previous SCM, we show that AO can be extended to deal with the former, wherein the problem is handled by solving convex problems in an alternating fashion. Again, the resulting AO method is proven to have KKT point convergence guarantee. For fast implementation, a custom-designed AO algorithm based on smoothing and projected gradient is also derived. The secrecy rate performance and computational efficiency of the proposed algorithms are demonstrated by simulations.

Consider the linear transceiver design problem for a multi-user single-input multi-output (SIMO) interference channel. Assuming perfect channel knowledge, we formulate this problem as one of maximizing the minimum signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) among all the users, subject to individual power constraints at each transmitter. We prove in this letter that the max-min fairness linear transceiver design problem for the SIMO interference channel can be solved to global optimality in polynomial time. We further propose a low-complexity inexact cyclic coordinate ascent algorithm (ICCAA) to solve this problem. Numerical simulations show the proposed algorithm can efficiently find the global optimal solution of the considered problem.

In an interference network, joint power and admission control aims to support a maximum number of links at their specified signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) targets while using a minimum total transmission power. Since this problem is NP-hard, convex approximation heuristics have been considered in the literature. In this work, we first reformulate the problem as a sparse ℓ0-minimization problem and then relax it to a linear program (LP). Then, we derive an easily-checkable necessary condition for all links in the network to be simultaneously supported at their target SINR levels, and use it to iteratively remove strong interfering links (deflation). Numerical simulations show the proposed heuristic compares favorably with the existing approaches in terms of both the number of supported links and speed.

Consider the max-min fairness linear transceiver design for a multi-user MIMO interference channel. Assuming perfect channel knowledge, this problem can be formulated as the maximization of minimum SINR utility, subject to individual power constraints at each transmitter. In this paper, it is shown that when the number of antennas at each transmitter (receiver) is at least two and at each receiver (transmitter) is at least three, the problem of checking whether the given target SINR is feasible is strongly NP-hard. A cyclic coordinate ascent algorithm is also proposed for this design problem. Monotonicity and global convergence to KKT solution of the proposed algorithm are proved.

In a cellular wireless system, users located at cell edges often suffer significant out-of-cell interference. In this paper we consider a coordinated beamforming approach whereby multiple base stations jointly optimize their downlink beamforming vectors in order to simultaneously improve the data rates of a given group of cell edge users. Assuming perfect channel knowledge, we formulate this problem as the maximization of a system utility function (which balances user fairness and average user rates), subject to individual power constraints at each base station. We show that, for the single carrier case and when the number of antennas at each base station is at least two, the optimal coordinated beamforming problem is strongly NP-hard for both the harmonic mean utility function and the proportional fairness utility function. For the min-rate utility function, we show that the problem is solvable in polynomial time.