Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is considered as a promising paradigm to overcome the computational constraints of mobile devices by offloading intensive tasks to nearby edge servers. As the number of users in the MEC network increases, users inevitably compete for limited wireless and computing resources, leading to a substantial escalation in the complexity of network resource allocation. Motivated by this challenge, this paper focuses on a multi-user binary computation offloading system in an MEC environment over quasi-static competitive wireless channels. We propose a non-cooperative game model, where user devices strategically optimize their offloading decisions to minimize total costs in terms of latency and energy consumption. Building upon this, the existence and feasibility of a Nash equilibrium is rigorously proved, thereby ensuring stability within the system. Furthermore, a distributed computation offloading algorithm is proposed based on game optimization, which enables user devices to adaptively attain balanced offloading strategies with minimal computational overhead. Extensive simulations validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, demonstrating that it achieves near-optimal performance compared with the centralized optimization methods while avoiding additional server load or the need for user-specific configuration.

Quantum key distribution (QKD) has emerged as a promising solution for guaranteeing information-theoretic security. Inspired by this, a great amount of research effort has been recently put on designing and testing QKD systems as well as articulating preliminary application scenarios. However, due to the considerable high-cost of QKD equipment, a lack of QKD communication system design tools, wide deployment of such systems and networks is challenging. Motivated by this, this paper introduces a QKD communication system design tool. First we articulate key operation elements of the QKD, and explain the feasibility and applicability of coherent-one-way (COW) QKD solutions. Next, we focus on documenting the corresponding simulation framework as well as defining the key performance metrics, i.e., quantum bit error rate (QBER), and secrecy key rate. To verify the accuracy of the simulation framework, we design and deploy a real-world QKD setup. We perform extensive experiments for three deployments of diverse transmission distance in the presence or absence of a QKD eavesdropper. The results reveal an acceptable match between simulations and experiments rendering the simulation framework a suitable tool for QKD communication system design.

Downlink channel estimation and achievable rate optimization are critical challenges in current RIS-assisted MIMO systems. The two issues are studied separately: deep learning is used for channel estimation, and convex optimization is employed for rate maximization. But the step-by-step execution will lead to an increase in computational complexity and algorithmic complexity due to the separate handling of each task. To overcome these limitations, we propose an end-to-end integrated deep learning framework that jointly executes channel estimation and optimizes phase configuration to improve system performance. Specifically, a two-stage deep neural network architecture is introduced, which is trained using a multi-task optimization strategy. Moreover, the optimal network structure was explored by adjusting the scale of each stage and the training weight ratio. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm significantly reduces computational overhead while maintaining high system performance.

The downlink channel estimation is currently a critical bottleneck for IRS-assisted cell-free multiple input multiple output communication. Conventionally, most studies have employed deep learning methods to estimate the high-dimensional, complex cascaded channels generated by IRS, necessitating data collection from all users for centralized model training, which results in excessively large overheads, and data privacy problems. To tackle this challenge, a federated learning (FL)-based channel estimation framework incorporates coalition formation to guide the formation of FL user groups. We propose a coalition formation-enabled federated learning framework for channel estimation, utilizing a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approach to intelligently group users into multiple coalitions, thereby improving channel estimation accuracy. Moreover, considering that nodes with similar distances to the base station and similar received signal power have a strong likelihood that they experience similar channel fading, we designed a transfer learning method that incorporates both received reference signal power and distance similarity metrics. The transfer learning technique is designed to accelerate the convergence of DRL-federated learning process. Simulations reveal that the proposed algorithms significantly reduce communication overhead for local users and improve data privacy while maintaining commendable channel estimation accuracy.

In this work, we investigate the physical layer security (PLS) of ambient backscatter communication non-orthogonal multiple access (AmBC-NOMA) networks where non-colluding eavesdroppers (Eves) are randomly distributed. In the proposed system, a base station (BS) transmits a superimposed signal to a typical NOMA user pair, while a backscatter device (BD) simultaneously transmits its unique signal by reflecting and modulating the BS’s signal. Meanwhile, Eves passively attempt to wiretap the ongoing transmissions. Notably, the number and locations of Eves are unknown, posing a substantial security threat to the system. To address this challenge, the BS injects artificial noise (AN) to mislead the Eves, and a protected zone is employed to create an Eve-exclusion area around the BS. Theoretical expressions for outage probability (OP) and intercept probability (IP) are provided to evaluate the system’s reliability-security trade-off. Asymptotic behavior at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is further explored, including the derivation of diversity orders for the OP. Numerical results validate the analytical findings through extensive simulations, demonstrating that both the AN injection and protected zone can effectively enhance PLS. Furthermore, analysis and insights of different key parameters, including transmit SNR, reflection efficiency at the BD, power allocation coefficient, power fraction allocated to desired signal, Eve-exclusion area radius, Eve distribution density, and backscattered AN cancellation efficiency, on OP and IP are also provided.

This paper focuses on providing a theoretical framework for the evaluation of the performance of holographic reconfigurable intelligent surface (HRIS) empowered terahertz (THz) wireless systems under fog conditions. In more detail, we present a comprehensive methodology for evaluating the geometric losses of the end-to-end channel. Moreover, the stochastic nature of the end-to-end channel is characterized by novel closed-form probability density and cumulative distribution functions. Building upon them, the outage probability and the throughput of the system are extracted in closed form. These formulas account for the impact of transceiver hardware imperfections and are expected to become useful tools for the design of HRIS empowered THz wireless systems due to its remarkable engineering insights.

One of the disruptive communication technologies for sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks is cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (CF-mMIMO), which is capable to control inter-cell interference in MIMO systems. This paper investigates the performance of a full-duplex (FD) CF-mMIMO systems with practical limited-capacity fronthaul links. The proposed system employs a large number of M distributed FD APs, arbitrarily distributed$K_{d}$downlink (DL) and$K_{u}$uplink (UL) half-duplex (HD) single-antenna equipped user terminals (UEs), and a central processing unit (CPU). To exploit the energy efficiency and potential throughput gains of FD systems, each AP is linked to the CPU through a fronthaul link with limited capacity that handles the quantized UL/DL data to/from the CPU. Each AP is expected to support K HD UEs on the same spectrum resource, where$K = (K_{u} + K_{d})$. Imperfect channel state information and the mobility of the UEs are also considered. A closed-form expression for the outage probability is derived using the optimal uniform quantization and maximum-ratio combining/maximum-ratio transmission considering the Welch-Satterthwaite approximation. Additionally, the asymptotic and infinite-M outage expressions for the proposed system are analytically studied and verified via Monte Carlo simulation. Simulation results demonstrate the relationship between the improved outage performance and uniform quality of service (QoS) for all UEs. Moreover, this analysis provides valuable insights into the behavior of FD-CF-mMIMO system and underscores the importance of providing a uniform QoS to all UEs in improving the overall performance of the system.

In this paper, we consider a novel hybrid reconfigurable intelligent surface (HRIS) consisting of active as well as passive reflecting elements mounted on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The aim is to improve air-to-ground communication by assisting multiple users, while detecting several low mobility targets. We formulate a sum-rate optimization problem that accounts for statistical channel estimation errors (SCEEs) to concurrently fine-tune both active and passive phase-shift matrices, UAV trajectory, and transmit beamformer for integrated sensing and communication (ISAC). Subsequently, we introduce a transfer learning based approach combining with deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) to enhance the overall data rate while minimizing the time it takes for users to transmit data. Additionally, we present an alternating optimization (AO) algorithm that employs a repetitive method to address the combinatorial nonconvex optimization problem and offers a solution that is very close to optimal. Finally, we showcase the superiority of the proposed scheme through Monte Carlo simulations. Also, we have compared the performance with perfect channel state information (CSI) counterpart. The outcomes of simulations confirm the theoretical analysis and demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed framework. Additionally, the results reveal the advantages of incorporating HRIS aided UAV assisted ISAC in improving the quality of both communication and sensing performance.

Given the rapid growth of diverse communication demands, future large-scale satellite-aerial-terrestrial integrated networks (SATINs) need to simultaneously provide services to users while guaranteeing spectral efficiency, secrecy and energy efficiency. This paper addresses the problem of maximising secrecy energy efficiency (SEE) in SATINs, which can accurately describe the effective trade-off between security, spectral efficiency and transmit power. Particularly, we investigate a secure beamforming (BF) scheme in cognitive SATINs that employs rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) and reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) in the presence of multiple eavesdroppers (Eves) in a UAV-aided secondary network (SN). To optimize the SEE for secondary vehicle users while satisfying the constraints of primary users (PUs), we utilize deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to address the coupling between different optimized parameters based on the improved long short-term memory proximal policy optimization (LSTM-PPO) algorithm. The main innovation of this paper is to design a sophisticated reward function, action space, and state space according to each constraint to speed up the convergence. In addition, simulation results show that the proposed DRL-based optimization scheme exhibits significant advantages in terms of SEE compared with benchmark schemes, validating the effectiveness of this work.

In the ever-evolving landscape of next-generation wireless communication systems, the need for high data rates, seamless connectivity, and energy efficiency continues to increase. To meet these demands, the integration of emerging technologies such as cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (CFm-MIMO) and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) has gained significant attention. This paper presents a comprehensive performance analysis of a downlink active RIS-assisted CFm-MIMO system in the context of user terminal (UT) mobility, emphasizing the critical aspect of constrained fronthaul capacity. The paper employs a rigorous analytical framework to determine the outage performance of the proposed system considering imperfections in the channel state information (CSI). The findings presented in this paper demonstrate the impact of the number of RIS elements ($N$), quantization parameters, UT mobility, scattering models, and imperfect CSI on the outage probability. It is revealed that by increasing the$N$from 8 to 32 will significantly decreases the OP by 99.75%. Moreover, it is interesting to observe that the choice and optimization of quantization parameters remain consistent regardless of RIS presence.

This paper explores a cutting-edge terahertz (THz) integrated sensing and communication system (ISAC) that utilizes active simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (A-STAR-RIS). The system incorporates a novel dynamic delay alignment (DDA) modulation technique, allowing signals from different paths to reach the receiver simultaneously, eliminating the need for complex channel equalization and mitigating inter-symbol interference, while considering the dynamic movement of the vehicles, and accounting for time-selective fading and uniform Doppler power spectra (DPS) model. Our system features a dual-function radar and communication multiple antenna base station (BS), serving both communication and target sensing functions concurrently through an A-STAR-RIS. The objective is to maximize the sum rate by jointly optimizing BS transmit beamforming, A-STAR-RIS reflection and transmission beamforming matrices, vehicular unit (VU) mobility correlation parameters, and radar receive filter. Given the intricate nature of this non-convex optimization problem, owing to dynamic changes in communication links and the interplay of multiple variables, traditional optimization methods prove challenging. To overcome this, we propose a machine learning (ML) based deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) algorithm. Our simulations validate the substantial benefits of A-STAR-RIS over conventional benchmark scenarios.

This paper presents an American sign language (ASL) semantic communications scheme. The scheme consists of a semantic encoder that leverages a convolutional neural network to effectively utilize the ASL alphabet. The encoded information is transmitted with the 24-QAM quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). Additionally, this paper introduces a dataset that involves the overlaying of red-green-blue landmarks and key-points onto the acquired images, thereby augmenting the depiction of hand posture. The quantification of the proposed system’s training, testing, and communication performance is accomplished through numerical results, which serve to emphasize the attainable benefits and stimulate meaningful discussions.

In this paper, we consider a novel hybrid reconfigurable intelligent surface (HRIS) consisting of active as well as passive reflecting elements mounted on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The aim is to improve air-to-ground communication by assisting multiple users, while detecting several moving targets. We formulate an optimization model that account for statistical channel estimation errors (SCEEs) to concurrently fine-tune both active and passive phase-shift matrices, UAV trajectory and transmit beamformer for integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), while aiming to maximize the overall achievable sum-rate. Subsequently, we introduce an alternating optimization algorithm that employs a repetitive method to address the combinatorial nonconvex optimization problem and ultimately yielding a solution that is nearly optimal. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we showcase the superiority of the suggested approach in comparison to baseline schemes.

Satellite and high-altitude platform (HAP) are considered as the key parts of the next generation networks, and specifically for the Internet-of-Things networks, which are utilized to provide unobstructed connections and massive user access for terrestrial networks. In this article, we investigate the power allocation (PA) and system performance of nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-enabled integrated satellite-HAP-terrestrial systems under practical limitations. Particularly, a practical system model is established by considering the channel estimation errors and imperfect successive interference cancelation at the receiver. To achieve the different quality of service requirements among multiple served users, we propose a novel NOMA-based PA scheme. In addition, the analytical and asymptotic expressions for the outage probability of NOMA users are obtained to verify the proposed scheme as well as the ergodic capacity. Finally, numerical results are corroborated with Monte Carlo simulations, which show the correctness of our analytical results, and the benefits of our proposed scheme. The proposed scheme indicates that the HAP relay link plays a significant role in the system performance.

This work investigates the performance of simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) in a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided internet of things (IoT) communications under imperfect channel state information (CSI). We formulate a multi-objective optimization problem (MOOP) to design transmit precoding vector (TPV) at the base station (BS) and phase shift matrix (PSM) at the RIS that jointly maximizes energy efficiency (EE) and harvested power (HP) under the norm bounded CSI error model. Due to the conflicting objective functions and non-convex nature of the above optimization problem, the MOOP is simplified using the.-constraint method and subsequently adopting advanced optimization tools, such as Dinkelbach method, S-procedure, general sign-definiteness, semidefinite programming and convex-concave procedure. Thereafter, we propose an alternating optimization-based algorithm which determines optimal TPV and PSM iteratively that jointly maximizes the EE and HP of the considered system. Through numerical simulations, we validate the robustness, optimality, convergence, accuracy and effectiveness of our proposed algorithm. Furthermore, we assess the impact of several key parameters such as the number of RIS elements, available transmit power at BS and the minimum HP on the performance of the considered system.

It is true that medical diagnosis and treatment have always been at the top of research activities. Recently, a very promising area that combines the operation of human body with the principles of wireless communications has arisen and given birth to the field of bio-photonics. Although the deployment of nano-networks inside the human body seems to be an achievable goal, the implementation of optical wireless nano-networks remains a very challenging field due to the lack of accurate channel modeling. Therefore, in this paper, we comprehensively investigate the optical wireless nano-communication channels by considering the deterministic geometric losses (e.g., optical absorption and scattering in human tissues), and modeling the impact of nano-node disorientation and misalignment in in-body nano-networks. To this end, we analytically study the stochastic nature of disorientation and misalignment coefficient in terms of the position and orientation of the nano-node with reference to the out-of-body optical receiver. In particular, we study the statistics of the joint disorientation and misalignment coefficient in terms of the probability density function, which is given in closed-form expression, whereas its cumulative distribution function is introduced as a semi-infinite series expression. Building upon them, we extract novel analytical expressions for the average signal-to-noise-ratio and the outage probability, and a thorough study on the impact of the human tissues on the above performance metrics is conducted. The analytical results are corroborated and cross-compared by means of Monte Carlo simulations, which reveal the importance of accounting for the joint impact of disorientation and misalignment of nano-node when designing optical wireless nano-networks.

Integrated satellite-aerial-terrestrial relay networks (ISATRNs) have been considered as a promising architecture for next-generation networks, where high altitude platform (HAP) is pivotal in these integrated networks. In this paper, we introduce a novel model for HAP-based ISATRNs with mixed FSO/RF transmission mode, which incorporates unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) to dynamically reconfigure the propagation environment and fulfill the massive access requirements of ground users. Our aim is to maximize the system ergodic rate by joint optimizing the UAV trajectory, RIS phase shift, and active transmit beamforming matrix under the constraint of UAV energy consumption. To solve this intractable problem, a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based energy efficient optimization scheme by utilizing an improved long short-term memory (LSTM)-double deep Q-network (DDQN) framework is proposed. Numerical results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed algorithm over the traditional DDQN algorithm, on single-step exploration average reward values and other evaluation metrics.

Full duplex (FD) radios have attracted extensive attention due to the co-time and co-frequency transceiving capability. However, the potential gain brought by FD radios is closely related to the management of self-interference (SI), which imposes high or even stringent requirements on SI cancellation (SIC) techniques. When the FD deployment evolves into next-generation mobile networking, the SI problem becomes more complicated, significantly limiting its potential gains. In this paper, we conceive a multi-cell FD networking scheme by deploying a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) at the cell boundary to configure the radio environment proactively. To achieve the full potential of the system, we aim to maximize the sum rate (SR) of multiple cells by jointly optimizing the transmit precoding (TPC) matrices at FD base stations (BSs) and users, as well as the phase shift matrix at the RIS. Since the original problem is non-convex, we reformulate and decouple it into a pair of subproblems by utilizing the relationship between the SR and minimum mean square error (MMSE). The optimal solutions of TPC matrices are obtained in closed form, while both complex circle manifold (CCM) and successive convex approximation (SCA) based algorithms are developed to resolve the phase shift matrix suboptimally. Our simulation results show that introducing an RIS into an FD networking system not only improves the overall SR significantly but also enhances the cell edge performance prominently. More importantly, we validate that the RIS deployment with optimized phase shifts can reduce the requirement for SIC and the number of BS antennas, which further reduces the hardware cost and power consumption, especially with a sufficient number of reflecting elements. As a result, the utilization of an RIS enables the originally cumbersome FD networking system to become efficient and practical.

To overcome the long transmission distances and limited spectrum resources issues, both the space-aerial-terrestrial relay networks (SATRNs) and hybrid-free space optical/radio frequency (FSO/RF) mode have attracted significant attentions. Specifically, high-altitude platform (HAP) and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) are employed in this paper to enhance the transmission reliability and improve the resource utilization along with the reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) and rate splitting multiple access (RSMA) techniques. Besides, we propose a novel access-free federated deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework, which exploits the privacy-preserving security features of federated learning (FL) and DRL, to optimize active beamforming vectors, RIS reflection coefficients, UAV trajectory, and power splitting ratio. The learning process of the algorithm is performed locally which significantly reduces the computational overhead compared to traditional algorithms. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed federated DRL-aided framework achieves higher energy efficiency compared to the reference schemes.

This paper explores the state-of-the-art terahertz (THz) integrated sensing and communication system (ISAC) that uses active reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (ASRIS) that can transmit and reflect signals at the same time. The system incorporates a novel dynamic delay alignment (DDA) modulation technique, allowing signals from different paths to reach the receiver simultaneously, eliminating the need for complex channel equalization and mitigating inter-symbol interference, while considering the dynamic movement of the vehicular units (VUs), and accounting for time-selective fading and uniform Doppler power spectra (DPS) model. Our system is equipped with a dual-function radar and communication multiple-antenna base station (BS), which simultaneously serves both communication and target sensing functions through an ASRIS. The objective is to maximize the sum rate by jointly optimizing BS transmit beamforming, ASRIS reflection and transmission beamforming matrices, VU mobility correlation parameters, and radar receive filter. Traditional optimization methods prove challenging given the intricate nature of this non-convex optimization problem, owing to dynamic changes in communication links and the interplay of multiple variables. To overcome this, we propose a machine learning (ML)-based multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient (MADDPG) algorithm. MADDPG enables collaborative learning, adapts to the dynamic communication environment, and excels in optimizing interdependent parameters in the proposed THz system. Deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG), proximal policy optimization (PPO), and modified-PPO (MPPO) algorithms serve as benchmarks, showcasing the distinctive advantages of the ML-based MADDPG solution for the proposed system’s complexities. Our simulations validate the substantial benefits of ASRIS over conventional RIS benchmark scenarios.

Semi-grant-free (SGF) transmission scheme enables grant-free (GF) users to utilize resource blocks allocated for grant-based (GB) users while maintaining the quality of service of GB users. This work investigates the secrecy performance of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-aided SGF systems. First, analytical expressions for the exact and asymptotic secrecy outage probability (SOP) of NOMA-aided SGF systems with a single GF user are derived. Then, the SGF systems with multiple GF users and the best-user scheduling scheme is considered. By utilizing order statistics theory, analytical expressions for the exact and asymptotic SOP are derived. Monte Carlo simulation results are provided and compared with two benchmark schemes. The effects of system parameters on the SOP of the considered system are demonstrated and the accuracy of the developed analytical results is verified. The results indicate that both the outage target rate for GB and the secure target rate for GF are the main factors of the secrecy performance of SGF systems.

The proliferation of multiple devices and acceleration of spectral efficiency has become a pivotal requirement for the unprecedented connectivity and performance of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) networks. This paper investigates an unconventional framework of reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-integrated full-duplex (FD) rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) communication systems, which aims to maximize the spectral efficiency of uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) vehicles in V2X network. In particular, a robust spectral-efficient design for the considered RIS-integrated FD-RSMA system via joint beamforming design and power allocation at UL vehicles under imperfect channel state information is investigated. To tackle the non-convexity of the original sum-rate maximization problem, we adopt a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm which leverages Markov decision process formulation. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the integration of RIS, RSMA, and FD schemes for V2X networks over half-duplex (HD) and multi-user linear precoding schemes. Furthermore, the superiority of the proposed PPO algorithm is validated over the counterpart deep deterministic policy gradient algorithm (DDPG).

In this paper, we consider Simultaneous Transmission and Reflection (STAR) Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (S-RIS) and passive RIS (P-RIS) assisted integrated sensing and communication system (ISAC), where S-RIS is enabled to broadcast communication signal, and P-RIS assists sensing functionalities. In particular, we jointly optimize the beamforming vector at the multi-antenna ISAC transmitter, and phase shift vector to maximize the weighted sum-rate (WSR) at the communication users while taking care of the maximum power limit at ISAC transmitter while ensuring the performance of sensing model to detect targets in its vicinity and limitations of phase and amplitude of S-RIS elements. To address the non-convexity of the above problem, we propose a low-complexity alternating optimization (AO) algorithm. Furthermore, we provide a comprehensive simulation-based graphical results to verify the viability of the proposed framework with its P-RIS assisted counterpart. Eventually, exhaustive simulation results are demonstrated to present the impact of RIS elements and the number of antennas at the ISAC transmitter. Accordingly, we illustrate the impact of S-RIS and the number of targets to highlight the trade-off between sensing and communication.

This work investigates the performance of simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) in a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided green multiple input single output (MISO) communications under imperfect channel state information (CSI). With an aim to provide green and robust transmission, we formulate a multi-objective optimization problem (MOOP) to design transmit precoding vector (TPV) at the base station (BS) and phase shift matrix (PSM) at the RIS that maximizes the energy efficiency at the information receivers and harvested power at the energy receivers under the norm bounded CSI error model. Due to the conflicting objective functions and non-convex nature, the MOOP is simplified using the$\epsilon$-constraint method. We then propose an alternating optimization-based iterative algorithm that utilizes semidefinite programming to determine the optimal TPV and PSM one by one until convergence is achieved. Via exhaustive simulations, we graphically demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed algorithm. Furthermore, we assess the impact of several key parameters such as the number of RIS elements, available transmit power at BS and the minimum harvested power at each energy receiver on the performance of the considered system.

In this paper, a radio-frequency (RF) domain symbol level precoding technique is developed for reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted downlink multiuser multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) systems. We study a system with a base station (BS) employing an analog architecture formed by a phase shifting network which serves a number of single antenna users with the help of a RIS. Such an architecture facilitates significant reductions in power consumption and hardware complexity. The objective of this paper is to jointly derive the optimal RF precoder, RIS reflection matrix and receive processing coefficients, subject to constraints on the BS analog architecture, the total transmit power, and the structure of the RIS reflection matrix. To that end, a difficult nonconvex optimization problem is formulated and solved. An efficient algorithmic solution is developed for the considered problem. Numerical results show that the derived solution offers significant energy efficiency gains when compared to non-RIS-assisted approaches.

Concurrent with the rise of real-time wireless systems enabled by the Internet of Things, the age of information (AoI) has been widely perceived as a crucial destination-centric performance metric to quantify the timeliness of data delivery. This paper deals with the analysis of information freshness in a multi-source M/G/1 queueing system with utilization of idle server time, referred to as server vacation, in an effective manner. In particular, the status update packets in our model are generated independently by a finite set of source nodes and according to a Poisson process, while their service time follows a general random variable. Using stochastic decomposition and the Laplace-Stieltjes transform, we derive the average AoI (AAoI) expression for the multi-source M/G/1 queueing model with generally-distributed vacation time in closed form. Our numerical simulations validate the accuracy of the derived AAoI expression and assess the impact of different parameters on the system performance.

The cell-free massive multiple-input and multiple-output (CF-mMIMO) communication technology has the ability to handle inter-cell interference in MIMO systems, making it a potential candidate for sixth-generation (6G) wireless communication. A CF-mMIMO system is investigated in this paper for mission-critical ultra-reliable low latency communication (URLLC) applications involving a central processing unit (CPU), many distributed access points (APs), each with multiple antennas, and multiple single-antenna user equipment (UEs). In order to maximize energy efficiency (EE) and throughput gains, each AP is linked to the CPU through a fronthaul link with limited capacity, which handles the quantized uplink data to the CPU. We assume that each AP serves fewer UEs. Our approach has a minimal signal processing complexity and offers UEs uniform quality of service (QoS) as well as improved EE. Closed-form expression for outage probability (OP) in the uplink of the CF-mMIMO system considering Welch-Satterthwaite approximation is derived using a variety of Doppler power spectra (DPS) models that consider imperfect channel state information (CSI) and mobility of UEs. Our numerical simulations validate the correctness of the derived expressions.

In this paper, we propose a multi-cell full-duplex (FD) networking scheme by deploying a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) at the cell boundary to configure the radio environment proactively. We aim to maximize the sum rate (SR) of multiple cells by jointly optimizing the transmit precoding (TPC) matrices at FD base stations (BSs) and the phase shift matrix at RIS. Since the original problem is non-convex, we reformulate and decouple it into a pair of subproblems by utilizing the relationship between SR and minimum mean square error. The optimal solutions of TPC matrices are obtained in closed form, while a successive convex approximation-based algorithm is developed to resolve the phase shift matrix suboptimally. Simulation results show that introducing an RIS into the FD networking system can improve the overall SR significantly. More importantly, we validate that the RIS deployment with optimized phase shifts can reduce the requirement for self-interference cancellation (SIC) and the number of BS antennas effectively, especially with enough reflecting elements. As a result, the utilization of RIS enables the originally cumbersome FD networking system to become efficient and practical.

Abstract In this paper, a two‐way relay‐aided cognitive satellite terrestrial network (TR‐CSTN) model is proposed, where primary users are located at the edge of the base station. In the TR‐CSTN, one of satellite terminal users (STUs) is selected by the fusion center as the TR to forward information between two edge primary users with power of the TR. Meanwhile, these edge primary users share the licensed frequency band with the selected TR to send information to the satellite. Then, given the limited spectrum utilization and energy efficiency (EE) of the communication system, the cooperative spectrum sensing is employed to realize green communication. Specifically, the fusion center threshold, energy detection threshold, sensing duration and number of STUs are jointly optimized to enhance EE. Furthermore, considering that the node's energy shortage results in a short network lifetime, absolute EE gets improved. In detail, a power allocation scheme named normalized power aided Lévy flight trajectory‐based whale optimization algorithm (NP‐LWOA) is provided, which fulfills effective energy compensation among STUs to prolong the network lifetime notably. Finally, numerical results confirm the theoretical analysis and show the effectiveness of the TR‐CSTN and the NP‐LWOA in efficiently achieving the concept of green communication compared with other methods.

In the uplink cognitive radio-inspired nonorthogonal multiple access (CR-NOMA) systems, the successive interference cancellation (SIC), and power control (PC) schemes were designed to enhance the outage performance but they lack the capability of protecting signals from being eavesdropped. This work investigates the secrecy performance of uplink CR-NOMA systems with the hybrid SIC and PC (HSIC-PC) scheme in the presence of a passive eavesdropper. Furthermore, through transmitting artificial noise (AN), a new scheme is proposed to improve the security of the cognitive user with HSIC-PC without deteriorating the primary user’s quality of service. Specifically, the primary and secondary users transmit AN cooperatively to enhance the security of the secondary user. The secrecy performance of the proposed scheme is analyzed based on the relationship between the maximum interference power that the primary user can tolerate and the secondary user’s channel gain. The analytical expressions for the secrecy outage probability (SOP) are derived, and the effect of parameters on the SOP is discussed. We also derive the analytical expressions of the asymptotic SOP in the high-power region to obtain further insights. Monte Carlo simulation results are performed to verify the analytical results. The results demonstrate that the proposed scheme performs better than the benchmarks.

In this paper, a rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) scheme is proposed to aid a mobile edge computing (MEC) system where multiple randomly deployed users offload their computation tasks to a MEC server. Considering that users are divided into the center and edge groups, a cognitive radio (CR)-inspired rate-splitting is designed to enable the paired users to simultaneously offload to MEC server. Under the CR principles, the rate-splitting parameters are jointly designed to attain the maximum achievable rate for the secondary user, meanwhile maintaining the primary user’s offloading performance same as in orthogonal multiple access. For the case of the paired users with fixed locations, we derive a closed-form expression for the successful computation probability (SCP) achieved by the RSMA-aided MEC (RSMA-MEC) scheme and formulate a SCP maximization problem to obtain the optimal offloading parameters. To reveal the impact of the user locations on the offloading performance of the RSMA-MEC system, various distance-based user pairing schemes are investigated by invoking stochastic geometry techniques. We provide closed-form expressions for the SCPs achieved by the user pairing schemes to characterize the offloading performance. Pros and cons of the user locations to maximize the SCP are highlighted. Simulation results verify the accuracy of the analytical results and clarify the superior offloading performance achieved by the RSMA-MEC scheme, which attains a higher SCP than the existing schemes.

Ambient backscatter communication (AmBC) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) are two promising technologies for the future wireless communication networks owing to their high energy and spectral efficiencies. The AmBC-aided NOMA symbiotic radio is a promising technology because of possessing advantages of AmBC and NOMA. Nonetheless, when a number of devices with limited power and computation capability access to the AmBC-based NOMA symbiotic networks, communication security becomes a critical issue. In this paper, we investigate physical-layer authentication (PLA) to identify the users and prevent illegal access and malicious activities for AmBC-based NOMA symbiotic networks. Moreover, channel estimation errors are considered when calculating the probability of false alarm (PFA) and probability of detection (PD) of the far user and near user. To enhance the authentication performance, three PLA schemes for the considered networks are designed according to the multiplexing form of the authentication tags: i) PLA with shared authentication tag (PLA-SAT); ii) PLA with space division multiplexing authentication tags; iii) PLA with time-division multiplexing authentication tags. To characterize the proposed PLA schemes, we first derive the PFA and the PD of the considered AmBC-based NOMA symbiotic networks. Then, the covertness is studied in terms of outage probability and asymptotic behavior in the high signal-to-noise ratio regime. Extensive analytical and computer simulated results show that: i) The PLA-SAT scheme has better performance than the other two authentication schemes with the same threshold; ii) The outage performance of systems employing authentication schemes is worse than those without authentication; iii) There exists a trade-off between robustness and covertness.

A multiple-input multiple-output wireless communication system is analytically studied, which operates with the aid of a large-scale reconfigurable intelligent surface (LRIS). LRIS is equipped with multiple passive elements with discrete phase adjustment capabilities, and independent Rician fading conditions are assumed for both the transmitter-to-LRIS and LRIS-to-receiver links. A direct transceiver link is also considered which is modeled by Rayleigh fading distribution. The system performance is analytically studied when the linear yet efficient zero-forcing detection is implemented at the receiver. In particular, the outage performance is derived in closed-form expression for different system configuration setups with regards to the available channel state information (CSI) at the receiver. In fact, the case of both perfect and imperfect CSI is analyzed. Also, an efficient phase shift design approach at LRIS is introduced, which is linear on the number of passive elements and receive antennas. The proposed phase shift design can be applied on two different modes of operation; namely, when the system strives to adapt either on the instantaneous or statistical CSI. Finally, some impactful engineering insights are provided, such as how the channel fading conditions, CSI, discrete phase shift resolution, and volume of antenna/LRIS element arrays impact on the overall system performance.

With their high mobility, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) become appealing data collectors in hard-to-reach wide-area distributed sensor networks. Different from existing works focusing on the perspective of UAVs for service order optimization and UAV utility maximization, we consider the utilities of both sensors and UAVs, and innovatively model the competition among sensors (buyers) for the service of UAVs (sellers) as an auction game. A “unity makes strength” strategy is exploited. That is, to strengthen the bidding competitiveness, a group-buying coalition auction method that encourages sensors to form coalitions to bid for UAV service is proposed. Besides, we propose a parallel variable neighborhood ascent search algorithm, we can quickly determine the approximately optimal group-buying coalition structure. Numerical results show that the proposed method outperforms the joint trajectory design-task scheduling (TDTS) UAV-to-community method and the single coalition formation game (CFG) method.

Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) connectivity in 5G-andbeyond communication networks supports the futuristic intelligent transportation system (ITS) by allowing vehicles to intelligently connect with everything. The advent of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) has led to realizing the true potential of V2X communication. In this work, we propose a dual RIS-based vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication scheme. Following that, the performance of the proposed communication scheme is evaluated in terms of deriving the closed-form expressions for outage probability, spectral efficiency and energy efficiency. Finally, the analytical findings are corroborated with simulations which illustrate the superiority of the RIS-assisted vehicular networks.

Fluid antenna systems (FAS) enable mechanically flexible antennas that offer adaptability and flexibility for modern communication devices. In this work, we present a conceptual model for a single-antenna N-port (SANP) FAS over spatially correlated Nakagami-m fading channels and compare it with the traditional diversity schemes in terms of outage probability. The proposed FAS model switches to the best antenna port and resembles the operation of a selection combining (SC) diversity. FAS improves the quality of service (QoS) of the network through antenna port selection. The advantage of FAS is the ability to fit hundreds of antenna ports into a half-wavelength antenna size at the cost of spatial channel correlation. Simulation results demonstrate the superior outage probability performance of FAS at several tens of antenna ports compared to the traditional diversity schemes such as maximum ratio combining, equal gain combining, and SC. Moreover, the novel probability and cumulative density functions for the land mobile correlated Nakagami-m random variates are evaluated in this paper.

Incorporating mobile-edge computing (MEC) in the Internet of Things (IoT) enables resource-limited IoT devices to offload their computation tasks to a nearby edge server. In this article, we investigate an IoT system assisted by the MEC technique with its computation task subjected to sequential task dependency, which is critical for video stream processing and other intelligent applications. To minimize energy consumption per IoT device while limiting task processing delay, task offloading strategy, communication resource, and computation resource are optimized jointly under both slow and fast-fading channels. In slow fading channels, an optimization problem is formulated, which is nonconvex and involves one integer variable. To solve this challenging problem, we decompose it as a 1-D search of task offloading decision problem and a nonconvex optimization problem with task offloading decision given. Through mathematical manipulations, the nonconvex problem is transformed to be a convex one, which is shown to be solvable only with the simple Golden search method. In fast-fading channels, optimal online policies depending on the instant channel state are derived even though they are entangled. In addition, it is proved that the derived policy will converge to the offline policy when the channel coherence time is low, which can help save extra computation complexity. Numerical results verify the correctness of our analysis and the effectiveness of our proposed strategies over the existing methods.

In this article, we study the secure communication performance of nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) communication systems with aerial eavesdroppers. First, the ground-to-ground NOMA communications systems are considered wherein the near user is uniformly distributed in an inner disc and the far user is uniformly distributed in an outer ring within cell coverage of a base station (BS) at the center. A single eavesdropper is uniformly distributed outside the protected zone or multiple eavesdroppers are randomly dispersed and modeled as a 3-D homogeneous Poisson point process. Subsequently, the secrecy performance of the ground-to-air NOMA communications systems is investigated wherein the near user is uniformly distributed in an internal 3-D spherical cap and the far user is uniformly distributed in an external 3-D spherical cap. To enhance secrecy performance, a protected zone is introduced around the ground BS. Novel exact expressions for the secrecy outage probability (SOP) for both scenarios are derived. Finally, Monte Carlo simulation results are presented to validate the correctness of the derived analytical expressions and demonstrate the effects of system parameters on SOP of the considered system.

In this paper, we address the antenna selection (AS) problem in full-duplex (FD) cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems, where a multi-antenna FD relay bridges the connection between the multi-antenna base station and NOMA far user. Specifically, two AS schemes, namely max-U1 and max-U2, are proposed to maximize the end-to-end signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio at either or both near and far users, respectively. Moreover, a two-stage AS scheme, namely quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning scheme, is designed to realize a specific rate at the far user while improving the near user’s rate. To enhance the performance of the QoS provisioning AS scheme, the idea of dynamic antenna clustering is applied at the relay to adaptively partition the relay’s antennas into transmit and receive subsets. The proposed AS schemes’ exact outage probability and achievable rate expressions are derived. To provide more insight, closed-form asymptotic outage probability expressions for the max-U1 and max-U2 AS schemes are obtained. Our results show that while the QoS provisioning AS scheme can deliver a near-optimal performance for static antenna setup at the relay, it provides up to 12% average sum rate gain over the optimum AS selection with fixed antenna setup.

Joint communication and radar sensing (JCAS) integrates the two functions into one system, sharing one transmitted signal. In this paper, we investigate JCAS waveform optimization in communication-centric systems, where a base station (BS) detects radar targets and communicates with mobile users simultaneously. Different from existing works, we study multi-metric optimizations for a practical low-cost system and establish their connections. To relax the requirement of full-duplex technology, we add a single receive antenna for sensing at the BS, which is synchronized with and spatially separated from the JCAS transmit array. We first optimize precoders for communications and radar, individually. Then, we formulate a JCAS waveform optimization problem that constrains either mutual information (MI) or Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) of radar and maximizes the relaxed signal-to-interference-plus-noise rate (SINR) of communications. Exploiting the geometric characteristic of the relaxed SINR, we provide a closed-form solution under certain conditions and propose a numerical iteration algorithm that works in all situations. We also disclose the connections between optimizations with constraining MI and CRB, using numerical results. Finally, simulation results are provided and validate the proposed optimization solutions.

In this paper, the performance of a mixed Terahertz/free-space optical (THz/FSO) wireless transmission system is studied, where the joint effects of channel fading and pointing errors are considered for both THz and FSO links. Employing the semi-blind amplify-and-forward protocol, we derive the cumulative distribution function and probability density function of the end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio. By applying the derived statistics, exact expressions for the outage probability (OP), average bit error rate (BER), and average channel capacity are obtained. In order to attain useful physical insights, asymptotic OP and average BER expressions are also presented. Based on them, the diversity gain is determined, which is shown to depend on channel fading and pointing errors of both links. In addition, by taking into account the hardware impairments, the OP of the non-ideal hardware system is derived. Moreover, the analysis is extended to multi-antenna scenarios and the asymptotic OP is obtained. Finally, illustrative numerical results are plotted and it can be observed that the path loss, channel fading, pointing errors and hardware impairments lead to a considerable degradation in system performance.

In this paper, we investigate a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) assisted cognitive satellite-terrestrial network under practical system conditions, such as transceiver hard-ware impairments, channel state information mismatch, imperfect successive interference cancellation and interference noises. Generalized coverage probability formulas for NOMA users in both primary and secondary networks are derived considering the impact of interference temperature constraint. Moreover, the numerical results demonstrate superior outperformance compared to the ones obtained for an orthogonal multiple access scheme. Finally, the derived analytical findings are fully supported by thorough Monte Carlo simulations.

In this paper, we investigate the physical layer security based on space shift keying (SSK) in which bit-to-spatial mapping of antenna indices dynamically adapts according to the partial channel state information (CSI) of the legitimate channel at the transmitter (Tx). Further, the Tx also adapts transmit power allocation to each transmit antenna according to partial CSI. Since an eavesdropper (Eve) is not (usually) aware of the legitimate CSI, it cannot successfully decode the antenna index; thus, transmission over the legitimate channel is secured from the wiretapping of Eve. An important virtue of the proposed scheme is that the Tx does not require full CSI of the legitimate and eavesdropper channels to secure the confidential information. The proposed work focuses on the secrecy rate (SR) and bit error rate (BER) of the considered multiple-input single-output system over Rayleigh fading channels. Approximate expressions of Bob's data rate for 2-ary and 4-ary SSK modulations are derived in closed-form. Furthermore, an upper-bound of Bob's data rate for Na-ary SSK modulation is also derived. In order to obtain the secrecy rate for the proposed scheme, we also evaluate Eve's data rate. Analytical results of SR and BER demonstrate the robustness of the proposed scheme. All numerical results are thoroughly verified by using extensive Monte Carlo simulations.

An energy-efficient two-way (TW) full-duplex (FD) network with the assistance of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is proposed, where the UAV acts as a mobile relay to assist the information exchange between two terrestrial transceivers. In particular, the self-interference (SI) channel gains follow complex Gaussian distribution and the perfect channel state information (CSI) of SI channels is unavailable at the receiver. To maximize the energy efficiency (EE), UAV flight speeds are controlled and power adaptation at the UAV relay is performed. The genetic algorithm (GA) is applied to efficiently obtain the optimal solution. Numerical results show that our scheme performs better than the one-way (OW) FDR scheme, fixed power (FP) and fixed flight speed (FS) policy. In addition, the SI cancellation factor on the EE is also demonstrated.

In this6study, the channel estimation problem is investigated for a wireless communication system assisted by a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS). The RIS thus creates an assistant channel, which has the features of positivity and dominance. Owing to these features, the channel estimation problem is formulated as a constrained residual sum of squares minimisation problem, which differs radically from the traditional channel estimation issue. An efficient Lagrange multiplier and dual ascent‐based estimation scheme is then designed to obtain an iterative solution for the estimator. Moreover, the Cramér–Rao lower bounds are deduced as a performance benchmark. Simulation results show that the authors' designed scheme improves the estimation accuracy up to 33%, compared with the conventional least‐square method in the low signal‐to‐noise ratio regime.

To support massive connectivity and boost spectral efficiency for Internet of Things (IoT), a downlink scheme combining virtual multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) and nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is proposed. All the single-antenna IoT devices in each cluster cooperate with each other to establish a virtual MIMO entity, and multiple independent data streams are requested by each cluster. NOMA is employed to superimpose all the requested data streams, and each cluster leverages zero-forcing detection to demultiplex the input data streams. Only statistical channel state information (CSI) is available at the base station to avoid the waste of the energy and bandwidth on frequent CSI estimations. The outage probability and goodput of the virtual MIMO-NOMA system are thoroughly investigated by considering the Kronecker model, which embraces both the transmit and receive correlations. Furthermore, the asymptotic results facilitate not only the exploration of physical insights but also the goodput maximization. In particular, the asymptotic outage expressions provide quantitative impacts of various system parameters and enable the investigation of diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT). Moreover, power allocation coefficients and/or transmission rates can be properly chosen to achieve the maximal goodput. By favor of the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions, the goodput maximization problems can be solved in closed form, with which the joint power and rate selection is realized by using alternately iterating optimization. Besides, the optimization algorithms tend to allocate more power to clusters under unfavorable channel conditions and support clusters with a higher transmission rate under benign channel conditions.

In this paper, we investigate the two-way communication between two users assisted by a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS). The scheme that two users communicate simultaneously over Rayleigh fading channels is considered. The channels between the two users and RIS can either be reciprocal or non-reciprocal. For reciprocal channels, we determine the optimal phases at the RIS to maximize the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR). We then derive exact closed-form expressions for the outage probability and spectral efficiency for single-element RIS. By capitalizing the insights obtained from the single-element analysis, we introduce a gamma approximation to model the product of Rayleigh random variables which is useful for the evaluation of the performance metrics in multiple-element RIS. Asymptotic analysis shows that the outage decreases at (log(ρ)/ρ)Lrate where L is the number of elements, whereas the spectral efficiency increases at log(ρ) rate at large average SINR p. For non-reciprocal channels, the minimum user SINR is targeted to be maximized. For single-element RIS, closed-form solution is derived whereas for multiple-element RIS the problem turns out to be non-convex. The latter one is solved through semidefinite programming relaxation and a proposed greedy-iterative method, which can achieve higher performance and lower computational complexity, respectively.

In this paper, we investigate energy efficient transmission for a satellite-aerial-terrestrial network (SATN), where a multi-antenna unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is employed as a relay to assist the satellite signal delivery. By considering total power constraint (TPC) or per-antenna power constraint (PPC) at the UAV, we first formulate an optimization problem to maximize the energy efficiency of the SATN, which is defined as ratio of the ergodic capacity to the total power consumption for communication at UAV. Then, by jointly exploiting array signal processing with the Dinkelbach's method, two new beamforming (BF) schemes, namely, TPC-BF and PPC-BF are proposed to solve the non-convex energy efficiency maximization problem. The main advantage of our method is that only angular information-based channel state information is used to obtain BF weight vectors so that a low implementation complexity is achieved. Furthermore, by assuming that the satellite-UAV link undergoes correlated Shadowed-Rician fading while the UAV-terminal link experiences correlated Rician fading, closed-form expressions for the statistics of the equivalent output signal-to-noise ratio are derived and, thus energy efficiency for the considered SATN with BF schemes is analytically presented. Finally, simulation results corroborate the derived expressions and confirm the effectiveness of the proposed BF schemes.

To boost energy saving for the general delay-tolerant IoT networks, a two-stage, and single-relay queueing communication scheme is investigated. Concretely, a traffic-aware N-threshold and gated-service policy are applied at the relay. As two fundamental and significant performance metrics, the mean waiting time and long-term expected power consumption are explicitly derived and related with the queueing and service parameters, such as packet arrival rate, service threshold and channel statistics. Besides, we take into account the electrical circuit energy consumptions when the relay server and access point (AP) are in different modes and energy costs for mode transitions, whereby the power consumption model is more practical. The expected power minimization problem under the mean waiting time constraint is formulated. Tight closed-form bounds are adopted to obtain tractable analytical formulae with less computational complexity. The optimal energy-saving service threshold that can flexibly adjust to packet arrival rate is determined. In addition, numerical results reveal that: 1) sacrificing the mean waiting time not necessarily facilitates power savings; 2) a higher arrival rate leads to a greater optimal service threshold; and 3) our policy performs better than the current state-of-the-art.

In this article, we propose a limited feedback-based space-shift keying (SSK) modulation scheme where transmitter (Tx) obtains partial channel state information (CSI) via a feedback link from receiver (Rx). More specifically, the Tx does not receive perfect information of channel gain, but is aware only of channel gain ordering. Based on the received partial CSI, the Tx adapts the spatial constellation and allocates different transmit weights to each transmit antenna representing spatial constellation points. Furthermore, the power adapted spatial constellation points are encoded by using gray coding scheme, which results in unit hamming distance between adjacent spatial constellation points. Next, a multiple-input single-output (MISO) system with maximum-likelihood detection is investigated. Accurate expressions for the average bit error rate (ABER) for 2 × 1 and 4 × 1 MISO systems over Rayleigh fading channel are derived. Further, an approximate expression for the ABER of a generalized MISO system is also obtained. It is shown analytically that the ABER performance of the proposed SSK scheme can be improved by applying a non-uniform power allocation to make transmit links more distinguishable at the Rx. Moreover, we demonstrate analytically that the proposed scheme attains a diversity order which is twice of the conventional SSK scheme. Numerical results, corroborated by Monte Carlo simulations, verify the proposed analysis and clearly highlight that, the proposed scheme significantly outperforms existing closed-loop spatial constellation-based schemes relying on full CSI in Tx and conventional open-loop SSK scheme.

In this paper, a novel 3D cellular model consisting of aerial base stations (aBSs) and aerial user equipments (aUEs) is proposed, by integrating the coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmission technique with the theory of stochastic geometry. For this new 3D architecture, a tractable model for aBSs' deployment based on the binomial-Delaunay tetrahedralization is developed, which ensures seamless coverage for a given space. In addition, a versatile and practical frequency allocation scheme is designed to eliminate the inter-cell interference effectively. Based on this model, performance metrics including the achievable data rate and coverage probability are derived for two types of aUEs: i) the general aUE (i.e., an aUE having distinct distances from its serving aBSs) and ii) the worst-case aUE (i.e., an aUE having equal distances from its serving aBSs). Simulation and numerical results demonstrate that the proposed approach emphatically outperforms the conventional binomial-Voronoi tessellation without CoMP. Insightfully, it provides a similar performance to the binomial-Voronoi tessellation which utilizes the conventional CoMP scheme; yet, introducing a considerably reduced computational complexity and backhaul/ signaling overhead.

In this paper, we investigate rate splitting (RS) for an uplink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system with a pair of near and far users adopting cyclic prefixed single carrier transmissions. Frequency-domain equalization is applied to assist successive interference cancellation at the base-station. Two kinds of RS schemes, namely, fixed RS (FRS) and cognitive RS (CRS) schemes, are proposed to realize RS for uplink NOMA with the aim of improving user fairness and outage performance in delay-limited transmissions. Corresponding to the split data streams, transmit power is allocated in either a fixed or cognitive manner for the FRS and CRS schemes, respectively. Based on achievable rate region analysis, the benefits of applying RS to uplink NOMA for enhancing the user fairness and outage performance are revealed. A modified Jain's index is proposed to measure the user fairness for the considered delay-limited transmissions. Closed-form expressions are derived for the outage probabilities of the paired users, respectively, whereas the preferred system parameters are chosen based on asymptotic outage probability expressions. The enhanced user fairness and superior outage performance of the proposed RS schemes are corroborated by Monte Carlo simulation results.

This work studies the joint problem of content placement, remote radio head (RRH) clustering and beamformer design, in a cache-enabled cloud-radio access network (C-RAN). In the considered system, downlink users are cooperatively served by multiple RRHs, in turn connected to a centralized baseband unit (BBU) pool via fronthaul links. Each RRH is equipped with a local cache from which it can directly acquire the requested user contents, without utilizing the fronthaul links. We aim to jointly optimize the aforementioned three aspects, in order to strike a balance between fronthaul traffic reduction and transmission power minimization. To this end, we propose to employ the ratio between these two important system utilities as the objective function, referred to as caching efficiency. Two joint design algorithms are presented to address the resulting nonconvex optimization problem, which features coupling constraints and mixed-integer variables, namely: the penalty concave-convex procedure (P-CCCP) and penalty dual decomposition (PDD) based algorithms. Furthermore, since content placement is usually updated over a larger timescale, we propose a two-timescale joint design algorithm, where the P-CCCP and PDD-based algorithms can be employed for efficient initialization as well as for establishing performance limits. Simulation results validate the efficiency of the proposed algorithms.

In this paper, a cooperative single carrier system comprising multiple cooperating remote radio heads and a single interferer operating in the presence of co-existing line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight paths is investigated. Distributed cyclic delay diversity is employed as the transmit diversity scheme for cyclic-prefixed single carrier transmissions over independent but non-identically distributed frequency selective fading channels. The main focus of this paper is to investigate the achievable diversity gain in the interference-limited and noise-limited regions. In contrast to the outage probability in the noise-limited region, it is shown that the diversity gain is not achievable in the interference-limited region. To justify this finding, the outage probability is derived first, and then verified by link-level simulations.

The hardware impairments of transceiver nodes generate signal distortions and degrade the secrecy performance of wireless communications systems. In this paper, we investigate the effect of hardware impairments on the secrecy outage probability of hybrid satellite-terrestrial relay systems (HSTRS). The source satellite transmits its signal to the terrestrial destination with the help of decode-and-forward (DF) terrestrial relays, while the eavesdropper attempts to tap the transmission from the terrestrial relays to destination. An optimal relay selection (ORS) scheme is proposed for enhancing the physical-layer security of HSTRS against hardware impairments. The traditional round-robin scheduling (RRS) is also considered for comparison purposes. We derive closed-form expressions of the secrecy outage probability for both the RRS and ORS schemes. Numerical results show that given certain hardware impairments, the secrecy outage performance of ORS scheme is better than that of the RRS. Additionally, as the number of terrestrial relays increases, the secrecy outage probability of proposed ORS scheme decreases significantly, demonstrating the advantage of exploiting relay selection against hardware impairments for HSTRS.

In this paper, we investigate the physical layer security (PLS) of cooperative wireless-powered networks where a source transmits confidential information to a destination with the aid of wireless-powered intermediate nodes equipped with multiple antennas in the presence of a passive eavesdropper. We consider two generalized joint relay and jammer selection (GJRJS) frameworks based on the power splitting (PS) and time switching (TS) techniques, respectively. Specifically, the intermediate nodes which cannot decode the source signal successfully are selected to act as friendly jammers to transmit artificial noise, and the remaining nodes are exploited as relays to simultaneously forward the source signal through cooperative beamforming. We further propose two cooperative secure beamforming (CSB) schemes for the PS-based GJRJS (PS-GJRJS) and TS-based GJRJS (TS-GJRJS) frameworks, respectively. To be specific, we investigate the optimization of the beamforming vector of our selected relays for maximizing the secrecy rate of the source–destination transmission. A closed-form solution is derived under the assumption of available instantaneous channel state information (CSI) of the main link and statistical CSI of the wiretap link. In addition, we also illustrate that the pure relay selection (PRS) scheme is a special case of our GJRJS framework at high signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). The numerical results show that the proposed CSB scheme achieves a higher secrecy rate than the traditional maximal ratio transmission (MRT) method for both the PS-GJRJS and TS-GJRJS frameworks. Additionally, the GJRJS framework outperforms the PRS as well as the joint best relay and jammer selection (JBRJS) methods in terms of secrecy rate.

This IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC) special issue (SI) aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art advances and a view of emerging research challenges and opportunities forSpatial Modulation in Emerging Wireless Systems. This SI solicits high-quality original research papers regarding theoretical studies, and application-oriented contributions dealing with architectures, platforms, and multiple access schemes.

Spatial modulation (SM) is an innovative and promising digital modulation technology that strikes an appealing tradeoff between spectral efficiency and energy efficiency with a simple design philosophy. SM enjoys plenty of benefits and shows great potential to fulfill the requirements of future wireless communications. The key idea behind SM is to convey additional information typically through the ON/OFF states of transmit antennas and simultaneously save the implementation cost by reducing the number of radio-frequency chains. As a result, the SM concept can have widespread effects on diverse applications and can be applied in other signal domains, such as frequency/time/code/angle domain or even across multiple domains. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the latest results and progresses in SM research. Specifically, the fundamental principles, variants of system design, and enhancements of SM are described in detail. Furthermore, the integration of the SM family with other promising techniques, applications to emerging communication systems, and extensions to new signal domains are also extensively studied.

This paper investigates the performance of a dual-hop decode-and-forward (DF) relaying-aided land mobile satellite communication over Shadowed-Rician (SR) fading channels. A practical model for the satellite relaying system is first developed, where the impacts of satellite multi-beam antenna, radio propagation loss, and random shadowing are taken into account. Next, by assuming that the multi-beam satellite suffers from hardware impairments (HIs) and is perturbed by interference signals, we derive an equivalent end-to-end signal-to-interference-plus-noise-and-distortion-ratio of the system, and justify that the maximum ratio transmission at the source and the maximum ratio combining at the destination are the optimal transmit-receive beamforming schemes on the proposed HIs model. Then, closed-form expressions for the probability density function (PDF) of the sum of independent and identically distributed (i.i.d) squared SR random variables in the case of integer and rational Nakagami-m fading parameters are derived. Based on the derived PDF, new analytical expressions for the outage probability (OP) and average throughput are obtained in the presence of HIs and interference. Moreover, the asymptotic OP and average throughput at high signal-to-noise ratio are investigated to reveal the achievable diversity order of the system. Finally, Monte Carlo simulation results are provided to corroborate the analytical results.

This paper investigates the problem of energy efficiency maximization (EEM) for the small cells that coexist with a macro cell in an underlay heterogeneous cellular network, where a macro base station and a number of small base stations transmit signals to a macro user and small users through their shared spectrum. We propose a joint power and bandwidth allocation (JPBA) scheme for the sake of maximizing the energy efficiency (EE) of small cells under the constraint of a guaranteed quality-of-service requirement for the macro cell. Considering that our formulated EEM-based JPBA (EEM-JPBA) problem is non-convex, we convert the original fractional problem into an equivalent subtractive form by adopting the Dinkelbach's method, which is addressed through the augmented Lagrange multiplier approach. Moreover, a new two-tier iterative algorithm is presented to obtain the optimal solution of our EEM-JPBA scheme. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed two-tier iterative algorithm can quickly converge to the optimal EE solution. In addition, it is shown that the proposed EEM-JPBA scheme significantly outperforms the conventional power and bandwidth allocation methods in terms of their EE performance.

This paper gives a novel perspective on physical layer security (PLS) and end-to-end (e2e) analysis under dual correlated Nakagami-m fading, and outdated channel state information, by employing 1) decode-and-forward opportunistic relays, and 2) an adaptive encoder with ON/OFF transmission. Assuming an infinite relay buffer size, two new sets of independent results for 1) non-integer fading parameter m, mathematically employing infinite summations, and 2) integer m, mathematically employing finite summations, are obtained. The adaptive encoder deployment improves transmission quality, and simultaneously enhances secrecy performance. The proposed e2e analysis coherently links secrecy, and e2e system performance for the first time under dual correlated Nakagami-m fading. Findings for wireless secrecy, and e2e system analysis with the non-integer fading parameter m offer an extra dimension to existing PLS literature, which has chronically been valid for only integer m. Convergence for infinite summations is achieved for a finite number of terms, realising the practicality of the proposed findings. Monte Carlo simulation successfully validates the new findings for non-integer m, and an asymptotic analysis under several specific scenarios is also presented.

Considering the widespread use of effective capacity in cross-layer design and the extensive existence of renewal service processes in communication networks, this paper thoroughly investigates the effective capacity for renewal processes. Exact expressions of the effective capacity at a given quality of service (QoS) exponent are derived for the renewal processes with either constant or variable reward. The simple expressions reveal meaningful insights, such as the monotonicity and bounds of the effective capacity. The analytical results are then applied to evaluate the cross-layer throughput for diverse hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) systems, including fixed-rate HARQ (FR-HARQ, e.g., Type I HARQ, HARQ with chase combining (HARQ-CC) and HARQ with incremental redundancy (HARQ-IR)), variable-rate HARQ (VR-HARQ), and cross-packet HARQ (XP-HARQ). Furthermore, aiming at maximizing the effective capacity via the optimal rate selection, it is disclosed that the VR-HARQ and XP-HARQ attain almost the same performance, and both of them perform better than FR-HARQ. In contrast, most of the prior outcomes approximate the effective capacity with the lack of insightful discussions that hampers the optimal design of HARQ systems. Finally, the numerical results corroborate the analytical ones.

In this paper, a cooperative single carrier system comprising multiple cooperating remote radio heads and spatially distributed interferers is investigated. Due to the random location of the interferers within the communication range, a mixture of line-of-sight (LoS) and non-line-of-sight (nLoS) paths is considered in the channel model. Under a frequency selective fading channel with a mixture of the LoS and nLoS paths, the distributed cyclic delay diversity is employed to achieve the maximum transmit diversity gain without the exact knowledge of the channel state information at the transmitter side. It is shown that the operating signal-to-noise regions are divided into two regions, i.e., noise-limited and interference-limited. In this paper, the main focus is on the interference-limited region, in which diversity gain is not achieved due to performance limits determined by the system and channel parameters. The existence of these limits on the performance metrics, such as the outage probability and ergodic capacity, is derived analytically and then verified by link-level simulations.

The conventional grant-based network relies on the handshaking between the base station and active devices to achieve dynamic multi-user scheduling, which may result in large signaling overheads as well as system latency. To address those problems, a grant-free receiver design is considered in this paper based on sparse code multiple access (SCMA), one of the promising air interface technologies for 5G wireless networks. With the presence of unknown multipath fading, the proposed receiver performs joint channel estimation and data decoding without knowing the user activity in the network. Formulating a factor graph representation for the problem, we devise a message-passing receiver for the uplink SCMA that performs joint estimation iteratively. Motivated by the idea of approximate inference, we use expectation propagation to project the intractable distributions into Gaussian families such that a linear complexity decoder is obtained. The simulation results show that the proposed receiver can detect active devices in the network with a high accuracy and can achieve an improved bit-error-rate performance compared with existing methods.

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is considered to be one of the promising multiple access techniques for 5G networks. This paper studies a decode-and-forward cooperative underlay cognitive radio NOMA network. Closed-form expressions for the outage probability of two NOMA secondary destination users (D1and D2) are evaluated. Furthermore, optimal power allocation factors for different distances of D1are found to satisfy the outage probability (OP) fairness for both users. Moreover, the OP for NOMA compared to that of conventional multiple access. Finally, the obtained analytical expressions are corroborated by Monte Carlo simulation.

In this paper, we investigate a coordinated direct and relay transmission for uplink (CDRT-UL) of a cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system, in which two users communicate with a base station (BS) with the aid of a decode-and-forward relay. By incorporating both relay links and non-negligible direct links from two users to BS, the CDRTUL scheme forms an orthogonal structure at the BS receiver side, so that the BS receiver applies only linear combinations to recover the desired signals without abusing successive interference cancellation. Outage probability of the paired two users is derived in closed-form under independent but not necessarily identically distributed Nakagami-m fading channels. Asymptotic analysis in the high signal-to-noise ratio regime is also introduced that provides closed-form expressions, which indicates that both two users achieve the same asymptotic outage performance. It is also shown that an improved outage performance and the higher target rate can be achieved by the CDRT-UL scheme over those of the DF relay without direct links. The enhanced system performance achieved by the CDRT-UL scheme is corroborated by Monte Carlo simulations.

In this study, the authors analyse the outage performance of the indoor relay‐assisted hybrid radio frequency (RF)/visible light communication (VLC) systems. They derive closed‐form expressions for the outage probability of the end‐to‐end signal‐to‐noise ratio. Then they obtain the optimal approximation parameter with optimising the outage probability using the differential evolution algorithm. Moreover, they analysed the average bit error rate (BER) performance of the hybrid RF/optical system using pulse position modulation method while assuming the timing error in synchronisation. Finally, they present some numerical results utilising the newly derived exact closed‐form expressions.

Free space optical (FSO) communication systems have high bandwidth, cost effectiveness and can provide secure wireless communication service for users. They can also form asymmetric dual‐hop cooperative communication links by multiplexing numerous radio frequency (RF) users by using amplify–forward transmissions over the FSO channel after converting to optical signals. In this study, an asymmetric dual‐hop RF–FSO system is studied where the RF links follow the well‐known Nakagami‐ m fading distribution and the FSO channel is efficiently modelled by the Málaga turbulence fading. The performance of the system is studied by deriving the closed‐form expressions for the outage probability and ergodic channel capacity together with their asymptotic analysis at high signal‐to‐noise ratio. The numerical results are corroborated by Matlab analytical plots.

Transmitter-side channel state information of the legitimate destination plays a critical role in physical layer secure transmissions. However, channel training procedure is vulnerable to the pilot spoofing attack (PSA) or pilot jamming attack (PJA) by an active eavesdropper (Eve), which inevitably results in severe private information leakage. In this paper, we propose a random channel training (RCT)-based secure downlink transmission framework for a time division duplex multiple antennas base station. In the proposed RCT scheme, multiple orthogonal pilot sequences (PSs) are simultaneously allocated to the legitimate user (LU), and the LU randomly selects one PS from the assigned PS set to transmit. Under either the PSA or PJA, we provide the detailed steps for the BS to identify the PS transmitted by the LU, and to simultaneously estimate channels of the LU and Eve. The probability that the BS makes an incorrect decision on the PS of the LU is analytically investigated. Finally, closed-form secure beamforming vectors are designed and optimized to enhance the secrecy rates during the downlink transmissions. Numerical results show that the secrecy performance is greatly improved compared to the conventional channel training scheme wherein only one PS is assigned to the LU.

In this paper, a two-hop decode-and-forward wireless powered relaying cognitive radio network with interference alignment over Rayleigh fading channels is investigated. The energy-constrained secondary relay node harvests energy from both the information and interference signals. Then, the harvested energy is used by the relay to forward the information signal from the source to the destination node. By applying beamforming matrices to primary and secondary networks, the performance metrics, such as outage probability, capacity, and bit error rate are studied under perfect and imperfect channel state information scenarios for both power-splitting relaying (PSR) and time-switching relaying (TSR) protocols. In addition, the optimal network performance is achieved by calculating the optimal energy harvesting time-switching and power-splitting coefficients. Finally, closed-form expressions for the outage probability of primary and secondary users are derived. Monte Carlo simulation results corroborate the analytical ones and show that the PSR technique outperforms TSR in the considered system model.

This paper investigates the constellation/codebook design of a promising uplink multiple access technique, sparse code multiple access (SCMA), proposed for the fifth generation mobile networks. The application of bit-interleaved coded modulation with iterative multiuser detection is considered for uplink SCMA over fading channels. Extrinsic information transfer chart is used to aid the analysis and the design of multidimensional constellations, and the design criteria for multidimensional constellations and labelings optimization are thus established. Furthermore, a new and simple approach of multi-stage optimization for the multidimensional constellation design is proposed for SCMA, to improve the bit-error rate performance and alleviate the complexity of turbo multiuser detection. Numerical and simulation results are also provided to demonstrate the performance and verify the efficiency of the proposed scheme, compared with the state of the art.

A cooperative cognitive radio network (CRN) with improved energy detection-based spectrum sensing is analyzed in various fading scenarios. Generalized multipath (Nakagami-m) fading and enriched multipath (Nakagami-q) fading models are considered along with two other general fading distributions, i.e., κ-μ and η-μ distributions. For spectrum sensing, instead of conventional power 2-based detection method, the arbitrary power p-based improved energy detector is used. The impact of the cognitive user mobility on the performance of the improved energy detector is investigated. Specifically, the statistics for the received signal are derived over various fading environments. The performance of the considered CRN system is evaluated in terms of probability of false alarm, probability of missed detection, and receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curves. Moreover, the area under the ROC curve is also obtained. Simulation results are provided to corroborate the theoretical results derived in this paper.

Millimeter wave (mmWave) signals are much more sensitive to blockage, which results in a significant increase of the outage probability, especially for the users at the edge of the cells. In this paper, we exploit the technique of base station (BS) cooperation to improve the performance of the cell-edge users in the downlink transmission of mmWave cellular networks. We design two cooperative schemes, which are referred to as fixed-number BS cooperation (FNC) scheme and fixed-region BS cooperation (FRC) scheme, respectively. In the FNC scheme, the cooperative BSs consist of the M nearest BSs around the served cell-edge users, and in the FRC scheme, the cooperative BSs include all the BSs located within a given region. We derive the expressions for the average rate and the outage probability of a typical cell-edge user located at the origin based on the stochastic geometry framework. To reduce the computational complexity of our analytical results for the outage probability, we further propose a Gamma approximation-based method to provide approximations with satisfying accuracy. Our analytical results incorporate the critical characteristics of mmWave channels, i.e., the blockage effects, the different path loss of LOS and NLOS links, and the highly directional antenna arrays. Simulation results show that the performance of the cell-edge users is greatly improved when mmWave networks are combined with the technique of BS cooperation.

Social awareness and social ties are becoming increasingly popular with emerging mobile and handheld devices. Social trust degree describing the strength of the social ties has drawn lots of research interests in many fields in wireless communications, such as resource sharing, cooperative communication, and so on. In this paper, we propose a social ties based hybrid cooperative beamforming and jamming scheme to secure wireless transmissions under a stochastic geometry framework, where the friendly nodes are categorized into relays and jammers according to their locations and social trust degrees with the source node. Connection outage probability (COP) and secrecy outage probability (SOP) of such a scheme in a random network have been analyzed. To facilitate a more convenient performance evaluation, we propose a double Gamma ratio approach through the Gamma approximation method. Based on this, the COP and SOP are tractably obtained in closed-forms. We further consider the SOP in the presence of Poisson point process distributed eavesdroppers and derive an upper bound. The simulation results verify our theoretical findings, and validate that the social trust degree has dramatic influences on the security performance in the networks.

In this paper, a joint beamforming alignment and suboptimal power allocation (Sub-OPA) for a two-way untrusted relay network is presented. Considering the link between users is established via only an untrusted relay because of either the shadowing fading or long distance between users, we utilize a destination-assisted-jamming (DAJ) technique to improve the security performance. In each time slot, a user transmits confidential signals and the other emits jamming signals simultaneously to prevent the untrusted relay from intercepting the confidential signals. First, we design a novel beamforming to align the confidential signal to the subspace corresponding to the confidential transmission channel and direct the cooperative jamming signal toward untrusted relay. Then, an iterative algorithm is presented to generate the Sub-OPA of each user for the transmission of confidential and cooperative jamming signal. The correctness and efficiency of the proposed beamforming scheme and the Sub-OPA are validated by numerical simulations and the results are compared via MatLab optimization toolbox. Moreover, the simulations show the iterative algorithm is converged after the fourth iteration at lower signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) and rapidly converged with allocating more power to the confidential signals at higher SNRs.

In this paper, we consider a single cell downlink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) network and aim at maximizing the energy efficiency. The energy-efficient resource allocation problem is formulated as a non-convex and NP-hard problem. To decrease the computation complexity, we decouple the optimization problem as a subchannel matching scheme and power allocation subproblems. In the subchannel matching scheme, a non-cooperative game is applied to model this problem. To discuss the existence of Nash equilibrium (NE), we introduce a super-modular game and then design an algorithm to converge to the NE point. Moreover, a greed subchannel matching algorithm with low complexity is given through a two-way choice between users and subchannels. However, for given subchannel matching scheme, power allocation is still a non-convex problem, which is difficult to get the optimal solution. We then transform the non-convex problem to a convex problem by applying a successive convex approximation method. Afterward, we provide an algorithm to converge to suboptimal solution by solving a convex problem iteratively. Finally, simulation result demonstrates that the energy efficiency performance of the NOMA system is better than the orthogonal frequency division multiple access system.

A new detection scheme for multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems is analytically presented. In particular, the transmitting users are being categorized in two distinct priority service groups, while they communicate directly with a multi-antenna receiver. The linear zero-forcing scheme is applied in two consecutive detection stages upon the signal reception. In the first stage, the signals of one service group are detected, followed by the second stage, including the corresponding detection of the remaining signals. An appropriate switching scheme based on specific transmission quality requirements is utilized prior to the detection so as to allocate the signals of a given service group to the suitable detection stage. The objective is the provision of the reception quality for both service groups. The proposed approach can be implemented directly in cognitive radio communication assigning the secondary users to the appropriate service group. The exact outage probability of the considered system is derived in closed form. The special case of massive MIMO is further studied yielding some useful engineering outcomes; the effective channel coherence time and a certain optimality condition defining both the transmission quality and effective number of independent transmissions.

In this paper, a two-hop decode-and-forward cognitive radio system with deployed interference alignment is considered. The relay node is energy- constrained and scavenges the energy from the interference signals. In the literature, there are two main energy harvesting protocols, namely, time-switching relaying and power-splitting relaying. We first demonstrate how to design the beamforming matrices for the considered primary and secondary networks. Then, the system capacity under perfect and imperfect channel state information scenarios, considering different portions of time-switching and power-splitting protocols, is estimated.

This paper investigates the asymptotic performance of bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) with iterative multiuser detection and decoding in uplink sparse code multiple access (SCMA) systems. The extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) characteristics analysis of the joint multiuser detector for SCMA is provided, and shows that the average detection reliability for multiple users converges to the single-user case, if ideal feedback from the decoder is available to the detector. We develop a tight analytical bound on the convolutionally encoded bit-error rate (BER) for independent Rayleigh fadings, based on the single-user bound with arbitrary multidimensional constellations. Moreover, we analyze the achievable coding and diversity gains of the SCMA-BICM system with iterative receiver. Simulations are carried out to verify the effectiveness of the analysis.

In this paper, the performance of an underlay multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) cognitive radio system is analytically studied. In particular, the multiple antennas of the secondary transmitter operate in a spatial multiplexing transmission mode, while a zero-forcing (ZF) detector is employed at the secondary receiver. Additionally, the secondary system is interfered by multiple randomly distributed single-antenna primary users (PUs). To enhance the performance of secondary transmission, optimal power allocation is performed at the secondary transmitter with a constraint on the interference temperature (IT) specified by the PUs. To mitigate instantaneous excessive interference onto PUs caused by the time-average IT, an iterative antenna reduction algorithm is developed for the secondary transmitter and, accordingly, the average number of transmit antennas is analytically computed. Extensive numerical and simulation results corroborate the effectiveness of our analysis.

In this paper, a multi-user multi-relay network with wireless energy harvesting (EH) and transferring (ET) is studied. In our system, a simultaneous two-level cooperation, i.e., information-level and energy-level cooperation is conducted for uplink data transmissions (from the users to a destination). Specifically, network coding is employed at the relays to facilitate the information-level cooperation; meanwhile, ET is adopted to share the harvested energy among the users for the energy-level cooperation. The energy minimization problem that takes into account the energy causality and outage probability constraints is formulated. However, the optimization problem is non-convex and hard to be solved directly. Alternatively, an approximation technique is adopted to convert it into a convex one. By solving the convex problem, efficient power allocation and ET policies are designed. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm is able to achieve a near-optimal performance and outperforms the state of arts.

Device-to-device communication and energy harvesting are both key technologies to improve spectrum and energy efficiency. In this paper, we investigate the resource allocation problem for the energy harvesting-powered D2D communication underlaying cellular networks, where D2D pairs firstly harvest energy and then transmit information signals. The goal is to maximize the sum throughput via joint time scheduling and power control while satisfying the SINR requirement of cellular user and taking into account the energy constraint. The formulated non-convex problem is transformed into a nonlinear fractional programming problem with a tactful reformulation. Coupled with D.C. (difference of two convex functions) programming, a near optimal solution of the non-convex problem can be obtained by iteratively solving a sequence of convex problems. Then, a first-order algorithm is employed to solve these convex problems. Numerical simulations are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and evaluate the system throughput performance.

This paper studies a two-hop decode-and-forward underlay cognitive radio system with interference alignment technique. An energy-constrained relay node harvests the energy from the interference signals through a power-splitting (PS) relaying protocol. Firstly, the beamforming matrices design for the primary and secondary networks is demonstrated. Then, a bit error rate (BER) performance of the system under perfect and imperfect channel state information (CSI) scenarios for PS protocol is calculated. Finally, the impact of the CSI mismatch parameters on the BER performance is simulated.

In this study, the performance of decode‐and‐forward relay‐assisted free‐space‐optical (FSO) communication systems under atmospheric turbulence‐induced fading and misalignment errors is investigated. To mitigate the adverse effects of the atmospheric turbulence, the aperture‐averaging receivers are considered both at the relay and destination sides. The atmospheric turbulence‐induced fading is modelled via the exponentiated‐Weibull distribution, which has recently been proposed to characterise an FSO link in the presence of finite‐sized receiver aperture. The expression for the moment generating function (MGF) of the instantaneous signal‐to‐noise ratio is derived. Furthermore, new closed‐form expression for the outage probability is obtained. Moreover, the new expression for the average symbol error rate of the subcarrier intensity‐modulated M ‐ary phase‐shift keying is obtained using the MGF‐based approach. Finally, numerical examples are discussed and all the derived analytical results are corroborated by Monte Carlo simulations.

Welcome to the third one in the sequel of three IEEE JSAC special issues on Spectrum Sharing and Aggregation for Future Wireless Networks. In recognition of the fact that a substantial number of submissions have been received in response to the call for papers, the decision has been made to publish three issues on the cutting-edge advances in spectrum sharing and aggregation. The first two issues were published in October 2016 with 20 papers and November 2016 with 19 papers, respectively. This is the third issue with 17 papers, covering a feast of hot research topics as follows.

This paper proposes an iterative detector for uncoded OFDM signals in cooperative networks, where the information symbols are simply partitioned through a time-domain matrix at the OFDM transmitter. We analytically show that our proposed iterative detector at the partner node converges and can completely recover the user's data from its partitioned version, if sufficient redundancy is inserted in the user's data. For efficient use of the redundancy in the user's data, a coded cooperative transmission based on superposition modulation is proposed. Additionally, a closed-form input-output relationship for the partitioning and reconstruction algorithm in the proposed cooperative scenario is derived. We also obtain closed-form expressions for symbol error rate performance of the proposed coded cooperative scenario over Rayleigh frequency-selective fading channels. Numerical comparisons shed light on the relative merits of the proposed coded cooperation under various inter-user and uplink channel conditions.

The extension of long term evolution (LTE) networks in unlicensed spectrum areas under the licensed assisted access concept aims at achieving higher transmission rates via the aggregation of the aforementioned bands along with the licensed ones within the 3G Partnership Project framework. A prospect carrier aggregation (CA) scheme should handle efficiently the coexistence of the LTE systems that compete for the same unlicensed spectrum areas along with their incumbent users (i.e., Wi-Fi). In this paper, a novel CA scheme is proposed for licensed/unlicensed MIMO LTE systems that allocates optimally the resources (power and resource blocks) of an evolved Node B to user equipments. Furthermore, the proposed approach handles the coexistence matters within the unlicensed bands with an efficient decentralized way. The new scheme involves the solution to a mixed integer nonlinear programming problem and thus, an optimal low complexity method is proposed based on the Lagrange dual decomposition. Furthermore, the proposed technique is extended to the imperfect channel state information (CSI) case. To that end, a novel listen-before-talk scheme is developed via which the required unlicensed bands CSI are estimated in a blind manner. The performance of all of the proposed techniques is verified via indicative simulations.

In this paper, we investigate the spectral efficiency of a communication link in a wireless body area network (WBAN) capable of harvesting energy from the environment. We consider two scenarios for the transmission which are single- and dual-hop and achieve the power management policy for each scenario. In the first scenario, the aim is to maximize the link's spectral efficiency over N time slots subject to the battery capacity, energy harvesting constraint, and WBAN limitations including power and outage probability. In the second scenario, a decode-and-forward relay node is considered, and a spectral efficiency optimization problem with constraints similar to the first scenario is evaluated. In addition, since the channel distribution information is available at the transmitters, the lower and upper bounds of the average spectral efficiency are also derived in both scenarios. Finally, numerical results corroborate the analytical results.

A multi-user cognitive (secondary) radio system is considered, where the spatial multiplexing mode of operation is implemented amongst the nodes, under the presence of multiple primary transmissions. The secondary receiver carries out minimum mean-squared error detection to effectively decode the secondary data streams, while it performs spectrum sensing at the remaining signal to capture the presence of primary activity or not. New analytical closed-form expressions regarding some important system measures are obtained, namely, the outage and detection probabilities, the transmission power of the secondary nodes, the probability of unexpected interference at the primary nodes, and the detection efficiency with the aid of the area under the receive operating characteristics curve. The realistic scenarios of channel fading time variation and channel estimation errors are encountered for the derived results. Finally, the enclosed numerical results verify the accuracy of the proposed framework, while some useful engineering insights are also revealed, such as the key role of the detection accuracy to the overall performance and the impact of transmission power from the secondary nodes to the primary system.

In this paper, a multi-user multi-relay network with integrated energy harvesting and transferring (IEHT) strategy is studied. In our system, a simultaneous two-level cooperation, i.e., information- and energy-level cooperation is conducted for uplink data transmissions (from the users to a destination). Specifically, network coding is employed at the relays to facilitate the information-level cooperation; meanwhile, ET is adopted to share the harvested energy among the users for the energy-level cooperation. For generality purposes, the Nakagami-m fading channels that are independent but not necessarily identically distributed (i.n.i.d.) are considered. The problem of energy efficiency maximization under constraints of the energy causality and a predefined outage probability threshold is formulated and shown to be non-convex. By exploiting fractional and geometric programming, a convex form-based iterative algorithm is developed to solve the problem efficiently. Close-to-optimal power allocation and energy cooperation policies across consecutive transmissions are found. Moreover, the effects of relay locations, wireless energy transmission efficiency, battery capacity as well as the existence of direct links are investigated. The performance comparison with the current state of solutions demonstrates that the proposed policies can manage the harvested energy more efficiently.

Narrowband powerline communications (NB-PLC) and unlicensed wireless communications are two leading communications technologies for the emerging smart grid applications. The channel and noise statistics experienced by powerline and wireless transmissions are independent and of a non-identical nature. In this paper, we exploit the diversity provided by the simultaneous transmission of the same information signal over powerline and wireless links to enhance the overall system reliability. In particular, we propose efficient techniques to combine the received signals of the NB-PLC and wireless links for both coherent and differential modulation schemes while considering the impulsive nature of the noise on both links. In addition, we derive closed-form expressions for the average bit-error-rate of the proposed combining techniques. Furthermore, we present simulation results that quantify the performance gains achieved by our proposed receive diversity combining techniques compared with conventional combining techniques.

We present a multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) cognitive radio system consisting of a secondary receiver that deploys spatial multiplexing to decode signals from multiple secondary transmitters, under the presence of primary transmissions. The secondary receiver carries out minimum mean-squared error detection to decode the secondary data streams, while it performs spectrum sensing at the remaining signal to capture the potential presence of primary activity. Assuming Rayleigh fading as well as the realistic cases of channel fading time variation and channel estimation errors, we present novel closed-form expressions for important system measures, namely, the detection and false-alarm probabilities as well as the transmission power of the secondary nodes. The enclosed numerical results verify the accuracy of the presented analysis.

A dual-hop cognitive (secondary) relaying system incorporating collaborative spectrum sensing to opportunistically switch between data transmission and energy harvesting is introduced. The secondary relays, first scan the wireless channel for a primary network activity, and then convey their reports to a secondary base station (SBS). Afterwards, the SBS, based on these reports and its own estimation, decides cooperatively the presence of primary transmission or not. In the former scenario, all secondary relays start to harvest energy from the transmission of one or more primary nodes. In the latter scenario, the system initiates secondary communication via a best relay selection policy. The performance of the proposed scheme is thoroughly investigated by assuming realistic channel conditions, i.e., non-identical link-distances and outdated channel estimation, while its overall energy consumption is evaluated, indicating the efficiency of the switching approach.

Energy detection has been for long constituting the most popular sensing method in RADAR and cognitive radio systems. The present paper investigates the sensing behaviour of an energy detector over Hoyt fading channels, which have been extensively shown to provide rather accurate characterization of enriched multipath fading conditions. To this end, a simple series representation and an exact closed-form expression are firstly derived for the corresponding average probability of detection for the conventional single-channel communication scenario. These expressions are subsequently employed in deriving novel analytic results for the case of both collaborative detection and square-law selection diversity reception. The derived expressions have a relatively tractable algebraic representation which renders them convenient to handle both analytically and numerically. As a result, they can be utilized in quantifying the effect of fading in energy detection based spectrum sensing and in the determination of the trade-offs between sensing performance and energy efficiency in cognitive radio communications. Based on this, it is shown that the performance of the energy detector depends highly on the severity of fading as even slight variations of the fading conditions affect the value of the average probability of detection. It is also clearly shown that the detection performance improves substantially as the number of branches or collaborating users increase. This improvement is substantial in both moderate and severe fading conditions and can practically provide full compensation for the latter cases.

In this paper a novel Carrier Aggregation (CA) scheme is proposed for downlink MIMO LTE-A Systems. The proposed approach achieves increased transmission rates by establishing the communication links via both licensed and unlicensed bands without generating or experiencing interference to/from the users of the latter bands. To that end, a rate optimization problem is defined and solved subject to the previous zero interference constraints, a total power constraint and a maximum number of aggregated bands constraint. It turns out that the previous problem is a Mixed Integer Non Linear Programming (MINLP) one that requires an exhaustive search procedure in order to be solved. To tackle this, an optimal low complexity method is proposed based on the Lagrange dual decomposition. The performance of the original (MINLP) and the low-complexity proposed techniques is verified via indicative simulations.

This paper presents a systematic approach to exploiting TV white space (TVWS) for device-to-device (D2D) communications with the aid of the existing cellular infrastructure. The goal is to build a location-specific TVWS database, which provides a lookup table service for any D2D link to determine its maximum permitted emission power (MPEP) in an unlicensed digital TV (DTV) band. To achieve this goal, the idea of mobile crowd sensing is first introduced to collect active spectrum measurements from massive personal mobile devices. Considering the incompleteness of crowd measurements, we formulate the problem of unknown measurements recovery as a matrix completion problem and apply a powerful fixed point continuation algorithm to reconstruct the unknown elements from the known elements. By joint exploitation of the big spectrum data in its vicinity, each cellular base station further implements a nonlinear support vector machine algorithm to perform irregular coverage boundary detection of a licensed DTV transmitter. With the knowledge of the detected coverage boundary, an opportunistic spatial reuse algorithm is developed for each D2D link to determine its MPEP. Simulation results show that the proposed approach can successfully enable D2D communications in TVWS while satisfying the interference constraint from the licensed DTV services. In addition, to our best knowledge, this is the first try to explore and exploit TVWS inside the DTV protection region resulted from the shadowing effect. Potential application scenarios include communications between internet of vehicles in the underground parking and D2D communications in hotspots such as subway, game stadiums, and airports.

Energy efficiency has become an encouragement, and more than this, a requisite for the design of the next-generation wireless communication standards. In this paper, a dual-hop cognitive (secondary) relaying system is considered, incorporating multiple amplify-and-forward relays, a rather cost-effective solution. First, the secondary relays sense the wireless channel, scanning for a primary network activity, and then convey their reports to a secondary base station (SBS). Afterward, the SBS, based on these reports and its own estimation, decides cooperatively the presence of primary transmission or not. In the former scenario, all the secondary nodes start to harvest energy from the transmission of primary nodes. In the latter scenario, the system initiates secondary communication via a best relay selection policy. Performance evaluation of this system is thoroughly investigated, by assuming realistic channel conditions, i.e., non-identical link distances, Rayleigh fading, and outdated channel estimation. The detection and outage probabilities as well as the average harvested energy are derived as new closed-form expressions. In addition, an energy-efficiency optimization problem is analytically formulated and solved, while a necessary condition in terms of power consumption minimization for each secondary node is presented. From a green communication standpoint, it turns out that energy harvesting greatly enhances the resources of secondary nodes, especially when primary activity is densely present.

Welcome to the IEEE JSAC special issue on Spectrum Sharing and Aggregation for Future Wireless Networks. The conception of this special issue is motivated by the following observations: the ever-increasing penetration of both the mobile Internet and of the Internet-of-things is gradually clogging up the most valuable spectral bands available in the sub-2 GHz frequency range for future wireless networks. Hence there is an urgent need for improved spectrum exploitation to satisfy this demand. It is expected that the wireless tele-traffic will continue to grow quite dramatically in the ensuing years, hence further widening the spectrum-supply versus demand gap. In order to mitigate this gap, spectrum sharing and aggregation have been well recognized as promising approaches, which led to rapid advances by harnessing a large cross-section of the research community. Nonetheless, there are numerous unsolved technical challenges. This special issue aims for reporting on some of these cutting-edge advances in spectrum sharing and aggregation, whilst opening new avenues of research in this area.

The papers in this special issue represent the second one in the sequel of three special issues on spectrum sharing and aggregation for future wirelessn networks.

This paper considers a wirelessly powered wiretap channel, where an energy constrained multi-antenna information source, powered by a dedicated power beacon, communicates with a legitimate user in the presence of a passive eavesdropper. Based on a simple time-switching protocol, where power transfer and information transmission are separated in time, we investigate two popular multi-antenna transmission schemes at the information source, namely, maximum ratio transmission and transmit antenna selection. Closed-form expressions are derived for the achievable secrecy outage probability and average secrecy rate for both schemes. In addition, simple approximations are obtained at the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. Our results demonstrate that by exploiting the full knowledge of channel state information (CSI), we can achieve a better secrecy performance, e.g., with full CSI of the main channel, the system can achieve substantial secrecy diversity gain. On the other hand, without the CSI of the main channel, no diversity gain can be attained. Moreover, we show that the additional level of randomness induced by wireless power transfer does not affect the secrecy performance in the high SNR regime. Finally, our theoretical claims are validated by the numerical results.

The energy efficiency (EE) of a multi-user multi-relay system with the maximum diversity network coding (MDNC) is studied. We explicitly find the connection among the outage probability, energy consumption, and EE, and formulate the maximizing EE problem under the outage probability constraint. Relay scheduling (RS) and power allocation (PA) are applied to schedule the relay states (transmitting, sleeping, and so on) and optimize the transmitting power under the practical channel and power consumption models. Since the optimization problem is NP hard, to reduce computational complexity, the outage probability is first tightly approximated to a log-convex form. Furthermore, the EE is converted into a subtractive form based on the fractional programming. Then, a convex mixed-integer nonlinear problem is eventually obtained. With a generalized outer approximation algorithm, RS and PA are solved in an iterative manner. The Pareto-optimal curves between the EE and the target outage probability show the EE gains from PA and RS. Moreover, by comparing with the no network coding (NoNC) scenario, we conclude that with the same number of relays, MDNC can lead to EE gains. However, if RS is implemented, NoNC can outperform MDNC in terms of the EE when more relays are needed in the MDNC scheme.

Cognitive radio is regulated to permit efficient access to leftover licensed bands by unlicensed users in an opportunistic manner. Spectrum sensing is aimed to protect the primary users from interferences of the secondary users. Energy detection constitutes the most dominant method for spectrum sensing in cognitive radio and many other systems owing to its non-coherent structure as well as its simplicity and applicability. The sensing capability of wireless detectors in unreliable environments is challenged by adverse effects of multipath fading. Motivated by this, in the presented work the performance analysis of the energy detector is investigated over η-μ and α-μ fading channels. Novel closed-form expressions are derived for the detector using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) measure. The derived analytical results are verified by numerical computations and Monte Carlo simulations.

Energy detection constitutes a popular sensing approach thanks to its relatively satisfactory performance at low complexity requirements. Its efficiency can be practically enhanced by employing diversity schemes which are also capable of providing adequate mitigation of multipath fading effects. Based on this, the present work is devoted to the analysis of energy detection based spectrum sensing over generalized multipath fading channels using square law combining. Unlike the traditional evaluation based on the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves, the present analysis is based on the area under ROC curve (AUC), which is a particularly accurate performance measure that is used widely in natural sciences and engineering. To this end, novel closed-form expressions are firstly derived for the conventional AUC over the generalized κ − μ fading channels. These results are subsequently employed for deriving closed-form expressions for the case of square law combining. It is shown that the corresponding performance is, as expected, highly dependent upon the severity of fading and is improved substantially as the number of branches increase. In this context, it is also shown that using up to five branches ensures rather acceptable performance even at non-high signal-to-noise ratio values. Furthermore, the offered results have a relatively convenient algebraic representation and can be useful in analyses relating to cognitive radio and RADAR systems.

The exponentiated Weibull (EW) distribution has been recently proposed for the modelling of free-space optical (FSO) links in the presence of finite sized receiver aperture. In this paper, the performance of FSO communication systems over EW is studied. Specifically, the probability density function (PDF) and cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the instantaneous signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), over EW turbulence fading, are studied. The derived statistics of the SNR is utilized to analyse the performance of an FSO communication system over a generalized communication environment with turbulence induced fading, misalignment errors and path loss. New expression for the outage probability is obtained, and exact expressions for the average bit error rate (BER) are derived for various binary modulation schemes. Finally, the obtained analytical results are verified via Monte Carlo simulations.

This paper investigates the impact of the multiple antenna and co-channel interference (CCI) on the outage performance of a dual-hop amplify-and-forward energy harvesting relaying network. The energy constrained relay is powered by radio frequency signals and employs the power splitting receiver architecture. To exploit the benefit of multiple antennas, two different linear processing schemes are investigated, namely, Maximum ratio combining/maximal ratio transmission (MRC/ MRT) and Minimum mean-square error/MRT (MMSE/MRT). For both schemes, a new closed-form outage lower bound and a simple high signal-to-noise ratio outage approximation are derived, respectively. Also, the achievable diversity order is quantified. In addition, we study the optimal power splitting ratio which minimizes the outage probability. Our results show that, by increasing the energy harvesting capability, the implementation of multiple antennas significantly improves the systems performance. Moreover, CCI could be potentially exploited to boost the performance, while how much performance gain can be obtained depends on the choice of the linear processing scheme.

A fast and reliable detection scheme is essential in several wireless applications such as radar and cognitive radio systems. Energy detection is such a method as it does not require a priori information of the received signal while it exhibits low implementation complexity and costs. Since the detection capability of ED is largely affected by the effects of multipath fading, this paper is devoted to a thorough analysis of energy detection based spectrum sensing over generalized fading conditions. To this end, analytical expressions are firstly derived using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) under additive white Gaussian noise. This analysis is subsequently extended to the case of generalized fading conditions characterized by k — μ and η — μ fading distributions. The offered results are novel and are employed in analyzing the corresponding performance. It is shown that fading phenomena result to detrimental effects on the performance of spectrum sensing since the deviation between severe and non-severe conditions is rather substantial.

In this paper, an energy harvesting dual-hop relaying system without/with the presence of co-channel interference (CCI) is investigated. Specifically, the energy constrained multi-antenna relay node is powered by either the information signal of the source or via the signal receiving from both the source and interferer. In particular, we first study the outage probability and ergodic capacity of an interference free system, and then extend the analysis to an interfering environment. To exploit the benefit of multiple antennas, three different linear processing schemes are investigated, namely, 1) Maximum ratio combining/maximum ratio transmission (MRC/MRT), 2) Zero-forcing/MRT (ZF/MRT) and 3) Minimum mean-square error/MRT (MMSE/MRT). For all schemes, both the systems outage probability and ergodic capacity are studied, and the achievable diversity order is also presented. In addition, the optimal power splitting ratio minimizing the outage probability is characterized. Our results show that the implementation of multiple antennas increases the energy harvesting capability, hence, significantly improves the systems performance.

In this study, the outage performance of a multi‐relay cooperative network operating in a spectrum sharing environment is analysed. Focusing on the secondary communication process, a relay selection procedure is performed prior to the communication process, where the selected relay is the one maximising the instantaneous end‐to‐end signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR) and, at the same time, satisfying the power restrictions imposed by the primary receivers. The secondary destination employs a selection combining strategy, selecting the best path (direct link or relaying link) with the highest instantaneous SNR. Two kinds of relaying protocols are considered: decode‐and‐forward and amplify‐and‐forward. For the former, an exact closed‐form expression for the outage probability (OP) is derived, whereas for the latter an accurate approximation for the OP is obtained. Then, an asymptotic analysis is carried out and reveals that the system diversity order is N + 1 for both relaying protocols, with N denoting the number of relays. Monte Carlo simulations assess the accuracy of the authors’ results.

The performance of free-space optical (FSO) communication systems is compromised by atmospheric fading and pointing errors. The pointing errors are widely considered as a combination of two components: boresight and jitter. A statistical model is investigated for pointing errors with nonzero boresight by taking into account the laser beamwidth, detector aperture size, and jitter variance. A novel closed-form probability density function (PDF) is derived for this new nonzero boresight pointing error model. Furthermore, we obtain closed-form PDF for the composite lognormal turbulence channels and finite series approximate PDF for the composite Gamma-Gamma turbulence channels, which is suitable for terrestrial FSO applications impaired by building sway. We conduct error rate analysis of on-off keying signaling with intensity modulation and direct detection over the lognormal and Gamma-Gamma fading channels. Asymptotic error rate analysis and outage probability of such a system are also presented based on the derived composite PDFs. It is shown that the boresight can only affect the coding gain, while the diversity order is determined by the atmospheric fading effect as well as the pointing error effect.

This paper is devoted to the derivation of novel analytic expressions and bounds for a family of special functions that are useful in wireless communication theory. These functions are the well-known Nuttall Q-function, incomplete Toronto function, Rice Ie-function, and incomplete Lipschitz-Hankel integrals. Capitalizing on the offered results, useful identities are additionally derived between the above functions and Humbert, Φ1, function as well as for specific cases of the Kampé de Fériet function. These functions can be considered as useful mathematical tools that can be employed in applications relating to the analytic performance evaluation of modern wireless communication systems, such as cognitive radio, cooperative, and free-space optical communications as well as radar, diversity, and multiantenna systems. As an example, new closed-form expressions are derived for the outage probability over nonlinear generalized fading channels, namely, α-η-μ, α-λ-μ, and α-κ-μ as well as for specific cases of the η-μ and λ-μ fading channels. Furthermore, simple expressions are presented for the channel capacity for the truncated channel inversion with fixed rate and corresponding optimum cutoff signal-to-noise ratio for single-antenna and multiantenna communication systems over Rician fading channels. The accuracy and validity of the derived expressions is justified through extensive comparisons with respective numerical results.

Previous works on cognitive relay networks (CRNs) considered only symmetric fading channels. However, in practical wireless propagation scenarios, it is likely that the channels of the secondary user (SU) and primary user (PU) may undergo different fading characteristics. In this paper, we assume that the channels of the secondary network (SU-source→SU-relay→SU-destination) are subject to Rician fading, whereas the channels of the link from the SU to the PU experience Rayleigh fading. Based on this framework, the end-to-end outage probability (OP) of CRNs is investigated for two different relaying schemes: i) in the absence of the direct link with decode-and-forward (DF) protocol and ii) in the presence of the direct link with incremental DF protocol. In particular, we derive both exact and asymptotic OP expressions for the considered CRNs. Our analysis reveals important insights into the impact of fading parameters on the CRN performance under distinct fading distributions.

Cooperative spectrum sharing systems (CSSSs) have recently received considerable attention from the wireless community due to their performance gains and spectrum utilization improvement when compared to traditional communication systems. Owing to this fact, we investigate the outage performance of CSSSs in the presence of multiple primary users (PUs). The secondary user (SU) network is composed by one source node, N decode-and-forward (DF) relays, and one destination. A best relay selection strategy is performed where the selected relay is that which maximizes the end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and, simultaneously, satisfies the interference constraint imposed by the MPU receivers. The communication between the SU source and SU destination is carried out through the help of one out of N DF relays and also via direct link. Afterwards, the SU destination selects the best path between the direct and the relaying path by using selection combining technique. A closed-form expression for the outage probability (OP) is derived, and an asymptotic analysis is carried out which reveals that the diversity order of the considered system equals N +1, showing that it is not affected neither by the number of PU receivers nor by the interference threshold. The presented analytical expressions are corroborated by means of Monte Carlo simulations and insightful discussions are provided.

Multihop network has been considered as a breakthrough frontier to enhance the coverage of wireless network. Spectrum-sharing is an efficient technique to enhance the utilization of the limited radio frequency bandwidth. In this paper, we therefore consider the extension of multihop network to cognitive radio networks with the spectrum sharing approach. In particular, we investigate the cognitive multihop networks in the presence of multiple licensed transmitters and receivers. Under the stringent power constraint imposed by the licensed users, we derive the closed-form and asymptotic expressions for the outage probability over Nakagami-m fading channels. The tractable closed-form expressions reveal the impact of important network parameters such as the fading severity parameters of the unlicensed network, the number of licensed users, the peak interference power imposed by the licensed receivers, the interference power from licensed transmitters. A significant observation corroborated by our study shows that the cognitive multihop networks benefit both cognitive radio and multihop networks for improving the coverage extension and frequency spectrum utilization.

The aim of this work is the formulation and derivation of the η-μ/Inverse Gaussian composite distribution which corresponds to a physical fading model. The η-μ distribution is a generalized small-scale fading model which accounts effectively for non-line-of-sight scenarios and includes as special cases the widely known Nakagami-m, Rayleigh, Hoyt and one sided Gaussian distributions. Similarly, the inverse Gaussian (IG) distribution is a convenient model which was recently shown to characterize shadowing more efficiently than the widely used gamma distribution. To this effect, the proposed η-μ/IG model provides an overall efficient characterization of multipath and shadowing effects which typically occur simultaneously. The offered modelling accuracy is achieved thanks to the remarkable flexibility of its parameters. This is also verified by the fact that the proposed model is capable of providing good fittings to experimental data that correspond to realistic wireless communication scenarios while they include as special cases the widely known Nakagami-m/IG, Rayleigh/IG and Hoyt/IG composite fading models. Novel analytic expressions are derived for the envelope and power probability density function (pdf) of the η-μ/IG model. The derived expressions can be utilized in various studies in radio communications, free space optical communications and ultrasound imaging, among others. Indicatively, an analytic expression is derived for the outage probability (OP) of η-μ/IG fading channels.

Free-space optical links are vulnerable to atmospheric fading and pointing errors. When a laser beam wanders, most previous works model the random radial displacement distance of the pointing error as a Rayleigh distributed random variable. However, for a non-ideally fast-tracked laser beam, the radial displacement distance at the receiver aperture may not obey the Rayleigh distribution, since the displacements in vertical and horizontal directions may not always follow a zero-mean Gaussian distribution. In this paper, we generalize a widely used pointing error model by assuming that the radial displacement distance follows a Rician distribution and derive a closed-form probability density function (PDF) of the generalized pointing error model. Furthermore, we derive closed-form PDFs for the composite lognormal and Gamma-Gamma turbulence channels using this generalized pointing error model. Error rate performance is also studied for an on-off keying signaling system with intensity modulation and direct detection in the presence of this generalized pointing error.

The aim of this work is the proposition of the κ-μ/Inverse Gaussian distribution which corresponds to a physical fading model. This is a composite distribution which is based on the κ-μ multipath model and the recently proposed Inverse Gaussian shadowing model. The former is a generalised model which includes as special cases the widely known Nakagamim, Rayleigh, Rice and one sided Gaussian distributions and accounts particularly for Non-Line-of-Sight communications. The latter is a convenient model which was recently shown to characterize shadowing effect more accurately than the widely used gamma distribution. As a result, the proposed composite model provides an overall efficient characterisation of multipath and shadowing effects which typically occur simultaneously. The offered modelling accuracy is achieved thanks to the remarkable flexibility of its parameters which is verified by the fact that the model is capable of providing good fittings to measurement data from realistic communication scenarios. Novel analytic expressions are derived for the probability density function (pdf) and the moments of the κ-μ/Inverse Gaussian composite fading model which includes as special cases the Nakagami-m/Inverse Gaussian, Rayleigh/Inverse Gaussian and Rice/Inverse Gaussian composite fading distributions. The offered expressions can be readily utilized in the derivation of vital performance measures in radio and free-space-optical communications over multipath/shadowing and medium-to-strong atmospheric turbulence, respectively. In this context, a closed-form expression is derived for the Amount of Fading over κ-μ/Ig fading channels.

In this study, the authors consider distributed orthogonal space–time block coding for relay‐based channel state information‐assisted amplify‐and‐forward networks. Specifically, they show that opportunistic relaying (OR) is an optimal solution in terms of instantaneous signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR), that is, it provides the maximum instantaneous SNR under the constraint of fixed transmit power for the relays. In particular, instead of allocating the given transmit power to all relays, letting the best relay transmit with this power is an optimal solution for maximising the received SNR. To exhibit this benefit, Monte Carlo simulations are presented showing superior performance of the OR scheme compared to equal power allocation policy for the considered relay networks. For the considered optimal scenario, the authors further derive analytical expressions for the outage probability and symbol error rate (SER) over quasi‐static independent, not necessarily identically distributed Nakagami‐ m fading channels. They further present asymptotically tight approximations for the outage probability and SER in the high SNR regime, rendering insights into the cooperative diversity behaviour. Finally, numerical results are provided to examine the effect of network parameters on the system performance of the considered network.

In this paper, the effect of keyhole on the performance of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) amplify-and-forward (AF) relay networks with orthogonal space-time block codes (OSTBCs) transmission is investigated. In particular, we analyze the asymptotic symbol error probability (SEP) performance of a downlink communication system where the amplifying processing at the relay can be implemented by either the linear or squaring approach. Our tractable asymptotic SEP expressions enable us to obtain both diversity and array gains. Our finding reveals that with condition n_S > min(n_R,n_D), the linear approach can provide the full achievable diversity gain of min(n_R,n_D) when only the second hop suffers from the keyhole effect, i.e., single keyhole effect (SKE), where n_S, n_R, and n_D are the number of antennas at source, relay, and destination, respectively. However, for the case that both the source-relay and relay-destination links experience the keyhole effect, i.e., double keyhole effect (DKE), the achievable diversity order is only one regardless of the number of antennas. In contrast, utilizing the squaring approach, the overall diversity gain can be achieved as min(n_R,n_D) for both SKE and DKE. An important observation corroborated by our studies is that for satisfying the tradeoff between performance and complexity, we should use the linear approach for SKE and the squaring approach for DKE.

In this paper, we investigate the degenerative effects of antenna correlation and keyhole on the performance of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) amplify-and-forward (AF) relay networks. In particular, we considered a downlink MIMO AF relay system consisting of an nS-antenna base station S, an nR-antenna relay station R, and an nD-antenna mobile station D, in which the signal propagation originated from the mobile station suffers from keyhole and spatial correlation effects. We have derived an exact expression for the moment generation function of the instantaneous signal-to-noise ratio which enables us to analyze the symbol error probability and outage probability of the considered system. We have shown that although the mobile station is in a poor scattering environment, i.e., keyhole, the relay channel (S → R → D link) still achieves a cooperative diversity order of min(nR, nD) provided that the channel from the source (S → R link) is keyhole-free. This result is important to radio system designers since under such a severe scenario it is unnecessary to deploy a large number of antennas on the relay station (nR) but only requires nR= nDto obtain the maximum achievable diversity gain.

In this paper, several important performance metrics for the cyclic prefix-based single-carrier (CP-SC) cooperative diversity systems with best relay node selection, are presented and quantitatively compared with Monte-Carlo simulations. The statistical evaluation of the upper bound of the average end-to-end signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) of a two-hop amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying CP-SC transmission is presented. By using this upper bound, closed-form bounds for the maximum achievable average rate, the outage probability and the average symbol error rate (SER), are derived. Further, asymptotic analysis on the outage probability and the average SER reveal that the diversity gain is determined by both the number of relay nodes in the system and the number of channel taps being supported by the CP length. Simulation results verify the derived closed-form analytical expressions and also the diversity gains. Asymptotic performance is also verified in practically high SNR region via Monte Carlo simulations.

To address the issues of high peak-to-average power ratio and high power backing-off in orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) relaying systems, a cyclic prefixed single-carrier (CP-SC) relaying system employing best terminal selection (BTS) is considered in this paper. Under a system power constraint, the problem of joint optimal power allocation to the source and relay is investigated. For a two-hop amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying protocol, the optimal power allocation is first obtained by maximizing the achievable spectral efficiency. After applying the obtained optimal power allocations to the source and relay, a destination terminal that has the best effective end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio is selected. With the help of the statistical properties of circulant channel matrices in the relay links, closed-form bounds for the maximum achievable spectral efficiency, outage probability, and average symbol error rate (ASER) are derived. Further, an asymptotic analysis of the outage probability and ASER is conducted and it is shown that both the number of terminals in the system and the number of channel taps being supported by the CP length play key roles in determining the overall diversity gain. Monte Carlo simulation results verify the derived closed-form analytical expressions.

Due to higher peak-to-average power ratio and higher power backing-off in OFDM relaying systems, a cyclic prefixed single-carrier cooperative diversity system is considered in this paper. Under the transmission power constraint, the joint optimal power allocation to the source and relay node is investigated. For a two-hop decode-and-forward relaying protocol, the optimal power allocation is first obtained in the considered system, and then the opportunistic destination terminal selection is applied to improve the achievable average spectral efficiency (ASE). Based on the proposed QR decomposition (QRD)-based receiver in the destination terminal, closed-form expressions for the maximum achievable ASE are derived. Simulation results verify the derived closed-form analytical expressions.

In this paper, we analyze the performance of dual-hop channel state information (CSI)-assisted amplify-and-forward (AF) cooperative networks using orthogonal space-time block codes (OSTBCs) over independent but not identically distributed Nakagami-$m$ fading channels. Specifically, we present closed-form expressions of the outage probability (OP) and the symbol error probability (SEP). The analytical results are given in tractable forms which readily allow us to assess the performance of AF relay systems using OSTBCs. For sufficiently large signal-to-noise ratio, we obtain the asymptotic results for OP and SEP which reveal insights into the effect of fading factors on the diversity and coding gains. It has been shown that between the two hops the more severe link solely determines the diversity and coding gains. In particular, these two gains strictly depend on the fading severity parameters and the channel mean powers of the more rigorous hop, respectively. Numerical results are provided showing an excellent agreement between our analytical results and those of Monte-Carlo simulations for selected scenarios.

We analyze the performance of amplify-and-forward (AF) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) cooperative networks over independent but not identically distributed Nakagami-m fading channels. Specifically, we consider an AF MIMO relay network where the source deploys the transmit antenna selection scheme to communicate with the destination through the help of a relay. We derive analytical expressions for outage probability (OP) and symbol error probability (SEP). Moreover, asymptotically tight approximations for OP and SEP have been obtained to facilitate insights on how fading parameters affect the performance. Our analytical results are verified by Monte-Carlo simulations for respective scenarios.

In this paper, several performance analysis metrics for the cyclic prefix-based single-carrier (CP-SC) opportunistic cooperative diversity systems are presented. After the statistical evaluation of the end-to-end signal-to-noise-ratio of a two-hop relaying transmission, we derive tight upper bounds for the maximum achievable average rate and lower bounds for the outage probability in closed form. Further, asymptotic analysis on the outage probability reveals that the diversity gain is determined by both the number of relay nodes in the system and the number of channel taps being supported by the CP length. Simulation results verify the derived closed-form analytical expressions and also the diversity gains. Asymptotic performance is also verified via Monte Carlo simulations.

The outage probability and the symbol error rate (SER) with outdated erroneous opportunistic scheduling over the cyclically prefixed single-carrier downlink transmission, are analyzed. In the user equipment, the QR decomposition-based time domain equalization is employed. Based on this proposed receiver, the effective signal-to-noise ratio (ESNR) and its maximum ESNR are derived. By using the statistical properties of these defined ESNRs, closed-form expressions for the outage probability and the upper bound SER, are derived. Monte Carlo simulations verified the analytical expressions and the outage diversity gain.

In relay networks, partial channel state information at the transmitter due to feedback delay can severely degrade the beamforming performance. In this paper, the decremental effect of transmit beamforming with feedback delay on the downlink performance of a two hop Amplify-and-Forward (AF) relay network over Rayleigh fading channels is investigated. The source is equipped with multiple antennas while the relay and the destination has a single antenna. We have derived closed-form expressions for the outage probability, probability density function of the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the destination and the average bit error rate (BER). To gain further insights, outage probability and average BER approximations at high SNR are also presented. Numerical results supported by simulations are provided to illustrate the decremental effects feedback delay on the performance of the considered AF relay system.

A major performance-limiting factor in terrestrial optical wireless (OW) systems is turbulence-induced fading. Exploiting the additional degrees of freedom in the spatial dimension, multiple laser transmitters combined with multiple receiver apertures provide an effective solution for fading mitigation. Although MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) OW systems have been extensively studied in recent years, most of these works are mainly limited to symbol-by-symbol decoding. Maximum likelihood sequence detection (MLSD) exploits the temporal correlation of turbulence-induced fading and promises further performance gains. In this paper, we investigate MLSD for IM/DD (intensity-modulation/direct-detection) MIMO OW systems over log-normal atmospheric turbulence channels. Even with a low-order modulation scheme such as on-off keying which is typically used in OW systems, the complexity of MLSD might be prohibitive. We therefore present an iterative sequence detector based on the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. The complexity of the proposed algorithm is much smaller than a direct evaluation of the log-likelihood function. The Monte-Carlo simulation results demonstrate that the EM-based algorithm outperforms the symbol-by-symbol decoder and achieves a performance which lies within 0.5 dB of that of the optimal MLSD.

Turbulence fading is one of the main impairments affecting the operation of free-space optical (FSO) communication systems. The authors study the performance of FSO communication systems, also known as wireless optical communication systems, over log-normal and gamma–gamma atmospheric turbulence-induced fading channels. These fading models describe the atmospheric turbulence because of its very good agreement with experimental measurement data. Closed-form expressions for the average (ergodic) capacity and the outage probability are derived for both statistical models. Another contribution of this work is a study of how the performance metrics are affected by the atmospheric conditions and other parameters such as the length of the link and the receiver's aperture diameter. The derived analytical expressions are verified by various numerical examples and can be used as an alternative to time-consuming Monte-Carlo simulations.

Optical wireless, also known as free-space optics, has received much attention in recent years as a cost-effective, license-free and wide-bandwidth access technique for high data rates applications. The performance of free-space optical (FSO) communication, however, severely suffers from turbulence-induced fading caused by atmospheric conditions. Multiple laser transmitters and/or receivers can be placed at both ends to mitigate the turbulence fading and exploit the advantages of spatial diversity. Spatial diversity is particularly crucial for strong turbulence channels in which single-input single-output (SISO) link performs extremely poor. Atmospheric-induced strong turbulence fading in outdoor FSO systems can be modeled as a multiplicative random process which follows the K distribution. In this paper, we investigate the error rate performance of FSO systems for K-distributed atmospheric turbulence channels and discuss potential advantages of spatial diversity deployments at the transmitter and/or receiver. We further present efficient approximated closed-form expressions for the average bit-error rate (BER) of single-input multiple-output (SIMO) FSO systems. These analytical tools are reliable alternatives to time-consuming Monte Carlo simulation of FSO systems where BER targets as low as 10-9are typically aimed to achieve.

Free-space optical (FSO) communication has received much attention in recent years as a cost-effective, license-free and wide-bandwidth access technique for high data rates applications. The performance of FSO communication, however, severely suffers from turbulence-induced fading caused by atmospheric conditions. Multiple laser transmitters and/or receivers can be placed at both ends to mitigate the turbulence fading and exploit the advantages of spatial diversity. Spatial diversity is particularly crucial for strong turbulence channels in which single-input single-output (SISO) link performs extremely poor. Atmospheric-induced strong turbulence fading in outdoor FSO systems can be modeled as a multiplicative random process which follows the K distribution. In this paper, we investigate the error rate performance of FSO systems for K-distributed atmospheric turbulence channels and potential advantages of spatial diversity deployments at the transmitter and/or receiver. Our results demonstrate significant diversity gains of multiple transmitter/receivers deployment in FSO channels. We further present efficient approximated closed-form expressions for the average bit-error rate (BER) of multiple-input single-output (MISO) and single-input multiple-output (SIMO) FSO systems. These analytical tools are reliable alternatives to time-consuming Monte Carlo simulation of FSO systems where BER targets as low as 10-9are typically aimed to achieve.

The performance of dual-branch equal-gain combining (EGC) and maximal-ratio combining receivers operating over a composite correlated fading environment, modelled by the generalised Gamma (GG) distribution, is analysed. The moments of the output signal-to-noise ratio are derived in closed form for both types of receivers, and by employing the Padé approximants method, the average bit error probability is studied for a great variety of modulation schemes. Furthermore, based on the statistic of the product of two correlated GG random variables, a tight union upper bound for the outage probability of the EGC is obtained, whereas for the special case of Weibull fading a simpler bound is derived in closed form. The proposed mathematical analysis is complemented by various, numericaly evaluated performance results, whereas simulations verify the correctness of the proposed analysis.

We introduce an adaptive generalized selection combining (A-GSC) receiver that can be efficiently applied in diversity rich fading environments such as in ultra-wideband applications. The branches that participate in the combining process are selected taking into account the quality of both the total combining output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the individual SNR of each branch. The proposed scheme achieves better adaptation to channel conditions compared to other competing schemes such as normalized threshold GSC (NT-GSC), minimum selection GSC (MS-GSC) or minimum estimation and combining GSC (MEC-GSC), with no further complexity. The A-GSC receiver compromises between the power consumption, hardware complexity and performance gain that each additional diversity branch induces, resulting in significant savings in power and computational resources.

Motivated by the transmit antenna selection (TAS) concept, used in Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output systems, we argue fordistributedtransmitantennaselection(DTAS), which corresponds to a method of selecting a subset of available relays in cooperative diversity systems. Assuming amplify and forward relays, the proposed selection method represents a low-complexity tool for determining the optimum relaying set. Two optimization problems are studied: the error probability minimization subject to total energy consumption constraints, and the dual one, the total energy consumption minimization under error performance constraints. Numerical examples verify the advantage of the proposed method in adapting the number of relaying terminals to the desired performance-consumption tradeoff.

We introduce the concept of fairness at the physical- layer in amplify and forward cooperative diversity systems, which reflects the need for equally allocating the consumed power among the relays. To this end, we propose a relay-selection method, which utilizes knowledge on both the instantaneous and average channel conditions in order to encompass this concept. We also provide a closed-form expression for the outage probability in the high signal to noise ratio (SNR) regime. Numerical results show that the outage performance of the proposed scheme resembles closely the performance of the "best relay selection" scheme, albeit maintaining the average power consumptions equal.

Multi-user cooperative diversity is a recent technique promising great improvement of the performance of wireless communication systems operating in fading environments. Based on combinatorial optimization theory and specifically on the so-called knapsack problem, this paper presents a method of optimizing the selection among the potential cooperating users, when amplify-and-forward relays are used. In particular, two optimization problems are studied: the error probability minimization subject to total energy consumption constraints, and the dual one, the energy consumption minimization under error performance constraints. Depending on the frequency of repeating this selection, the above problems are categorized into short-term and long-term node selection. Numerical examples verify the expected knapsack scheme's advantage of adapting the number of cooperating users, depending on the desired performance-consumption tradeoff. Moreover, long-term node selection seems to lead to similar error or consumption performance compared to the short-term one, despite its simplicity.

In this paper, we study the performance of multihop free-space optical (FSO) wireless systems over turbulence-induced fading channels. The analysis is carried out for systems employing amplify-and-forward (AF) or decode-and-forward (DF) relays and for turbulence channels which can be modeled by the Gamma-Gamma distribution. An exact analytical expression for the end-to-end outage probability of AF systems is obtained, while a closed-form expression of DF systems is derived. The average bit-error probability of a dual-hop FSO system employing a DF relay is studied as a special case. Numerical examples are also presented to illustrate the proposed analysis and to further investigate the effects of the turbulence severity on the multihop FSO systems' performance.

The end-to-end performance of a dual-hop relaying system operating over independent, non-identical Nakagami-m fading channels, is analyzed and evaluated. Closed-form expressions for the cumulative distribution function, the probability density function, the moments and the moment generating function of the end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), are derived. Using these results, closed-form expressions for the outage probability are presented for both channel state information and fixed-gain relays. Furthermore, for the case of fixed-gain relay, the average end-to-end SNR, the amount of fading and the average bit-error rate are also expressed in closed-form. The proposed mathematical analysis is complemented by numerical examples, including the effects on the overall performance of the SNRs unbalancing as well as the fading severity

We present closed-form expressions for the probability density function (PDF) and the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the sum of non-identical squared Nakagami-m random variables (RVs) with integer-order fading parameters. As it is shown, they can be written as a weighted sum of Erlang PDFs and CDFs, respectively, while the analysis includes both independent and correlated sums of RVs. The proposed formulation significantly improves previously published results, which are either in the form of infinite sums or higher order derivatives of the fading parameter m. The obtained formulas can be applied to the performance analysis of diversity combining receivers operating over Nakagami-m fading channels

We present closed-form lower bounds for the performance of multihop transmissions with nonregenerative relays over not necessarily identically distributed Nakagami-m fading channels. The end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio is formulated and upper bounded by using an inequality between harmonic and geometric means of positive random variables (RVs). Novel closed-form expressions are derived for the moment generating function, the probability density function, and the cumulative distribution function of the product of rational powers of statistically independent Gamma RVs. These statistical results are then applied to studying the outage probability and the average bit-error probability for phase- and frequency-modulated signaling. Numerical examples compare analytical and simulation results, verifying the tightness of the proposed bounds.

A versatile envelope distribution which generalizes many commonly used models for multipath and shadow fading is the so-called generalized Gamma (GG) distribution. By considering the product of N GG random variables (RV)s, novel expressions for its moments-generating, probability density, and cumulative distribution functions are obtained in closed form. These expressions are used to derive a closed-form union upper bound for the distribution of the sum of GG distributed RVs. The proposed bound turns out to be an extremely convenient analytical tool for studying the performance of TV-branch equal-gain combining receivers operating over GG fading channels. For such receivers, first the moments of the signal-to-noise (SNR) at the output, including average SNR and amount of fading, are obtained in closed form. Furthermore, novel union upper bounds for the outage and the average bit error probability are derived and evaluated in terms of Meijer's G-functions. The tightness of the proposed bounds is verified by performing comparisons between numerical evaluation and computer simulations results

We present closed-form bounds for the performance of multihop transmissions with non-regenerative relays over Nakagami-m fading channels. The end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is formulated and upper bounded by using the inequality between harmonic and geometric mean of positive random variables (RVs). Novel closed-form expressions are derived for the moment generating function, the probability density function, and the cumulative distribution function of the product of arbitrary powers of statistically independent Gamma RVs in terms of the Meijer's G-function. Using these theoretical results, closed-form lower bounds are obtained for the outage and average bit error probability of phase or frequency modulated signallings, while simple asymptotic expressions are also given for the bounds at high SNRs. Numerical results are compared to computer simulations, to show the tightness of the proposed bounds.

Efficient performance bounds for multihop wireless communications systems with non-regenerative fixed-gain relays operating over non-identical generalized fading channels, are presented. More specifically, the end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is formulated and upper bounded by using the well-known inequality between harmonic and geometric mean of positive random variables. Based on this bound, the moments of the end-to-end SNR for Rayleigh, Nakagami-m, and Rice fading channels, are obtained in simple closed-forms. Furthermore, the outage performance and the average error probability for coherent and non-coherent modulation schemes are also studied using the moment-generating function (MGF) approach. The proposed method for the evaluation of the MGF is based on the Pade approximants theory. Moreover, new expressions are derived for the gain of previously proposed "semi-blind" relays. These expressions are used in numerical and computer simulations examples, to verify the accuracy and to show the tightness of the proposed bounds.