The integration of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) and simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) present a promising solution for sustainable and efficient wireless communications in large-scale IoT networks, especially within energy-constrained smart agriculture applications. However, most existing works assume ideal energy harvesting (EH) models and continuous RIS phase shifts that limit their practical relevance. This paper addresses these limitations by proposing a total transmit power minimization framework for a multi-user RIS-assisted MISO power-splitting (PS) SWIPT system. First, a practical logistic non-linear energy harvesting (NL-EH) model is adopted to better reflect the realistic behavior of RF energy conversion circuits. Second, a discrete phase shift (DPS) model with finite quantization levels is employed to account for practical RIS hardware constraints. Third, an alternating optimization algorithm is developed for the resulting non-convex optimization problem through joint optimization of the base station’s beamforming vectors, RIS reflection matrix, and PS ratio. Techniques such as Zero-Forcing (ZF), Semidefinite Relaxation (SDR), and Gaussian randomization (GR) are leveraged to address the associated sub-problems, while an alternate one-dimensional search strategy is used for RIS phase shift optimization. Finally, numerical simulations are conducted to validate the proposed framework in terms of performance and convergence. The results demonstrate robustness under imperfect channel state information (ICSI) and varying system parameters for next-generation IoT-enabled smart farming use-case.

This paper investigates the design of distributed precoding for multi-satellite massive MIMO transmissions. We first conduct a detailed analysis of the transceiver model, in which delay and Doppler precompensation is introduced to ensure coherent transmission. In this analysis, we examine the impact of precompensation errors on the transmission model, emphasize the near-independence of inter-satellite interference, and ultimately derive the received signal model. Based on such signal model, we formulate an approximate expected rate maximization problem that considers both statistical channel state information (sCSI) and compensation errors. Unlike conventional approaches that recast such problems as weighted minimum mean square error (WMMSE) minimization, we demonstrate that this transformation fails to maintain equivalence in the considered scenario. To address this, we introduce an equivalent covariance decomposition-based WMMSE (CDWMMSE) formulation derived based on channel covariance matrix decomposition. By exploiting the channel characteristics, we develop a low-complexity decomposition method and propose an optimization algorithm. To further reduce computational complexity, we introduce a model-driven scalable deep learning (DL) approach that leverages the equivariance of the mapping from sCSI to the unknown variables in the optimal closed-form solution, enhancing performance through novel dense Transformer network and scaling-invariant loss function design. Simulation results validate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method in some practical scenarios. We also demonstrate that the DL approach can adapt to dynamic settings with varying numbers of users and satellites.

This letter addresses the quadratic equality constrained least squares (QEC-LS) problem, a class of non-convex optimization problems that arise in various signal processing and communication applications. We revisit the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) approach to QEC-LS problem and investigate its convergence and efficiency. Despite the inherent non-convexity, the proposed ADMM algorithm is proved to converge globally only requiring the quadratic term equal to a positive constant. Numerical results demonstrate that our method achieves global optimality with significantly reduced complexity compared to existing approaches such as semidefinite relaxation and primal-dual methods.

Integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) has emerged as a key enabler for 6G and beyond. However, ISAC systems face significant challenges, including the sensing function that introduces interference and degrades communication performance, as well as high sensing power consumption that reduces overall communication efficiency, particularly in complex urban environments. To address these issues, we propose a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) ISAC system, where a RIS enhances connectivity for users in localized coverage gaps. We formulate and study two optimization problems: i) maximizing system sum spectral efficiency and ii) maximizing global energy efficiency, by jointly optimizing transmit precoding, subcarrier allocation, and RIS phase shifts under power, quality of service, and sensing accuracy constraints. These problems are classified as mixed-integer nonlinear programs, which are generally difficult to solve optimally. To tackle this, we develop efficient iterative algorithms leveraging successive convex approximation, alternating optimization, Riemannian manifolds, and Dinkelbach’s method to obtain at least locally optimal solutions. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed designs, demonstrating their superiority over benchmark schemes, achieving up to 40% higher spectral efficiency and up to 60% improvement in energy efficiency compared to conventional overlap and random-phase approaches.

This paper investigates robust transmit (TX) beamforming from the satellite to user terminals (UTs), based on statistical channel state information (CSI). The proposed design specifically targets the mitigation of satellite-to-terrestrial interference in spectrum-sharing integrated terrestrial and satellite networks. By leveraging the distribution information of terrestrial UTs, we first establish an interference model from the satellite to terrestrial systems without shared CSI. Based on this, robust TX beamforming schemes are developed under both the interference threshold and the power budget. Two optimization criteria are considered: satellite weighted sum rate maximization and mean square error minimization. The former achieves a superior achievable rate performance through an iterative optimization framework, whereas the latter enables a low-complexity closed-form solution at the expense of reduced rate, with interference constraints satisfied via a bisection method. To avoid complex integral calculations and the dependence on user distribution information in inter-system interference evaluations, we propose a terrestrial base station position-aided approximation method, and the approximation errors are subsequently analyzed. Numerical simulations validate the effectiveness of our proposed schemes.

This paper presents an approach to target detection in automotive radar systems, where the highly dynamic nature of the sensor platform and environment, along with challenges such as hardware cost and installation constraints, necessitates a general sensor configuration that integrates widely separated, colocated MIMO, and distributed aperture radar (DAR). A joint Doppler processing and MIMO transmit demodulation technique is proposed, utilizing arbitrary DDM, TDM, or BPM precoding matrices with a lower-dimensional antenna steering matrix as the detection input. The signal model incorporates environmental information, such as the cell under test (CUT) range and line-of-sight regions, to enhance detection performance. A distributed Generalized Likelihood Ratio Test (GLRT) detector is derived using secondary data with CFAR property, and the robustness of the proposed detectors is evaluated under mismatch conditions using mesa plots. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, evaluated using key performance metrics such as probability of detection, probability of false alarm.

This paper investigates the integration of Internet of Things (IoT) networks with modern massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless systems to enable various new use cases. Given the dynamic nature of parameters monitored by IoT nodes, efficient techniques for tracking these time-varying parameters are required. In a typical IoT networks, each IoT node linearly precodes its observations and transmits them over a coherent multiple access channel to a fusion center (FC). These IoT networks are power and bandwidth constrained in nature. Therefore, designing transmit precoders for the IoT nodes and a combiner for the FC is essential. This work proposes online linear receive combiner and transmit precoder designs that minimize the mean square error (MSE) under transmit power constraints. Using an alternating optimization technique, we derive closed-form solutions for the combiners and transmit precoders. Our numerical results validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

A scenario with multiple radars connected to a fusion centre and tracking a target endowed with cognitive abilities is considered. The aim of the target is to degrade the performance of the radar network using its cognitive abilities. In the embodiment considered in this paper, the target injects interference that perturbs the measurements at the different radars. The injected interference is designed to maximize the trace of the error covariance matrix in each instance of the extended Kalman filter iterations used at the fusion centre. The optimal interference in such a setting is formulated as a convex problem and its structure reveals a low-rank correlated structure unlike the intuitive additive white noise. Relation to water-filling is drawn and the impact of such an interference is subsequently analysed using numerical simulations.

A key challenge in Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC), especially in Full-Duplex (FD) Dual-Functional Radar-Communication (DFRC) systems, is self-interference (SI) caused by signal leakage from the transmitter to the receiver, impairing sensing tasks. Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) can manipulate signal reflections with minimal power, making them promising for enhancing 6G communication, yet its potential for SI mitigation in DFRC systems is underexplored. This paper proposes a novel RIS-enabled approach for SI elimination in mono-static full-duplex DFRC systems. Our method decomposes the RIS function into spatial beam-forming and temporal modulation to ensure sufficient target illumination and orthogonality between reflected and transmitted waveforms, effectively eliminating SI without the need for SI channel information. Simulations confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach in SI elimination and sensing performance.

This paper investigates joint device activity detection and channel estimation for grant-free random access in Lowearth orbit (LEO) satellite communications. We consider uplink communications from multiple single-antenna terrestrial users to a LEO satellite equipped with a uniform planar array of multiple antennas, where orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation is adopted. To combat the severe Doppler shift, a transmission scheme is proposed, where the discrete prolate spheroidal basis expansion model (DPS-BEM) is introduced to reduce the number of unknown channel parameters. Then the vector approximate message passing (VAMP) algorithm is employed to approximate the minimum mean square error estimation of the channel, and the Markov random field is combined to capture the channel sparsity. Meanwhile, the expectation-maximization (EM) approach is integrated to learn the hyperparameters in priors. Finally, active devices are detected by calculating energy of the estimated channel. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms conventional algorithms in terms of activity error rate and channel estimation precision.

This paper presents a digital beamforming architecture based on the discrete Fourier transform, designed for medium-Earth orbit satellite payloads to serve multiple ground users. The system leverages a 16×16 16-point two-dimensional fast Fourier transform (2DFFT) to address the growing demand for high-speed data traffic and adaptable satellite communications. The architecture features a routing algorithm for flexible user allocation to any beam position and a cluster-based linear precoding approach to reduce resource and power consumption. Two versions of the 2DFFT module—quantized and non-quantized—are compared in terms of resource usage, power consumption, and performance. Experimental results show that the non-quantized version provides better power efficiency, while the quantized version removes the need for DSP blocks.

This paper investigates robust transmit beamforming based on statistical channel state information (CSI), against satellite-to-terrestrial user terminal (UT) interference arising from spectrum sharing in the integrated terrestrial and satellite network. First, we develop an integral-form interference model free of shared CSI to characterize the interference from satellite to terrestrial UTs. Then, we propose a robust interference-avoidance transmit beamforming scheme under the interference threshold and power budget. We derive a closed-form solution based on the minimum mean square error criterion and apply a bisection method to satisfy interference thresholds. Furthermore, we introduce a base station position-aided approximation scheme to eliminate the complex integral calculations. Numerical simulations validate the proposed schemes.

This work proposes a framework for the robust design of UAV-assisted wireless networks that combine 3D trajectory optimization with user mobility prediction to address dynamic resource allocation challenges. We proposed a sparse second-order prediction model for real-time user tracking coupled with heuristic user clustering to balance service quality and computational complexity. The joint optimization problem is formulated to maximize the minimum rate. It is then decomposed into user association, 3D trajectory design, and resource allocation subproblems, which are solved iteratively via successive convex approximation (SCA). Extensive simulations demonstrate: (1) near-optimal performance with ϵ ≈ 0.67% deviation from upper-bound solutions, (2) 16% higher minimum rates for distant users compared to non-predictive 3D designs, and (3) 10 − 30% faster outage mitigation than time-division benchmarks. The framework’s adaptive speed control enables precise mobile user tracking while maintaining energy efficiency under constrained flight time. Results demonstrate superior robustness in edge-coverage scenarios, making it particularly suitable for 5G/6G networks.

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) have emerged as a promising technology for enhancing wireless communication by dynamically controlling the propagation environment. Recently, a non-diagonal RIS architecture has been proposed, enabling more advanced signal manipulation by allowing signals impinging on one element to be reflected from another element after appropriate phase-shift adjustment. This paper analyzes the energy efficiency of non-diagonal RIS-assisted wireless communication systems in high- and low-signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) regime. We derive closed form expressions of the spectral and energy efficiency for both the non-diagonal and its diagonal counterpart, which is used as a benchmark for comparison. Simulation results reveal that non-diagonal RIS systems are the preferred choice for communication systems that prioritize spectral efficiency. Interestingly, for energy efficiency, the selection between diagonal and non-diagonal RIS architectures depends on the received SNR conditions, with diagonal RIS systems excelling at high SNR and non-diagonal RIS systems performing better at low SNR scenarios.

This paper studies the distributed precoding design for multi-satellite massive MIMO transmission. We first conduct a detailed analysis of the transceiver process, examining the effects of delay and Doppler compensation errors and emphasizing the nearly independent nature of inter-satellite interference. Based on the derived signal model, an approximate expected sum rate maximization problem is formulated, incorporating statistical channel state information and compensation errors. Unlike conventional approaches that recast such problems as weighted minimum mean square error (WMMSE) minimization, we demonstrate that this transformation cannot hold equivalence in the considered scenario. To address this, we propose a modified WMMSE formulation leveraging channel covariance matrix decomposition. By exploiting channel characteristics, a low-complexity decomposition method is then developed, accompanied by an efficient algorithm. Simulation results validate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method in some practical simulated scenarios.

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite communication is crucial for developing sixth-generation (6G) networks. The integration of massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology is being actively researched to enhance the performance of LEO satellite communication systems. However, the limited power resources of LEO satellites pose significant challenges to improving energy efficiency (EE) under power-constrained conditions. Typical optimization-based methods often lack real-time adaptability and computational efficiency. This paper proposes innovative solutions to address the challenges of precoding in massive MIMO LEO satellite communications. Specifically, we introduce a deep unfolding of the Dinkelbach algorithm and the weighted minimum mean square error (WMMSE) approach to achieve enhanced EE. This transformation of iterative optimization procedures into a graph neural network (GNN) leads to faster convergence and improved computational efficiency. Furthermore, we apply the Taylor expansion method to approximate matrix inversion within the GNN framework. Numerical experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method in terms of complexity and robustness, achieving significant improvements over other state-of-the-art methods.

This paper investigates joint device identification, channel estimation, and symbol detection for cooperative multi-satellite-enhanced random access, where orthogonal time-frequency space modulation with the large antenna array is utilized to combat the dynamics of the terrestrial-satellite links (TSLs). We introduce the generalized complex exponential basis expansion model to parameterize TSLs, thereby reducing the pilot overhead. By exploiting the block sparsity of the TSLs in the angular domain, a message passing algorithm is designed for initial channel estimation. Subsequently, we examine two cooperative modes to leverage the spatial diversity within satellite constellations: the centralized mode, where computations are performed at a high-power central server, and the distributed mode, where computations are offloaded to edge satellites with minimal signaling overhead. Specifically, in the centralized mode, device identification is achieved by aggregating backhaul information from edge satellites, and channel estimation and symbol detection are jointly enhanced through a structured approximate expectation propagation (AEP) algorithm. In the distributed mode, edge satellites share channel information and exchange soft information about data symbols, leading to a distributed version of AEP. The introduced basis expansion model for TSLs enables the efficient implementation of both centralized and distributed algorithms via fast Fourier transform. Simulation results demonstrate that proposed schemes significantly outperform conventional algorithms in terms of the activity error rate, the normalized mean squared error, and the symbol error rate. Notably, the distributed mode achieves performance comparable to the centralized mode with only two exchanges of soft information about data symbols within the constellation.

Satellite communications (SatComs) have recently been through a renaissance, both technologically and entrepreneurially. Ambitious plans have already come into fruition with the operation of low-Earth orbit (LEO) constellations including thousands of satellites and supported by state of the art but proprietary technologies, such as active antenna arrays and intersatellite links (ISLs). In this context, this article aims to provide a forward-looking vision of use cases and a deep dive into technological enablers that will be prominent in space communications beyond 2030. In parallel, it motivates how open standards can play a role in delivering affordable communication services in space. Starting from the 5G plans for nonterrestrial networks, we provide a survey and roadmap toward artificial intelligence (AI)-supported satellite systems, space-enabled quantum networks, and joint communications and positioning (JCAP) for space missions and interplanetary exploration.

With countless promising applications in various domains such as IoT and Industry 4.0, task-oriented communication design (TOCD) is getting accelerated attention from the research community. This paper presents a novel approach for designing scalable task-oriented quantization and communications in cooperative multi-agent systems (MAS). The proposed approach utilizes the TOCD framework and the value of information (VoI) concept to enable efficient communication of quantized observations among agents while maximizing the average return performance of the MAS, a parameter that quantifies the MAS’s task effectiveness. The computational complexity of learning the VoI, however, grows exponentially with the number of agents. Thus, we propose a three-step framework: (i) learning the VoI (using reinforcement learning (RL)) for a two-agent system, (ii) designing the quantization policy for an N-agent MAS using the learned VoI for a range of bit-budgets and, (iii) learning the agents’ control policies using RL while following the designed quantization policies in the earlier step. Our analytical results show the applicability of the proposed framework under a wide range of problems. Numerical results show striking improvements in reducing the computational complexity of obtaining VoI needed for the TOCD in a MAS problem without compromising the average return performance of the MAS.

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite communication is a critical component in the development of sixth generation (6G) networks. The integration of massive multiple-input multipleoutput (MIMO) technology is being actively explored to enhance the performance of LEO satellite communications. However, the limited power of LEO satellites poses a significant challenge in improving communication energy efficiency (EE) under constrained power conditions. Artificial intelligence (AI) methods are increasingly recognized as promising solutions for optimizing energy consumption while enhancing system performance, thus enabling more efficient and sustainable communications. This paper proposes approaches to address the challenges associated with precoding in massive MIMO LEO satellite communications. First, we introduce an end-to-end graph neural network (GNN) framework that effectively reduces the computational complexity of traditional precoding methods. Next, we introduce a deep unfolding of the Dinkelbach algorithm and the weighted minimum mean square error (WMMSE) approach to achieve enhanced EE, transforming iterative optimization processes into a structured neural network, thereby improving convergence speed and computational efficiency. Furthermore, we incorporate the Taylor expansion method to approximate matrix inversion within the GNN, enhancing both the interpretability and performance of the proposed method. Numerical experiments demonstrate the validity of our proposed method in terms of complexity and robustness, achieving significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods.

In this work, we consider a typical scenario in a harsh urban propagation environment which is typical for a smart city scenario where multiple reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) are deployed in different hotspot areas to overcome signal blockage between the base station and users. Our goal is to ensure uninterrupted service availability to users in different hotspot areas regardless of their location. Consistent service availability can be achieved by guaranteeing that each RIS deployed in a hotspot area can support a certain number of users. This plays a critical role in smart city applications in the context of emergency communications and ubiquitous connectivity since the design ensures service availability to as many users as possible in all relevant locations. Taking into consideration the challenges in obtaining channel state information (CSI) given the passive nature of RIS and dynamic environments, we formulate a robust fairness problem to maximize the minimum expected number of served users in proximity to each RIS while considering the available transmit power and the worst-case quality of service (QoS) constraints within the bounded CSI error model framework. The resulting problem is a mixed integer non-convex program which is highly coupled and challenging to solve in polynomial time. Thus, we resort to binary variable relaxation, convex approximation techniques, and alternating optimization to tackle the problem. Additionally, we handle the semi-infinite uncertainty constraints by employing the S-procedure and general sign-definiteness. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design in obtaining consistent and reliable service in different hotspot areas compared to the relevant benchmark schemes. In addition, the proposed design shows flexibility in serving users with their target QoS given different channel uncertainty levels.

Precoding is a critical and long-standing technique in multi-user communication systems. However, the majority of existing precoding methods do not consider channel coding in their designs. In this paper, we consider the precoding problem in multi-user multiple-input single-output (MISO) systems, incorporating channel coding into the design. By leveraging the error-correcting capability of channel codes we increase the degrees of freedom in the transmit signal design, thereby enhancing the overall system performance. We first propose a novel data-dependent precoding framework for coded MISO systems, referred to aschannel-coded precoding(CCP), which maximizes the probability that information bits can be correctly recovered by the channel decoder. This proposed CCP framework allows the transmit signals to produce data symbol errors at the users’ receivers, as long as the overall information BER performance can be improved. We develop the CCP framework for both one-bit and multi-bit error-correcting capacity and devise a projected gradient-based approach to solve the design problem. We also develop a robust CCP framework for the case where knowledge of perfect channel state information (CSI) is unavailable at the transmitter, taking into account the effect of both noise and channel estimation errors. Finally, we conduct numerous simulations to verify the effectiveness of the proposed CCP and its superiority compared to existing precoding methods, and we identify situations where the proposed CCP yields the most significant gains.

This paper investigates joint device identification, channel estimation, and symbol detection for LEO satellite-enabled grant-free random access systems, specifically targeting scenarios where remote Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices operate without global navigation satellite system (GNSS) assistance. Considering the constrained power consumption of these devices, the large differential delay and Doppler shift are handled at the satellite receiver. We firstly propose a spreading-based multi-frame transmission scheme with orthogonal time-frequency space (OTFS) modulation to mitigate the doubly dispersive effect in time and frequency, and then analyze the input-output relationship of the system. Next, we propose a receiver structure based on three modules: a linear module for identifying active devices that leverages the generalized approximate message passing algorithm to eliminate inter-user and inter-carrier interference; a non-linear module that employs the message passing algorithm to jointly estimate the channel and detect the transmitted symbols; and a third module that aims to exploit the three dimensional block channel sparsity in the delay-Doppler-angle domain. Soft information is exchanged among the three modules by careful message scheduling. Furthermore, the expectation-maximization algorithm is integrated to adjust phase rotation caused by the fractional Doppler and to learn the hyperparameters in the priors. Finally, the convolutional neural network is incorporated to enhance the symbol detection. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed transmission scheme boosts the system performance, and the designed algorithms outperform the conventional methods significantly in terms of the device identification, channel estimation, and symbol detection.

This paper addresses the challenge of balancing conflicting goals, namely data rate and energy harvesting (EH) in Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer (SWIPT) systems, while incorporating Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) technology. We formulate a weighted optimization objective to address this issue, seeking to simultaneously maximize data rate, EH, and minimize transmit power utilization. The proposed approach involves optimizing time switching (TS) ratios and transmit power using a practical phase-dependent amplitude model for each RIS element’s reflectivity. To address this complex optimization problem involving ratio of concave-convex problem, the paper introduces fractional programming-based modified Dinkelbach Algorithm providing upper and lower bounds, which are then compared with Quadratic transform-related algorithms and solutions based on Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions. Numerical findings highlight the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms in enhancing the overall performance of SWIPT systems with RIS technology.

In this paper, we present a generic signal model applicable to various distributed radar setups, encompassing both phased array (PA) and MIMO radar configurations. We consider a range of waveform modulation methods, including TDM, BPM, DDM, and fast time CDM. We devise a GLRT based detector for scenarios where the interference consists of colored noise plus a signal in a low-rank subspace and prove that the designed detector is CFAR. We demonstrate that when the CPI time is similar for the systems, the PA radar system exhibits better detection performance than MIMO, irrespective of the waveform modulation approach adopted. However, if the CPI time of the PA system is divided to the number of transmit waveforms utilized in the MIMO radar case (to account for the time needed for a PA radar to scan all angles), then in the presence of non-uniform interference, MIMO techniques, except TDM, surpass the performance of PA. Conversely, in cases of uniform interference, the performance of both MIMO techniques and PA are equivalent.

Space debris detection and tracking, a key enabler for Space Situational Awareness (SSA), poses two inherent challenges: (1) small-sized targets (e.g., 1 − 10 cm) posing detection difficulties for conventional ground-based radars (GBRs) and optical measurements; (2) large number resulting in a costly tracking exercise. To address these, this work utilizes intersatellite link (ISL) in the emerging low earth orbit (LEO) constellations to opportunistically sense debris. The spatially dense-distributed debris is modeled as a cluster to reduce the number of quantities estimated. Using a stochastic geometry-based channel model, a nested expectationbased SAGE2is proposed, building on space-alternativegeneration-estimation-maximization (SAGE) to estimate the cluster-based channel parameters. Finally, the debris clusters are localized using the ISL forming a bistatic sensing setup. Simulation results validate the proposed approach and show the proposed SAGE2is faster than the conventional SAGE in clustered multipath channels.

In this paper, we study the resource allocation problem in multi-RIS-aided outdoor-to-indoor communications. Specifically, we aim to provide geographical fairness to ensure that users in different hotspot areas in a smart city can be served regardless of their location. We consider a scenario where RISs are deployed to extend coverage to indoor users in different buildings where there is limited network accessibility. This design is crucial in smart cities in the context of emergency communication and ubiquitous connectivity since it ensures service availability to as many users as possible independently of the locations. Thus, to achieve geographical fairness, we formulate a max-min fairness problem to maximize the minimum number of users served by each RIS by jointly optimizing the active precoding and RIS-based beamforming subject to power and quality of service constraints. The geographical location of users is directly linked to the RIS which means that users are served by the RIS closest to them. In this case, we ensure that a certain number of users can be supported by each RIS. The formulated problem is a mixed integer nonlinear program, which is challenging to solve directly using methods of convex optimization. Accordingly, we propose an efficient successive convex approximation-based alternating optimization algorithm to tackle the complexity of the formulated problem. The presented results show the performance gain of the proposed design in providing geographical fairness compared to the relevant benchmark schemes.

This paper introduces a joint optimization framework for user-centric beam selection and linear precoding (LP) design in a coordinated multiple-satellite (CoMSat) system, employing a Digital-Fourier-Transform-based (DFT) beamforming (BF) technique. Regarding serving users at their target SINRs and minimizing the total transmit power, the scheme aims to efficiently determine satellites for users to associate with and activate the best cluster of beams together with optimizing LP for every satellite-to-user transmission. These technical objectives are first framed as a complex mixed-integer programming (MIP) challenge. To tackle this, we reformulate it into a joint cluster association and LP design problem. Then, by theoretically analyzing the duality relationship between downlink and uplink transmissions, we develop an efficient iterative method to identify the optimal solution. Additionally, a simpler duality approach for rapid beam selection and LP design is presented for comparison purposes. Simulation results underscore the effectiveness of our proposed schemes across various settings.

This work investigates the application of Beyond Diagonal Intelligent Reflective Surface (BD-IRS) to enhance THz downlink communication systems, operating in a hybrid: reflective and transmissive mode, to simultaneously provide services to indoor and outdoor users. We propose an optimization framework that jointly optimizes the beamforming vectors and phase shifts in the hybrid reflective/transmissive mode, aiming to maximize the system sum rate. To tackle the challenges in solving the joint design problem, we employ the conjugate gradient method and propose an iterative algorithm that successively optimizes the hybrid beamforming vectors and the phase shifts. Through comprehensive numerical simulations, our findings demonstrate a significant improvement in rate when compared to existing benchmark schemes, including time- and frequency-divided approaches, by approximately 30.5% and 69.9% respectively and even outperforms the STAR-IRS system by 76.99%. This underscores the significant influence of IRS elements on system performance relative to that of base station antennas, highlighting their pivotal role in advancing the communication system efficacy.

Simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) is an emerging technology that enables full-space ($\mathbf{3 6 0}$ degrees) coverage on both sides of the surface. To harness the benefits of the dynamic configuration of STAR-RIS while avoiding co-channel interference, we investigate the performance of a multi-user network assisted by STARRIS. In this setup, users are divided into multiple groups, each comprising two users located on opposite sides of the STARRIS. Orthogonal time resources are allocated to each group such that the groups are served sequentially. Based on the Gamma moment matching method, we introduce a Gamma distribution to model the product of Rician, Rayleigh and mixed fading STAR-RIS channels. We then derive exact closed-form expressions for the outage probability and diversity order per user in the proposed system model. Moreover, simulation results are provided to substantiate the analytical derived expressions. Our findings highlight a reliability trade-off associated with the number of grouped users per time slot, STAR-RIS elements, and the user targeted data rates. This balance is crucial for optimizing network performance.

This paper delves into the dynamics of resource allocation in ultra-dense Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks within a cell-free massive MIMO framework, focusing on the impact of residual synchronization errors. We conduct various analyses to understand how these errors - encompassing time, phase, and frequency - influence the Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise Ratio (SINR) and the average number of satellite links connected to each user. Our approach measures the effects of these remaining synchronization errors and uses these values to inform and optimize power and resource allocation decisions. The study reveals that as synchronization errors increase, the number of effective satellite links to users diminishes, consequently reducing the number of satellites actively connected to each user. This research not only highlights the critical impact of synchronization errors on network performance but also demonstrates how advanced knowledge of these error variances can significantly enhance resource allocation strategies and network efficiency in future ultra-dense LEO satellite systems.

To harness the benefits of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs), we propose a novel RIS-empowered decode-and-forward (RIS-DF) relaying scheme tailored to cooperative NOMA transmissions. This integration is a promising direction for improving communication reliability, extending coverage, and enhancing the overall performance in sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks. This paper focuses on enhancing signal reception of the cell-edge users with weak channel conditions by deploying multiple RISs within cooperative NOMA systems. In this setting, we investigate system outage performance and derive closed-form analytical expressions for both cooperative NOMA and its orthogonal mul-tiple access (OMA) counterpart, which is used as a benchmark for comparison. To validate the proposed solutions, numerical results are provided to demonstrate the performance gains of the proposed scheme compared to the existing conventional DF relays developed for cooperative NOMA. Further, the impact of RIS placement within the system on performance is also examined, offering useful practical design insights.

We consider a task-effective quantization problem that arises when multiple agents are controlled via a centralized controller (CC). While agents have to communicate their observations to the CC for decision-making, the bit-budgeted communications of agent-CC links may limit the task-effectiveness of the system which is measured by the system’s average sum of stage costs/rewards. As a result, each agent should compress/quantize its observation such that the average sum of stage costs/rewards of the control task is minimally impacted. We address the problem of maximizing the average sum of stage rewards by proposing two different Action-Based State Aggregation (ABSA) algorithms that carry out the indirect and joint design of control and communication policies in the multi-agent system. While the applicability of ABSA-1 is limited to single-agent systems, it provides an analytical framework that acts as a stepping stone to the design of ABSA-2. ABSA-2 carries out the joint design of control and communication for a multi-agent system. We evaluate the algorithms -with average return as the performance metric -using numerical experiments performed to solve a multi-agent geometric consensus problem. The numerical results are concluded by introducing a new metric that measures the effectiveness of communications in a multi-agent system.

The low-Earth orbiting (LEO) satellite constellations in the 90s (such as Iridium and Globalstar), although representing a major technical breakthrough, were not able to achieve the initial goal of complementing the second-generation mobile terrestrial networks due to the rapid worldwide adoption of GSM and other standards. However, the decline of conventional linear television and the persisting need to mitigate the digital divide still affecting billions of people recently generated a renewed interest by private investors for Low-Earth Orbiting (LEO) satellite mega-constellations. The mega-constellations under deployment can provide lower delays versus geostationary (GEO) satellites, broadband access anywhere, anytime leveraging the low-cost series production of small satellites, and more affordable launch solutions. At the end of the last decade, key industrial players realized the potential complementary role satellites can play to extend the 5G terrestrial network coverage over low-density populated areas, oceans, or similar. This has led to great technological developments and a sharp reduction in LEO satellite volume, weight, and, ultimately, manufacturing and launching costs. Also, it has triggered the inclusion of a non terrestrial network (NTN) component in the latest 5G 3GPP standard releases. Yet, there are many technological challenges remaining to ensure that both the quality and cost of the NTN services are comparable to the terrestrial counterpart. This is mainly due to the constraints in satellite payload power, mass, and antenna size. This comes in addition to the stringent power flux density limitations on the ground, in particular in the below 6 GHz satellite bands. The required order of magnitude increase of the effective delivered throughput and service cost reduction can only be achieved by a mix of system architectures and innovative technologies for both the space and ground segments. Space communication systems and technologies will also play a key role in human return to the Moon planned for mid-2020, to prepare for human exploration of Mars in the more distant future and further cosmic exploration. As missions voyage further from Earth, it is important to consider how we can continue to reliably communicate with them and how they will accurately navigate through space when they are so far from home.

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have emerged as a game-changing technology to improve wireless network performance by intelligently manipulating and customizing the physical propagation environment. Such capability is especially important for the application of smart cities as it increases wireless service offers and quality to end-users. In this paper, we aim to maximize the number of served users in a challenging RIS-aided smart city street by jointly optimizing the multislot scheduling, precoding, and passive RIS-based beamforming design under quality of service and power constraints. Multislot scheduling is introduced in order to benefit from additional time diversity and thus better exploit the available degrees of freedom. The formulated problem is a mixed integer nonlinear programming, which is NP-hard. To solve the problem with affordable complexity, we develop an efficient iterative algorithm based on binary variable relaxation, alternating optimization, and successive convex approximation techniques. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed design over the design without RIS and the design without scheduling, especially in the presence of a large number of users. In addition, results illustrate that by introducing a quality of service margin, the proposed design can improve its robustness to outdated channel state information in mobility scenarios.

Beam-hopping (BH) technology, integral to multi-beam satellite systems, adapts beam activation to the variable communication demands of terrestrial users. The optimization of power allocation and beam illumination scheduling constitutes the core design challenge in BH systems, especially under the constraint on a limited number of simultaneously active beams due to restricted radio frequency chain availability. This paper proposes a two-stage BH design solution, which minimizes energy consumption in BH satellite communications while accommodating the heterogeneous demands of users. The first stage addresses the coupling variables of power and beam status by recasting the allocation and scheduling problem through a statistical lens, thus breaking down the intricate relationship between variables. To manage the resulting non-convex challenge, we propose an iterative method that capitalizes on the optimality conditions inherent to this problem. This method is designed to procure a statistically-informed solution that aligns with our reformulated interpretation. Subsequently, the second stage maps this solution into a concrete beam illumination schedule, employing binary quadratic programming techniques. A penalty-based iterative method is applied, ensuring convergence to a locally optimal solution. Through numerical simulations, the proposed framework has been validated for its efficacy in improving energy efficiency and accurately matching demands.

This paper investigates the antenna selection problem in massive multiple-input multiple-out (MIMO) systems under incomplete channel state information (CSI), with a particular interest on risk-aware planning subjected to practical constraints such as transmit power budgets and quality of services (QoS). Due to a very large number of antennas, obtaining complete channel measurements becomes a cost-prohibitive, energy-inefficient and spectral-inefficient task. To reduce pilot overhead, incomplete CSI and antenna selection (AS) are expected in practical massive MIMO systems. However, most existing AS algorithms heavily rely on the complete CSI, which imposes a high probability of violating the practical constraints in the scenarios of our interests. Motivated by this, we propose a joint channel prediction and antenna selection framework (JCPAS) which efficiently performs AS and is robust against the incomplete CSI and practical constraints. The proposed framework comprises i) a channel tracker which estimates the channel dynamics based on historical incomplete observations, and ii) a risk-aware Monte Carlo tree search (RA-MCTS) algorithm which utilizes the estimated channel dynamics to select antennas in a risk-aware manner. Simulation results show that the proposed RA-MCTS not only achieves much lower energy consumption compared to the existing typical algorithms, but also significantly reduces the probability of violating the practical constraints.

Integrated communications and localization (ICAL) will play an important part in future sixth generation (6G) networks for the realization of Internet of Everything (IoE) to support both global communications and seamless localization. Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) low earth orbit (LEO) satellite systems have great potential in providing wide coverage with enhanced gains, and thus are strong candidates for realizing ubiquitous ICAL. In this paper, we develop a wideband massive MIMO LEO satellite system to simultaneously support wireless communications and localization operations in the downlink. In particular, we first characterize the signal propagation properties and derive a localization performance bound. Based on these analyses, we focus on the hybrid analog/digital precoding design to achieve high communication capability and localization precision. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed ICAL scheme supports both the wireless communication and localization operations for typical system setups.

With the emergence of ultra-reliable and low latency communication (URLLC) services, link adaptation (LA) plays a pivotal role in improving the robustness and reliability of communication networks via appropriate modulation and coding schemes (MCS). LA-based resource management schemes in both physical and medium access control layers can significantly enhance the system performance in terms of throughput, latency, reliability, and quality of service. Increasing the number of retransmissions will achieve higher reliability and increase transmission latency. In order to balance this trade-off with improved link performance for URLLC services, we study a joint subcarrier and power allocation problem to maximize the achievable sum-rate under an appropriate MCS. The formulated problem is mixed-integer nonconvex programming which is challenging to solve optimally. In addition, a direct application of standard optimization techniques is no longer applicable due to the complication of the effective signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) function. To overcome this challenge, we first relax the binary variables to continuous ones and introduce additional variables to convert the relaxed problem into a more tractable form. By leveraging the successive convex approximation method, we develop a low-complexity iterative algorithm that guarantees to achieve at least a locally optimal solution. Simulation results are provided to show the fast convergence of the proposed iterative algorithm and demonstrate the significant performance improvement in terms of the achievable sum-rate, compared with the conventional LA approach and existing retransmission policy.

Task-oriented communication design (TOCD) has gained significant attention from the research community due to its numerous promising applications in domains such as$\text{IoT}$and industry 4.0. This paper introduces an innovative approach to designing scalable task-oriented quantization and communications in cooperative multi-agent systems (MAS). Our proposed approach leverages the TOCD framework and the concept of the value of information$(\text{VoI})$to facilitate efficient communication of quantized observations among agents while maximizing the average return performance of the MAS-a metric that measures the task effectiveness of the MAS. Learning the VoI becomes a prohibitively large computational problem as the number of agents grows in the MAS. To address this challenge, we present a three-step framework. First, we employ reinforcement learning (RL) to learn the VoI for a two-agent, rather than for the original$N$-agent system, reducing the computational costs associated with obtaining the value of information. Next, we design the quantization policy for a MAS with N agents, utilizing the learned VoI across a range of bit-budgets. The resulting quantization strategy for agents' observations, ensures that more valuable observations are communicated with greater precision. Finally, we apply RL to learn the agents' control policies, while adhering to the quantization policies designed in the previous step. Our analytical results showcase the effectiveness of the proposed framework across a wide range of problems. Numerical experiments demonstrate improvements in reducing the computational complexity required for obtaining VoI by five orders of magnitude in TOCD for MAS problems while compromising less than 1% on the average return performance of the MAS.

This paper proposes a novel transmission scheme that leverages the synergistic benefits of multiple reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) and cooperative non-orthogonal multi-ple access (NOMA) to improve both spectral and energy efficiency in 5G and beyond wireless systems. The proposed scheme involves selecting one of cell-center users to an access point (AP), which then relays the data to a cell-edge user without a direct connection to the AP with assistance of multiple distributed RISs. In this respect, we propose a cooperative NOMA scheme and develop a user selection strategy for two RIS exploitation scenarios: (i) the RIS selection scheme where the transmission between the selected cell-center and cell-edge users is performed via a selected RIS, and (ii) the distributed RIS scheme where all RISs assist in the end-to-end communications. The system outage performance is statistically characterized and its closed-form expressions are derived. Additionally, simulations are carried out to validate the analytical expressions and compare the performance of these two schemes to a single RIS-assisted network under different numbers of RISs, reflecting elements, and cell-center users. The results show that combining multiple RIS in cooperative NOMA can yield high spectral efficiency gains and improved outage performance, even with a low number of RIS elements.

Future generation of Wireless Communications encompasses massive connectivity of energy-starved and heavy-data driven billions of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. In this vein, Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) holds great promise while providing improved performance and efficiency in terms of energy, cost and spectrum. Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transmission (SWIPT) in conjunction with RIS makes a great partnership to suffice the IoT demands. This paper examines a SWIPT-IoT system that utilizes power-splitting (PS) and non-linear energy harvesting (EH) model to achieve more data rates in constraint environment. The IoT node receives both energy and information from the base station via RIS. We present a combined problem that aims to optimize the individual objectives of rate, EH, and transmit power, while taking into account various sets of quality-of-service (QoS)-based constraints. We introduce a set of iterative optimization algorithm that utilize a divide-and-conquer approach to effectively solve the aforementioned problems. Based on our computational results, we confer that in order to reap the benefits of PS-based SWIPT-IoTs, it is imperative to increase the size of RIS and position them in optimal proximity to both the base station and the user.

This paper investigates joint device identification, channel estimation, and signal detection for LEO satellite-enabled grant-free random access, where a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system with orthogonal time-frequency space modulation (OTFS) is utilized to combat the dynamics of the terrestrial-satellite link (TSL). We divide the receiver structure into three modules: first, a linear module for identifying active devices, which leverages the generalized approximate message passing (GAMP) algorithm to eliminate inter-user interference in the delay-Doppler domain; second, a non-linear module adopting the message passing algorithm to jointly estimate channel and detect transmit signals; the third aided by Markov random field (MRF) aims to explore the three dimensional block sparsity of channel in the delay-Doppler-angle domain. The soft information is exchanged iteratively between these three modules by careful scheduling. Furthermore, the expectation-maximization algorithm is embedded to learn the hyperparameters in prior distributions. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms the conventional methods significantly in terms of activity error rate, channel estimation accuracy, and symbol error rate.

Driven by emerging applications, mmWave radars are increasingly being integrated into indoor scene monitoring systems due to their ability to provide high accuracy range, velocity, and angle information of the objects. This paper addresses the problem of moving target detection in a connected, distributed Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) radar sensor network designed as an indoor scene monitoring system. We propose a general signal model for distributed connected MIMO radar sensors that collect unwanted and interference signals in a low-rank subspace based on their angle and Doppler frequency spread with different subspace coefficients. We use Generalized Likelihood Ratio Test (GLRT) for moving target detection and find the best detector while demonstrating that it has a constant false alarm rate. The performance of the proposed detector is validated by Monte-Carlo simulation.

In this paper, we look at a waveform design problem for colocated Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) radar systems. Under continuous phase constraint, we aim to minimize the range-Integrated Sidelobe Level (ISL) with a compatible spectral response. In this regard, we define the range-ISL function in the time domain first, and then express it in the frequency domain using the Parseval relation. Following that, we incorporate weights on the range-ISL in the frequency domain to apply spectral compatibility. As a result, we have a multi-variable, non-convex, NP-hard optimization problem. We proposed an iterative algorithm based on the Coordinate Descent (CD) method to obtain a local optimum solution. We show the performance of the proposed method and compare it to the counterparts in the numerical results.

In the symbol-level precoding (SLP) based wireless systems, the reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is usually configured on a block level, which causes a mismatch to the SLP design in terms of update rate. Although it is expected that updating both the RIS and precoding on the symbol level could boost the system performance, the requirements for synchronization and system overhead will become demanding inevitably. In this paper, we consider the RIS-aided dual-function radar-communication (DFRC) system and investigate the benefit of increasing the RIS updating frequency. We jointly design the SLP and RIS to maximize the target illumination power while satisfying the power budget and the multiuser multiple input single output (MU-MISO) communication quality of service (QoS) requirements, where the RIS is updated multiple times in a block (at a sub-block level). Through the simulation results, we demonstrate the optimized trade-off between system performance and RIS update rate.

The space communications industry is challenged to develop a technology that can deliver broadband services to user terminals equipped with miniature antennas, such as handheld devices. One potential solution to establish links with ground users is the deployment of massive antennas in one single spacecraft. However, this is not cost-effective. Aligning with recent NewSpace activities directed toward miniaturization, mass production, and a significant reduction in spacecraft launch costs, an alternative could be distributed beamforming from multiple satellites. In this context, we propose a distributed beamforming modeling technique for wideband signals. We also consider the statistical behavior of the relative geometry of the swarm nodes. The paper assesses the proposed technique via computer simulations, providing interesting results on the beamforming gains in terms of power and the security of the communication against potential eavesdroppers at non-intended pointing angles. This approach paves the way for further exploration of wideband distributed beamforming from satellite swarms in several future communication applications.

Medium Earth orbit (MEO) constellation is an appealing solution between geostationary equatorial orbit (GEO) and lower Earth orbit (LEO) in terms of latency and number of satellites required. On-board processing of digital beam-former in MEO satellites is an efficient solution for achieving wider bandwidth, increased flexibility, and lower latency. Power constraints, however, make it impractical to digitally create thousands of beams at once. In this paper, area-power efficient digital beamformer architectures are proposed considering key metrics of a typical MEO scenario. The proposed efficient digital beamformer is comprised of a sparse-matrix-based user selection, a 2D discrete Fourier transform (DFT)-based digital beam generation, which is implemented by a fast Fourier transform (FFT) algorithm, and a spatial windowing module for selecting the antenna pattern. Furthermore, architectures of digital beam-former using conventional 2D-FFT approach, fully unrolled 2D-FFT, and an area-power efficient twiddle factor (TF) quantized fully unrolled 2D-FFT are proposed. The spatial windowing architecture concerning 10 × 10 radio frequency chains and sparse matrix architecture for user selection is also proposed. The proposed architectures are implemented targeting Virtex ultrascale FPGA and the area-power utilization is reported. It is noticed that more than 50%-reduction in area and power is achieved with the beamformer incorporating the proposed TF quantized fully unrolled 2D-FFT.

This paper proposes a novel resource allocation scheme for optimizing the downlink of a user-centric cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system. The proposed approach aims to optimize the number of users served by each access point based on channel conditions while adapting to variable packet error rate and modulation and coding schemes. To enhance the received signal-to-noise plus interference ratio, the authors use a precoding design approach called the local protective partial zero-forcing that categorizes users based on their channel gain. The problem is formulated as a joint optimization of user assignment, resource allocation, and the precoding design. Closed-form expressions for the data rate are derived, and a new algorithm for resource allocation is introduced that outperforms several different scenarios while keeping the computational complexity reasonable. Compared to fixed parameter schemes, the proposed approach provides an optimal selection of the number of users for each access point and has the potential to significantly improve the system throughput, making it a novel and impactful solution for the practical implementation of user-centric cell-free massive MIMO systems.

In this paper, we tackle the problem of joint symbol level precoding (SLP) and reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) phase shift design with constellation rotation in the finite block length regime. We aim to increase energy efficiency by minimizing the total transmit power while satisfying the quality of service constraints. The total power consumption can be significantly minimized through the exploitation of multiuser interference by symbol level precoding and by the intelligent manipulation of the propagation environment using reconfigurable intelligent surfaces. In addition, the constellation rotation per user contributes to energy efficiency by aligning the symbol phases of the users, thus improving the utilization of constructive interference. The formulated power minimization problem is non-convex and correspondingly difficult to solve directly. Hence, we employ an alternating optimization algorithm to tackle the joint optimization of SLP and RIS phase shift design. The optimal phase of each user’s constellation rotation is obtained via an exhaustive search algorithm. Through Monte-Carlo simulation results, we demonstrate that the proposed solution yields substantial power minimization as compared to conventional SLP, zero forcing precoding with RIS as well as the benchmark schemes without RIS.

Reconfigurable Intelligent surfaces (RIS) have the potential to significantly improve the performance of future 6G LEO satellite networks. In particular, RIS can improve the signal quality of ground terminal, reduce power consumption of satellite and increase spectral efficiency of overall network. This paper proposes an energy-efficient RIS-enabled NOMA communication for LEO satellite networks. The proposed framework simultaneously optimizes the transmit power of ground terminals at LEO satellite and passive beamforming at RIS while ensuring the quality of services. Due to the nature of the considered system and optimization variables, the problem of energy efficiency maximization is formulated as non-convex. In practice, it is very challenging to obtain the optimal solution for such problems. Therefore, we adopt alternating optimization methods to handle the joint optimization in two steps. In step 1, for any given phase shift vector, we calculate efficient power for ground terminals at satellite using Lagrangian dual method. Then, in step 2, given the transmit power, we design passive beamforming for RIS by solving the semi-definite programming. To validate the proposed solution, numerical results are also provided to demonstrate the benefits of the proposed optimization framework.

This work considers the orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) technology that enables multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (multi-UAV) communication systems to provide on-demand services. The main aim of this work is to derive the optimal allocation of radio resources, 3D placement of UAVs, and user association matrices. To achieve the desired objectives, we decoupled the original joint optimization problem into two sub-problems: i) 3D placement and user association and ii) sum-rate maximization for optimal radio resource allocation, which are solved iteratively. The proposed iterative algorithm is shown via numerical results to achieve fast convergence speed after less than 10 iterations. The benefits of the proposed design are demonstrated via superior sum-rate performance compared to existing reference designs. Moreover, the results declared that the optimal power and sub-carrier allocation helped mitigate the co-cell interference that directly impacts the system’s performance.

On-board processing of digital beamforming in satellites is an efficient solution for the higher data rates, more capacity, and lower latency, but the available on-board limited power makes it impractical to digitally create thousands of beams at once. A significant portion of the analog hardware in a satellite communications payload can be replaced with highly integrated digital components, which are often more affordable, lighter, smaller, and reprogrammable by employing digital beamforming. In comparison to matrix-by-vector multiplication beamforming, the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) beamformer enables the finer realization of real-time beamformers with reduced circuit complexity and lower power consumption. Fast Fourier transform (FFT) methods can further reduce the computing cost of the DFT computation. Therefore, in this paper, area-power efficient two-dimensional (2D) FFT digital beamforming techniques are analyzed and implemented. The major implementation challenge is to produce N samples per cycle with lower area-power consumption. Fully unrolled 4-bit twiddle factor (TF) quantized FFT is proposed in this regard. The optimization techniques through quantization, truncation, and complex multipliers are thoroughly discussed for efficient implementation. The behavioral and post-route timing simulations are validated, and implementation results like area and power consumption are estimated and compared among conventional , fully unrolled, and the proposed 4-bit TF quantized 2D-FFT.

We consider a distributed quantization problem that arises when multiple edge devices, i.e., agents, are controlled via a centralized controller (CC). While agents have to communicate their observations to the CC for decision-making, the bit-budgeted communications of agent-CC links may limit the task-effectiveness of the system which is measured by the system's average sum of stage costs/rewards. As a result, each agent, given its local processing resources, should compress/quantize its observation such that the average sum of stage costs/rewards of the control task is minimally impacted. We address the problem of maximizing the average sum of stage rewards by proposing two different Action-Based State Aggregation (ABSA) algorithms that carry out the indirect and joint design of control and communication policies in the multi-agent system (MAS). While the applicability of ABSA-1 is limited to single-agent systems, it provides an analytical framework that acts as a stepping stone to the design of ABSA-2. ABSA-2 carries out the joint design of control and communication for an MAS. We evaluate the algorithms - with average return as the performance metric - using numerical experiments performed to solve a multi-agent geometric consensus problem.

Low earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellation-enabled communication networks are expected to be an important part of many Internet of Things (IoT) deployments due to their unique advantage of providing seamless global coverage. In this paper, we investigate the random access problem in massive multiple-input multiple-output-based LEO satellite systems, where the multi-satellite cooperative processing mechanism is considered. Specifically, at edge satellite nodes, we conceive a training sequence padded multi-carrier system to overcome the issue of imperfect synchronization, where the training sequence is utilized to detect the devices’ activity and estimate their channels. Considering the inherent sparsity of terrestrial-satellite links and the sporadic traffic feature of IoT terminals, we utilize the orthogonal approximate message passing-multiple measurement vector algorithm to estimate the delay coefficients and user terminal activity. To further utilize the structure of the receive array, a two-dimensional estimation of signal parameters via rotational invariance technique is performed for enhancing channel estimation. Finally, at the central server node, we propose a majority voting scheme to enhance activity detection by aggregating backhaul information from multiple satellites. Moreover, multi-satellite cooperative linear data detection and multi-satellite cooperative Bayesian dequantization data detection are proposed to cope with perfect and quantized backhaul, respectively. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of our proposed schemes in terms of channel estimation, activity detection, and data detection for quasi-synchronous random access in satellite systems.

A whole suite of innovative technologies and architectures have emerged in response to the rapid growth of wireless traffic. This paper studies an integrated network design that boosts system capacity through cooperation between wireless access points (APs) and a satellite for enhancing the network’s spectral efficiency.As for our analytical contributions, upon coherently combing the signals received by the central processing unit (CPU) from the users through the space and terrestrial links, we first mathematically derive an achievable throughput expression for the uplink (UL) data transmission over spatially correlated Rician channels. Our generic achievable throughput expression is applicable for arbitrary received signal detection techniques employed at the APs and the satellite under realistic imperfect channel estimates. A closed-form expression is then obtained for the ergodic UL data throughput, when maximum ratio combining is utilized for detecting the desired signals.As for our resource allocation contributions, we formulate the max-min fairness and total transmit power optimization problems relying on the channel statistics for performing power allocation. The solution of each optimization problem is derived in form of a low-complexity iterative design, in which each data power variable is updated relying on a closed-form expression. Our integrated hybrid network concept allows users to be served that may not otherwise be accommodated due to the excessive data demands. The algorithms proposed allow us to address the congestion issues appearing when at least one user is served at a rate below his/her target. The mathematical analysis is also illustrated with the aid of our numerical results that show the added benefits of considering the space links in terms of improving the ergodic data throughput. Furthermore, the proposed algorithms smoothly circumvent any potential congestion, especially in face of high rate requirements and weak channel conditions.

Automotive-Industry 5.0 will use beyond fifth-generation (B5G) technologies to provide robust, computationally intelligent, and energy-efficient data sharing among various onboard sensors, vehicles, and other devices. Recently, ambient backscatter communications (AmBC) have gained significant interest in the research community for providing battery-free communications. AmBC can modulate useful data and reflect it towards near devices using the energy and frequency of existing RF signals. However, obtaining channel state information (CSI) for AmBC systems would be very challenging due to no pilot sequences and limited power. As one of the latest members of multiple access technology, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has emerged as a promising solution for connecting large-scale devices over the same spectral resources in B5G wireless networks. Under imperfect CSI, this paper provides a new optimization framework for energy-efficient transmission in AmBC enhanced NOMA cooperative vehicle-to-everything (V2X) networks. We simultaneously minimize the total transmit power of the V2X network by optimizing the power allocation at BS and reflection coefficient at backscatter sensors while guaranteeing the individual quality of services. The problem of total power minimization is formulated as non-convex optimization and coupled on multiple variables, making it complex and challenging. Therefore, we first decouple the original problem into two sub-problems and convert the nonlinear rate constraints into linear constraints. Then, we adopt the iterative sub-gradient method to obtain an efficient solution. For comparison, we also present a conventional NOMA cooperative V2X network without AmBC. Simulation results show the benefits of our proposed AmBC enhanced NOMA cooperative V2X network in terms of total achievable energy efficiency.

Beam Hopping (BH) is a popular technique considered for next-generation multi-beam satellite communication system which allows a satellite focusing its resources on where they are needed by selectively illuminating beams. While beam illumination plan can be adjusted according to its needs, the main limitation of convectional BH is the adjacent beam avoidance requirement needed to maintain acceptable levels of interference. With the recent maturity of precoding technique, a natural way forward is to consider a dynamic beam illumination scheme with selective precoding, where large areas with high-demand can be covered by multiple active precoded beams. In this paper, we mathematically model such beam illumination design problem employing an interference-based penalty function whose goal is to avoid precoding whenever possible subject to beam demand satisfaction constraints. The problem can be written as a binary quadratic programming (BQP). Next, two convexification frameworks are considered namely: (i) A Semi-Definition Programming (SDP) approach particularly targeting BQP type of problems, and (ii) Multiplier Penalty and Majorization-Minimization (MPMM) based method which guarantees to converge to a local optimum. Finally, a greedy algorithm is proposed to alleviate complexity with minimal impact on the final performance. Supporting results based on numerical simulations show that the proposed schemes outperform the relevant benchmarks in terms of demand matching performance while minimizing the use of precoding.

In millimeter-wave (mmWave) dual-function radar-communication (DFRC) systems, hybrid beamforming (HBF) is recognized as a promising technique utilizing a limited number of radio frequency chains. In this work, in the presence of extended target and clutters, a HBF design based on the subarray connection architecture is proposed for a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) DFRC system. In this HBF, the double-phase-shifter (DPS) structure is embedded to further increase the design flexibility. We derive the communication spectral efficiency (SE) and radar signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) with respect to the transmit HBF and radar receiver, and formulate the HBF design problem as the SE maximization subjecting to the radar SINR and power constraints. To solve the formulated nonconvex problem, the joinT Hybrid bEamforming and Radar rEceiver OptimizatioN (THEREON) is proposed, in which the radar receiver is optimized via the generalized eigenvalue decomposition, and the transmit HBF is updated with low complexity in a parallel manner using the consensus alternating direction method of multipliers (consensus-ADMM). Furthermore, we extend the proposed method to the multi-user multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) scenario. Numerical simulations demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithm and show that the solution provides a good trade-off between number of phase shifters and performance gain of the DPS HBF.

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite communication (SatCom) has drawn particular attention recently due to its high data rate services and low round-trip latency. It has low launching and manufacturing costs than Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) and Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) satellites. Moreover, LEO SatCom has the potential to provide global coverage with a high-speed data rate and low transmission latency. However, the spectrum scarcity might be one of the challenges in the growth of LEO satellites, impacting severe restrictions on developing ground-space integrated networks. To address this issue, cognitive radio and rate splitting multiple access (RSMA) are the two emerging technologies for high spectral efficiency and massive connectivity. This paper proposes a cognitive radio enabled LEO SatCom using RSMA radio access technique with the coexistence of GEO SatCom network. In particular, this work aims to maximize the sum rate of LEO SatCom by simultaneously optimizing the power budget over different beams, RSMA power allocation for users over each beam, and subcarrier user assignment while restricting the interference temperature to GEO SatCom. The problem of sum rate maximization is formulated as non-convex, where the global optimal solution is challenging to obtain. Thus, an efficient solution can be obtained in three steps: first we employ a successive convex approximation technique to reduce the complexity and make the problem more tractable. Second, for any given resource block user assignment, we adopt KarushKuhnTucker (KKT) conditions to calculate the transmit power over different beams and RSMA power allocation of users over each beam. Third, using the allocated power, we design an efficient algorithm based on the greedy approach for resource block user assignment. For comparison, we propose two suboptimal schemes with fixed power allocation over different beams and random resource block user assignment as the benchmark. Numerical results provided in this work are obtained based on the Monte Carlo simulations, which demonstrate the benefits of the proposed optimization scheme compared to the benchmark schemes.

This paper investigates the massive connectivity of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite-based Internet-of-Things (IoT) for seamless global coverage. We propose to integrate the grant-free non-orthogonal multiple access (GF-NOMA) paradigm with the emerging orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) modulation to accommodate the massive IoT access, and mitigate the long round-trip latency and severe Doppler effect of terrestrial–satellite links (TSLs). On this basis, we put forward a two-stage successive active terminal identification (ATI) and channel estimation (CE) scheme as well as a low-complexity multi-user signal detection (SD) method. Specifically, at the first stage, the proposed training sequence aided OTFS (TS-OTFS) data frame structure facilitates the joint ATI and coarse CE, whereby both the traffic sparsity of terrestrial IoT terminals and the sparse channel impulse response are leveraged for enhanced performance. Moreover, based on the single Doppler shift property for each TSL and sparsity of delay-Doppler domain channel, we develop a parametric approach to further refine the CE performance. Finally, a least square based parallel time domain SD method is developed to detect the OTFS signals with relatively low complexity. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed methods over the state-of-the-art solutions in terms of ATI, CE, and SD performance confronted with the long round-trip latency and severe Doppler effect.

The new era of space exploration demands a significant increase in the number of human and robotic missions, thus resulting in novel communication and service requirements. To satisfy such requirements, the fifth generation of mobile communication systems (5G), despite providing connectivity on Earth, has the potential to serve as a communication standard for space resource missions, particularly the ones targeting the Moon. In fact, 5G non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) are already in the standardization process and new techniques are being proposed in order to counteract the peculiarities of the non-terrestrial channel. However, going one step ahead and deploying constellations of satellites around the Earth or the Moon, requires first a detailed analysis and testing of the validity of the proposed techniques. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce the 5G Space Communications Lab, which has been developed with the purpose of simulating space-based 5G communications. The designed testbed proposed here increases the technology readiness level (TRL) of NTN-based 5G systems, demonstrating over a laboratory environment successful 5G communication via space links.

This paper studies an integrated network design that boosts system capacity through cooperation between wireless access points (APs) and a satellite. By coherently combing the signals received by the central processing unit from the users through the space and terrestrial links, we mathematically derive an achievable throughput expression for the uplink (UL) data transmission over spatially correlated Rician channels. A closed-form expression is obtained when maximum ratio combining is employed to detect the desired signals. We formulate the max-min fairness and total transmit power optimization problems relying on the channel statistics to perform power allocation. The solution of each optimization problem is derived in form of a low-complexity iterative design, in which each data power variable is updated based on a closed-form expression. The mathematical analysis is validated with numerical results showing the added benefits of considering a satellite link in terms of improving the ergodic data throughput.

Low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite communication has drawn particular attention recently due to its high data rate services and low round-trip latency. It is low-cost to launch and can provide global coverage. However, the spectrum scarcity might be one of the critical challenges in the growth of LEO satellites, impacting severe restrictions on the development of ground-space integrated networks. To address this issue, we propose rate splitting multiple access (RSMA) for cognitive radio (CR) enabled nongeostationary orbit (GEO)-LEO coexisting satellite network. In particular, this work aims to maximize the system's sum rate by simultaneously optimizing the power allocation and sub carrier beam assignment of LEO satellite communication while restricting the interference temperature to GEO satellite users. The problem of sum rate maximization is formulated as non-convex and a Global optimal solution is challenging to obtain. Therefore, we first employ the successive convex approximation technique to reduce the complexity and make the problem more tractable. Then for the power allocation, we exploit Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) condition and adopt an efficient algorithm based on the greedy approach for subcarrier beam assignment. We also propose two suboptimal schemes with fixed power allocation and random sub carrier beam assignment as the benchmark. Results demonstrate the benefits of the proposed scheme compared to the benchmark schemes.

This paper studies the non-orthogonal multicast and unicast coordinated beamforming design for integrated terrestrial and satellite networks (ITSN), when the channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) is imperfect. In order to mitigate the interference induced by simultaneous multicast and unicast links along with the spectrum coexisting mechanism for integrated terrestrial and satellite transmissions, we consider a two-layer layered division multiplexing (LDM) structure where the mul-ticast and unicast services are provided in different layers. We formulate a coordinated beamforming problem with the objective to minimize the transmit power under individual quality of service (QoS) constraints. With regard to the unknown convexity of the transmit power minimization problem, we transform the original infeasible optimization into a deterministic optimization form with linear matrix inequality (LMI) by utilizing S-procedure and semi-definite relaxation (SDR) methods. Then, we introduce a penalty function and propose an iterative algorithm with guaranteed convergence to obtain optimal solutions. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed coordinated beamforming scheme, especially for the case of imperfect CSIT, while our LDM based coordinated beamforming scheme signifi-cantly outperforms the conventional ones in terms of sum rate.

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have recently gained significant interest as an emerging technology for future wireless networks. This paper studies an RIS-assisted propagation environment, where a single-antenna source transmits data to a single-antenna destination in the presence of a weak direct link. We analyze and compare RIS designs based on long-term and short-term channel statistics in terms of coverage probability and ergodic rate. For the considered optimization designs, closed-form expressions for the coverage probability and ergodic rate are derived. We use numerical simulations to validate the obtained analytical framework. Also, we show that the considered optimal phase shift designs outperform several heuristic benchmarks.

Direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation can be represented as a sparse signal recovery problem and effectively solved by sparse Bayesian learning (SBL). For the DOA estimation in active sensing, the SBL-based estimation error is related to the transmitted probing waveform. Therefore, it is expected to improve the estimation by waveform optimization. In this paper, we propose a recurrent scheme of waveform design by sequentially leveraging on the previous-round SBL estimates. Within this scheme, we formulate the waveform design problem as a minimization of the SBL estimation variance, which is non-convex and then solved by a majorization-minimization based algorithm. The simulations demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed design scheme in terms of avoiding incorrect detection and accelerating the DOA estimation convergence. Further, the results indicate that the waveform design is essentially a beampattern shaping methodology.

The key advantage of successive relaying (SR) networks is their ability to mimic the full-duplex (FD) operation with half-duplex (HD) relays. However, the main challenge that comes with such schemes is the associated inter-relay interference (IRI). In this work, we propose a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-enhanced SR network, where one RIS is deployed near each of the two relay nodes to provide spatial suppression of IRI, and to maximize the gain of desired signals. The resultant max-min optimization problem with joint phase-shift design for both RISs is first tackled via the semidefinite programming (SDP) approach. Then, a lower-complexity solution suitable for real-time implementation is proposed based on particle swarm optimization (PSO). Numerical results demonstrate that even relatively small RISs can provide significant gains in achievable rates of SR networks, and the proposed PSO scheme can achieve a near optimal performance.

In this work, we investigate the decode-and-forward (DF) relay-aided double reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted networks, where the signal is subject to reflections from two RISs before reaching the destination. Different relay-aided network architectures are considered for maximum achievable rate under a total power constraint. Phase optimization for the double-RIS channels is tackled via the alternating optimization and majorization-minimization (MM) schemes. Moreover, closed-form solutions are obtained for each case. Numerical results indicate that the deployment of two relays, one near each RIS, achieves higher rates at low and medium signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) compared to placing a single relay between the two RISs; while at high SNRs, the latter approach achieves higher rates only if the inter-relay interference for the former case is considerably high.

The next generation multibeam satellites open up a new way to design satellite communication channels with the full flexibility in bandwidth, transmit power and beam coverage management. In this paper, we exploit the flexible multibeam satellite capabilities and the geographical distribution of users to improve the performance of satellite-assisted edge caching systems. Our aim is to jointly optimize the bandwidth allocation in multibeam and caching decisions at the edge nodes to address two important problems: i) cache feeding time minimization and ii) cache hits maximization. To tackle the non-convexity of the joint optimization problem, we transform the original problem into a difference-of-convex (DC) form, which is then solved by the proposed iterative algorithm whose convergence to at least a local optimum is theoretically guaranteed. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the proposed design is evaluated under the realistic beams coverage of the satellite SES-14 and Movielens data set. Numerical results show that our proposed joint design can reduce the caching feeding time by 50% and increase the cache hit ratio (CHR) by 10% to 20% compared to existing solutions. Furthermore, we examine the impact of multispot beams and multicarrier wide-beam on the joint design and discuss potential research directions.

Through precoding, the spectral efficiency of the system can be improved; thus, more users can benefit from 5G and beyond broadband services. However, complete precoding (using all precoding coefficients) may not be possible in practice due to the high signal processing complexity involved in calculating a large number of precoding coefficients and combining them with symbols for transmission. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient sparse precoding design, where only a few precoding coefficients are used with lower transmit power consumption depending on the demand. In this context, we formulate an optimization problem that minimizes the number of in-use precoding coefficients and the system power consumption while matching the per beam demand. This problem is non-convex. Hence, we apply Lagrangian relaxation and successive convex approximation to convexify it. The proposed solution outperforms the benchmark schemes in energy efficiency and demand satisfaction with the additional advantage of sparse precoding design.

To ensure quality of service to the users within the coverage area, time-flexible satellite system needs to design a beam illumination strategy, i.e. a time-space transmission pattern that is periodically repeated. The beam activation dwells just long enough to satisfy the traffic demand. The beam illumination pattern design is typically a combinatorial problem with a non-convex structure due to the presence of inter-beam interference. The computational complexity of existing solutions addressing this problem are unbearable for practical systems. In this paper, we propose a low-complexity beam illumination design which splits the task into two sequential sub-problems: (i) Estimation of number of time-slots to be allocated to each geographical area in order to satisfy its demand; (ii) Assignment of illumination slots over the time domain. Note that the outcome of step (ii) determines the resulting interference environment and, as a consequence, the resulting offered capacity. The latter is, at the same time, an input needed for step (i). For this reason, we propose an adaptive system where the two steps are iteratively executed until convergence. Furthermore, we show that a random assignment for step (ii) significantly reduces the complexity without a major impact on the performance. The proposed design is validated and compared with existing schemes using numerical results.

Backscatter communications (BC) has emerged as a promising technology for providing low-powered transmissions in nextG (i.e., beyond 5G) wireless networks. The fundamental idea of BC is the possibility of communications among wireless devices by using the existing ambient radio frequency signals. Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has recently attracted significant attention due to its high spectral efficiency and massive connectivity. This paper proposes a new optimization framework to minimize total transmit power of BC-NOMA cooperative vehicle-to-everything networks (V2XneT) while ensuring the quality of services. More specifically, the base station (BS) transmits a superimposed signal to its associated roadside units (RSUs) in the first time slot. Then the RSUs transmit the superimposed signal to their serving vehicles in the second time slot exploiting decode and forward protocol. A backscatter device (BD) in the coverage area of RSU also receives the superimposed signal and reflect it towards vehicles by modulating own information. Thus, the objective is to simultaneously optimize the transmit power of BS and RSUs along with reflection coefficient of BDs under perfect and imperfect channel state information. The problem of energy efficiency is formulated as non-convex and coupled on multiple optimization variables which makes it very complex and hard to solve. Therefore, we first transform and decouple the original problem into two sub-problems and then employ iterative sub-gradient method to obtain an efficient solution. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed BC-NOMA V2XneT provides high energy efficiency than the conventional NOMA V2XneT without BC.

Reflecting intelligent surfaces (RIS) is a low-cost and energy-efficient solution to achieve high spectral efficiency in sixth-generation (6G) networks. The basic idea of RIS is to smartly reconfigure the signal propagation by using passive reflecting elements. On the other side, the demand of high throughput geostationary (GEO) satellite communications (SatCom) is rapidly growing to deliver broadband services in inaccessible/insufficient covered areas of terrestrial networks. This paper proposes a GEO SatCom network, where a satellite transmits the signal to a ground mobile terminal using multicarrier communications. To enhance the effective gain, the signal delivery from satellite to the ground mobile terminal is also assisted by RIS which smartly shift the phase of the signal towards ground terminal. We consider that RIS is mounted on a high building and equipped With multiple re-configurable passive elements along with smart controller. We jointly optimize the power allocation and phase shift design to maximize the channel capacity of the system. The joint optimization problem is formulated as nonconvex due to coupled variables which is hard to solve through traditional convex optimization methods. Thus, we propose a new $\epsilon-$ optimal algorithm which is based on Mesh Adaptive Direct Search to obtain an efficient solution. Simulation results unveil the benefits of RIS-assisted SatCom in terms of system channel capacity.

Satellite communication systems can provide seamless wireless coverage directly or through complementary ground-terrestrial components and are projected to be incorporated into future wireless networks, particularly 5G and beyond networks. Increased capacity and flexibility in telecom satellite payloads based on classic radio frequency technology have traditionally translated into increased power consumption and dissipation. Much of the analog hardware in a satellite communications payload can be replaced with highly integrated digital components that are often smaller, lighter, and less expensive, as well as software reprogrammable. Digital beamforming of thousands of beams simultaneously is not practical due to the limited power available onboard satellite processors. Reduced digital beamforming power consumption would enable the deployment of a full digital payload, resulting in comprehensive user applications. Beamforming can be implemented using matrix multiplication, hybrid methodology, or a discrete Fourier transform (DFT). Implementing DFT via fast Fourier transform (FFT) reduces the power consumption, process time, hardware requirements, and chip area. Therefore, in this paper, area-power efficient FFT architectures for digital beamforming are analyzed. The area in terms of look up tables (LUTs) is estimated and compared among conventional FFT, fully unrolled FFT, and a 4-bit quantized twiddle factor (TF)FFT. Further, for the typical satellite scenarios, area, and power estimation are reported.

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) are planar structures connected to electronic circuitry, which can be employed to steer the electromagnetic signals in a controlled manner. Through this, the signal quality and the effective data rate can be substantially improved. While the benefits of RIS-assisted wireless communications have been investigated for various scenarios, some aspects of the network design, such as coverage, optimal placement of RIS, etc., often require complex optimization and numerical simulations, since the achievable effective rate is difficult to predict. This problem becomes even more difficult in the presence of phase estimation errors or location uncertainty, which can lead to substantial performance degradation if neglected. Considering randomly distributed receivers within a ring-shaped RIS-assisted wireless network, this paper mainly investigates the effective rate by taking into account the above-mentioned impairments. Furthermore, exact closed-form expressions for the effective rate are derived in terms of Meijer’s G-function, which (i) reveals that the location and phase estimation uncertainty should be well considered in the deployment of RIS in wireless networks; and (ii) facilitates future network design and performance prediction.

This article presents a closed-loop differential phase compensation system for a precoding-enabled multibeam satellite forward link and its validation by live experiments on a GEO satellite scenario. The precoding operation avoids inter-beam interference and maximizes the spectrum efficiency by full frequency reuse as an alternative to the traditional two-color or four-color reuse methods proposed in the DVB-S2 standard. However, the satellite payload introduces differential phase and frequency impairments, which can degrade the precoding performance. This work describes the implementation of the differential phase and frequency tracking and compensation loop in an end-to-end testbed over a multibeam satellite system with independent local oscillators. The developed system performs end-to-end real-time communication over the satellite link, including channel measurements and precompensation. Results are validated by an over-the-air demonstration using two beams of the SES-14 multibeam satellite. Each beam is transmitted by independent transponders, which results in differential frequency and phase offsets due to the transponder undisciplined local oscillators. This phase offset makes it impossible to use precoding without the phase compensation loop. We prove that the implemented system can successfully track and compensate the differential phase and frequency to improve precoding performance.

Among a plethora of new wireless communication technologies, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) emerges as one of the revolutionary solutions to provide energy- and cost-efficient signal transmissions. RIS is capable of reflecting electromagnetic signals in a controlled manner. In this paper, we jointly design the active beamforming at the base station and passive beamforming at the RIS to maximize the number of served users in a practical Smart City street scenario, subject to quality of service (QoS) and power constraints. The formulated problem belongs to the difficult class of mixed-integer non-convex programming, which is NP-hard. To arrive at a low-complexity solution, we first decompose the original problem into two subproblems and then propose an alternating optimization algorithm based on successive convex approximation (SCA) to solve them in an iterative manner. Simulation results are provided to verify the performance improvement of the proposed algorithm as compared to baseline schemes.

Simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) and full-duplex (FD) communications have emerged as prominent technologies in overcoming the limited energy resources in Internet of Things (IoT) networks and improving their spectral efficiency (SE). This article investigates the outage and throughput performance for a decode-and-forward (DF) relay SWIPT system, which consists of one source, multiple relays, and one destination. The relay nodes in this system can harvest energy from the source’s signal and operate in the FD mode. A suboptimal, low-complexity, yet efficient relay selection scheme is also proposed. Specifically, a single relay is selected to convey information from a source to a destination so that it achieves the best channel from the source to the relays. An analysis of outage probability (OP) and throughput performed on two relaying strategies, termed static power splitting-based relaying (SPSR) and optimal dynamic power splitting-based relaying (ODPSR), is presented. Notably, we considered independent and nonidentically distributed (i.n.i.d.) Rayleigh fading channels, which pose new challenges in obtaining analytical expressions. In this context, we derived exact closed-form expressions of the OP and throughput of both SPSR and ODPSR schemes. We also obtained the optimal power splitting ratio of ODPSR for maximizing the achievable capacity at the destination. Finally, we present extensive numerical and simulation results to confirm our analytical findings. Both simulation and analytical results show the superiority of ODPSR over SPSR.

Optimal allocation of shared resources is key to deliver the promise of jointly operating radar and communications systems. In this paper, unlike prior works which examine synergistic access to resources in colocated joint radar-communications or among identical systems, we investigate this problem for a distributed system comprising heterogeneous radars and multi-tier communications. In particular, we focus on resource allocation in the context of multi-target tracking (MTT) while maintaining stable communications connections. By simultaneously allocating the available power, dwell time and shared bandwidth, we improve the MTT performance under a Bayesian tracking framework and guarantee the communications throughput. Our${a}$lter${n}$ating allo${c}$ation of${h}$eterogene${o}$us${r}$esources (ANCHOR) approach solves the resulting non-convex problem based on the alternating optimization method that monotonically improves the Bayesian Cramér-Rao bound. Numerical experiments demonstrate that ANCHOR significantly improves the tracking error over two baseline allocations and stability under different target scenarios and radar-communications network distributions.

The space-air-ground-sea integrated network (SAGSIN) plays an important role in offering global coverage. To improve the efficient utilization of spectral and hardware resources in the SAGSIN, integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) has drawn extensive attention. Most existing ISAC works focus on terrestrial networks and cannot be straightforwardly applied in satellite systems due to the significantly different electromagnetic wave propagation properties. In this work, we investigate the application of ISAC in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) low earth orbit (LEO) satellite systems. We first characterize the statistical wave propagation properties by considering beam squint effects. Based on this analysis, we propose a beam squint-aware ISAC technique for hybrid analog/digital massive MIMO LEO satellite systems exploiting statistical channel state information. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can operate both the wireless communications and the target sensing simultaneously with satisfactory performance, and the beam-squint effects can be efficiently mitigated with the proposed method in typical LEO satellite systems.

High-throughput satellite communication systems are growing in strategic importance thanks to their role in delivering broadband services to mobile platforms and residences and/or businesses in rural and remote regions globally. Although precoding has emerged as a prominent technique to meet ever-increasing user demands, there is a lack of studies dealing with congestion control. This paper enhances the performance of multi-beam high throughput geostationary satellite systems under congestion, where the users’ quality of service (QoS) demands cannot be fully satisfied with limited resources. In particular, we propose congestion control strategies, relying on simple power control schemes. We formulate a multi-objective optimization framework balancing the system sum-rate and the number of users satisfying their QoS requirements. Next, we propose two novel approaches that effectively handle the proposed multi-objective optimization problem. The former is a model-based approach that relies on the weighted sum method to enrich the number of satisfied users by solving a series of the sum-rate optimization problems in an iterative manner. The latter is a data-driven approach that offers a low-cost solution by utilizing supervised learning and exploiting the optimization structures as continuous mappings. The proposed general framework is evaluated for different linear precoding techniques, for which the low computational complexity algorithms are designed. Numerical results manifest that our proposed framework effectively handles the congestion issue and brings superior improvements of rate satisfaction to many users than previous works. Furthermore, the proposed algorithms show low run-time and make them realistic for practical systems.

This paper investigates the downlink (DL) transmit design for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellite communication systems, where only the slow-varying statistical channel state information is exploited at the transmitter. The channel model for the DL massive MIMO LEO satellite system is established, in which both the satellite and the user terminals (UTs) are equipped with uniform planar arrays. Observing the rank-one property of the channel matrices, we show that the single-stream precoding for each UT is the optimal choice that maximizes the ergodic sum rate. This favorable result simplifies the complicated design of transmit covariance matrices into that of precoding vectors without any loss of optimality. Then, an efficient algorithm is devised to compute the precoding vectors. Furthermore, we formulate an approximate transmit design based on the upper bound on the ergodic sum rate, for which the optimality of single-stream precoding still holds. We show that, in this case, the design of precoding vectors can be simplified into that of scalar variables, for which an effective algorithm is developed. In addition, a low-complexity learning framework is proposed for optimizing the scalar variables. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approaches can achieve significant performance gains over the existing schemes.

The massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission technology has recently attracted much attention in the non-geostationary, e.g., low earth orbit (LEO) satellite communication (SATCOM) systems since it can significantly improve the energy efficiency (EE) and spectral efficiency. In this work, we develop a hybrid analog/digital precoding technique in the massive MIMO LEO SATCOM downlink, which reduces the onboard hardware complexity and power consumption. In the proposed scheme, the analog precoder is implemented via a more practical twin-resolution phase shifting (TRPS) network to make a meticulous tradeoff between the power consumption and array gain. In addition, we consider and study the impact of the distortion effect of the nonlinear power amplifiers (NPAs) in the system design. By jointly considering all the above factors, we propose an efficient algorithmic approach for the TRPS-based hybrid precoding problem with NPAs. Numerical results show the EE gains considering the nonlinear distortion and the performance superiority of the proposed TRPS-based hybrid precoding scheme over the baselines.

We consider an aeronautical ad-hoc network relying on aeroplanes operating in the presence of a spoofer. The aggregated signal received by the terrestrial base station is considered as “clean” or “normal”, if the legitimate aeroplanes transmit their signals and there is no spoofing attack. By contrast, the received signal is considered as “spurious” or “abnormal” in the face of a spoofing signal. An autoencoder (AE) is trained to learn the characteristics/features from a training dataset, which contains only normal samples associated with no spoofing attacks. The AE takes original samples as its input samples and reconstructs them at its output. Based on the trained AE, we define the detection thresholds of our spoofing discovery algorithm. To be more specific, contrasting the output of the AE against its input will provide us with a measure of geometric waveform similarity/dissimilarity in terms of the peaks of curves. To quantify the similarity betweenunknowntesting samples and thegiventraining samples (including normal samples), we first propose a so-calleddeviation-based algorithm. Furthermore, we estimate the angle of arrival (AoA) from each legitimate aeroplane and propose a so-calledAoA-based algorithm. Then based on a sophisticated amalgamation of these two algorithms, we form our final detection algorithm for distinguishing the spurious abnormal samples from normal samples under a strict testing condition. In conclusion, our numerical results show that the AE improves the trade-off between the correct spoofing detection rate and the false alarm rate as long as the detection thresholds are carefully selected.

This paper studies the joint multislot design of user scheduling and precoding to minimize the time needed to serve all the users for unicast and multicast transmission in single-cell multiuser MISO downlink systems. In the literature, the joint design of scheduling and precoding is typically undertaken based on feedback from previous slots. In a system with time-varying channels and QoS requirements, joint multislot designs can achieve better performance since they have the flexibility to schedule users over multiple slots and also can split users across slots efficiently. Further, a joint multislot design can provide a feasible solution even when the sequential design fails. In this paper, scheduling is represented by a binary matrix where the rows represent users, columns represent slots and entries represent scheduling of users in the slots. Noticing that the users may not be permuted across slots for time-varying channels, service time needed for scheduling is rendered as the highest column index corresponding to non-zero columns. With the help of binary scheduling matrix, service time minimization is formulated as a structured mixed-Boolean fractional programming. Further, by exploiting the hidden convex-concave structure in the problem, a convex-concave procedure-based iterative algorithm is proposed. Finally, we vindicate the necessity and illustrate the superiority in performance of joint multislot design over the sequential solution through Monte-Carlo simulations.

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is a key technology for improving the spectral and energy efficiency in 5G-and-beyond wireless networks. For a tractable analysis, most of the previous works on Massive MIMO have been focused on the system performance with complex Gaussian channel impulse responses under rich-scattering environments. In contrast, this paper investigates the uplink ergodic spectral efficiency (SE) of each user under the double scattering channel model. We derive a closed-form expression of the uplink ergodic SE by exploiting the maximum ratio (MR) combining technique based on imperfect channel state information. We further study the asymptotic SE behaviors as a function of the number of antennas at each base station (BS) and the number of scatterers available at each radio channel. We then formulate and solve a total energy optimization problem for the uplink data transmission that aims at simultaneously satisfying the required SEs from all the users with limited data power resource. Notably, our proposed algorithms can cope with the congestion issue appearing when at least one user is served by lower SE than requested. Numerical results illustrate the effectiveness of the closed-form ergodic SE over Monte-Carlo simulations. Besides, the system can still provide the required SEs to many users even under congestion.

Cell-Free Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) are two promising technologies for application to beyond-5G networks. This paper considers Cell-Free Massive MIMO systems with the assistance of an RIS for enhancing the system performance under the presence of spatial correlation among the engineered scattering elements of the RIS. Distributed maximum-ratio processing is considered at the access points (APs). We introduce anaggregated channelestimation approach that provides sufficient information for data processing with the main benefit of reducing the overhead required for channel estimation. The considered system is studied by using asymptotic analysis which lets the number of APs and/or the number of RIS elements grow large. A lower bound for the channel capacity is obtained for a finite number of APs and engineered scattering elements of the RIS, and closed-form expressions for the uplink and downlink ergodic net throughput are formulated in terms of only the channel statistics. Based on the obtained analytical frameworks, we unveil the impact of channel correlation, the number of RIS elements, and the pilot contamination on the net throughput of each user. In addition, a simple control scheme for optimizing the configuration of the engineered scattering elements of the RIS is proposed, which is shown to increase the channel estimation quality, and, hence, the system performance. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system design and performance analysis. In particular, the performance benefits of using RISs in Cell-Free Massive MIMO systems are confirmed, especially if the direct links between the APs and the users are of insufficient quality with high probability.

Nowadays, Ambient Backscatter Communication (AmBC) systems have emerged as a green communication technology to enable massive self-sustainable wireless networks by leveraging Radio Frequency (RF) Energy Harvesting (EH) capability. A Full-duplex Ambient Backscatter Communication (FAmBC) network with a Full-duplex Access Point (AP), a dedicated Legacy User (LU), and several Backscatter Devices (BDs) is considered in this study. The AP with two antennas transfers downlink Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) information and energy to the dedicated LU and several BDs, respectively, while receiving uplink backscattered information from BDs at the same time. One of the key aims in AmBC networks is to ensure fairness among BDs. To address this, we propose the Multi-objective Lexicographical Optimization Problem (MLOP), which aims to maximize the minimum BD’s throughput while enhancing overall BDs’ throughput, subject to the AP’s subcarrier power, BDs’ reflection coefficients, and backscatter time allocation. Owe to the MLOP is non-convex, we propose Difference Convex Algorithm (DCA) using Exterior Penalty Function Method (EPFM)—an inventive non-convex optimization method— to reach the optimal solution. The most critical advantage of applying this proposed approach is finding the globally optimal solution. The effectiveness of the proposed method supported by theoretical analysis confirms its superiority compared to some of the investigated suboptimal algorithms with the same computational complexity.

This work addresses the issue of interference generated by co-channel users in downlink multi-antenna multicarrier systems with frequency-packed faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) signaling. The resulting interference stems from an aggressive strategy for enhancing the throughput via frequency reuse across different users and the squeezing of signals in the time-frequency plane beyond the Nyquist limit. The spectral efficiency is proved to be increasing with the frequency packing and FTN acceleration factors. The lower bound for the FTN sampling period that guarantees information losslesness is derived as a function of the transmitting-filter roll-off factor, the frequency-packing factor, and the number of subcarriers. Space-time-frequency symbol-level precoders (SLPs) that trade off constructive and destructive interblock interference (IBI) at the single-antenna user terminals are proposed. Redundant elements are added as guard interval to cope with vestigial destructive IBI effects. The proposals can handle channels with delay spread longer than the multicarrier-symbol duration. The receiver architecture is simple, for it does not require digital multicarrier demodulation. Simulations indicate that the proposed SLP outperforms zero-forcing precoding and achieves a target balance between spectral and energy efficiencies by controlling the amount of added redundancy from zero (full IBI) to half (destructive IBI-free) the group delay of the equivalent channel.

Federated learning (FL) is capable of performing large distributed machine learning tasks across multiple edge users by periodically aggregating trained local parameters. To address key challenges of enabling FL over a wireless fog-cloud system (e.g., non-i.i.d. data, users’ heterogeneity), we first propose an efficient FL algorithm based on Federated Averaging (called$\mathsf {FedFog}$) to perform the local aggregation of gradient parameters at fog servers and global training update at the cloud. Next, we employ$\mathsf {FedFog}$in wireless fog-cloud systems by investigating a novel network-aware FL optimization problem that strikes the balance between the global loss and completion time. An iterative algorithm is then developed to obtain a precise measurement of the system performance, which helps design an efficient stopping criteria to output an appropriate number of global rounds. To mitigate the straggler effect, we propose a flexible user aggregation strategy that trains fast users first to obtain a certain level of accuracy before allowing slow users to join the global training updates. Extensive numerical results using several real-world FL tasks are provided to verify the theoretical convergence of$\mathsf {FedFog}$. We also show that the proposed co-design of FL and communication is essential to substantially improve resource utilization while achieving comparable accuracy of the learning model.

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication has emerged as a prominent technology for emergency communications (e.g., natural disaster) in the Internet of Things (IoT) networks to enhance the ability of disaster prediction, damage assessment, and rescue operations promptly. A UAV can be deployed as a flying base station (BS) to collect data from time-constrained IoT devices and then transfer it to a ground gateway (GW). In general, the latency constraint at IoT devices and UAV’s limited storage capacity highly hinder practical applications of UAV-assisted IoT networks. In this paper, full-duplex (FD) radio is adopted at the UAV to overcome these challenges. In addition, half-duplex (HD) scheme for UAV-based relaying is also considered to provide a comparative study between two modes (viz., FD and HD). Herein, a device is considered to be successfully served if its data is collected by the UAV and conveyed to GW timely during flight time. In this context, we aim to maximize the number of served IoT devices by jointly optimizing bandwidth, power allocation, and the UAV trajectory while satisfying each device’s requirement and the UAV’s limited storage capacity. The formulated optimization problem is troublesome to solve due to its non-convexity and combinatorial nature. Towards appealing applications, we first relax binary variables into continuous ones and transform the original problem into a more computationally tractable form. By leveraging inner approximation framework, we derive newly approximated functions for non-convex parts and then develop a simple yet efficient iterative algorithm for its solutions. Next, we attempt to maximize the total throughput subject to the number of served IoT devices. Finally, numerical results show that the proposed algorithms significantly outperform benchmark approaches in terms of the number of served IoT devices and system throughput.

Multiuser techniques play a central role in the fifth-generation (5G) and beyond 5G (B5G) wireless networks that exploit spatial diversity to serve multiple users simultaneously in the same frequency resource. It is well known that a multi-antenna base station (BS) can efficiently serve a number of users not exceeding the number of antennas at the BS via precoding design. However, when there are more users than the number of antennas at the BS, conventional precoding design methods perform poorly because inter-user interference cannot be efficiently eliminated. In this paper, we investigate the performance of a highly-loaded multiuser system in which a BS simultaneously serves a number of users that is larger than the number of antennas. We propose a dynamic bandwidth allocation and precoding design framework and apply it to two important problems in multiuser systems: i) User fairness maximization and ii) Transmit power minimization, both subject to predefined quality of service (QoS) requirements. The premise of the proposed framework is to dynamically assign orthogonal frequency channels to different user groups and carefully design the precoding vectors within every user group. Since the formulated problems are non-convex, we propose two iterative algorithms based on successive convex approximations (SCA), whose convergence is theoretically guaranteed. Furthermore, we propose a low-complexity user grouping policy based on the singular value decomposition (SVD) to further improve the system performance. Finally, we demonstrate via numerical results that the proposed framework significantly outperforms existing designs in the literature.

Next-generation satellite systems require more flexibility in resource management such that available radio resources can be dynamically allocated to meet time-varying and non-uniform traffic demands. Considering potential benefits of beam hopping (BH) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), we exploit the time-domain flexibility in multi-beam satellite systems by optimizing BH design, and enhance the power-domain flexibility via NOMA. In this paper, we investigate the synergy and mutual influence of beam hopping and NOMA. We jointly optimize power allocation, beam scheduling, and terminal-timeslot assignment to minimize the gap between requested traffic demand and offered capacity. In the solution development, we formally prove the NP-hardness of the optimization problem. Next, we develop a bounding scheme to tightly gauge the global optimum and propose a suboptimal algorithm to enable efficient resource assignment. Numerical results demonstrate the benefits of combining NOMA and BH, and validate the superiority of the proposed BH-NOMA schemes over benchmarks.

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is promising for low earth orbit (LEO) satellite communications due to the potential in enhancing the spectral efficiency. However, the conventional fully digital precoding architectures might lead to high implementation complexity and energy consumption. In this paper, hybrid analog/digital precoding solutions are developed for the downlink operation in LEO massive MIMO satellite communications, by exploiting the slow-varying statistical channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter. First, we formulate the hybrid precoder design as an energy efficiency (EE) maximization problem by considering both the continuous and discrete phase shift networks for implementing the analog precoder. The cases of both the fully and the partially connected architectures are considered. Since the EE optimization problem is nonconvex, it is in general difficult to solve. To make the EE maximization problem tractable, we apply a closed-form tight upper bound to approximate the ergodic rate. Then, we develop an efficient algorithm to obtain the fully digital precoders. Based on which, we further develop two different efficient algorithmic solutions to compute the hybrid precoders for the fully and the partially connected architectures, respectively. Simulation results show that the proposed approaches achieve significant EE performance gains over the existing baselines, especially when the discrete phase shift network is employed for analog precoding.

This paper considers Cell-Free Massive Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) systems with the assistance of an RIS for enhancing the system performance. Distributed maximum-ratio combining (MRC) is considered at the access points (APs). We introduce an aggregated channel estimation method that provides sufficient information for data processing. The considered system is studied by using asymptotic analysis which lets the number of APs and/or the number of RIS elements grow large. A lower bound for the channel capacity is obtained for a finite number of APs and engineered scattering elements of the RIS, and closed-form expression for the uplink ergodic net throughput is formulated. In addition, a simple scheme for controlling the configuration of the RIS scattering elements is proposed. Numerical results verify the effectiveness of the proposed system design and the benefits of using RISs in Cell-Free Massive MIMO systems are quantified.

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology has attracted much attention in low earth orbit (LEO) downlink satellite communication (SATCOM) systems recently since the energy efficiency (EE) and spectral efficiency can be significantly improved. In order to reduce the power consumption for the massive MIMO LEO SATCOM systems, we focus on the hybrid analog/digital architecture in this work. Considering the limited resolution of the phase shifters in practical MIMO SATCOM systems, a twin-resolution phase shifting (TRPS) network is proposed to make a meticulous tradeoff between the power consumption and array gains. In addition, we examine the impact of the distortion, introduced by the power amplifiers (PAs) to the system design, by considering nonlinear PA models. Moreover, we propose an efficient algorithm for TRPS-based hybrid precoding with nonlinear PAs. Numerical results show the EE gains considering nonlinear distortion and the performance superiority of the proposed hybrid architecture compared with the baselines.

In this paper, we apply non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) in satellite systems to assist data transmission for services with latency constraints. We investigate a problem to minimize the transmission time by jointly optimizing power allocation and terminal-timeslot assignment for accomplishing a transmission task in NOMA-enabled satellite systems. The problem appears non-linear/non-convex with integer variables and can be equivalently reformulated in the format of mixed-integer convex programming (MICP). Conventional iterative methods may apply but at the expenses of high computational complexity in approaching the optimum or near-optimum. We propose a combined learning and optimization scheme to tackle the problem, where the primal MICP is decomposed into two learning-suited classification tasks and a power allocation problem. In the proposed scheme, the first learning task is to predict the integer variables while the second task is to guarantee the feasibility of the solutions. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms benchmarks in terms of average computational time, transmission time performance, and feasibility guarantee.

In large-scale antenna array (LSAA) wireless communication systems employing analog beamforming architectures, the placement or selection of a subset of antennas can significantly reduce the power consumption and hardware complexity. In this work, we propose a joint design of analog beamforming with antenna selection (AS) or antenna placement (AP) for an analog beamforming system. We approach this problem from a beampattern matching perspective and formulate a sparse unit-modulus least-squares (SULS) problem, which is a nonconvex problem due to the unit-modulus and the sparsity constraints. To that end, we propose an efficient and scalable algorithm based on the majorization-minimization (MM) framework for solving the SULS problem. We show that the sequence of iterates generated by the algorithm converges to a stationary point of the problem. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed joint design of analog beamforming with AS outperforms conventional array architectures with fixed inter-antenna element spacing.

This paper shows the enhancement in detection performance in an automotive scenario by leveraging the backscattered communication signals from vehicles at the target scene. A sensor fusion algorithm is proposed to benefit from the information from radar and communication to improve the final range estimates. We demonstrate theoretically and illustrate through simulation that our proposed scheme enhances the radar detection performance. Thus the proposed scheme offers a solution for augmenting existing sensing capabilities to enhance detecting capabilities in a dynamic automotive scenario.

We consider a multi-group (MG) multicasting (MC) system wherein a multi-antenna transmitter serves heterogeneous users capable of either information decoding (ID) or energy harvesting (EH), or both. In this context, we investigate a precoder design framework to explicitly serve the ID and EH users categorized within certain MC and EH groups. Specifically, the ID users are categorized within multiple MC groups while the EH users are a part of single (last) group. We formulate a problem to optimize the energy efficiency in the considered scenario under a quality-of-service (QoS) constraint. An algorithm based on Dinkelback method, slack-variable replacement, and second-order conic programming (SOCP)/semi-definite relaxation (SDR) is proposed to obtain a suitable solution for the above-mentioned fractional-objective dependent non-convex problem. Simulation results illustrate the benefits of proposed algorithm under several operating conditions and parameter values, while drawing a comparison between the two proposed methods.

Co-array-based Direction of Arrival (DoA) estimation using Sparse Linear Arrays (SLAs) has recently gained considerable attention in array processing thanks to its capability of providing enhanced degrees of freedom for DoAs that can be resolved. Additionally, deployment of one-bit Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADCs) has become an important topic in array processing, as it offers both a low-cost and a low-complexity implementation. Although the problem of DoA estimation form one-bit SLA measurements has been studied in some prior works, its analytical performance has not yet been investigated and characterized. In this paper, to provide valuable insights into the performance of DoA estimation from one-bit SLA measurements, we derive an asymptotic closed-form expression for the performance of One-Bit Co-Array-Based MUSIC (OBCAB-MUSIC). Further, numerical simulations are provided to validate the asymptotic closed-form expression for the performance of OBCAB-MUSIC and to show an interesting use case of it in evaluating the resolution of OBCAB-MUSIC.

In this paper, the performance of an RF energy harvesting scheme for multi-user massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is investigated in the presence of multiple active jammers. The key idea is to exploit the jamming transmissions as an energy source to be harvested at the legitimate users. To this end, the achievable uplink sum rate expressions are derived in closed-form for two different antenna configurations. An optimal time-switching policy is also proposed to ensure user-fairness in terms of both harvested energy and achievable rate. Besides, the essential trade-off between the harvested energy and achievable sum rate are quantified in closed-form. Our analysis reveals that the massive MIMO systems can make use of RF signals of the jamming attacks for boosting the amount of harvested energy at the served users. Numerical results illustrate the effectiveness of the derived closed-form expressions over Monte-Carlo simulations.

This paper considers a massive MIMO system under the double scattering channels. We derive a closed-form expression of the uplink ergodic spectral efficiency (SE) by exploiting the maximum-ratio combining technique with imperfect channel state information. We then formulate and solve a total uplink data power optimization problem that aims at simultaneously satisfying the required SEs from all the users with limited power resources. We further propose algorithms to cope with the congestion issue appearing when at least one user is served by lower SE than requested. Numerical results illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed power optimization. More importantly, our proposed congestion-handling algorithms can guarantee the required SEs to many users under congestion, even when the SE requirement is high.

This paper address the design of a phase tracking block for the DVB-S2X user terminals in a satellite precoding system. The spectral characteristics of the phase noise introduced by the oscillator, the channel, and the thermal noise at the receiver are taken into account. Using the expected phase noise mask, the optimal parameters for a second-order PLL intended to track channel variations from the pilots are calculated. To validate the results a Simulink model was implemented considering the characteristics of the hardware prototype. The performance of the design was evaluated in terms of the accuracy and stability for the frame structure of superframe Format 2, as described in Annex E of DVB-S2X.

Distributed antenna arrays, fractionated payloads and cooperative platforms can provide unprecedented performance in the next generation of spaceborne communications and remote sensing systems. Remote phase synchronization of physically separated oscillators is the first step towards a coherent operation of distributed systems. This work shows the preliminary results of a TDD remote phase synchronization algorithm with a master-follower architecture. Herein, we describe the implementation and validation of the proposed algorithm. The implementation has been conducted in a Cubesat-ready software defined radio and validated at the end-to-end satellite communications testbed available at the University of Luxembourg.

The quest for finding a small-sized energy supply to run the small-scale wireless gadgets, with almost an infinite lifetime, has intrigued humankind since past several decades. In this context, the concept of Quantum batteries has come into limelight more recently to serve the purpose. However, the main issue revolving around the closed-system design of Quantum batteries is to ensure a loss-less environment, which is extremely difficult to realize in practice. In this paper, we present the modeling and optimization aspects of a Radio-Frequency (RF) Energy Harvesting (EH) assisted Quantum battery, wherein several EH modules (in the form of micro- or nano- sized integrated circuits (ICs)) help each of the involved Quantum sources achieve the so-called quasi-stable state. Specifically, a micro-controller manages the overall harvested energy from the RF-EH ICs and a photon emitting device, such that the emitted photons are absorbed by the electrons in the Quantum sources. In order to precisely model and optimize the considered framework, we formulate a transmit power minimization problem for an RF-based wireless system to optimize the number of RF-EH ICs under the given EH constraints at the Quantum battery-enabled wireless device. We obtain an analytical solution to the above-mentioned problem using a rational approach, while additionally seeking another solution obtained via a non-linear program solver. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is reported in the form of numerical results by taking a range of system parameters into account.

This paper investigates the effective rate when the instantaneous received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) could be modeled as the mixture Gamma (MG), mixture of Gaussian (MoG), and Fox’s H-function distributed random variable (RV), respectively. Three closed-form expressions are correspondingly derived in terms of the Fox’s H-function. The obtained analytical results are further examined by the Monte-Carlo simulation. One can observe that (i) the analytical solutions provide an excellent match with the Monte-Carlo simulation results; (ii) the MG and MoG approaches provide highly approximated solutions, and the MG is better due to a simpler form; and (iii) the Fox’s H-function solution is exact and offers a unified, general and flexible framework for the effective rate analysis.

We investigate the downlink (DL) transmit strategy for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellite communication (SATCOM) systems, in which only the slow-varying statistical channel state information is known at the transmitter side. First, we derive the massive MIMO LEO satellite channel model, when the uniform planar arrays are deployed at both the satellite and user terminals (UTs). Building on the rank-one property of the satellite channel matrices, we show that transmitting a single data stream to each UT is optimal in the sense that the ergodic sum rate is maximized. This result is of great importance for massive MIMO LEO SATCOM systems, since the sophisticated design of transmit covariance matrices is turned into that of precoding vectors, without loss of optimality. Furthermore, we develop an algorithm to compute the precoding vectors. Simulation results show the significant performance gains of the proposed approaches over the existing schemes.

This paper presents two different low-complexity methods for obtaining the secrecy capacity of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wiretap channel subject to a sum power constraint (SPC). The challenges in deriving computationally efficient solutions to the secrecy capacity problem are due to the fact that the secrecy rate is a difference of convex functions (DC) of the transmit covariance matrix, for which its convexity is only known for the degraded case. In the first method, we capitalize on the accelerated DC algorithm, which requires solving a sequence of convex subproblems. In particular, we show that each subproblem indeed admits a water-filling solution. In the second method, based on the equivalent convex-concave reformulation of the secrecy capacity problem, we develop a so-called partial best response algorithm (PBRA). Each iteration of the PBRA is also done in closed form. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed methods.

In this work, we consider an eavesdropping scenario in wireless multi-user (MU) multiple-input single-output (MISO) systems with channel coding in the presence of a multi-antenna eavesdropper (Eve). In this setting, we exploit machine learning (ML) tools to design a hard decoding scheme by using precoded pilot symbols as training data. Within this, we propose an ML framework for a multi-antenna hard decoder that allows an Eve to decode the transmitted message with decent accuracy. We show that MU-MISO systems are vulnerable to such an attack when conventional block-level precoding is used. To counteract this attack, we propose a novel symbol-level precoding scheme that increases the bit-error rate at Eve by obstructing the learning process. Simulation results validate both the ML-based attack as well as the countermeasure, and show that the gain in security is achieved without affecting the performance at the intended users.

In this paper, we investigate potential synergies of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and beam hopping (BH) for multi-beam satellite systems. The coexistence of BH and NOMA provides time-power-domain flexibilities in mitigating a practical mismatch effect between offered capacity and requested traffic per beam. We formulate the joint BH scheduling and NOMA-based power allocation problem as mixed-integer non-convex programming. We reveal the exponential-conic structure for the original problem, and reformulate the problem to the format of mixed-integer conic programming (MICP), where the optimum can be obtained by exponential-complexity algorithms. A greedy scheme is proposed to solve the problem on a timeslot-by-timeslot basis with polynomial-time complexity. Numerical results show the effectiveness of the proposed efficient suboptimal algorithm in reducing the matching error by 62.57% in average over the OMA scheme and achieving a good trade-off between computational complexity and performance compared to the optimal solution.

Federated learning (FL) allows multiple edge computing nodes to jointly build a shared learning model without having to transfer their raw data to a centralized server, thus reducing communication overhead. However, FL still faces a number of challenges such as nonindependent and identically distributed data and heterogeneity of user equipments (UEs). Enabling a large number of UEs to join the training process in every round raises a potential issue of the heavy global communication burden. To address these issues, we generalize the current state-of-the-art federated averaging (FedAvg) by adding a weight-based proximal term to the local loss function. The proposed FL algorithm runs stochastic gradient descent in parallel on a sampled subset of the total UEs with replacement during each global round. We provide a convergence upper bound characterizing the tradeoff between convergence rate and global rounds, showing that a small number of active UEs per round still guarantees convergence. Next, we employ the proposed FL algorithm in wireless Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks to minimize either total energy consumption or completion time of FL, where a simple yet efficient path-following algorithm is developed for its solutions. Finally, numerical results on unbalanced data sets are provided to demonstrate the performance improvement and robustness on the convergence rate of the proposed FL algorithm over FedAvg. They also reveal that the proposed algorithm requires much less training time and energy consumption than the FL algorithm with full user participation. These observations advocate the proposed FL algorithm for a paradigm shift in bandwidth-constrained learning wireless IoT networks.

This letter studies the problem of Direction of Arrival (DoA) estimation from low-resolution few-bit quantized data collected by Sparse Linear Array (SLA). In such cases, contrary to the one-bit quantization case, the well known arcsine law cannot be employed to estimate the covaraince matrix of unquantized array data. Instead, we develop a novel optimization-based framework for retrieving the covaraince matrix of unquantized array data from low-resolution few-bit measurements. The MUSIC algorithm is then applied to an augmented version of the recovered covariance matrix to find the source DoAs. The simulation results show that increasing the sampling resolution to 2 or 4 bits per samples could significantly increase the DoA estimation performance compared to the one-bit sampling regime while the power consumption and implementation costs is still much lower in comparison to the high-resolution sampling implementations.

We address the symbol-level precoding design problem for the downlink of a multiuser millimeter wave (mmWave) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless system where the transmitter is equipped with a large-scale antenna array. The high cost and power consumption associated with the massive use of radio frequency (RF) chains prohibit fully-digital implementation of the precoder, and therefore, we consider a hybrid analog-digital architecture where a small-sized baseband precoder is followed by two successive networks of analog on-off switches and variable phase shifters according to a fully-connected structure. We jointly optimize the digital baseband precoder and the states of the switching network on a symbol-level basis, i.e., by exploiting both the channel state information (CSI) and the instantaneous data symbols, whereas the phase-shifting network is designed only based on the CSI due to practical considerations. Our approach to this joint optimization is to minimize the Euclidean distance between the optimal fully-digital and the hybrid symbol-level precoders. Remarkably, the use of a switching network allows for power-savings in the analog precoder by switching some of the phase shifters off according to the instantaneously optimized states of the switches. Our numerical results indicate that, on average, up to 50 percent of the phase shifters can be switched off. We provide an analysis of energy efficiency by adopting appropriate power dissipation models for the analog precoder, where it is shown that the energy efficiency of precoding can substantially be improved thanks to the phase shifter selection approach, compared to the fully-digital and the state-of-the-art hybrid symbol-level schemes.

This paper presents novel numerical approaches to finding the secrecy capacity of the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wiretap channel subject to multiple linear transmit covariance constraints, including sum power constraint, per antenna power constraints and interference power constraint. An analytical solution to this problem is not known and existing numerical solutions suffer from slow convergence rate and/or high per-iteration complexity. Deriving computationally efficient solutions to the secrecy capacity problem is challenging since the secrecy rate is expressed as a difference of convex functions (DC) of the transmit covariance matrix, for which its convexity is only known for some special cases. In this paper we propose two low-complexity methods to compute the secrecy capacity along with a convex reformulation for degraded channels. In the first method we capitalize on the accelerated DC algorithm which requires solving a sequence of convex subproblems, for which we propose an efficient iterative algorithm where each iteration admits a closed-form solution. In the second method, we rely on the concave-convex equivalent reformulation of the secrecy capacity problem which allows us to derive the so-called partial best response algorithm to obtain an optimal solution. Notably, each iteration of the second method can also be done in closed form. The simulation results demonstrate a faster convergence rate of our methods compared to other known solutions. We carry out extensive numerical experiments to evaluate the impact of various parameters on the achieved secrecy capacity.

In conventional polar format algorithm (PFA), the effective imaging scene is bounded to a limited region near the reference point unless postprocessing is utilized. In a previous paper, refocusing and zoom-in PFA (RZPFA) for curvilinear spotlight SAR imaging were proposed to produce a refocused image for an arbitrary region of interest (ROI) with constant elevation. However, for certain applications, the residual distortion and defocus caused by rugged terrain could not be ignored. In this article, RZPFA is adapted to incorporate the known digital elevation model (DEM) into the imaging process, which is named as orthorectified PFA (OPFA). With just little additional computations than RZPFA, OPFA can realize georeferenced orthorectified imaging via a nonuniform fast Fourier transform of type 3 (NuFFT-3) without the need of postprocessing. The quantitative metrics for the residual DEM distortion and residual DEM defocus were also derived to determine the effective imaging extent of OPFA. Within the effective extent, the proposed OPFA can obtain an orthorectified image efficiently, and the image has a very high quality comparable to backprojection (BP). The imaging results of measured echo and DEM data demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Herein, a precoding scheme is developed for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmission in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems that use one-bit digital-to-analog converters (DACs) and analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) at the transmitter and receiver, respectively, as a means to reduce the power consumption. Two different one-bit architectures are presented. In the first, a single user MIMO system is considered where the DACs and ADCs of the transmitter and the receiver are assumed to be one-bit and in the second, a network of analog phase shifters is added at the receiver as an additional analog-only processing step with the view to mitigate some of the effects of coarse quantization. The precoding design problem is formulated and then split into two NP-hard optimization problems, which are solved by an algorithmic solution based on the Cyclic Coordinate Descent (CCD) framework. The design of the analog post-coding matrix for the second architecture is decoupled from the precoding design and is solved by an algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). Numerical results show that the proposed precoding scheme successfully mitigates the effects of coarse quantization and the proposed systems achieve a performance close to that of systems equipped with full resolution DACs/ADCs.

We investigate the performance of multi-user multiple-antenna downlink systems in which a base station (BS) serves multiple users via a shared wireless medium. In order to fully exploit the spatial diversity while minimizing the passive energy consumed by radio frequency (RF) components, the BS is equipped with$M$RF chains and$N$antennas, where$M < N$. Upon receiving pilot sequences to obtain the channel state information (CSI), the BS determines the best subset of$M$antennas for serving the users. We propose a joint antenna selection and precoding design (JASPD) algorithm to maximize the system sum rate subject to a transmit power constraint and quality of service (QoS) requirements. The JASPD algorithm overcomes the non-convexity of the formulated problem via a doubly iterative algorithm, in which an inner loop successively optimizes the precoding vectors, followed by an outer loop that tests all valid antenna subsets. Although approaching (near) global optimality, the JASPD suffers from a combinatorial complexity, which may limit its application in real-time network operations. To overcome this limitation, we propose a learning-based antenna selection and precoding design algorithm (L-ASPA), which employs a deep neural network (DNN) to establish underlaying relations between key system parameters and the selected antennas. The proposed L-ASPD algorithm is robust against the number of users and their locations, the transmit power of the BS, as well as the small-scale channel fading. With a well-trained learning model, it is shown that the L-ASPD algorithm significantly outperforms baseline schemes based on the block diagonalization and a learning-assisted solution for broadcasting systems and achieves a better effective sum rate than that of the JASPA under limited processing time. In addition, we observed that the proposed L-ASPD algorithm can reduce the computation complexity by 95% while retaining more than 95% of the optimal performance.

This article studies fast adaptive beamforming optimization for the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio balancing problem in a multiuser multiple-input single-output downlink system. Existing deep learning based approaches to predict beamforming rely on the assumption that the training and testing channels follow the same distribution which may not hold in practice. As a result, a trained model may lead to performance deterioration when the testing network environment changes. To deal with this task mismatch issue, we propose two offline adaptive algorithms based on deep transfer learning and meta-learning, which are able to achieve fast adaptation with the limited new labelled data when the testing wireless environment changes. Furthermore, we propose an online algorithm to enhance the adaptation capability of the offline meta algorithm in realistic non-stationary environments. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed adaptive algorithms achieve much better performance than the direct deep learning algorithm without adaptation in new environments. The meta-learning algorithm outperforms the deep transfer learning algorithm and achieves near optimal performance. In addition, compared to the offline meta-learning algorithm, the proposed online meta-learning algorithm shows superior adaption performance in changing environments.

In this paper, we address the problem of cross-view action recognition from a monocular RGB camera. This topic has been considered extremely challenging due to the lack of 3D information in 2D images. Exploiting the advances in 3D pose estimation from a single RGB camera, we propose a new framework termed DeepVI, for cross-view action recognition without the need for pose alignment. Virtual viewpoints are used to augment the variability of training data along with the use of an end-to-end Deep Neural Network (DNN). The proposed network is composed of two modules. The first one, called SmoothNet, implicitly smooths skeleton joint trajectories using revisited temporal convolution in order to reduce the noise in the estimated 3D skeletons. The second module consists of a state-of-the-art approach designed for action recognition based on Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks (ST-GCN [40]). Experiments have been conducted in cross-view settings on two datasets, namely, NTU RGB-D and Northwestern-UCLA. The obtained results show the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

We address the symbol-level precoding design problem for the downlink of a multiuser millimeter wave (mmWave) multiple-input multiple-output wireless system. We consider a hybrid analog-digital architecture with phase shifter selection where a small-sized baseband precoder is followed by two successive networks of analog on-off switches and variable phase shifters according to a fully-connected structure. We jointly optimize the digital baseband precoder and the states of the switching network on a symbol-level basis, i.e., by exploiting both the channel state information (CSI) and the instantaneous data symbols, while the phase-shifting network is designed only based on the CSI. Our approach to this joint optimization is to minimize the Euclidean distance between the optimal fully-digital and the hybrid symbol-level precoders. It is shown via numerical results that using the proposed approach, up to 50 percent of the phase shifters can be switched off on average, allowing for reductions in the power consumption of the phase-shifting network. Adopting appropriate power consumption models for the analog precoder, our energy efficiency analysis further shows that this power reduction can substantially improve the energy efficiency of the hybrid precoding compared to the fully-digital and the state-of-the-art schemes.

A collaborative task is assigned to a multiagent system (MAS) in which agents are allowed to communicate. The MAS runs over an underlying Markov decision process and its task is to maximize the averaged sum of discounted one-stage rewards. Although knowing the global state of the environment is necessary for the optimal action selection of the MAS, agents are limited to individual observations. The inter-agent communication can tackle the issue of local observability, however, the limited rate of the inter-agent communication prevents the agents from acquiring the precise global state information. To overcome this challenge, agents need to communicate their observations in a compact way such that the MAS compromises the minimum possible sum of rewards. We show that this problem is equivalent to a form of rate-distortion problem which we call the task-based information compression. State Aggregation for Information Compression (SAIC) is introduced here to perform the task-based information compression. The SAIC is shown, conditionally, to be capable of achieving the optimal performance in terms of the attained sum of discounted rewards. The proposed algorithm is applied to a rendezvous problem and its performance is compared with two benchmarks; (i) conventional source coding algorithms and the (ii) centralized multiagent control using reinforcement learning. Numerical experiments confirm the superiority and fast convergence of the proposed SAIC.

In this paper, we provide a framework for the direction of arrival (DOA) estimation using a single moving sensor and evaluate performance bounds on estimation. We introduce a signal model which captures spatio-temporal incoherency in the received signal due to sensor motion in space and finite bandwidth of the signal, hitherto not considered. We show that in such a scenario, the source signal covariance matrix becomes a function of the source DOA, which is usually not the case. Due to this unknown dependency, traditional subspace techniques cannot be applied and conditions on source covariance needs to imposed to ensure identifiability. This motivates us to investigate the performance bounds through the Cramer-Rao Lower Bounds (CRLBs) to set benchmark performance for future estimators. This paper exploits the signal model to derive an appropriate CRLB, which is shown to be better than those in relevant literature.

Single waveform design for automotive joint radar-communications (JRC) is being increasingly considered recently, as it addresses the problem of spectrum sharing between the two systems. The paper addresses the challenge of designing a waveform in MIMO-radar MIMO-communications (MRMC) set-up in a broadcast environment to ensure certain performance of the two systems is guaranteed. It develops an optimization problem to enhance mutual information metrics for radar and communications considering the worst case Doppler/angle at a range bin. The intractable optimization problem is decomposed and relaxed into two convex sub-problems, which are subsequently solved through an iterative method. The benefits of the proposed waveform are illustrated through numerical simulations.

Constant Envelope (CE) precoding is an efficient technique for systems based on massive antenna arrays since the constant amplitude of the transmit signal facilitates the use of power efficient non-linear transmitter circuitry, such as power amplifiers (PAs). On the other hand, Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) is a well-known multicarrier transmission scheme which is used to mitigate the effects of multipath propagation, but usually leads to high peak-to-average-power ratio (PAPR). Herein, the problem of CE MIMO-OFDM precoding for transmission over frequency selective channels is tackled. First, a novel efficient formulation is proposed, where the precoding problem is formulated as an unconstrained nonlinear least-squares problem. Next, using the new formulation the problem is solved using the Gauss-Newton algorithm. Numerical results show that the proposed solution is more efficient than the current state of the art techniques both from the aspect of computational complexity and the overall system performance.

We investigate waveform design for coexistence between a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar and MIMO communications (MRMC), with a radar-centric criterion that leads to a minimal interference in the communications system. The communications use the traditional mode of operation in Long Term Evolution (LTE)/Advanced (FDD), where we formulate the design problem based on information-theoretic criterion with the discrete phase constraint at the design stage. The optimization problem, is non-convex, multi-objective and multi-variable, where we propose an efficient algorithm based on the coordinate descent (CD) framework to simultaneously improve radar target detection performance and the communications rate. The numerical results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in designing discrete phase set of sequences, potentially binary.

This paper tackles the problem of both multi-user and intersymbol interference stemming from co-channel users transmitting at a faster- than-Nyquist (FTN) rate in multi-antenna downlink transmissions. We propose a framework for redundant block-based symbol-level precoders enabling the trade-off between constructive and destructive multi-user and interblock interference (IBI) effects at the singleantenna user terminals. Redundant elements are added as guard interval to handle IBI destructive effects. It is shown that, within this framework, accelerating the transmissions via FTN signaling improves the error-free spectral efficiency, up to a certain acceleration factor beyond which the transmitted information cannot be perfectly recovered by linear filtering followed by sampling. Simulation results corroborate that the proposed spatiotemporal symbol-level precoding can change the amount of added redundancy from zero (full IBI) to half (IBI-free) the equivalent channel order, so as to achieve a target balance between spectral and energy efficiencies.

While the use of weather radars to continuously monitor the spatiotemporal dynamics of precipitation has grown in recent years, these systems are expensive and sparsely deployed across the world. In this context, densely located ground-based terminals for interactive satellite services have the potential for dual-use as weather sensors because they measure rain-attenuated power of the downlink signal. Although in the millimeter-wave regime, the rain rate has almost a linear relationship with specific attenuation, lack of other weather radar observables at satellite terminals imposes a daunting task of extracting rainfall rate from these highly attenuated signals. We address this problem by designing a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) that learns the relationship between the signal attenuation and rainfall rate observed by weather radars and rain gauges at a given location. During the prediction stage, the CNN accepts downlink attenuation as input and classifies the rain intensity which is then used to apply an appropriate rainfall estimator. Our experiments with real data show that, despite severe attenuation, CNN-based downlink rainfall accumulations closely follow the nearest C-band German weather service Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD) radar.

This paper is focused on designing a set of constant modulus waveform for cognitive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) radar systems. The aim is to shape the beam-pattern in transmitter to minimize the Integrated Side-lobe Level (ISL) in spatial domain in a cognitive paradigm. This minimization leads to a NP-hard and non-convex optimization problem. To address this, the problem is formulated based on Coordinate Descent (CD) framework with constant modulus constraint. Subsequently, an low-complexity and fast method based on Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) is proposed which monotonically decreases the spatial ISL. Finally, we show some numerical results and assess the performance of the proposed technique.

Parameter estimation from noisy and one-bit quantized data has become an important topic in signal processing, as it offers low cost and low complexity in the implementation. On the other hand, Direction-of-Arrival (DoA) estimation using Sparse Linear Arrays (SLAs) has recently gained considerable interest in array processing due to their attractive capability of providing enhanced degrees of freedom. In this paper, the problem of DoA estimation from one-bit measurements received by an SLA is considered and a novel framework for solving this problem is proposed. The proposed approach first provides an estimate of the received signal covariance matrix through minimization of a constrained weighted least-squares criterion. Then, MUSIC is applied to the spatially smoothed version of the estimated covariance matrix to find the DoAs of interest. Several numerical results are provided to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach over its counterpart already propounded in the literature.

This work proposes a novel 3D Deformation Signature (3DS) to represent a 3D deformation signal for 3D Dynamic Face Recognition. 3DS is computed given a non-linear 6D-space representation which guarantees physically plausible 3D deformations. A unique deformation indicator is computed per triangle in a triangulated mesh as a ratio derived from scale and in-plane deformation in the canonical space. These indicators, concatenated, construct the 3DS for each temporal instance. There is a pressing need of non-intrusive bio-metric measurements in domains like surveillance and security. By construction, 3DS is a non-intrusive facial measurement that is resistant to common security attacks like presentation, template and adversarial attacks. Two dynamic datasets (BU4DFE and COMA) were examined, in a standard classification framework, to evaluate 3DS. A first rank recognition accuracy of 99.9%, that outperforms existing literature, was achieved. Assuming an open-world setting, 99.97% accuracy was attained in detecting unseen distractors.

In this paper, Constant-Envelope Precoding techniques are presented for satellite-based communication systems. In the developed transmission technique the signals of the antennas are designed to be of constant amplitude, improving the robustness of the latter to the nonlinear distortions on satellite systems, introduced by the employed on-board Traveling-Wave-Tube-Amplifiers. We consider the forward link of a multi-beam broadband satellite system where the aim is to design the signals at the gateway such that the desired symbols are transmitted to the intended user terminals and the transmitted signals from the satellite terminal are of constant amplitude. At first, the gateway signals are designed given that a fixed on-board beamformer is applied to the satellite terminal. Then, the case of an adaptive on-board beamformer is considered which is designed jointly with the gateway signals. The design of the gateway signals and the adaptive on-board beamformer, in the second case, requires solving difficult nonconvex problems. Efficient algorithmic solutions are developed based on the saddle point method. The effectiveness of the proposed approaches is verified via numerical results.

We propose a novel technique for total transmit power minimization and optimal precoder design in wireless multi-group (MG) multicasting (MC) systems. The considered framework consists of three different systems capable of handling heterogeneous user types viz., information decoding (ID) specific users with conventional receiver architectures, energy harvesting (EH) only users with non-linear EH module, and users with joint ID and EH capabilities having separate units for the two operations, respectively. Each user is categorized under unique group(s), which can be of MC type specifically meant for ID users, and/or an energy group consisting of EH explicit users. The joint ID and EH users are a part of the (last) EH group as well as any one of the MC groups distinctly. In this regard, we formulate an optimization problem to minimize the total transmit power with optimal precoder designs for the three aforementioned scenarios, under constraints on minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio and harvested energy by the users with respective demands. The problem may be adapted to the well-known semi-definite program, which can be typically solved via relaxation of rank-l constraint. However, the relaxation of this constraint may in some cases lead to performance degradation, which increases with the rank of the solution obtained from the relaxed problem. Hence, we develop a novel technique motivated by the feasible-point pursuit and successive convex approximation method in order to address the rank-related issue. The benefits of the proposed method are illustrated under various operating conditions and parameter values, with comparison between the three above-mentioned scenarios.

We propose a one-bit symbol-level precoding method for massive multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) downlink systems using the idea of constructive interference (CI). In particular, we adopt a max-min fair design criterion which aims to maximize the minimum instantaneous received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) among the user equipments (UEs), while ensuring a CI constraint for each UE and under the restriction that the output of the precoder is a vector of binary elements. This design problem is an NP-hard binary quadratic programming due to the one-bit constraints on the elements of the precoder’s output vector, and hence, is difficult to solve. In this paper, we tackle this difficulty by reformulating the problem, in several steps, into an equivalent continuous-domain biconvex form. Our final biconvex reformulation is obtained via an exact penalty approach and can efficiently be solved using a standard block coordinate ascent algorithm. We show through simulation results that the proposed design outperforms the existing schemes in terms of (uncoded) bit error rate. It is further shown via numerical analysis that our solution algorithm is computationally-efficient as it needs only a few tens of iterations to converge in most practical scenarios.

This paper investigates the combined benefits of full-duplex (FD) and cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (CF-mMIMO), where a large number of distributed access points (APs) having FD capability simultaneously serve numerous uplink and downlink user equipments (UEs) on the same time-frequency resources. To enable the incorporation of FD technology in CF-mMIMO systems, we propose a novel heap-based pilot assignment algorithm, which not only can mitigate the effects of pilot contamination but also reduce the involved computational complexity. Then, we formulate a robust design problem for spectral efficiency (SE) maximization in which the power control and AP-UE association are jointly optimized, resulting in a difficult mixed-integer nonconvex programming. To solve this problem, we derive a more tractable problem before developing a very simple iterative algorithm based on inner approximation method with polynomial computational complexity. Numerical results show that our proposed methods with realistic parameters significantly outperform the existing approaches in terms of the quality of channel estimate and SE.

Cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (CF-MIMO) is a promising technological enabler for fifth generation (5G) networks in which a large number of access points (APs) jointly serve the users. Each AP applies conjugate beamforming to precode data, which is based only on the AP’s local channel state information. However, by having the nature of a (very) large number of APs, the operation of CF-MIMO can be energy inefficient. In this paper, we investigate the energy efficiency performance of CF-MIMO by considering a practical energy consumption model which includes both the signal transmit energy as well as the static energy consumed by hardware components. In particular, a joint power allocation and AP selection design is proposed to minimize the total energy consumption subject to given quality of service (QoS) constraints. In order to deal with the combinatorial complexity of the formulated problem, we employ norm $l_{2,1}-$based block-sparsity and successive convex optimization to leverage the AP selection process. Numerical results show significant energy savings obtained by the proposed design, compared to all-active APs scheme and the large-scale based AP selection.

Low earth orbit (LEO) satellite communications are expected to be incorporated in future wireless networks to provide global wireless access with enhanced data rates. Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) techniques, though widely used in terrestrial communication systems, have not been applied to LEO satellite communication systems. In this paper, we propose a massive MIMO downlink (DL) transmission scheme with full frequency reuse (FFR) for LEO satellite communication systems by exploiting statistical channel state information (sCSI) at the transmitter. We first establish a massive MIMO channel model for LEO satellite communications and propose Doppler and time delay compensation techniques at user terminals (UTs). Then, we develop a closed-form low-complexity sCSI based DL precoder by maximizing the average signal-to-leakage-plus-noise ratio (ASLNR). Motivated by the DL ASLNR upper bound, we further propose a space angle based user grouping algorithm to schedule the served UTs into different groups, where each group of UTs use the same time and frequency resource. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed massive MIMO transmission scheme with FFR significantly enhances the data rate of LEO satellite communication systems.

We propose the training of very deep neural networks (DNNs) without shortcut connections known as PlainNets. Training such networks is a notoriously hard problem due to: (1) the relatively popular challenge of vanishing and exploding activations, and (2) the less studied ‘near singularity’ problem. We argue that if the aforementioned problems are tackled together, the training of deeper PlainNets becomes easier. Subsequently, we propose the training of very deep PlainNets by leveraging Leaky Rectified Linear Units (LReLUs), parameter constraint and strategic parameter initialization. Our approach is simple and allows to successfully train very deep PlainNets having up to 100 layers without employing shortcut connections. To validate this approach, we validate on five challenging datasets; namely, MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR100, SVHN and ImageNet datasets. We report the best results known on the ImageNet dataset using a PlainNet with top-1 and top-5 error rates of 24.1% and 7.3%, respectively.

Spatio-temporal Graph Convolutional Networks (ST-GCNs) have shown great performance in the context of skeleton-based action recognition. Nevertheless, ST-GCNs use raw skeleton data as vertex features. Such features have low dimensionality and might not be optimal for action discrimination. Moreover, a single layer of temporal convolution is used to model short-term temporal dependencies but can be insufficient for capturing both long-term. In this paper, we extend the Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network for skeleton-based action recognition by introducing two novel modules, namely, the Graph Vertex Feature Encoder (GVFE) and the Dilated Hierarchical Temporal Convolutional Network (DH-TCN). On the one hand, the GVFE module learns appropriate vertex features for action recognition by encoding raw skeleton data into a new feature space. On the other hand, the DH-TCN module is capable of capturing both short-term and long-term temporal dependencies using a hierarchical dilated convolutional network. Experiments have been conducted on the challenging NTU RGB-D 60, NTU RGB-D 120 and Kinetics datasets. The obtained results show that our method competes with state-of-the-art approaches while using a smaller number of layers and parameters; thus reducing the required training time and memory.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) with many layers of feature representations yield state-of-the-art results on several difficult learning tasks. However, optimizing very deep DNNs without shortcut connections known as PlainNets, is a notoriously hard problem. Considering the growing interest in this area, this paper investigates holistically two scenarios that plague the training of very deep PlainNets: (1) the relatively popular challenge of `vanishing and exploding units' activations', and (2) the less investigated `singularity' problem, which is studied in details in this paper. In contrast to earlier works that study only the saturation and explosion of units' activations in isolation, this paper harmonizes the inconspicuous coexistence of the aforementioned problems for very deep PlainNets. Particularly, we argue that the aforementioned problems would have to be tackled simultaneously for the successful training of very deep PlainNets. Finally, different techniques that can be employed for tackling the optimization problem are discussed, and a specific combination of simple techniques that allows the successful training of PlainNets having up to 100 layers is demonstrated.

Remote Sensing from distributed platforms has become attractive for the community in the last years. Phase, frequency, and time synchronization are a crucial requirement for many such applications as multi-static remote sensing and also for distributed beamforming for communications. The literature on the field is extensive, and in some cases, the requirements an complexity of the proposed synchronization solution may surpass the ones set by the application itself. Moreover, the synchronization solution becomes even more challenging when the nodes are flying or hovering on aerial or space platforms. In this work, we discuss the synchronization considerations for the implementation of distributed remote sensing applications. The general framework considered is based on a distributed collection of autonomous nodes that synchronize their clocks with a common reference using inter-satellite links. For this purpose, we implement a synchronization link between two nodes operating in a full-duplex fashion. The experimental testbed uses commercially available SDR platforms to emulate two satellites, two targets, and the communication channel. The proposal is evaluated considering phase and frequency errors for different system parameters.

Edge caching is a promising technology to face the stringent latency requirements and back-haul traffic overloading in 5G wireless networks. However, acquiring the contents and modeling the optimal cache strategy is a challenging task. In this work, we use an active learning approach to learn the content popularities since it allows the system to leverage the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. Exploration refers to caching new files whereas exploitation use known files to cache, to achieve a good cache hit ratio. In this paper, we mainly focus to learn popularities as fast as possible while guaranteeing an operational cache hit ratio constraint. The effectiveness of proposed learning and caching policies are demonstrated via simulation results as a function of variance, cache hit ratio and used storage.

Ultrareliable uplink communication based on random access poses novel research challenges for the receiver design. Here, the uncertainty imposed by the random access and a large amount of interfering transmissions is the limiting factor for the system performance. Recently, this type of communication has been addressed in context of simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT). The need to adapt the power splitting to the signal states according to the underlying random access has been tackled by introducing a predictor, which determines the valid states of the received signal based on the long-term observation. Hence, the power splitting factor is scaled accordingly in order to guarantee ultrareliable communication and maximized harvested energy.In this work, we extend the considered SWIPT scenario by introducing multiple antennas at the receiver side. Through this, the received energy can be substantially increased, if the energy harvesting parameters and the spatial filter coefficients are jointly optimized. Hence, we propose an optimization procedure, which aims at maximizing the harvested energy under the ultrareliability constraint. The mentioned prediction method is then combined with the optimization solution and the resulting system performance is numerically evaluated.

In this paper, we aim to improve the performance of proactive caching policies by presenting an accurate content request prediction algorithm. We develop a Bayesian dynamical model through which a latent temporal trend structure in the content request can be accurately tracked and predicted. The dynamical model also leverages tensor train decomposition to capture content-location interactions to further enhance the accuracy of predictions. We derive an approximation of the posterior distribution based on variational Bayes (VB) and Kalman smoother algorithms to infer the model’s parameters. Moreover, using a real-world dataset, we examine the impact of prediction accuracy of our proposed scheme on a designed cooperative caching policy. The numerical results show that our algorithm substantially outperforms reference methods which ignore the temporal trends and content-location interactions.

Integrating massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) into satellite network is regarded as an effective strategy to improve the spectral efficiency as well as the coverage of satellite communication. However, the inevitable intra-system and inter-system interference deteriorate the total performance of system. In this paper, we consider precoding in the 5G Satellite Integrated Network (5GSIN) with the deployment of Massive MIMO and propagation of shared millimeter-wave (mmWave) link. Taking the requirements of both frequency efficiency and energy assumption into account, a hybrid analog and digital pre-coding scheme in the specific scenario of 5GSIN is proposed. We model sum rate maximization problem for both of satellite and terrestrial system that incorporates maximum power constrains and minimum achievable rate requirements and formulate to a convex power allocation problem with Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) norm and Logarithmic Linearization method. In order to balance between performance and complexity, we propose an analog and digital separated hybrid precoding algorithm to mitigate intra-system interference. Moreover, an iterative power allocation with interference mitigation algorithm is also devised to mitigate interference from satellite to terrestrial link so that power allocation can be executed by generalized iterative algorithm. Simulation results show that our proposed hybrid precoding algorithm in 5GSIN can improve the overall spectral efficiency with a small amount of iterations.

Data-driven approaches, e.g., deep learning (DL),have been widely studied in terrestrial wireless communications fields, proving the benefits and potentials of such techniques. In comparison, DL for satellite networks is studied to a limited extent in the literature. In this paper, we develop a DL assisted approach to facilitate efficient beam hopping (BH) in multibeam satellite systems. BH is adopted to provide a high level of flexibility to manage irregular and time variant traffic requests in the satellite coverage area. Conventional iterative optimization approaches and typical data-driven techniques may have their respective limitations in achieving timely and satisfactory performance. We herein explore a combined learning-and-optimization approach to provide a fast, feasible, and near-optimal solution for BH scheduling. Numerical study shows that in the proposed solution, the learning component is able to largely accelerate the procedure of BH pattern selection and allocation, while the optimization component can guarantee the solution's feasibility and improve the overall performance.

State-of-the-art Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are typically too cumbersome to be practically useful in portable electronic devices. As such, several works pursue model compression that seeks to drastically reduce computational memory footprints, FLOPS and memory for storage. Many of these works achieve unstructured compression, where the compressed models are not directly useful since dedicated hardware and specialized algorithms are required for storage of sparse weights and fast sparse matrix-vector multi-plication respectively. In this paper, we propose structured compression of large DNNs using debiased elastic group LASSO (DEGL), which is motivated by different interesting characteristics of the individual components. That is, where group LASSO penalty enforces structured sparsity, l2-norm penalty promotes features grouping, and debiasing disentangles sparsity and shrinkage effects of group LASSO. We perform extensive experiments by applying DEGL to different DNN architectures including LeNet, VGG, AlexNet and ResNet on MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet datasets. Furthermore, we validate the effectiveness of our proposal on domain adaptation using Oxford-102 flower species and Food-5K datasets. Results show that DEGL can compress DNNs by several folds with small or no loss of performance. Particularly, DEGL outperforms conventional group LASSO and several other state-of-the-art methods that perform structured compression.

In this paper, we investigate the performance of simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) multiuser systems, in which a base station serves a set of users with both information and energy simultaneously via a power splitting (PS) mechanism. To capture realistic scenarios, a nonlinear energy harvesting (EH) model is considered. In particular, we jointly design the PS factors and the beamforming vectors in order to maximize the total harvested energy, subjected to rate requirements and a total transmit power budget. To deal with the inherent non-convexity of the formulated problem, an iterative optimization algorithm is proposed based on the inner approximation method and semide-finite relaxation (SDR), whose convergence is theoretically guaranteed. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms the baseline max-min based SWIPT multicast and fixed-power PS designs.

Aerial base stations (BSs) attached to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) constitute a new paradigm for next-generation cellular communications. However, the flight range and communication capacity of aerial BSs are usually limited due to the UAVs' size, weight, and power (SWAP) constraints. To address this challenge, in this paper, we consider dynamic cooperative transmission among multiple aerial BSs for power-efficient aerial communications. Thereby, a central controller intelligently selects the aerial BSs navigating in the air for cooperation. Consequently, the large virtual array of moving antennas formed by the cooperating aerial BSs can be exploited for low-power information transmission and navigation, taking into account the channel conditions, energy availability, and user demands. Considering both the fronthauling and the data transmission links, we jointly optimize the trajectories, cooperation decisions, and transmit beamformers of the aerial BSs for minimization of the weighted sum of the power consumptions required by all BSs. Since obtaining the global optimal solution of the formulated problem is difficult, we propose a low-complexity iterative algorithm that can efficiently find a Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) solution to the problem. Simulation results show that, compared with several baseline schemes, dynamic multi-UAV cooperation can significantly reduce the communication and navigation powers of the UAVs to overcome the SWAP limitations, while requiring only a small increase of the transmit power over the fronthauling links.

In-band full-duplex (FD) operation is practically more suited for short-range communications such as WiFi and small-cell networks, due to its current practical limitations on the self-interference cancellation. In addition, cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (CF-mMIMO) is a new and scalable version of MIMO networks, which is designed to bring service antennas closer to end user equipments (UEs). To achieve higher spectral and energy efficiencies (SE-EE) of a wireless network, it is of practical interest to incorporate FD capability into CF-mMIMO systems to utilize their combined benefits. We formulate a novel and comprehensive optimization problem for the maximization of SE and EE in which power control, access point-UE (AP-UE) association and AP selection are jointly optimized under a realistic power consumption model, resulting in a difficult class of mixed-integer nonconvex programming. To tackle the binary nature of the formulated problem, we propose an efficient approach by exploiting a strong coupling between binary and continuous variables, leading to a more tractable problem. In this regard, two low-complexity transmission designs based on zero-forcing (ZF) are proposed. Combining tools from inner approximation framework and Dinkelbach method, we develop simple iterative algorithms with polynomial computational complexity in each iteration and strong theoretical performance guaranteed. Furthermore, towards a robust design for FD CF-mMIMO, a novel heap-based pilot assignment algorithm is proposed to mitigate effects of pilot contamination. Numerical results show that our proposed designs with realistic parameters significantly outperform the well-known approaches (i.e., small-cell and collocated mMIMO) in terms of the SE and EE. Notably, the proposed ZF designs require much less execution time than the simple maximum ratio transmission/combining.

Low earth orbit (LEO) satellite communications are expected to be incorporated in future wireless networks, in particular 5G and beyond networks, to provide global wireless access with enhanced data rates. Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) techniques, though widely used in terrestrial communication systems, have not been applied to LEO satellite communication systems. In this paper, we propose a massive MIMO transmission scheme with full frequency reuse (FFR) for LEO satellite communication systems and exploit statistical channel state information (sCSI) to address the difficulty of obtaining instantaneous CSI (iCSI) at the transmitter. We first establish the massive MIMO channel model for LEO satellite communications and simplify the transmission designs via performing Doppler and delay compensations at user terminals (UTs). Then, we develop the low-complexity sCSI based downlink (DL) precoder and uplink (UL) receiver in closed-form, aiming to maximize the average signal-to-leakage-plus-noise ratio (ASLNR) and the average signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (ASINR), respectively. It is shown that the DL ASLNRs and UL ASINRs of all UTs reach their upper bounds under some channel condition. Motivated by this, we propose a space angle based user grouping (SAUG) algorithm to schedule the served UTs into different groups, where each group of UTs use the same time and frequency resource. The proposed algorithm is asymptotically optimal in the sense that the lower and upper bounds of the achievable rate coincide when the number of satellite antennas or UT groups is sufficiently large. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed massive MIMO transmission scheme with FFR significantly enhances the data rate of LEO satellite communication systems. Notably, the proposed sCSI based precoder and receiver achieve the similar performance with the iCSI based ones that are often infeasible in practice.

In this letter, a fast approach for curve reparametrization, called Fast Adaptive Reparamterization (FAR), is introduced. Instead of computing an optimal matching between two curves such as Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and elastic distance-based approaches, our method is applied to each curve independently, leading to linear computational complexity. It is based on a simple replacement of the curve parameter by a variable invariant under specific variations of reparametrization. The choice of this variable is heuristically made according to the application of interest. In addition to being fast, the proposed reparametrization can be applied not only to curves observed in Euclidean spaces but also to feature curves living in Riemannian spaces. To validate our approach, we apply it to the scenario of human action recognition using curves living in the Riemannian product Special Euclidean space$\mathbb {SE}(3)^n$. The obtained results on three benchmarks for human action recognition (MSRAction3D, Florence3D, and UTKinect) show that our approach competes with state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and computational cost.

Herein, we focus on an end-to-end design of a proactive cooperative caching strategy for a multi-cell network. The design is challenging as it involves two interrelated problems: the ability to predict future content popularity and to meet network operation characteristics. To this end, we first formulate a cooperative content caching in order to optimize the aggregated network cost for delivering contents to users. An efficient proactive caching policy requires an accurate prediction of time-varying content popularity. Content popularity has temporal and spatial dependencies and therefore, we develop a probabilistic dynamical model for content popularity prediction by exploiting its spatiotemporal correlations. To achieve an accurate tracking and prediction of content popularity evolution, the proposed dynamical model is non-linear and incorporates non-Gaussian distributions. We use Variational Bayes (VB) approach for estimating the model parameters. The VB provides mathematical tractability. We then develop an online VB method that works with streaming data where content request arrives sequentially. Using extensive simulations study on a real-world dataset, we show that our online VB based dynamical model provides improved performance compared to conventional content caching policies.

The average performance of the MISO downlink channel, with a large number of users compared to transmit antennas of the base station, depends on the interference management which necessitates the joint design of scheduling and precoding. Unlike the previous works which do not offer a truly joint design, this paper focuses on formulating a problem amenable for the joint update of scheduling and precoding. Novel optimization formulations are investigated to reveal the hidden difference of convex/ concave structure for three classical criteria (weighted sum rate, max-min signal-to-interference plus noise ratio, and power minimization) and associated constraints are considered. Thereafter, we propose a convex-concave procedure framework based iterative algorithm where scheduling and precoding variables are updated jointly in each iteration. Finally, we show the superiority in performance of joint solution over the state-of-the-art designs through Monte-Carlo simulations.

Herein, we consider constant envelope precoding in a multiple-input multiple-output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing system (CE MIMO-OFDM) for frequency selective channels. In CE precoding the signals for each transmit antenna are designed to have constant amplitude regardless of the channel realization and the information symbols that must be conveyed to the users. This facilitates the use of power-efficient components, such as phase shifters (PS) and nonlinear power amplifiers, which are key for the feasibility of large-scale antenna array systems because of their low cost and power consumption. The CE precoding problem is firstly formulated as a least-squares problem with a unit modulus constraint and solved using an algorithm based on coordinate descent. The large number of optimization variables in the case of the MIMO-OFDM system motivates the search for a more computationally efficient solution. To tackle this, we reformulate the CE precoding design into an unconstrained nonlinear least-squares problem, which is solved efficiently using the Gauss-Newton algorithm. Simulation results underline the efficiency of the proposed solutions and show that they outperform state of the art techniques.

Large communication networks, e.g. Internet of Things (IoT), are known to be vulnerable to co-channel interference. One possibility to address this issue is the use of orthogonal multiple access (OMA) techniques. However, due to a potentially very long duty cycle, OMA is not well suited for such schemes. Instead, random medium access (RMA) appears more promising. An RMA scheme is based on transmission of short data packets with random scheduling, which is typically unknown to the receiver. The received signal, which consists of the overlapping packets, can be used for energy harvesting and powering of a relay device. Such an energy harvesting relay may utilize the energy for further information processing and uplink transmission. In this paper, we address the design of a simultaneous information and power transfer scheme based on randomly scheduled packet transmissions and reliable symbol detection. We formulate a prediction problem with the goal to maximize the harvested power for an RMA scenario. In order to solve this problem, we propose a new prediction method, which shows a significant performance improvement compared to the straightforward baseline scheme. Furthermore, we investigate the complexity of the proposed method and its vulnerability to imperfect channel state information.

Mobile edge caching (MEC) has received much attention as a promising technique to overcome the stringent latency and data hungry requirements in future generation wireless networks. Meanwhile, full-duplex (FD) transmission can potentially double the spectral efficiency by allowing a node to receive and transmit in the same time/frequency block simultaneously. In this paper, we investigate the delivery time performance of full-duplex enabled MEC (FD-MEC) systems, in which the users are served by distributed edge nodes (ENs), which operate in FD mode and are equipped with a limited storage memory. Firstly, we analyse the FD-MEC with different levels of cooperation among the ENs and take into account a realistic model of self-interference cancellation. Secondly, we propose a framework to minimize the system delivery time of FD-MEC under both linear and optimal precoding designs. Thirdly, to deal with the non-convexity of the formulated problems, two iterative optimization algorithms are proposed based on the inner approximation method, whose convergence is analytically guaranteed. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed designs are demonstrated via extensive numerical results. It is shown that the cooperative scheme mitigates inter-user and self interference significantly better than the distributed scheme at an expense of inter-EN cooperation. In addition, we show that minimum mean square error (MMSE)-based precoding design achieves the best performance-complexity trade-off, compared with the zero-forcing and optimal designs.

The efficiency of cache-placement algorithms in edge-caching networks depends on the accuracy of the content request’s statistical model and the estimation method based on the postulated model. This paper studies these two important issues. First, we introduce a new model for content requests in stationary environments. The common approach to model the requests is through the Poisson stochastic process. However, the Poisson stochastic process is not a very flexible model since it cannot capture the correlations between contents. To resolve this limitation, we instead introduce the Poisson Factor Analysis (PFA) model for this purpose. In PFA, the correlations are modeled through additional random variables embedded in a low dimensional latent space. The correlations provide rich information about the underlying statistical properties of content requests which can be used for advanced cache-placement algorithms. Secondly, to learn the model, we use Bayesian Learning, an efficient framework which does not overfit. This is crucial in edge-caching systems since only partial view of the entire request set is available at the local cache and the learning method should be able to estimate the content popularities without overfitting. In the simulation results, we compare the performance of our approach with the existing popularity estimation method.

In a mmWave multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication system employing a large-scale antenna array (LSAA), the hybrid transceivers are used to reduce the power consumption and the hardware cost. In a hybrid analog-digital (A/D) transceiver, the pre/post-processing operation splits into a lower-dimensional baseband (BB) pre/postcoder, followed by a network of analog phase shifters. Primarily two kinds of hybrid architectures are proposed in the literature to implement hybrid transceivers namely, the fully- connected and the partially-connected. Implementation of fully-connected architecture has higher hardware complexity, cost and power consumption in comparison with partially- connected. In this paper, we focus on partially- connected hybrid architecture and develop a low- complexity algorithm for transceiver design for a single user point-to-point mmWave MIMO system. The proposed algorithm utilizes the variable elimination (projection) and the minorization- maximization (MM) frameworks and has convergence guarantees to a stationary point. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is easily scalable for LSAA systems and achieves significantly improved performance in terms of the spectral efficiency (SE) of the system compared to the state-of-the-art solution.

Recent satellite standards enforce the coding of multiple users’ data in a frame. This transmission strategy mimics the well-known physical layer multigroup multicasting (MGMC). However, typical beam coverage with a large number of users and limited frame length lead to the scheduling of only a few users. Moreover, in emerging aggressive frequency reuse systems, scheduling is coupled with precoding. This is addressed in this work, through the joint design of scheduling and precoding for frame-based MGMC satellite systems. This aim is formulated as the maximization of the sum- rate under per beam power constraint and minimum SINR requirement of scheduled users. Further, a framework is proposed to transform the non-smooth SR objective with integer scheduling and nonconvex SINR constraints as a difference- of-convex problem that facilitates the joint update of scheduling and precoding. Therein, an efficient convex-concave procedure based algorithm is proposed. Finally, the gains (up to 50%) obtained by the jointed design over state- of-the-art methods is shown through Monte-Carlo simulations.

This paper designs dynamic onboard signal processing schemes in a multiple gateway multi-beam satellite system where full frequency reuse pattern is considered among the beams and feeds. In particular, we deploy on-board Joint Precoding, Feed selection and Signal switching mechanism (JPFS) so that the following advantages are realized, I) No need of Channel State Information (CSI) exchange among the gateways and satellite, since the performance of precoding is highly sensitive to the quality of CSI, II) In case one gateway fails, rerouting signals through other gateways can be applied without any extra signal processing, III) Properly selecting on-board feed/s to serve each user which generates maximum gain toward corresponding user, IV) Flexibly switching the signals received from the gateways to requested users where each user can dynamically request traffic from any gateway, and V) Multiple users with multiple traffic streams can be dynamically served at each beam. However, deploying such JPFS architecture imposes high complexity to the satellite payload. To tackle this issue, this study aims at deploying JPFS that can provide affordable complexity at the payload. In addition, while increasing the data demand imposes extensive bandwidth resources requirement in the feeder link, the proposed JPFS design works efficiently with available feeder link resources even if the data demand increases. The proposed design is evaluated with a close-to-real beam pattern and the latest broadband communication standard for satellite communications.

Most physical-layer security (PLS) works employ information theoretic metrics for performance analysis. In this paper, however, we investigate PLS from a signal processing point of view, where we rely on bit-error rate (BER) at the eavesdropper (Eve) as a metric for information leakage. Recently, symbol-level precoding (SLP) has been shown to enhance PLS in the presence of an Eve. In this work, nonetheless, we introduce a machine learning (ML) based attack to which even SLP schemes can be vulnerable. Namely, this attack manifests when an Eve utilizes ML in order to learn the precoding pattern when precoded pilots are sent. With this ability, an Eve can decode data with favorable accuracy. As a countermeasure to this attack, we propose a novel security enhanced precoding technique. The proposed countermeasure yields high BER at the Eve, which makes symbol detection practically infeasible for the latter, thus providing physical-layer security between the base station (BS) and the users. In the numerical results, we validate both the attack and the countermeasure, and show that this gain in security can be achieved at the expense of only a small additional power consumption at the transmitter.

In this paper, we study the sparse phase retrieval problem, that is, to estimate a sparse signal from a small number of noisy magnitude-only measurements. We propose an iterative soft-thresholding with exact line search algorithm (STELA). It is a parallel coordinate descent algorithm, which has several attractive features: i) fast convergence, as the approximate problem solved at each iteration exploits the original problem structure, ii) low complexity, as all variable updates have a closed-form expression, iii) easy implementation, as no hyperparameters are involved, and iv) guaranteed convergence to a stationary point for general measurements. These advantages are also demonstrated by numerical tests.

In this paper, we propose a novel view-invariant action recognition method using a single monocular RGB camera. View-invariance remains a very challenging topic in 2D action recognition due to the lack of 3D information in RGB images. Most successful approaches make use of the concept of knowledge transfer by projecting 3D synthetic data to multiple viewpoints. Instead of relying on knowledge transfer, we propose to augment the RGB data by a third dimension by means of 3D skeleton estimation from 2D images using a CNN-based pose estimator. In order to ensure view-invariance, a pre-processing for alignment is applied followed by data expansion as a way for denoising. Finally, a Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) architecture is used to model the temporal dependency between skeletons. The proposed network is trained to directly recognize actions from aligned 3D skeletons. The experiments performed on the challenging Northwestern-UCLA dataset show the superiority of our approach as compared to state-of-the-art ones.

Single waveform design for automotivejoint radar-communications (JRC) is being increasingly considered of late. This paper formulates the JRC design as an optimization problem exploiting the co-location of the two systems and investigates the trade-off between them. We propose an algorithm to maximize the performance of communication and radar receivers (e.g., BER and probability of detection, respectively). This intractable optimization problem is decomposed into two subproblems, which are subsequently solved in succession through a combination of gradient projection method and convex relaxations. The benefits of the proposed waveform are illustrated through numerical simulations.

In this paper, a new framework for designing the radar transmit waveform is established through shaping the radar Ambiguity Function (AF). Specifically, the AF of the phase coded waveforms are analyzed and it is shown that a continuous/discrete phase sequence with the desired AF can be obtained by solving an optimization problem promoting equality between the AF of the transmit sequence and the desired AF. An iterative algorithm based on Coordinate Descent (CD) method is introduced to deal with the resulting non-convex optimization problem. Numerical results illustrate the proposed algorithm make it possible to design sequences with remarkably high tolerance towards Doppler frequency shifts, which is of interest to the future generations of automotive radar sensors.

Multimodal learning leverages data from different modalities to improve the performance of a trained model. Typically, latent representations extracted from multimodal data are provided via direct feature fusion for end-to-end training of a deep neural network towards a specific task. However, the informativeness of the different data modalities can easily vary across a collected dataset. As such, naively or directly fusing the latent representations obtained for one modality and the other, as is commonly done in state-of-the-art works, may burden the model in finding concise representations that are indeed useful for learning. In this paper, we propose to instead learn the fusion of latent representations for multimodal data by using a modality gating mechanism that allows the dynamic weighting of extracted latent representations based on their informativness. Extensive experiments using the BU-3DFE dataset for facial expression recognition and the Washington object classification multimodal RGB-D dataset show that learning the fusion of the latent representations for different data modalities leads to improved model generalization than the conventional naive fusion method.

This paper studies the problem of max-min fairness power allocation in distributed small cell networks operated under the same frequency bandwidth. We introduce a calibrated learning enhanced time division multiple access scheme to optimize the transmit power decisions at the small base stations (SBSs) and achieve max-min user fairness in the long run. Provided that the SBSs are autonomous decision makers, the aim of the proposed algorithm is to allow SBSs to gradually improve their forecast of the possible transmit power levels of the other SBSs and react with the best response based on the predicted results at individual time slots. Simulation results validate that in terms of achieving max-min signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio, the proposed distributed design outperforms two benchmark schemes and achieves a similar performance as compared to the optimal centralized design.

This paper proposes BODYFITR, a fully automatic method to fit a human body model to static 3D scans with complex poses. Automatic and reliable 3D human body fitting is necessary for many applications related to healthcare, digital ergonomics, avatar creation and security, especially in industrial contexts for large-scale product design. Existing works either make prior assumptions on the pose, require manual annotation of the data or have difficulty handling complex poses. This work addresses these limitations by providing a novel automatic fitting pipeline with carefully integrated building blocks designed for a systematic and robust approach. It is validated on the 3DBodyTex dataset, with hundreds of high-quality 3D body scans, and shown to outperform prior works in static body pose and shape estimation, qualitatively and quantitatively. The method is also applied to the creation of realistic 3D avatars from the high-quality texture scans of 3DBodyTex, further demonstrating its capabilities.

Phase, frequency and time synchronization is a crucial requirement for many applications as such as multi-static remote sensing and distributed beamforming for communications. The literature on the field is very wide, and in some cases, the requirements of the proposed synchronization solution may surpass the ones set by the application itself. Moreover, the synchronization solution becomes even more challenging when the nodes are flying or hovering on aerial or space platforms. In this work, we compare and classify the synchronization technologies available in the literature according to a common proposed framework, and we discuss the considerations of an implementation for distributed remote sensing applications. The general framework considered is based on a distributed collection of autonomous nodes that try to synchronize their clocks with a common reference. Moreover, they can be classified in non-overlapping, adjacent and overlapping frequency band scenarios.

In a content-delivery network, files’ popularity and users’ requests change fast. Conventional caching schemes, e.g., caching (re)placement once per day during the off-peak hours, may not capture the up-to-date popularity. In this case, the contents in caches have to be regularly updated to prevent information becoming outdated, and at the same time users’ requested files must be delivered. These two tasks are challenging in practical heavy-traffic and multi-user scenarios when the network resources are limited. In this paper, we apply non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) to facilitate concurrent caching replacement and content delivery in downlink transmission. We formulate a resource allocation problem to investigate how to efficiently push proactive files to the cache at the small base station and deliver the requested files to users. The resource-allocation problem is formulated as a mixed-integer exponential conic optimization problem. To enable a computationally-efficient optimal solution with finite convergence, we develop an iterative algorithm based on polyhedral outer approximation, where a polyhedral relaxation subproblem and a convex subproblem are constructed and iteratively solved to tighten the lower and upper bounds for the optimum, respectively. The numerical results demonstrate significant performance gains of the NOMA-enabled data transmission scheme in power and resource savings compared to the baseline scheme.

The paper investigates the applicability of a conventional communications signal for sensing and detection in vehicular scenario. This Joint Radar-Communications (JRC) system caters to an automotive setting characterized by a multi-target environment including clutter. In this contribution, an automotive radar employing phase modulated communication signal is considered wherein the detection of other vehicles is enabled in presence of clutter. Particularly, it is shown when the clutter is dominant in the environment, bit error rate (BER) of communications will suffer. Further, the receiver processing includes demodulation of the communication symbols at communicating vehicle in addition to the extraction of the radar parameters − range and Doppler shifts of the targets − at the JRC-equipped vehicle. The study investigates the impact of various parameters in determining the performance of the JRC set-up.

Consider a collaborative task carried out by two autonomous agents that can communicate over a noisy channel. Each agent is only aware of its own state, while the accomplishment of the task depends on the value of the joint state of both agents. As an example, both agents must simultaneously reach a certain location of the environment, while only being aware of their own positions. Assuming the presence of feedback in the form of a common reward to the agents, a conventional approach would apply separately: (i) an off-the-shelf coding and decoding scheme in order to enhance the reliability of the communication of the state of one agent to the other; and (ii) a standard multiagent reinforcement learning strategy to learn how to act in the resulting environment. In this work, it is argued that the performance of the collaborative task can be improved if the agents learn how to jointly communicate and act. In particular, numerical results for a baseline grid world example demonstrate that the jointly learned policy carries out compression and unequal error protection by leveraging information about the action policy.

In a multi-beam satellite communication system, traffic requests are typically asymmetric across beams and highly heterogeneous among terminals. In practical operations, it is important to achieve a good match between the offered and requested traffic, i.e., to improve the performance of Offered Capacity to requested Traffic Ratio (OCTR). Due to satellites’ payload constraints and limited flexibilities, it is a challenging task for resource optimization. In this paper, we tackle this issue by formulating a max-min resource allocation problem, taking fairness into account such that the lowest OCTR can be maximized. To exploit the potential synergies, we introduce Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) to enable aggressive frequency reuse and mitigate intra-beam interference. Although NOMA has proven its capabilities in improving throughput and fairness in 5G terrestrial networks, for multi-beam satellite systems it is unclear if NOMA can help to enhance the OCTR performance, and hence is worth quantifying how much gain it can bring. To solve the problem, we design a suboptimal algorithm to firstly decompose the original problem into multiple convex subproblems by fixing power allocation for each beam, and secondly adjust beam power to improve the minimum OCTR in iterations. Numerical results show the convergence of the proposed algorithm and the superiority of the proposed NOMA scheme in max-min OCTR.

We propose a novel formulation for joint maximization of total weighted sum-spectral efficiency and weighted sum-harvested energy to study Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer (SWIPT) from a pricing perspective. Specifically, we consider that a transmit source communicates with multiple destinations using Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) system within a dual-hop relay-assisted network, where the destination nodes are capable of jointly decoding information and harvesting energy from the same radiofrequency (RF) signal using either the time-switching (TS) or power-splitting (PS) based SWIPT receiver architectures. Computation of the optimal solution for the aforementioned problem is an extremely challenging task as joint optimization of several network resources introduce intractability at high numeric values of relays, destination nodes and OFDM sub-carriers. Therefore, we present a suitable algorithm with sub-optimal results and good performance to compute the performance of joint data processing and harvesting energy under fixed pricing methods by adjusting the respective weight factors, motivated by practical statistics. Furthermore, by exploiting the binary options of the weights, we show that the proposed formulation can be regulated purely as a sum-spectral efficiency maximization or solely as a sum-harvested energy maximization problem. Numerical results illustrate the benefits of the proposed design under several operating conditions and parameter values.

This paper presents designing precoding technique at the gateway of a multibeam mobile satellite systems, enabling full frequency reuse pattern among the beams. Such a system brings in two critical challenges to overcome. The inter-beam interference makes applying interference mitigation techniques necessary. Further, when the user terminals are mobile the Channel State Information (CSI) becomes time-varying which is another challenge to overcome. Therefore, the gateway has only access to an outdated CSI, which can eventually limit the precoding gains. In this way, employing a proper CSI estimation mechanism at the gateway can improve the performance of the precoding scheme. In this context, the objectives of this paper are two folds. First, we present different CSI feedback mechanisms which aim at preserving a lower CSI variations at the gateway. Then, we develop the corresponding precoding schemes which are adapted with the proposed CSI feedback mechanisms. To keep the complexity of the proposed precoding schemes affordable, we consider a maritime communication scenario so that the signals received by mobile user terminals suffer from a lower pathloss compared to the Land Mobile communication. Finally, we provide several simulations results in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed precoding techniques.

The optimal flow assignment is strongly dependent on the network link capacities, which in turn are determined by the allocation of the available radio resources. In this paper, we consider the holistic design of joint power and flow assignment in the context of Integrated Terrestrial-Satellite Backhaul (ITSB) networks. Aiming for an spectral efficient system, we focus on the scenario where the satellite links operate in the non- exclusive Ka band, which is shared with the terrestrial microwave backhaul links. We focus on the maximization of the network throughput considering a penalizing term to restrict the use of the satellite links in order to avoid the expensive cost of satellite bandwidth. The interference resulting from the spectrum sharing assumption makes the joint power and flow assignment a very challenging problem. We propose a convex relaxation approach which eases the formulation and allows the implementation of efficiency convex optimization tools to achieve a feasible solution to the original problem. Supporting results based on numerical simulations validate the proposed approach.

Edge-caching is recognized as an efficient technique for future wireless cellular networks to improve network capacity and user-perceived quality of experience. Due to the random content requests and the limited cache memory, designing an efficient caching policy is a challenge. To enhance the performance of caching systems, an accurate content request prediction algorithm is essential. Here, we introduce a flexible model, a Poisson regressor based on a Gaussian process, for the content request distribution in stationary environments. Our proposed model can incorporate the content features as side information for prediction enhancement. In order to learn the model parameters, which yield the Poisson rates or alternatively content popularities, we invoke the Bayesian approach which is very robust against over-fitting. However, the posterior distribution in the Bayes formula is analytically intractable to compute. To tackle this issue, we apply a Monte Carlo Markov Chain (MCMC) method to approximate the posterior distribution. Two types of predictive distributions are formulated for the requests of existing contents and for the requests of a newly-added content. Finally, simulation results are provided to confirm the accuracy of the developed content popularity learning approach.

Blockchain is a merging technology for decentralized management and data security, which was first introduced as the core technology of cryptocurrency, e.g., Bitcoin. Since the first success in financial sector, blockchain has shown great potentials in various domains, e.g., internet of things and mobile networks. In this paper, we propose a novel blockchain-based architecture for content delivery networks (B-CDN), which exploits the advances of the blockchain technology to provide a decentralized and secure platform to connect content providers (CPs) with users. On one hand, the proposed B-CDN will leverage the registration and subscription of the users to different CPs, while guaranteeing the user privacy thanks to virtual identity provided by the blockchain network. On the other hand, the B-CDN creates a public immutable database of the requested contents (from all CPs), based on which each CP can better evaluate the user preference on its contents. The benefits of B-CDN are demonstrated via an edge-caching application, in which a feature-based caching algorithm is proposed for all CPs. The proposed caching algorithm is verified with the realistic Movielens dataset. A win-win relation between the CPs and users is observed, where the B-CDN improves user quality of experience and reduces cost of delivering content for the CPs.

Edge caching has received much attention as a promising technique to overcome the stringent latency and data hungry challenges in the future generation wireless networks. Meanwhile, full-duplex (FD) transmission can potentially double the spectral efficiency by allowing a node to receive and transmit simultaneously. In this paper, we study a cache-aided FD system via delivery time analysis and optimization. In the considered system, an edge node (EN) operates in FD mode and serves users via wireless channels. Two optimization problems are formulated to minimize the largest delivery time based on the two popular linear beamforming zero-forcing and minimum mean square error designs. Since the formulated problems are non-convex due to the self-interference at the EN, we propose two iterative optimization algorithms based on the inner approximation method. The convergence of the proposed iterative algorithms is analytically guaranteed. Finally, the impacts of caching and the advantages of the FD system over the half-duplex (HD) counterpart are demonstrated via numerical results.

We investigate the performance of multi-user multiple-antenna downlinks via joint antenna selection and power control design. In order to fully exploit the spatial diversity while minimizing the energy consumed by active radio frequency (RF) modules, a subset of antennas are selected to serve the users. Firstly, we propose a joint antenna selection and power allocation (JASPA) algorithm to maximize the system sum rate subjected to the total transmit power constraint and quality of service (QoS) requirements. JASPA copes with the non-convexity of the formulated problem via a doubly iterative algorithm, in which an inner iteration successively optimizes the transmit power followed by an outer loop that tries all valid antenna combinations. Although approaching the global optimality, JASPA suffers a combinatorial complexity, which might limit its application in real-time network operations. To overcome this limitation, we propose a learning-based antenna selection and power allocation (L-ASPA) which significantly reduces the high computational time of JASPA while retaining comparative performance. The core idea behind L-ASPA is to exploit the advances in machine learning to establish underlaying relation between the key system parameters and the selected antennas. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithms is demonstrated via numerical results, which show that JASPA could achieve 90% of the optimal performance while reducing more than 93% computation time.

In this paper, we investigate the performance of cache-assisted simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) cooperative systems, in which one source communicates with one destination via the aid of multiple relays. In order to prolong the relays’ serving time, the relays are assumed to be equipped with a cache memory and energy harvesting (EH) capability. Based on the time-splitting mechanism, we analyze the effect of caching on the system performance in terms of the serving throughput and the stored energy at the relay. In particular, two optimization problems are formulated to maximize the relay-destination throughput and the energy stored at the relay subject to some quality-of-service (QoS) constraints, respectively. By using the KKT conditions and with the help of the Lambert function, closed-form solutions are obtained for the two formulated problems. In order to further improve the performance, a relay selection policy is introduced to select the best relay based on either the maximum throughput between the relays’ and destination link or maximum stored energy at the relay, for conveying information to the destination. Numerical results reveal significant benefits of incorporating caching capabilities to SWIPT systems, in terms of improved serving time, throughput, and EH performance at the relays.

This paper introduces a combined calibrated learning and bandit approach to online distributed power control in small cell networks operated under the same frequency bandwidth. Each small base station (SBS) is modelled as an intelligent agent who autonomously decides on its instantaneous transmit power level by predicting the transmitting policies of the other SBSs, namely the opponent SBSs, in the network, in real-time. The decision making process is based jointly on the past observations and the calibrated forecasts of the upcoming power allocation decisions of the opponent SBSs who inflict the dominant interferences on the agent. Furthermore, we integrate the proposed calibrated forecast process with a bandit policy to account for the wireless channel conditions unknowna priori, and develop an autonomous power allocation algorithm that is executable at individual SBSs to enhance the accuracy of the autonomous decision making. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm in cases of maximizing the long-term sum-rate, the overall energy efficiency and the average minimum achievable data rate. Numerical simulation results demonstrate that the proposed design outperforms the benchmark scheme with limited amount of information exchange and rapidly approaches towards the optimal centralized solution for all case studies.

In this paper, we consider three transmitter designs for symbol-level-precoding (SLP), a technique that mitigates multiuser interference (MUI) in multiuser systems by designing the transmitted signals using the channel state information and the information-bearing symbols. The considered systems tackle the high hardware complexity and power consumption of existing SLP techniques by reducing or completely eliminating fully digital radio frequency (RF) chains. The first proposed architecture referred to as, Antenna Selection SLP, minimizes the MUI by activating a subset of the available antennas and thus, reducing the number of required RF chains to the number of active antennas. In the other two architectures, which we refer to as RF domain SLP, the processing happens entirely in the RF domain, thus eliminating the need for multiple fully digital RF chains altogether. Instead, the analog phase shifters directly modulate the signals on the transmit antennas. The precoding design for all the considered cases is formulated as a constrained least squares problem and efficient algorithmic solutions are developed via the Coordinate Descent method. Simulations provide insights into the power efficiency of the proposed schemes and the improvements over the fully digital counterparts.

We investigate the resource allocation and relay selection in a two-hop relay-assisted multi-user orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) network, where the end-nodes support the simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) employing a power splitting (PS) technique. Our goal is to optimize the end-nodes’ PS ratios as well as the relay, carrier, and power assignment so that the sum-rate of the system is maximized subject to harvested energy and transmitted power constraints. Such joint optimization with mixed-integer non-linear programming structure is combinatorial in nature. Due to the complexity of this problem, we propose to solve its dual problem, which guarantees asymptotic optimality and less execution time compared to a highly-complex exhaustive search approach. Furthermore, we also present a heuristic method to solve this problem with lower computational complexity. The simulation results reveal that the proposed algorithms provide significant performance gains compared to a semi-random resource allocation and relay selection approach and is close to the optimal solution when the number of OFDMA sub-carriers is sufficiently large.

In this paper, a dataset, named 3DBodyTex, of static 3D body scans with high-quality texture information is presented along with a fully automatic method for body model fitting to a 3D scan. 3D shape modelling is a fundamental area of computer vision that has a wide range of applications in the industry. It is becoming even more important as 3D sensing technologies are entering consumer devices such as smartphones. As the main output of these sensors is the 3D shape, many methods rely on this information alone. The 3D shape information is, however, very high dimensional and leads to models that must handle many degrees of freedom from limited information. Coupling texture and 3D shape alleviates this burden, as the texture of 3D objects is complementary to their shape. Unfortunately, high-quality texture content is lacking from commonly available datasets, and in particular in datasets of 3D body scans. The proposed 3DBodyTex dataset aims to fill this gap with hundreds of high-quality 3D body scans with high-resolution texture. Moreover, a novel fully automatic pipeline to fit a body model to a 3D scan is proposed. It includes a robust 3D landmark estimator that takes advantage of the high-resolution texture of 3DBodyTex. The pipeline is applied to the scans, and the results are reported and discussed, showcasing the diversity of the features in the dataset.

In this paper, we investigate resource allocation and relay selection in a dual-hop orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based multi-user network where amplify-and-forward (AF) enabled relays facilitate simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) to the end- users. In this context, we address an optimization problem to maximize the end-users' sum-rate subjected to transmit power and harvested energy constraints. Furthermore, the problem is formulated for both time-switching (TS) and power- splitting (PS) SWIPT schemes.We aim at optimizing the users' SWIPT splitting factors as well as sub-carrier-destination assignment, sub-carrier pairing, and relay-destination coupling metrics. This kind of joint evaluation is combinatorial in nature with non-linear structure involving mixed-integer programming. In this vein, we propose a sub-optimal low complex sequential resource distribution (SRD) method to solve the aforementioned problem. The performance of the proposed SRD technique is compared with a semi- random resource allocation and relay selection approach. Simulation results reveal the benefits of the proposed design under several parameter values with various operating conditions to illustrate the efficiency of SWIPT schemes for the proposed techniques.

In this paper, we investigate the downlink transmission of a multiuser multiple-input single-output (MISO) channel under a symbol-level precoding (SLP) scheme, having imperfect channel knowledge at the transmitter. In defining the SLP design problem, a general category of constructive interference regions (CIR) called distance preserving CIR (DPCIR) is adopted. In particular, we are interested in a robust SLP design minimizing the total transmit power subject to individual quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. We consider two common models for the channel uncertainty region, namely, spherical (norm-bounded) and stochastic. For the spherical uncertainty model, a worst-case robust precoder is proposed, while for the stochastically known uncertainties, we derive a convex optimization problem with probabilistic constraints. We simulate the performance of the proposed robust approaches, and compare them with the existing methods. Through the simulation results, we also show that there is an essential trade-off between the two robust approaches.

This paper aims to design joint precoding and onboard beamforming at a multiple gateway multibeam satellite system. Full frequency reuse pattern is considered among the beams and each gateway serves a cluster of adjacent beams such that multiple clusters are served through a set of gateways. However, two issues are required to be addressed. First, the interference in both user and feeder links is the bottleneck of the whole system and employing interference mitigation techniques is essential. Second, as the data demand increases, the ground and space segments should employ extensive bandwidth resources in the feeder link accordingly. This entails embedding an extra number of gateways aiming to support a fair balance between the increasing demand and the corresponding required feeder link resources. To tackle these problems, this paper studies the impact of employing a joint multiple gateway architecture and on-board beamforming scheme. It is shown that by properly designing the on-board beamforming scheme, the number of gateways can be kept affordable even if the data demand increases. The proposed beamforming scheme can partially mitigate the interference in the user link. While the user and feeder link channels vary over time, this paper focuses on designing fixed beamforming which is sufficiently robust to the variations in both channels, leading to keep payload complexity low. Moreover, Zero Forcing precoding technique is employed at the gateways to reject the interference in the feeder links as well as it helps the proposed fixed on-board beamforming by partially equalizing the interference in user link.

We present a convex optimization based Symbol-Level Precoding (SLP) for sum power minimization and propose the low-latency closed-form algorithm to find a heuristic solution to the optimization problem. The technique exploits constructive interference at the multi-user MIMO systems and minimizes the sum power of the transmitted precoded signal per each set of MIMO symbols. As a result, the received signals gain extra Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), which improves data rate and energy efficiency of the system. We benchmark the low-complexity algorithm for solving the optimization technique against the conventional Fast Non-Negative Least Squares algorithm (NNLS). The demonstrated design of the SLP technique combined with the proposed closed-form algorithm has low computational complexity and fast processing time, which is applicable in low-latency high-throughput satellite communication systems.

Towards energy savings in large-scale nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) networks, we investigate power and load optimization for multi-cell and multi-carrier NOMA systems in this paper. To capture the coupling relation of mutual interference among cells, firstly, we extend a load-coupling model from orthogonal multiple access (OMA) to NOMA networks. Next, with this analytical tool, we formulate the considered optimization problem in NOMA-based load-coupled systems, where optimizing load, power, and determining decoding order are the key aspects in the optimization. Theoretically, we prove that the minimum network energy consumption can be achieved by using all the time-frequency resources in each cell to deliver users' demand. To achieve the optimal load and enable efficient power optimization, we develop a power-adjustment algorithm. Numerical results demonstrate promising energy-saving gains of NOMA over OMA in large-scale cellular networks, in particular for the high-demand and resource-limited scenarios.

Deep neural networks inherently have large representational power for approximating complex target functions. However, models based on rectified linear units can suffer reduction in representation capacity due to dead units. Moreover, approximating very deep networks trained with dropout at test time can be more inexact due to the several layers of nonlinearities. To address the aforementioned problems, we propose to learn the activation functions of hidden units for very deep networks via maxout. However, maxout units increase the model parameters, and therefore model may suffer from overfitting; we alleviate this problem by employing elastic net regularization. In this paper, we propose very deep networks with maxout units and elastic net regularization and show that the features learned are quite linearly separable. We perform extensive experiments and reach state-of-the-art results on the USPS and MNIST datasets. Particularly, we reach an error rate of 2.19% on the USPS dataset, surpassing the human performance error rate of 2.5% and all previously reported results, including those that employed training data augmentation. On the MNIST dataset, we reach an error rate of 0.36% which is competitive with the state-of-the-art results.

In this paper, we revisit trajectory-based action detection in a potent and non-uniform way. Improved trajectories have been proven to be an effective model for motion description in action recognition. In temporal action localization, however, this approach is not efficiently exploited. Trajectory features extracted from uniform video segments result in significant performance degradation due to two reasons: (a) during uniform segmentation, a significant amount of noise is often added to the main action and (b) partial actions can have negative impact in classifier's performance. Since uniform video segmentation seems to be insufficient for this task, we propose a two-step supervised non-uniform segmentation, performed in an online manner. Action proposals are generated using either 2D or 3D data, therefore action classification can be directly performed on them using the standard improved trajectories approach. We experimentally compare our method with other approaches and we show improved performance on a challenging online action detection dataset.

Symbol-level precoding (SLP) is a promising technique which allows to constructively exploit the multi-user interference in the downlink of multiple antenna systems. Recently, this approach has also been used in the context of non-linear systems for reducing the instantaneous power imbalances among the antennas. However, previous works have not exploited SLP to improve the dynamic properties of the waveforms in the temporal dimension, which are fundamental for non-linear systems. To fill this gap, this paper proposes a novel precoding method, referred to as spatio-temporal SLP, which minimizes the peak-to-average power ratio of the transmitted waveforms both in the spatial and in the temporal dimensions, while at the same time exploiting the constructive interference effect. Numerical results are presented to highlight the enhanced performance of the proposed scheme with respect to state of the art SLP techniques, in terms of power distribution and symbol error rate over non-linear channels.

In this paper, an on-line interactive method is proposed for learning a linear classifier. This problem is studied within the Active Learning (AL) framework where the learning algorithm sequentially chooses unlabelled training samples and requests their class labels from an oracle in order to learn the classifier with the least queries to the oracle possible. Additionally' a constraint is introduced into this interactive learning process which limits the percentage of the samples from one “unwanted” class under a certain threshold. An optimal AL solution is derived and implemented with a sophisticated, accurate and fast Bayesian Learning method, the Expectation Propagation (EP) and its performance is demonstrated through numerical simulations.

We consider the problem of user selection for symbol-level multigroup multicasting in the downlink of multiuser MISO systems. Symbol-level precoding is a new paradigm for multiuser multiple-antenna downlink systems which aims at creating constructive interference among the simultaneous data streams. This can be enabled by designing the precoded signal of the multiantenna transmitter on a symbol level, taking into account both channel state information and data symbols. This work proposes a user selection algorithm to facilitate serving multiple groups of users, by transmitting a stream of common symbols to each group on symbol-by-symbol basis if we have large number of users. We provide numerical results to validate the proposed algorithm.

Edge-caching has received much attention as an efficient technique to reduce delivery latency and network congestion during peak-traffic times by bringing data closer to end users. In this paper, we investigate the latency performance of content delivery networks with the aid of edge-caching, in which a data centre is serving the users via a shared wireless medium. Firstly, we derive a cache placement design which minimizes the average (buffering) latency during the delivery phase. It is found that the derived placement solution differs from the conventional placement method for throughput minimization. Secondly, for a given cache placement scheme, we optimize the signal transmission in the delivery phase taking into consideration the cached content to minimize the average user latency. Particularly, two optimization problems based on zero-forcing (ZF) and minimum mean square error (MMSE) designs are formulated subject to requesting rate and transmit power constraints. To deal with the non-convexity of the MMSE problem, an iterative algorithm is proposed that approximates the non-convex constraint by its first-order approximation. Finally, numerical results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed designs.

This paper present On-Board Precoding (OBP) for a multiple gateway multibeam satellite system where full frequency reuse pattern is employed at both user and feeder links. By reducing the Channel State Information (CSI) round-trip delay to half, OBP offers significant benefits in the emerging multiple gateway scenario in terms of lower gateways coordination. However, two critical issues need to be addressed: (a) interference in both user and feeder links is the bottleneck of the whole system and employing interference mitigation techniques is essential, (b) clear push towards non-adaptive (fixed) payload implementation, leading to low computationally complex satellite architectures. In order to fulfill requirements (a) and (b), this paper studies the impact of employing a fixed OBP technique at the payload which is sufficiently robust to the variations in both user and feeder link channels. In addition to (a) and (b), the provided simulation results depict the performance gain obtained by our proposed OBP with respect to the conventional interference mitigation techniques in multiple gateway multibeam systems.

We investigate the performance of time switching (TS) based energy harvesting model for cache-assisted simultaneous wireless transmission of information and energy (Wi-TIE). In the considered system, a relay which is equipped with both caching and energy harvesting capabilities helps a source to convey information to a destination. First, we formulate based on the time-switching architecture an optimization problem to maximize the harvested energy, taking into consideration the cache capability and user quality of service requirement. We then solve the formulated problem to obtain closed-form solutions. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system via numerical results.

This paper aims to design joint on-ground precoding and on-board beamforming of a multiple gateway multibeam satellite system in a hybrid space-ground mode where full frequency reuse pattern is considered among the beams. In such an architecture, each gateway serves a cluster of adjacent beams such that the adjacent clusters are served through a set of gateways that are located at different geographical areas. However, such a system brings in two challenges to overcome. First, the inter-beam interference is the bottleneck of the whole system and applying interference mitigation techniques becomes necessary. Second, as the data demand increases, the ground and space segments should employ extensive bandwidth resources in the feeder link accordingly. This entails embedding an extra number of gateways aiming to support a fair balance between the increasing demand and the corresponding required feeder link resources. To solve these problems, this study investigates the impact of employing a joint multiple gateway architecture and onboard beamforming scheme. It is shown that by properly designing the on-board beamforming scheme, the number of gateways can be kept affordable even if the data demand increases. Moreover, Zero Forcing (ZF) precoding technique is considered to cope with the inter-beam interference where each gateway constructs a part of block ZF precoding matrix. The conceived designs are evaluated with a close-to-real beam pattern and the latest broadband communication standard for satellite communications.

In this paper, we Investigate the performance of cache enabled millimeter wave (mmWave) ad-hoc network, where randomly distributed nodes are supported by a cache memory. Specifically, we study the optimal caching placement at the desirable mmWave node using a network model that accounts for the uncertainties in node locations and blockages. We then characterize the average success probability of content delivery. As a desirable side effect, certain factors like the density of nodes and increased antenna gain, can significantly increase the cache hit ratio in mmWave networks. However, a trade-off between the cache hit probability and the average successful content delivery probability with respect to the density of nodes is presented.

In this paper, we present a centralized method for real-time rainfall estimation using carrier-to-noise power ratio ($C/N$) measurements from broadband satellite communication networks. The$C/N$data of both forward link and return link are collected by the gateway station from the user terminals in the broadband satellite communication network and stored in a database. The$C/N$for such Ka-band scenarios is impaired mainly by the rainfall. Using signal processing and machine learning techniques, we develop an algorithm for real-time rainfall estimation. Extracting relevant features from$C/N$, we use artificial neural network in order to distinguish the rain events from dry events. We then determine the signal attenuation corresponding to the rain events and examine an empirical relationship between rainfall rate and signal attenuation. Experimental results are promising and prove the high potential of satellite communication links for real environment monitoring, particularly rainfall estimation.

In this paper, we introduce a deformation based representation space for curved shapes in . Given an ordered set of points sampled from a curved shape, the proposed method represents the set as an element of a finite dimensional matrix Lie group. Variation due to scale and location are filtered in a preprocessing stage, while shapes that vary only in rotation are identified by an equivalence relationship. The use of a finite dimensional matrix Lie group leads to a similarity metric with an explicit geodesic solution. Subsequently, we discuss some of the properties of the metric and its relationship with a deformation by least action. Furthermore, invariance to reparametrization or estimation of point correspondence between shapes is formulated as an estimation of sampling function. Thereafter, two possible approaches are presented to solve the point correspondence estimation problem. Finally, we propose an adaptation of k-means clustering for shape analysis in the proposed representation space. Experimental results show that the proposed representation is robust to uninformative cues, e.g., local shape perturbation and displacement. In comparison to state of the art methods, it achieves a high precision on the Swedish and the Flavia leaf datasets and a comparable result on MPEG-7, Kimia99 and Kimia216 datasets.

In this letter, we investigate optimal and relaxed constructive interference regions (CIR) for the symbol-level precoding (SLP) problem in the downlink of a multiuser multiple-input single-output (MISO) channel. We define two types of CIRs, namely, distance preserving CIR (DPCIR) and union bound CIR (UBCIR) for any given constellation shape and size. We then provide a systematic way to describe these regions as convex sets. Using the definitions of DPCIR and UBCIR, we show that the SLP power minimization problem, minimizing either sum or peak (per-antenna) transmit power, can always be formulated as a convex optimization problem. Our results indicate that these regions allow further reduction of the transmit power compared to the current state of the art without increasing the computational complexity at the transmitter or receiver.

In this letter, we study the optimal solution of multiuser symbol-level precoding (SLP) for minimization of the total transmit power under given signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio constraints. Adopting the distance preserving constructive interference regions (DPCIR), we first derive a simplified reformulation of the problem. Then, we analyze the structure of the optimal solution using the Karush–Kuhn–Tucker optimality conditions. This leads us to obtain a closed-form suboptimal SLP solution (CF-SLP) for the original problem. Meanwhile, we obtain the necessary and sufficient condition under which the power minimizer SLP is equivalent to the conventional zero-forcing beamforming (ZFBF). Simulation results show that CF-SLP provides significant gains over ZFBF, while performing quite close to the optimal SLP in scenarios with rather small number of users. The results further indicate that the CF-SLP method has a reduction of order$\mathbf {10^3}$in computational time compared to the optimal solution.

In this letter, we consider a network of single-antenna sensors that aim at the estimation of an unknown deterministic parameter. The sensors collect the observations and forward them to a fusion center via applying a phase-only beamforming weight. The derivation of the optimal beamforming weights requires the solution of a unit-modulus quadratic program (UQP), which in the relevant literature is solved via the semidefinite relaxation (SDR) technique or via a variation of the analytic constant modulus algorithm. The former achieves better performance, though it exhibits high computational cost that increases drastically with the number of sensors. The latter requires much less complexity, though it achieves worse performance. To that end, we propose an efficient algorithm for the solution of UQPs based on the alternating direction method of multipliers. The new approach achieves almost identical performance to that of the SDR-based approach while exhibiting significantly reduced computational complexity. The convergence of the proposed algorithm to a Karush–Kuhn–Tucker point is theoretically studied, and its effectiveness is verified via numerical results.

The narrow-beam operation in millimeter wave (mmWave) networks minimizes the network interference leading to noise-limited networks in contrast with interference-limited ones. The medium access control (MAC) layer throughput and interference management strategies heavily depend on the noise-limited or interference-limited regime. Yet, these regimes are not considered in recent mmWave MAC layer designs, which can potentially have disastrous consequences on the communication performance. In this paper, we investigate the performance of cache-enabled MAC-based mmWave ad hoc networks, where randomly distributed nodes are supported by a cache. The ad hoc nodes are modeled as homogenous Poisson point processes. Specifically, we study the optimal content placement (or caching placement) at desirable mmWave nodes using a network model that accounts for uncertainties both in node locations and blockages. We propose a contention-based multimedia delivery protocol to avoid collisions among the concurrent transmissions. Subsequently, only the node with smallest back-off timer among its contenders is allowed to transmit. We then characterize the average success probability of content delivery. We also characterize the cache hit ratio probability, and transmission probability of this system under essential factors, such as blockages, node density, path loss, and caching parameters.

In this article, we discuss enhanced full 360° 3D reconstruction of dynamic scenes containing non-rigidly deforming objects using data acquired from commodity depth or 3D cameras. Several approaches for enhanced and full 3D reconstruction of non-rigid objects have been proposed in the literature. These approaches suffer from several limitations due to requirement of a template, inability to tackle large local deformations and topology changes, inability to tackle highly noisy and low-resolution data, and inability to produce online results. We target online and template-free enhancement of the quality of noisy and low-resolution full 3D reconstructions of dynamic non-rigid objects. For this purpose, we propose a view-independent recursive and dynamic multi-frame 3D super-resolution scheme for noise removal and resolution enhancement of 3D measurements. The proposed scheme tracks the position and motion of each 3D point at every timestep by making use of the current acquisition and the result of the previous iteration. The effects of system blur due to per-point tracking are subsequently tackled by introducing a novel and efficient multi-level 3D bilateral total variation regularization. These characteristics enable the proposed scheme to handle large deformations and topology changes accurately. A thorough evaluation of the proposed scheme on both real and simulated data is carried out. The results show that the proposed scheme improves upon the performance of the state-of-the-art methods and is able to accurately enhance the quality of low-resolution and highly noisy 3D reconstructions while being robust to large local deformations.

We propose a deformation-based representation for analyzing expressions from three-dimensional (3D) faces. A point cloud of a 3D face is decomposed into an ordered deformable set of curves that start from a fixed point. Subsequently, a mapping function is defined to identify the set of curves with an element of a high-dimensional matrix Lie group, specifically the direct product of SE(3). Representing 3D faces as an element of a high-dimensional Lie group has two main advantages. First, using the group structure, facial expressions can be decoupled from a neutral face. Second, an underlying non-linear facial expression manifold can be captured with the Lie group and mapped to a linear space, Lie algebra of the group. This opens up the possibility of classifying facial expressions with linear models without compromising the underlying manifold. Alternatively, linear combinations of linearised facial expressions can be mapped back from the Lie algebra to the Lie group. The approach is tested on the Binghamton University 3D Facial Expression (BU-3DFE) and the Bosphorus datasets. The results show that the proposed approach performed comparably, on the BU-3DFE dataset, without using features or extensive landmark points.

This paper deals with the problem of the interference between multiple co-channel transmissions in the downlink of a multi-antenna wireless system. In this framework, symbol-level precoding (SLP) is a promising technique which is able to constructively exploit the multi-user interference and to transform it into useful power at the receiver side. While previous works on SLP were focused on exploiting the multi-user interference, in this paper, we extend this concept by jointly handling the interference both in the spatial dimension (multi-user interference) and in the temporal dimension (inter-symbol interference). Accordingly, we propose a novel precoding method, referred to as spatio-temporal SLP. In this new precoding paradigm, faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) signaling can be applied over multi-user MISO systems, and the inter-symbol interference can be tackled at the transmitter side, without additional complexity for the user terminals. While applying FTN signaling, the proposed optimization strategies perform a sum power minimization with quality-of-service constraints. Numerical results are presented in a comparative fashion to show the effectiveness of the proposed techniques, which outperform the state-of-the-art SLP schemes in terms of symbol error rate, effective rate, and energy efficiency.

Edge-caching has received much attention as an efficient technique to reduce delivery latency and network congestion during peak-traffic times by bringing data closer to end users. Existing works usually design caching algorithms separately from physical layer design. In this paper, we analyze edge-caching wireless networks by taking into account the caching capability when designing the signal transmission. Particularly, we investigate multi-layer caching where both base station (BS) and users are capable of storing content data in their local cache and analyze the performance of edge-caching wireless networks under two notable uncoded and coded caching strategies. First, we calculate backhaul and access throughputs of the two caching strategies for arbitrary values of cache size. The required backhaul and access throughputs are derived as a function of the BS and user cache sizes. Second, closed-form expressions for the system energy efficiency (EE) corresponding to the two caching methods are derived. Based on the derived formulas, the system EE is maximized via precoding vectors design and optimization while satisfying a predefined user request rate. Third, two optimization problems are proposed to minimize the content delivery time for the two caching strategies. Finally, numerical results are presented to verify the effectiveness of the two caching methods.

Optimizing non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) in multi-cell scenarios is much more challenging than the single-cell case because inter-cell interference must be considered. Most papers addressing NOMA consider a single cell. We take a significant step in analyzing NOMA in multi-cell scenarios. We explore the potential of NOMA networks in achieving optimal resource utilization with arbitrary topologies. Towards this goal, we investigate a broad class of problems consisting of optimizing power allocation and user pairing for any cost function that is monotonically increasing in time-frequency resource consumption. We propose an algorithm that achieves global optimality for this problem class. The basic idea is to prove that solving the joint optimization problem of power allocation, user pair selection, and time-frequency resource allocation amounts to solving a so-called iterated function without a closed form. We prove that the algorithm approaches optimality with fast convergence. Numerically, we evaluate and demonstrate the performance of NOMA for multi-cell scenarios in terms of resource efficiency and load balancing.

The article concerns the automatic calibration of a camera with radial distortion from a single image. It is known that, under the mild assumption of square pixels and zero skew, lines in the scene project into circles in the image, and three lines suffice to calibrate the camera up to an ambiguity between focal length and radial distortion. The calibration results highly depend on accurate circle estimation, which is hard to accomplish because lines tend to project into short circular arcs. To overcome this problem, we show that, given a short circular arc edge, it is possible to robustly determine a line that goes through the center of the corresponding circle. These lines, henceforth called Lines of Circle Centres (LCCs), are used in a new method that detects sets of parallel lines and estimates the calibration parameters, including the center and amount of distortion, focal length, and camera orientation with respect to the Manhattan frame. Extensive experiments in both semi-synthetic and real images show that our algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in unsupervised calibration from a single image, while providing more information.

Fast growth of Internet content and availability of electronic devices such as smart phones and laptops has created an explosive content demand. As one of the 5G technology enablers, caching is a promising technique to off-load the network backhaul and reduce the content delivery delay. Satellite communications provides immense area coverage and high data rate, hence, it can be used for large-scale content placement in the caches. In this work, we propose using hybrid mono/multi-beam satellite-terrestrial backhaul network for off-line edge caching of cellular base stations in order to reduce the traffic of terrestrial network. The off-line caching approach is comprised of content placement and content delivery phases. The content placement phase is performed based on local and global content popularities assuming that the content popularity follows Zipf-like distribution. In addition, we propose an approach to generate local content popularities based on a reference Zipf-like distribution to keep the correlation of content popularity. Simulation results show that the hybrid satellite-terrestrial architecture considerably reduces the content placement time while sustaining the cache hit ratio quite close to the upper-bound compared to the satellite-only method.

This paper investigates the implications of employing multiple transmissions as a diversity mechanism to counter the turbulence induced fading in satellite systems with optical feeder link and RF user links. Such a technique necessitates optimal estimation of the transmitted signal using the different streams on-board the satellite. Unlike traditional combining techniques like Maximal Ratio Combining (MRC) which assume signal independent noise, the aforementioned estimation is made interesting by the signal dependent noise characteristic of the optical processing in such systems. This paper investigates various estimators in the presence of signal dependent noise and assesses them based on performance and complexity. Towards this, the paper devises a signal model to illustrate the effect of various signal dependent and independent noise sources and derives estimators based on (a) averaging, (b) Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE), and (c) Maximum Likelihood (ML). The bias and the Mean Squared Error (MSE) of these estimators are analyzed and the impact of signal dependent noise characterized. Based on these results and complexity considerations, the paper presents recommendations for the receiver to be used in future generation of satellite systems with optical feeder links.

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) allows multiple users to simultaneously access the same time-frequency resource by using superposition coding and successive interfer- ence cancellation (SIC). Thus far, most papers on NOMA have focused on performance gain for one or sometimes two base stations. In this paper, we study multi-cell NOMA and provide a general framework for user clustering and power allocation, taking into account inter-cell interference, for optimizing resource allocation of NOMA in multi-cell networks of arbitrary topology. We provide a series of theoretical analysis, to algorithmically en- able optimization approaches. The resulting algorithmic notion is very general. Namely, we prove that for any performance metric that monotonically increases in the cells' resource consumption, we have convergence guarantee for global optimum. We apply the framework with its algorithmic concept to a multi-cell scenario to demonstrate the gain of NOMA in achieving significantly higher efficiency.

This paper investigates the problem of interference among the simultaneous multiuser transmissions in the downlink of multiple antennas systems. Symbol-level precoding (SLP) is a promising technique which has recently demonstrated large performance gains over the conventional block-level techniques. These gains can be translated in lower power requirements, improved energy efficiency, lower peak to average power ratio and resilience to non-linearities. However, previous works have not exploited the full potentials of SLP as it was only used to exploit multiuser interference spatially. In this paper, we extend this concept by using Faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) signaling and employing SLP to manage both multi-user and inter-symbol interference (ISI). We consider the aforementioned paradigm in the context of Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, where the number of transmit antennas is usually an order of magnitude larger than the number of served users. In this rich degrees of freedom (DoF) environment, we show that FTN SLP can double the effective user rates while improving the energy efficiency.

Interference is identified as a critical issue for satellite communication (SATCOM) systems and services. There is a growing concern in the satellite industry to manage and mitigate interference efficiently. While there are efficient techniques to monitor strong interference in SATCOM, weak interference is not so easily detected because of its low interference to signal and noise ratio (ISNR). To address this issue, this paper proposes and develops a technique which takes place on-board the satellite by decoding the desired signal, removing it from the total received signal and applying an Energy Detector (ED) in the remaining signal for the detection of interference. Different from the existing literature, this paper considers imperfect signal cancellation, examining how the decoding errors affect the sensing performance, derives the expressions for the probability of false alarm and provides a set of simulations results, verifying the efficiency of the technique.

Cognitive Radio (CR) communication has been considered as one of the promising technologies to enable dynamic spectrum sharing in the next generation of wireless networks. Among several possible enabling techniques, Spectrum Sensing (SS) is one of the key aspects for enabling opportunistic spectrum access in CR Networks (CRN). From practical perspectives, it is important to design low-complexity wideband CR receiver having low resolution Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) working at a reasonable sampling rate. In this context, this paper proposes a novel spatio-temporal wideband SS technique by employing multiple antennas and one-bit quantization at the CR node, which subsequently enables the use of a reasonable sampling rate. In our analysis, we show that for the same sensing performance requirements, the proposed wideband receiver can have lower power consumption than the conventional CR receiver equipped with a single-antenna and a high-resolution ADC. Furthermore, the proposed technique exploits the spatial dimension by estimating the direction of arrival of Primary User (PU) signals, which is not possible by the conventional SS methods and can be of a significant benefit in a CRN. Moreover, we evaluate the performance of the proposed technique and analyze the effects of one-bit quantization with the help of numerical results.

Hybrid Analog-Digital transceivers are employed with the view to reduce the hardware complexity and the energy consumption in millimeter wave/large antenna array systems by reducing the number of their Radio Frequency (RF) chains. However, the analog processing network requires power for its operation and it further introduces power losses, dependent on the number of the transceiver antennas and RF chains, that have to be compensated. Thus, the reduction in the power consumption is usually much less than it is expected and given that the hybrid solutions present in general inferior spectral efficiency than a fully digital one, it is possible for the former to be less energy efficient than the latter in several cases. Existing approaches propose hybrid solutions that maximize the spectral efficiency of the system without providing any insight on their actual energy requirements/efficiency. To that end, in this paper, a novel algorithmic framework is developed based on which energy efficient hybrid transceiver designs are developed and their performance is examined with respect to the employed number of RF chains. Solutions are proposed for fully and partially connected hybrid architectures. Numerical results provide insight on when a hybrid transceiver is the most energy efficient solution or not.

This work studies the performance of a cooperative network which consists of two channel-coded sources, multiple relays, and one destination. Due to the spectral efficiency constraint, we assume that a single time slot is dedicated to relaying. Conventional network-coded based cooperation (NCC) selects the best relay which uses network coding to serve the two sources simultaneously. It is shown that NCC, however, only achieves diversity of order two regardless of the number of available relays and the channel code. In this paper, we propose a novel partial relaying based cooperation (PARC) scheme to improve the system diversity in the finite signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. Firstly, closed-form expressions for the system bit error rate (BER) and diversity order of PARC are derived as a function of the operating SNR value and the minimum distance of the channel code. Secondly, we analytically show that the proposed PARC achieves full diversity order in the finite SNR regime, given that an appropriate channel code is used. Finally, numerical results verify our analysis and demonstrate a large SNR gain of PARC over NCC in the SNR region of interest.

The employment of a massive number of antennas in multiple-input multiple-output systems, known as massive MIMO, has drawn a new horizon for future communications systems to support a very large number of users. However, the actual number of active users in massive MIMO are limited by pilots training via the coherence time of the communication channel which is inversely proportional to the user velocity. The current model applies this coherence time for every user to design multiuser massive MIMO, which might result in a suboptimal solution since the users usually move at different speeds in practice. In this paper, we investigate multiuser massive MIMO by taking into consideration the differences in user velocities. In particular, two multiuser models are proposed to maximize the per-user spectral efficiency and the number of served users, respectively. System capacity of the proposed models is provided in analytical expression. Finally, numerical results demonstrate the advantages of our proposed models compared with the reference model.

Action recognition using dense trajectories is a popular concept. However, many spatio-temporal characteristics of the trajectories are lost in the final video representation when using a single Bag-of-Words model. Also, there is a significant amount of extracted trajectory features that are actually irrelevant to the activity being analyzed, which can considerably degrade the recognition performance. In this paper, we propose a human-tailored trajectory extraction scheme, in which trajectories are clustered using information from the human pose. Two configurations are considered; first, when exact skeleton joint positions are provided, and second, when only an estimate thereof is available. In both cases, the proposed method is further strengthened by using the concept of local Bag-of-Words, where a specific codebook is generated for each skeleton joint group. This has the advantage of adding spatial human pose awareness in the video representation, effectively increasing its discriminative power. We experimentally compare the proposed method with the standard dense trajectories approach on two challenging datasets.

In this paper, we introduce a novel method to transfer the deformation of a human body to another directly on a manifold. There exists a rich literature on transferring deformations based on Euclidean representations. However, a 3D human shape and pose live on a manifold and have a Riemannian structure. The proposed method uses the Lie Bodies manifold representation of 3D triangulated bodies. Its benefits are preserved, namely, minimum required degrees of freedom for any triangle deformation and no heuristics to constrain excessive ones. We give a closed form solution for deformation transfer directly on the Lie Bodies. The deformations have strictly positive determinants ensuring that non-physical deformations are removed. We show examples on three datasets, and highlight differences with the Euclidean deformation transfer.

The paper studies the problem of waveform design for a joint Radar-Communications (RadComms) system in an automotive setting characterized by a multitarget environment. The envisaged joint waveform allows exploitation of existing infrastructure to support additional functionalities. In this contribution, an automotive radar employing Phase Modulated Continuous Waveform (PMCW) is considered wherein, the transmission of communications bits is additionally facilitated. Particularly, the RadComms system is enabled by the transmission of Differential Phase Shift Keying (DPSK) communications symbols, each symbol modulated by the PMCW sequence. Further, the receiver processing includes demodulation of the communication symbols in addition to the extraction of the radar parameters — range, Angles of Arrival (AoA) and Doppler returns of the targets. In particular, FFT and subspace-based methods are proposed for estimating the radar parameters which are subsequently used in the demodulation of the communication symbols using diversity combining techniques. The performed study demonstrates the impact of the joint set-up on the two systems. It also highlights the effect of system parameters on the performance of receiver algorithms and the trade-off between the FFT and sub-spaced based processing.

In this paper, we study a problem of relay selection in a two-hop relaying network where the destination is equipped with Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transmission (SWIPT) capabilities. In contrast to conventional cooperative networks, the destination node is considered to be capable of simultaneously decoding information and harvesting energy from both the source and the relay transmissions. In this context, we formulate two optimization problems for both time switching (TS) and power splitting (PS) based SWIPT schemes. The first problem is the maximization of the overall user data rate while ensuring a minimum harvested power. The second problem focuses on the maximization of the overall harvested power at the user under the constraint on the minimum achievable rate. Assuming an amplify-and-forward (AF) relay protocol, closed-form solutions are obtained for the selection of an optimal relay, relay amplification coefficient and the optimal time or power splitting factor. The performance of the proposed relay selection strategies with the aforementioned objectives is evaluated and compared with the case of random relay selection. Furthermore, the Rate-Energy (R-E) tradeoff performance of the scenario with both the direct and indirect relay-assisted links is compared to the case where only a relay-assisted link is available. Our simulation results demonstrate the significant benefits of combining direct and indirect links in SWIPT-enabled cooperative networks in terms of the R-E tradeoff.

We present a precoded multi-user communication test-bed to demonstrate forward link interference mitigation techniques in a multi-beam satellite system scenario which will enable a full frequency reuse scheme. The developed test-bed provides an end-to-end precoding demonstration, which includes a transmitter, a multi-beam satellite channel emulator and user receivers. Each of these parts can be reconfigured accordingly to the desired test scenario. Precoded communications allow full frequency reuse in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel environments, where several coordinated antennas simultaneously transmit to a number of independent receivers. The developed real-time transmission test-bed assist in demonstrating, designing and benchmarking of the new Symbol-Level Precoding (SLP) techniques, where the data information is used, along with the channel state information, in order to exploit the multi-user interference and transform it into useful power at the receiver side. The demonstrated SLP techniques are designed in order to be computationally efficient, and can be generalized to others multi-channel interference scenarios.

In this paper, we investigate the secrecy outage probability of random wireless networks from the perspective of the k-th best source, which has still not been well characterized. We consider the artificial noise (AN) transmission strategy at source nodes to confuse the eavesdropper. Furthermore, we use a concept of security-region based on the k-th best source index. This is pragmatic in creating a protected communication zone for the typical destination and also in bounding the number of sources that can cooperate in a Coordinated Multi-point transmission (CoMP) network. We further derive the secrecy outage probability for these CoMP sources based on the security-region. We also provide a closed-form expression for the maximum number of eavesdroppers for a given secrecy outage constraint, which can effect the secure communication. Tractable numerical results are presented under various assumptions of densities, antenna gains, AN transmission factors and path loss exponents.

Content caching is an efficient technique to reduce delivery latency and system congestion during peak-traffic times by bringing data closer to end users. Existing works on caching usually assume symmetric networks with identical user requests distribution, which might be in contrast to practical scenarios where the number of users is usually arbitrary. In this paper, we investigate a cache-assisted heterogeneous network in which edge nodes or base stations (BSs) are capable of storing content data in their local cache. We consider general practical scenarios where each edge node is serving an arbitrary number of users. First, we derive an optimal storage allocation over the BSs to minimize the shared backhaul throughput for a uncoded caching policy. Second, a novel coded caching strategy is proposed to further reduce the shared backhaul's load. Finally, the effectiveness of our proposed caching strategy is demonstrated via numerical results.

Hybrid analog-digital transceivers are employed with the view to reduce the hardware complexity and the energy consumption in millimeter wave/large antenna array systems by reducing the number of their radio frequency (RF) chains. However, the analog processing network requires power for its operation and it further introduces power losses, dependent on the number of the transceiver antennas and RF chains that have to be compensated. Thus, the reduction in the power consumption is usually much less than it is expected and given that the hybrid solutions present in general inferior spectral efficiency than a fully digital one, it is possible for the former to be less energy efficient than the latter in several cases. Existing approaches propose hybrid solutions that maximize the spectral efficiency of the system without providing any insight on their energy requirements/efficiency. To that end, in this paper, a novel algorithmic framework is developed based on which energy efficient hybrid transceiver designs are derived and their performance is examined with respect to the number of RF chains and antennas. Solutions are proposed for fully and partially connected hybrid architectures and for both single- and multi-carrier systems under the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing modulation. Simulations and theoretical results provide insight on the cases, where a hybrid transceiver is the most energy efficient solution or not.

We propose a novel approach for enhancing depth videos containing non-rigidly deforming objects. Depth sensors are capable of capturing depth maps in real-time but suffer from high noise levels and low spatial resolutions. While solutions for reconstructing 3D details in static scenes, or scenes with rigid global motions have been recently proposed, handling unconstrained non-rigid deformations in relative complex scenes remains a challenge. Our solution consists in a recursive dynamic multi-frame super-resolution algorithm where the relative local 3D motions between consecutive frames are directly accounted for. We rely on the assumption that these 3D motions can be decoupled into lateral motions and radial displacements. This allows to perform a simple local per-pixel tracking where both depth measurements and deformations are dynamically optimized. The geometric smoothness is subsequently added using a multi-level$L_1$minimization with a bilateral total variation regularization. The performance of this method is thoroughly evaluated on both real and synthetic data. As compared to alternative approaches, the results show a clear improvement in reconstruction accuracy and in robustness to noise, to relative large non-rigid deformations, and to topological changes. Moreover, the proposed approach, implemented on a CPU, is shown to be computationally efficient and working in real-time.

Symbol-level precoding is a new paradigm for multiuser multiple-antenna downlink systems aimed at creating constructive interference among transmitted data streams. This can be enabled by designing the precoded signal of the multiantenna transmitter on a symbol level, taking into account both channel state information and data symbols. Previous literature has studied this paradigm for Mary phase shift keying modulations by addressing various performance metrics, such as power minimization and maximization of the minimum rate. In this paper, we extend this to generic multi-level modulations, i.e., Mary quadrature amplitude modulation by establishing connection to PHY layer multicasting with phase constraints. Furthermore, we address the adaptive modulation schemes which are crucial in enabling the throughput scaling of symbol-level precoded systems. In this direction, we design the signal processing algorithms for minimizing the required power under per-user signal to interference noise ratio or goodput constraints. Extensive numerical results show that the proposed algorithm provides considerable power and energy efficiency gains, while adapting the employed modulation scheme to match the requested data rate.

In conventional cognitive radio systems, the secondary user employs a “listen-before-talk” paradigm, where it senses if the primary user is active or idle, before it decides to access the licensed spectrum. However, this method faces challenges, with the most important one being the reduction of the secondary user’s throughput, as no data transmission takes place during the sensing period. In this context, the idea of simultaneous spectrum sensing and data transmission is proposed. This paper studies a system model where this concept is obtained through the collaboration of the secondary transmitter with the secondary receiver. First, the secondary receiver decodes the signal from the secondary transmitter, removes it from the total received signal, and then carries out spectrum sensing in the remaining signal in order to determine the presence/absence of the primary user. Different from the existing literature, this paper considers the imperfect signal cancellation, evaluating how the decoding errors affect the sensing reliability, and derives the analytical expressions for the probability of false alarm. Finally, numerical results are presented illustrating the accuracy of the proposed analysis.

In this paper, an intelligent probing method for interference constraint learning is proposed to allow a centralized cognitive radio network (CRN) to access the frequency band of a primary user (PU) in an underlay cognitive communication scenario. The main idea is that the CRN probes the PU and subsequently eavesdrops the reverse PU link to acquire the binary ACK/NACK packet. This feedback is implicit channel state information of the PU link, indicating whether the probing-induced interference is harmful or not. The intelligence of this sequential probing process lies in the selection of the power levels of the secondary users, which aims to minimize the number of probing attempts, a clearly active learning (AL) procedure, and expectantly the overall PU QoS degradation. The enhancement introduced in this paper is that we incorporate the probability of each feedback being correct into this intelligent probing mechanism by using a multivariate Bayesian AL method. This technique is inspired by the probabilistic bisection algorithm and the deterministic cutting plane methods (CPMs). The optimality of this multivariate Bayesian AL method is proven and its effectiveness is demonstrated through numerical simulations. Computationally cheap CPM adaptations are also presented, which outperform existing AL methods.

In this paper, we introduce a similarity metric for curved shapes that can be described, distinctively, by ordered points. The proposed method represents a given curve as a point in the deformation space, the direct product of rigid transformation matrices, such that the successive action of the matrices on a fixed starting point reconstructs the full curve. In general, both open and closed curves are represented in the deformation space modulo shape orientation and orientation preserving diffeomorphisms. The use of direct product Lie groups to represent curved shapes led to an explicit formula for geodesic curves and the formulation of a similarity metric between shapes by the L2-norm on the Lie algebra. Additionally, invariance to reparametrization or estimation of point correspondence between shapes is performed as an intermediate step for computing geodesics. Furthermore, since there is no computation of differential quantities on the curves, our representation is more robust to local perturbations and needs no pre-smoothing. We compare our method with the elastic shape metric defined through the square root velocity (SRV) mapping, and other shape matching approaches.

This paper investigates the problem of the interference among multiple simultaneous transmissions in the downlink channel of a multi- antenna wireless system. A symbol-level precoding scheme is considered, where the data information is used, along with the channel state information, in order to exploit the multi-user interference and transform it into useful power at the receiver side. In this framework, it is important to consider the power limitations individually for each transmitting antenna, since a common practice in multi-antenna systems is the use of separate per-antenna amplifiers. Thus, herein the problem of per-antenna power minimization in symbol-level precoding is formulated and solved, under Quality-of-Service constraints. In the proposed approach, the precoding design is optimized in order to control the instantaneous power transmitted by the antennas, and more specifically to limit the power peaks, while guaranteeing some specific target signal-to-noise ratios at the receivers. Numerical results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, which outperforms the existing state of the art techniques in terms of reduction of the power peaks and of the peak-to-average power ratio across the transmitting antennas.

In this work, a directional modulation-based technique is devised to enhance the security of a multi-antenna wireless communication system employing M-PSK modulation to convey information. The directional modulation method operates by steering the array beam in such a way that the phase of the received signal at the receiver matches that of the intended M-PSK symbol. Due to the difference between the channels of the legitimate receiver and the eavesdropper, the signals received by the eavesdropper generally encompass a phase component different than the actual symbols. As a result, the transceiver which employs directional modulation can impose a high symbol error rate on the eavesdropper without requiring to know the eavesdropper's channel. The optimal directional modulation beamformer is designed to minimize the consumed power subject to satisfying a specific resulting phase and minimal signal amplitude at each antenna of the legitimate receiver. The simulation results show that the directional modulation results in a much higher symbol error rate at the eavesdropper compared to the conventional benchmark scheme, i.e., zero-forcing precoding at the transmitter.

One of the fundamental issues in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is to count and localize multiple targets accurately. In this context, there has been an increasing interest in the literature in using Compressive Sensing (CS) based techniques by exploiting the sparse nature of spatially distributed targets within the monitored area. However, most existing works aim to count and localize the sparse targets utilizing a Single Measurement Vector (SMV) model. In this paper, we consider the problem of counting and localizing multiple targets exploiting the joint sparsity feature of a Multiple Measurement Vector (MMV) model. Furthermore, the conventional MMV formulation in which the same measurement matrix is used for all sensors is not valid any more in practical time-varying wireless environments. To overcome this issue, we reformulate the MMV problem into a conventional SMV in which MMVs are vectorized. Subsequently, we propose a novel reconstruction algorithm which does not need the prior knowledge of the sparsity level unlike the most existing CS-based approaches. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm and demonstrate the superiority of the proposed MMV approach over its SMV counterpart in terms of target counting and localization accuracies.

We consider the problem of sum-rate maximization in massive MIMO two-way relay networks with multiple (communication) operators employing the amplify-and-forward (AF) protocol. The aim is to design the relay amplification matrix (i.e., the relay beamformer) to maximize the achievable communication sum-rate through the relay. The design problem for the case of single-antenna users can be cast as a non-convex optimization problem, which in general, belongs to a class of NP-hard problems. We devise a method based on the minorization-maximization technique to obtain quality solutions to the problem. Each iteration of the proposed method consists of solving a strictly convex unconstrained quadratic program; this task can be done quite efficiently such that the suggested algorithm can handle the beamformer design for relays with up to ∼ 70 antennas within a few minutes on an ordinary PC. Such a performance lays the ground for the proposed method to be employed in massive MIMO scenarios.

In this paper, we present an optimization framework for designing precoding (a.k.a. beamforming) signals that are instrumental in achieving a fair user performance through the networks. The precoding design problem in such scenarios can typically be formulated as a non-convex max-min fractional quadratic program. Using a penalized version of the original design problem, we derive a simplified quadratic reformulation of the problem in terms of the signal (to be designed). Each iteration of the proposed design framework consists of a combination of power method-like iterations and the Gram-Schmidt process, and as a result, enjoys a low computational cost. Moreover, the suggested approach can handle various types of signal constraints such as total-power, per-antenna power, unimodularity, or discrete-phase requirements - an advantage which is not shared by other existing approaches in the literature.

In this paper, a novel simplified statistical approach to evaluate the error performance bound of Ordered Statistics Decoding (OSD) of Linear Block Codes (LBC) is investigated. First, we propose a novel statistic which depicts the number of errors contained in the ordered received noisy codeword. Then, simplified expressions for the probability mass function and cumulative distribution function are derived exploiting the implicit statistical independence property of the samples of the received noisy codeword before reordering. Second, we incorporate the properties of this new statistic to derive the simplified error performance bound of the OSD algorithm for all order-I reprocessing. Finally, with the proposed approach, we obtain computationally simpler error performance bounds of the OSD than those proposed in literature for all length LBCs.

In this paper, we study the performance of hybrid cognitive radio systems that combine the benefits of interweave and underlay systems by employing a spectrum sensing and a power control mechanism at the Secondary Transmitter (ST). Existing baseline models considered for performance analysis assume perfect knowledge of the involved channels at the ST, however, such situations hardly exist in practical deployments. Motivated by this fact, we propose a novel approach that incorporates channel estimation at the ST, and consequently characterizes the performance of Hybrid Systems (HSs) under realistic scenarios. To capture the impact of imperfect channel knowledge, we propose outage constraints on the detection probability at the ST and on the interference power received at the primary receiver. Our analysis reveals that the baseline model overestimates the performance of the HS in terms of achievable secondary user throughput. Finally, based on the proposed estimation-sensing-throughput tradeoff, we determine suitable estimation and sensing durations that effectively capture the effect of imperfect channel knowledge and subsequently enhance the achievable secondary user throughput.

In this paper, we consider the cognitive satellite uplink where satellite terminals reuse frequency bands of Fixed-Service (FS) terrestrial microwave links which are the incumbent users in the Ka 27.5–29.5 GHz band. In this scenario, the transmitted power of the cognitive satellite terminals has to be controlled so as to satisfy the interference constraints imposed by the incumbent FS receivers. We investigate and analyze a set of optimization frameworks for the power and rate allocation problem in the considered cognitive satellite scenario. The main objective is to shed some light on this rather unexplored scenario and demonstrate feasibility of the terrestrial-satellite co-existence. In particular, we formulate a multi-objective optimization problem where the rates of the satellite terminals form the objective vector and derive a general iterative framework which provides a Pareto-optimal solution. Next, we transform the multi-objective optimization problem into different single-objective optimization problems, focusing on popular figures of merit such as the sum-rate or the rate fairness. Supporting results based on numerical simulations are provided which compare the different proposed approaches.

Precoding for multibeam satellites with aggressive frequency reuse has attracted interest of late towards enhancing system capacity. Most of the works on precoding mitigate the linear co-channel interference between the beams caused by frequency reuse. However, the high power amplifier (HPA), an integral part of the satellite payload, is inherently non linear. Non-linear amplification combined with the linear co-channel interference introduces non-linear co-channel distortions at the receiver. Further, signals with very high peak to average power ratios (PAPR), typical of spectrally efficient modulations, are sensitive to the non-linear characteristic of the HPA and necessitate large back-off to have manageable distortion levels. In this work, a novel architecture comprising multistream Crest Factor Reduction (signal pre-clipping) and Signal Predistortion (SPD) in cascade, is devised to counter the non-linearities and co-channel interference in multibeam satellite systems. An iterative algorithm to optimize the parameters of the signal clipping and predistortion is devised taking recourse to analytical derivations. The proposed joint estimation paradigm is shown to compare favorably with state-of-art and provides a framework to combine predistortion and precoding.

This paper considers coordinated multicast beam-forming in a multi-cell wireless network. Each multiantenna base station (BS) serves multiple groups of single antenna users by generating a single beam with common data per group. The aim is to minimize the sum power of BSs while satisfying user-specific SINR targets. We propose centralized and distributed multicast beamforming algorithms for multi-cell multigroup systems. The NP-hard multicast problem is tackled by approximating it as a convex problem using the standard semidefinite relaxation method. The resulting semidefinite program (SDP) can be solved via centralized processing if global channel knowledge is available. To allow a distributed implementation, the primal decomposition method is used to turn the SDP into two optimization levels. The higher level is in charge of optimizing inter-cell interference while the lower level optimizes beamformers for given inter-cell interference constraints. The distributed algorithm requires local channel knowledge at each BS and scalar information exchange between BSs. If the solution has unit rank, it is optimal for the original problem. Otherwise, the Gaussian randomization method is used to find a feasible solution. The superiority of the proposed algorithms over conventional schemes is demonstrated via numerical evaluation.

In this paper, an intelligent probing method for interference constraint learning is proposed to allow a centralized Cognitive Radio Network (CRN) to access the frequency band of a Primary User (PU) operating based on an Adaptive Coding and Modulation (ACM) protocol. The main idea is that the CRN probes the PU and subsequently applies a Modulation and Coding Classification (MCC) technique to acquire the Modulation and Coding scheme (MCS) of the PU. This feedback is an implicit channel state information (CSI) of the PU link, indicating how harmful the probing induced interference is. The intelligence of this sequential probing process lies on the selection of the power levels of the Secondary Users (SUs) which aims to minimize the number of probing attempts, a clearly Active Learning (AL) procedure, and consequently the overall PU QoS degradation. The enhancement introduced in this work is that we incorporate the probability of each feedback being correct into this intelligent probing mechanism by using a univariate Bayesian Nonparamet-ric AL method, the Probabilistic Bisection Algorithm (PBA). An adaptation of the PBA is implemented for higher dimensions and its effectiveness as an uncertainty driven AL method is demonstrated through numerical simulations.

Knowledge of interacting channels is essential for characterizing the performance of a cognitive radio system in terms of interference power received by a primary receiver and throughput at a secondary receiver. Baseline models considered for the performance characterization assume perfect knowledge of the interacting channels. Recently, an analytical framework has been proposed that incorporates channel estimation and subsequently characterizes the performance of cognitive Interweave Systems (ISs). However, the analysis was pertained to the deterministic behaviour of the interacting channels. In this paper, we extend the characterization of the aforementioned framework to investigate the influence of channel fading on the performance of the IS. Our analysis indicate that an inappropriate choice of estimation time can severely degrade the performance of the IS in terms of achievable secondary throughput.

The demand for wider bandwidths has motivated the need for wireless systems to migrate to higher frequency bands. In line with this trend is an envisaged deployment of Ka-band (or mmWave) cellular infrastructure. Further, to improve the spectral efficiency, developing full-duplex radio transceivers is gaining momentum. In view of this move, the paper proposes the possibility of reusing the satellite feeder uplink band in the full-duplex small cells. The motivation for such a reuse is two-fold :(a) there is virtually no interference from the small cells to the incumbent in-orbit satellite receiver, and (b) directive feeder antennas, with possibly additional isolation and processing causing negligible interference to the small cells. The presented interference analysis clearly supports the proposed coexistence.

Among several potential applications of Full- Duplex (FD) technology, FD Cognitive Radio (CR) communication is one important area where FD can provide several advantages and possibilities such as concurrent sensing and transmission, improved sensing efficiency and the secondary throughput. However, the main challenge is to mitigate the harmful effects of the residual Self-Interference (SI) which depends on the SI mitigation capability of the employed technique. One way to mitigate this effect is to control the transmit power of the CR node, however, this power control over the entire frame duration results in a power- throughput tradeoff. In this context, we propose a novel Two-Phase Concurrent Sensing and Transmission (2P-CST) framework in which a CR performs concurrent sensing and transmission for a certain fraction of the frame duration by employing a power control mechanism and for the remaining fraction of the frame duration, the CR only transmits with the full power. The proposed framework allows the flexibility to optimize the sensing time and the transmit power in order to maximize the achievable throughput of the FD-CR system. Our results demonstrate that the proposed 2P-CST FD transmission strategy provides better performance in terms of the achievable throughput than the conventional Periodic Sensing and Transmission (PST) and CST techniques.

This paper revisits the problem of human action recognition from skeleton joint locations, and analyses the tradeoff of sampling the joint space with respect to the recognition performance and computational complexity. The provided insights led to the design of a new algorithm for automatically selecting the most appropriate set of joints for each action. During the training stage, the approach applies a guided joint sampling strategy for learning different SVM classifiers, selecting the classifier that maximizes confidence and ambiguity metrics. Experimental results on three action datasets show that pre-selecting the most varying skeleton joints for each action dramatically reduces the computational complexity while keeping competitive recognition rates.

This paper addresses the problem of exploiting interference among simultaneous multiuser transmissions in the downlink of multiple-antenna systems. Using symbol-level precoding, a new approach toward addressing the multiuser interference is discussed through jointly utilizing the channel state information (CSI) and data information (DI). The interference among the data streams is transformed under certain conditions to a useful signal that can improve the signal-to-interference noise ratio (SINR) of the downlink transmissions and as a result the system’s energy efficiency. In this context, new constructive interference precoding techniques that tackle the transmit power minimization (min power) with individual SINR constraints at each user’s receiver have been proposed. In this paper, we generalize the constructive interference (CI) precoding design under the assumption that the received MPSK symbol can reside in a relaxed region in order to be correctly detected. Moreover, a weighted maximization of the minimum SNR among all users is studied taking into account the relaxed detection region. Symbol error rate analysis (SER) for the proposed precoding is discussed to characterize the tradeoff between transmit power reduction and SER increase due to the relaxation. Based on this tradeoff, the energy efficiency performance of the proposed technique is analyzed. Finally, extensive numerical results show that the proposed schemes outperform other state-of-the-art techniques.

Secondary access to the licensed spectrum is viable only if the interference is avoided at the primary system. In this regard, different paradigms have been conceptualized in the existing literature. Among these, interweave systems (ISs) that employ spectrum sensing have been widely investigated. Baseline models investigated in the literature characterize the performance of the IS in terms of a sensing-throughput tradeoff, however, this characterization assumes perfect knowledge of the involved channels at the secondary transmitter, which is unavailable in practice. Motivated by this fact, we establish a novel approach that incorporates channel estimation in the system model, and consequently investigate the impact of imperfect channel knowledge on the performance of the IS. More particularly, the variation induced in the detection probability affects the detector’s performance at the secondary transmitter, which may result in severe interference at the primary receivers. In this view, we propose employing average and outage constraints on the detection probability, in order to capture the performance of the IS. Our analysis reveals that with an appropriate choice of the estimation time determined by the proposed approach, the performance degradation of the IS can be effectively controlled, and subsequently the achievable secondary throughput can be significantly enhanced.

We consider the problem of sum-rate maximization in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) amplify-and-forward relay networks with multi-operator. The aim is to design the MIMO relay amplification matrix (i.e., the relay beamformer) to maximize the achievable communication sum rate through the relay. The design problem for the case of single-antenna users can be cast as a non-convex optimization problem, which, in general, belongs to a class of NP-hard problems. We devise a method based on the minorization–maximization technique to obtain quality solutions to the problem. Each iteration of the proposed method consists of solving a strictly convex unconstrained quadratic program. This task can be done quite efficiently, such that the suggested algorithm can handle the beamformer design for relays with up to$\sim 70$antennas within a few minutes on an ordinary personal computer. Such a performance lays the ground for the proposed method to be employed in medium-scale (or lower regime massive) MIMO scenarios.

The constructive interference concept in the downlink of multiple-antenna systems is addressed in this paper. The concept of the joint exploitation of the channel state information (CSI) and data information (DI) is discussed. Using symbol-level precoding, the interference between data streams is transformed Under certain conditions into useful signal that can improve the signal to interference noise ratio (SINR) of the downlink transmissions. In the previous work, different constructive interference precoding techniques have been proposed for the MPSK scenario. In this context, a novel constructive interference precoding technique that tackles the transmit power minimization (min-power) with individual SINR constraints at each user's receivers is proposed assuming MQAM modulation. Extensive simulations are performed to validate the proposed technique.

In this work, we study the design of a precoder on the user downlink of a multibeam satellite channel. The variations in channel due to phase noise introduced by on-board oscillators and the long round trip delay result in outdated channel information at the transmitter. The phase uncertainty is modelled and a robust design framework is formulated based on availability and power constraints. The optimization problem is cast into the convex paradigm after approximations and the benefits of the resulting precoder are highlighted.

Efficient power amplification is inherently a non linear operation that introduces unwanted interference in the amplified signal. Strong inter-symbol interference is generated when the amplifier non linearity is combined with channel memory effects. Further, signals with very high peak to average power ratio, typical of multiple carrier systems, are even more sensitive to the non linearities resulting in severe distortion effects. Signal pre-clipping (crest factor reduction) and predistortion are conventional countermeasure techniques to reduce the generated non linear distortion and improve power and spectral efficiency. In this work, novel optimization methods for predistortion and pre-clipping are analytically derived for a general non-linear communication channel with memory. A combined architecture in which crest factor reduction is followed by signal predistortion is proposed and the parameters are estimated resorting to iterative algorithms based on least squares method. Performance evaluation of the estimation techniques shows the effectiveness of the derived algorithms and significant gain compared to previously known methods.

Understanding the performance of cognitive radio systems is of great interest. To perform dynamic spectrum access, different paradigms are conceptualized in the literature. Of these, Underlay System (US) has caught much attention in the recent past. According to US, a power control mechanism is employed at the Secondary Transmitter (ST) to constrain the interference at the Primary Receiver (PR) below a certain threshold. However, it requires the knowledge of channel towards PR at the ST. This knowledge can be obtained by estimating the received power, assuming a beacon or a pilot channel transmission by the PR. This estimation is never perfect, hence the induced error may distort the true performance of the US. Motivated by this fact, we propose a novel model that captures the effect of channel estimation errors on the performance of the system. More specifically, we characterize the performance of the US in terms of the estimation-throughput tradeoff. Furthermore, we determine the maximum achievable throughput for the secondary link. Based on numerical analysis, it is shown that the conventional model overestimates the performance of the US.

Herein, we study the spectral coexistence of Geostationary (GEO) Fixed Satellite Services (FSS) downlink and Broadcasting Satellite Services (BSS) feeder links in the Ka-band (17.3 – 18.1 GHz) which is primarily allocated for BSS feeder links. Firstly, a novel cognitive spectrum exploitation framework is proposed in order to utilize the available band efficiently. Subsequently, based on the interference analysis carried out between these systems, two cognitive approaches, namely Carrier Allocation (CA) and Beamforming (BF), are investigated under the considered framework assuming the availability of an accurate Radio Environment Map (REM). The employed techniques allow the flexibility of using additional shared carriers for the FSS downlink system along with the already available exclusive carriers (19.7 – 20.2 GHz), thus increasing the overall system throughput. It is shown that a significant improvement in the per beam throughput as well as in the beam availability can be achieved by applying CA and BF approaches in the considered scenario.

Exploring innovative cellular architectures to achieve enhanced system capacity and good coverage has become a critical issue towards realizing the fifth generation (5G) of wireless communications. In this context, this paper proposes a novel concept of an intelligent Amplify and Forward (AF) 5G repeater for enabling the densification of future cellular networks. The proposed repeater features a Spectrum Sensing (SS) intelligence capability and utilizes such intelligence in a complementary fashion in comparison to its existing counterpart (e.g., Cognitive Radio) by detecting the active channels within the assigned spectrum. This intelligence allows the proposed repeater to carry out selective amplification of the active channels in contrast to the full amplification in conventional AF repeaters. Furthermore, the performance of a Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA) based two hop cellular network utilizing the proposed repeater is evaluated in terms of the system throughput. Simulation results demonstrate up to 13 % increase when compared with the conventional repeaters. Moreover, the effect of SS errors on the system capacity is analyzed.

A statistical model for shapes in R2or R3is proposed. Shape modelling is a difficult problem mainly due to the non-linear nature of its space. Our approach considers curves as shape contours, and models their deformations with respect to a de-formable template shape. Contours are uniformly sampled into a discrete sequence of points. Hence, the deformation of a shape is formulated as an action of transformation matrices on each of these points. A parametrized stochastic model based on Markov process is proposed to model shape variability in the deformation space. The model's parameters are estimated from a labeled training dataset. Moreover, a similarity metric based on the Mahalanobis distance is proposed. Subsequently, the model has been successfully tested for shape recognition, synthesis, and retrieval.

When constructing a credit card fraud detection model, it is very important to extract the right features from transactional data. This is usually done by aggregating the transactions in order to observe the spending behavioral patterns of the customers. In this paper we propose to create a new set of features based on analyzing the periodic behavior of the time of a transaction using the von Mises distribution. Using a real credit card fraud dataset provided by a large European card processing company, we compare state-of-the-art credit card fraud detection models, and evaluate how the different sets of features have an impact on the results. By including the proposed periodic features into the methods, the results show an average increase in savings of 13%. The aforementioned card processing company is currently incorporating the methodology proposed in this paper into their fraud detection system.

Spectrum Sensing (SS) is one of the fundamental mechanisms required by a Cognitive Radio (CR). Among several SS techniques, cyclostationary feature detection is considered as an important technique due to its robustness against noise variance uncertainty and its capability to distinguish among different systems on the basis of their cyclostationary features. However, one of the main limitations of this detector in practical scenarios is its performance degradation in the presence of cyclic frequency mismatch, which mainly arises due to the lack of knowledge about the transmitter clock/oscillator errors at the detector. In this context, this paper proposes a novel solution to address the cyclic frequency mismatch problem utilizing the Slepian basis expansion instead of the widely used Fourier basis expansion. It is shown that the proposed approach captures the deviation in the cyclic frequency caused by the aforementioned imperfections and hence provides a significant improvement in the sensing performance in the presence of cyclic frequency mismatch.

A fundamental problem facing the next generation of Satellite Communications (SatComs) is the spectrum congestion and how the scarce spectral resources are allocated to meet the demand for higher rate and reliable broadband communications. In this context, this paper addresses the cognitive satellite uplink where satellite terminals reuse frequency bands of Fixed-Service (FS) terrestrial microwave links which are the incumbent users in the Ka band. In this scenario, the transmit power of the satellite terminals has to be controlled such that the total aggregated interference at the FS system is kept below some acceptable threshold. In this paper, we review simple and efficient power allocation techniques available in the literature and, with slight adaptations, we evaluate them to the proposed satellite uplink and terrestrial FS co-existence scenario. The presented numerical results highlight the tradeoff between the level of channel state information and the rates that can be achieved at the satellite network.

Satellite communication (SatCom) is facing a spectrum scarcity problem due to the limited available exclusive spectrum and the high demand of the broadband satellite services. In this context, there has been an increasing interest in the satellite community to exploit the non- exclusive Ka-band spectrum in order to enhance the spectral efficiency of future broadband satellite systems. Herein, we propose a novel concept of enabling the spectral coexistence of satellite and terrestrial networks using three dimensional (3D) beamforming, which exploits the elevation dimension in addition to the commonly used azimuth dimension. The proposed beamforming solution is employed in a Multiple-Input Low Noise Block Downconverter (MLNB) based Feed Array Reflector (FAR) in contrast to the widely used Uniform Linear Array (ULA) structure. Within the employed antenna structure, the performance of the proposed beamforming solution is evaluated considering different feed arrangements. Finally, a database-assisted approach and two blind approaches are suggested for the effective implementation of the proposed solutions.

A digital predistortion (DPD) scheme is presented for non‐linear distortion mitigation in multi‐carrier satellite communication channels. The proposed DPD has a multiple‐input multiple‐output architecture similar to data DPD schemes. However, it enhances the mitigation performance of data DPDs using a multi‐rate processing algorithm to achieve spectrum broadening of non‐linear operators. Compared to single carrier (single‐input single‐output) signal (waveform) DPD schemes, the proposed DPD has lower digital processing rate reducing the required hardware cost of the predistorter. The proposed DPD outperforms, in total degradation, both data and signal DPD schemes. Further, it performs closest to a channel bound described by an ideally mitigated channel with limited maximum output power.

Design of high bandwidth and reliable feeder links are central toward provisioning new services on the user link of a multibeam satellite communication system. Toward this, utilization of the Q/V band and an exploitation of multiple gateways (GWs) as a transmit diversity measure for overcoming severe propagation effects are being considered. In this context, this contribution deals with the design of a feeder link comprising$N+P$GWs ($N$active and$P$redundant GWs). Toward provisioning the desired availability, a novel switching scheme is analyzed and practical aspects such as prediction-based switching and switching rate are discussed. Unlike most relevant works, a dynamic rain attenuation model is used to analytically derive average outage probability in the fundamental$1+1$GW case. Building on this result, an analysis for the$N+P$scenario leading to a quantification of the end-to-end performance is provided. This analysis aids system sizing by illustrating the interplay between the number of active and redundant GWs on the chosen metrics: average outage and average switching rate.

In this paper, we investigate joint beamforming and power allocation in multicell multiple-input single-output (MISO) downlink networks. Our goal is to maximize the utility function defined as the ratio between the system weighted sum rate and the total power consumption subject to the users’ quality of service requirements and per-base-station (BS) power constraints. The considered problem is nonconvex and its objective is in a fractional form. To circumvent this problem, we first resort to an virtual uplink formulations of the the primal problem by introducing an auxiliary variable and applying the uplink-downlink duality theory. By exploiting the analytic structure of the optimal beamformers in the dual uplink problem, an efficient algorithm is then developed to solve the considered problem. Furthermore, to reduce further the exchange overhead between coordinated BSs in a large-scale antenna system, an effective coordinated power allocation solution only based on statistical channel state information is reached by deriving the asymptotic optimization problem, which is used to obtain the power allocation in a long-term timescale. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of our proposed schemes and show that both the spectral efficiency and the energy efficiency can be simultaneously improved over traditional downlink coordinated schemes, especially in the middle-high transmit power region.

Joint on-board amplification of multiple carriers reduces hardware and weight, enabling cost-efficient satellite architectures. However, on-board power amplification is inherently a non-linear operation and the distortion effects drastically increase when the high-power amplifier (HPA) is operated in multiple-carrier mode due to the generated inter-modulation products. In order to achieve the desired on-board power efficiency and to reduce the non-linear distortion, specific countermeasures need to be put in place. Emerging multi-gateway satellite systems where, in the most general case, each carrier is uplinked independently from a different gateway, would gain further flexibility by adopting a multicarrier architecture. While advanced predistortion techniques are already available for the single-gateway scenario, no solution has been proposed for the multi-gateway multicarrier scenario. In this work, we propose novel distributed predistortion techniques to improve spectral and power efficiency in multi-gateway non-linear satellite channels. Further, we analyze the multiple-carrier predistortion parameter estimation error with respect to noise sensitivity, proposing a robust version of the indirect learning method. Distributed processing becomes sensitive to synchronization amongst the actors, and we present an evaluation of the sensitivity of proposed techniques to imperfections.

Network coding is an efficient means to improve the spectrum efficiency of satellite communications. However, its resilience to eavesdropping attacks is not well understood. This paper studies the confidentiality issue in a bidirectional satellite network consisting of two mobile users who want to exchange message via a multibeam satellite using the XOR network coding protocol. We aim to maximize the sum secrecy rate by designing the optimal beamforming vector along with optimizing the return and forward link time allocation. The problem is nonconvex, and we find its optimal solution using semidefinite programming together with a 1-D search. For comparison, we also solve the sum secrecy rate maximization problem for a conventional reference scheme without using network coding. Simulation results using realistic system parameters demonstrate that the bidirectional scheme using network coding provides considerably higher secrecy rate compared with that of the conventional scheme.

Multibeam satellite systems offer flexibility that aims at efficiently reusing the available spectrum. To fully exploit the flexibility advantages, the payload resources—transmit power and bandwidth—must be efficiently allocated among multiple beams. This paper investigates the resource optimization problem in multibeam satellites. The NP-hardness and inapproximability of the problem are demonstrated motivating the use of metaheuristics. A systematic approach accomplishing the best traffic match is carried out. The additional requirement of minimizing the total power consumption is then considered, giving rise to a multi-objective optimization approach. The solutions to thea prioriaccomplished traffic matching optimization are used to enhance the efficiency of the multi-objective metaheuristic method proposed and, consequently, of the multibeam satellite system. The optimized performance is represented by the Pareto front, which provides trade-off points between total power consumption and rate achieved. This allows the decomposition of the problem into independent color-based sub-problems rendering the proposed two-stage optimization framework suitable for dimensioning the next generation multispot satellite systems.

Quality of service (QoS) for a network is characterized in terms of various parameters specifying packet delay and loss tolerance requirements for the application. The unpredictable nature of the wireless channel demands for application of certain mechanisms to meet the QoS requirements. Traditionally, medium access control (MAC) and network layers perform these tasks. However, these mechanisms do not take (fading) channel conditions into account. In this paper, we investigate the problem using cross layer techniques where information flow and joint optimization of higher and physical layer is permitted. We propose a scheduling scheme to optimize the energy consumption of a multiuser multi-access system such that QoS constraints in terms of packet loss are fulfilled while the system is able to maximize the advantages emerging from multiuser diversity. Specifically, this work focuses on modeling and analyzing the effects of packet buffering capabilities of the transmitter on the system energy for a packet loss tolerant application. We discuss low complexity schemes which show comparable performance to the proposed scheme. The numerical evaluation reveals useful insights about the coupling effects of different QoS parameters on the system energy consumption and validates our analytical results.

The present work focuses on the forward link of a broadband multibeam satellite system that aggressively reuses the user link frequency resources. Two fundamental practical challenges, namely the need to frame multiple users per transmission and the per-antenna transmit power limitations, are addressed. To this end, the so-called frame-based precoding problem is optimally solved using the principles of physical layer multicasting to multiple co-channel groups under per-antenna constraints. In this context, a novel optimization problem that aims at maximizing the system sum rate under individual power constraints is proposed. Added to that, the formulation is further extended to include availability constraints. As a result, the high gains of the sum rate optimal design are traded off to satisfy the stringent availability requirements of satellite systems. Moreover, the throughput maximization with a granular spectral efficiency versus SINR function, is formulated and solved. Finally, a multicast-aware user scheduling policy, based on the channel state information, is developed. Thus, substantial multiuser diversity gains are gleaned. Numerical results over a realistic simulation environment exhibit as much as 30% gains over conventional systems, even for 7 users per frame, without modifying the framing structure of legacy communication standards.

Interference in wireless networks degrades the signal quality at the terminals. However, it can potentially enhance the secrecy rate. This paper investigates the secrecy rate in a two-user interference network where one of the users, namely user 1, needs to establish a confidential connection. User 1 wants to prevent an unintended user of the network from decoding its transmission. User 1 has to transmit such that its secrecy rate is maximized while the quality of service at the destination of the other user, user 2, is satisfied, and both user's power limits are taken into account. We consider two scenarios: 1) user 2 changes its power in favor of user 1, an altruistic scenario, and 2) user 2 is selfish and only aims to maintain the minimum quality of service at its destination, an egoistic scenario. It is shown that there is a threshold for user 2's transmission power that only below or above which, depending on the channel qualities, user 1 can achieve a positive secrecy rate. Closed-form solutions are obtained to perform joint optimal power control. Further, a new metric called secrecy energy efficiency is introduced. We show that in general, the secrecy energy efficiency of user 1 in an interference channel scenario is higher than that of an interference-free channel.

Distributed spectrum sensing improves the detection reliability of a cognitive radio network but generally comes at the price of a large power consumption. Since cognitive radios are generally low-power sensors with limited batteries, a combined censoring and sleeping scheme is considered as an energy-efficient algorithm for distributed spectrum sensing. Each sensor switches off its sensing module with a specific sleeping rate. When the sensor is on, a censoring policy is employed to send the sensing result to the fusion center. The result is only transmitted, if it is deemed to be informative. Hence, the energy consumption of each sensor, including the sensing and transmission energies, is reduced. The underlying sensing parameters are derived by minimizing the maximum average energy consumption per sensor subject to a lower-bound on the global probability of detection and an upper-bound on the global probability of false alarm. We analyze the problem for the OR and the AND rule and provide a performance analysis for a case study based on the IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee standard. It is shown that the combined censoring and sleeping scheme achieves a significant energy saving compared to the case where no censoring or sleeping is taken into account.

We address the limitation of low resolution depth cameras in the context of face recognition. Considering a face as a surface in 3-D, we reformulate the recently proposed Upsampling for Precise Super-Resolution algorithm as a new approach on three dimensional points. This reformulation allows an efficient implementation, and leads to a largely enhanced 3-D face reconstruction. Moreover, combined with a dedicated face detection and representation pipeline, the proposed method provides an improved face recognition system using low resolution depth cameras. We show experimentally that this system increases the face recognition rate as compared to directly using the low resolution raw data.1

A multi-antenna transmitter that conveys independent sets of common data to distinct groups of users is herein considered, a model known as physical layer multicasting to multiple co-channel groups. In the recently proposed context of per-antenna power constrained multigroup multicasting, the present work focuses on a novel system design that aims at maximizing the total achievable throughput. Towards increasing the system sum rate, the available power resources need to be allocated to well conditioned groups of users. A detailed solution to tackle the elaborate sum rate maximizing, multigroup multicast problem, under per-antenna power constraints is therefore derived. Numerical results are presented to quantify the gains of the proposed algorithm over heuristic solutions. The solution is applied to rayleigh as well as Vandermonde channels. The latter case is typically realised in uniform linear array transmitters operating in the far field, where line-of-sight conditions are realized. In this setting, a sensitivity analysis with respect to the angular separation of co-group users is included. Finally, a simple scenario providing important intuitions for the sum rate maximizing multigroup multicast solutions is elaborated.

Reliable and agile spectrum sensing as well as secure communication are key requirements of a cognitive radio system. In this paper, secrecy throughput of a cognitive radio is maximized in order to determine the sensing threshold, the sensing time, and the transmission power. Constraints of the problem are defined as a lower-bound on the detection probability, an upper-bound on the average energy consumption per time-frame, and the maximum transmission power of the cognitive radio. We show that the problem can be solved by an on-off strategy where the cognitive radio only performs sensing and transmits data if the cognitive channel gain is greater than the average eavesdropper channel gain. The problem is then solved by a line-search over sensing time. Eventually, the secrecy throughput of the cognitive radio is evaluated employing the IEEE 802.15.4/Zig-Bee standard.

Herein, we consider the problem of detecting primary users' signals in the presence of noise correlation, which may arise due to imperfections in fltering and oversampling operations in a Cognitive Radio (CR) receiver. In this context, we study a Maximum Eigenvalue (ME) detection technique using recent results from Random Matrix Theory (RMT) for characterizing the distribution of the maximum eigenvalue of a class of sample covariance matrices. Subsequently, we derive a theoretical expression for a sensing threshold as a function of the probability of false alarm and evaluate the sensing performance in terms of probability of correct decision. It is shown that the proposed approach signifcantly improves the sensing performance of the ME detector in correlated noise scenarios.

The market trends towards the use of smaller dish antennas for TV satellite receivers, as well as the growing density of broadcasting satellites in orbit require the application of robust adjacent satellite interference (ASI) cancellation algorithms at the receivers. The wider beamwidth of a small size dish and the growing number of satellites in orbit impose an overloaded scenario, i.e., a scenario where the number of transmitting satellites exceeds the number of receiving antennas. For such a scenario, we present a two stage receiver to enhance signal detection from the satellite of interest, i.e., the satellite that the dish is pointing to, while reducing interference from neighboring satellites. Towards this objective, we propose an enhanced List-based Group-wise Search Detection (LGSD) receiver architecture that takes into account the spatially correlated additive noise and uses the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) maximization criterion to improve detection performance. Simulations show that the proposed receiver structure enhances the performance of satellite systems in the presence of ASI when compared to existing methods.

Interference management techniques in multicell multiple input multiple output (MIMO) networks require accurate channel state information (CSI). A popular technique for acquiring this CSI in time division duplex (TDD) systems is uplink training by exploiting the reciprocity of the wireless medium. Recently, the pilot contamination problem has been identified as one of the limiting factors for such kind of CSI acquisition. In an effort to tackle the problem of contamination, we utilize the compression capability of discrete cosine transform (DCT) and covariance matrices to spatially separate the estimate for the scenario of correlated single input multiple input (SIMO) channels. A least square estimation framework is proposed by utilizing the DCT to separate the overlapping spatial paths that create the interference. The spatial domain is thus exploited to mitigate the contamination which is able to discriminate across the interfering users. We validate our algorithms by simulation and compare them to the state of the art techniques.

Linear precoding exploits the spatial degrees of freedom offered by multi-antenna transmitters to serve multiple users over the same frequency resources. The present work focuses on simultaneously serving multiple groups of users, each with its own channel, by transmitting a stream of common symbols to each group. This scenario is known as physical layer multicasting to multiple co-channel groups. Extending the current state of the art in multigroup multicasting, the practical constraint of a maximum permitted power level radiated by each antenna is tackled herein. The considered per antenna power constrained system is optimized in a maximum fairness sense. In other words, the optimization aims at favoring the worst user by maximizing the minimum rate. This Max-Min Fair criterion is imperative in multicast systems, where the performance of all the receivers listening to the same multicast is dictated by the worst rate in the group. An analytic framework to tackle the Max-Min Fair multigroup multicasting scenario under per antenna power constraints is therefore derived. Numerical results display the accuracy of the proposed solution and provide insights to the performance of a per antenna power constrained system.

Distributed storage systems have been receiving increasing attention lately due to the developments in cloud and grid computing. Furthermore, a major part of the stored information comprises of multimedia, whose content can be communicated even with a lossy (non-perfect) reconstruction. In this context, Multiple Description Lattice Quantizers (MDLQ) can be employed to encode such sources for distributed storage and store them across distributed nodes. Their inherent properties yield that having access to all nodes gives perfect reconstruction of the source, while the reconstruction quality decreases gracefully with fewer available nodes. If a set of nodes fails, lossy repair techniques could be applied to reconstruct the failed nodes from the available ones. This problem has mostly been studied with the lossless (perfect) reconstruction assumption. In this work, a general model, Multiple Description Lattice Quantizer with Repairs (MDLQR), is introduced that encompasses the lossy repair problem for distributed storage applications. New performance measures and repair techniques are introduced for MDLQR, and a non-trivial identity is derived, which is related to other results in the literature. This enables us to find the optimal encoder for a certain repair technique used in the MDLQR. Furthermore, simulation results are used to evaluate the performance of the different repair techniques.

Distributed spectrum sensing enhances the detection reliability of a cognitive radio network. However, this comes at the price of a higher energy consumption. To solve this problem, a combined censoring and sleeping scheme is considered where the cognitive radios switch off their sensing module with a specific sleeping rate in each sensing period. The awake cognitive radios send their local decisions to the fusion center only if it is deemed to be informative. The fusion center either employs the OR or the AND rule to make the final decision about the presence or absence of the primary user. This paper investigates which rule performs better in terms of energy efficiency under various conditions. The underlying sensing parameters are derived by minimizing the maximum average energy consumption per sensor subject to a constraint on the probabilities of false alarm and detection. This way, it can be ensured that the spectrum opportunities are utilized efficiently while the primary users are not interfered with. A case study based on IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee is considered for performance evaluation. It is shown that significant energy savings can be obtained by employing combined censoring and sleeping.

Current satellite communication architectures can be potentially improved by applying multicarrier power amplification. Joint on-board amplification of multiple carriers reduces hardware and weight, enabling cost-efficient satellite architectures. However, on board power amplification is inherently a non-linear operation, whose distortion effects drastically increase when the high power amplifier (HPA) is operated in multiple carrier mode due to the generated inter-modulation products. In order to achieve the desired on-board power efficiency and to reduce the non-linear distortion, specific countermeasures need to be put in place. In this work we provide a novel data predistortion technique for multiple carriers satellite channel based on look up table (LUT) for high throughput applications. In contrast to known single carrier LUT techniques, the entries of the table are obtained by pursuing an analytical approach exploiting channel model and implementing recursive least squares techniques (RLS). A novel method to reduce the number of LUT entries based on LUT partitioning is proposed. Considerable performance gains over standard polynomial based predistortion are realized by the proposed technique.

Compressive Sensing (CS) has been widely investigated in the Cognitive Radio (CR) literature in order to reduce the hardware cost of sensing wideband signals assuming prior knowledge of the sparsity pattern. However, the sparsity order of the channel occupancy is time-varying and the sampling rate of the CS receiver needs to be adjusted based on its value in order to fully exploit the potential of CS-based techniques. In this context, investigating blind Sparsity Order Estimation (SOE) techniques is an open research issue. To address this, we study an eigenvalue-based compressive SOE technique using asymptotic Random Matrix Theory. We carry out detailed theoretical analysis for the signal plus noise case to derive the asymptotic eigenvalue probability distribution function (aepdf) of the measured signal's covariance matrix for sparse signals. Subsequently, based on the derived aepdf expression, we present a technique to estimate the sparsity order of the wideband spectrum with compressive measurements using the maximum eigenvalue of the measured signal's covariance matrix. The performance of the proposed technique is evaluated in terms of normalized SOE Error (SOEE). It is shown that the sparsity order of the wideband spectrum can be reliably estimated using the proposed technique.

Everal real-world classification problems are example-dependent cost-sensitive in nature, where the costs due to misclassification vary between examples. Credit scoring is a typical example of cost-sensitive classification. However, it is usually treated using methods that do not take into account the real financial costs associated with the lending business. In this paper, we propose a new example-dependent cost matrix for credit scoring. Furthermore, we propose an algorithm that introduces the example-dependent costs into a logistic regression. Using two publicly available datasets, we compare our proposed method against state-of-the-art example-dependent cost-sensitive algorithms. The results highlight the importance of using real financial costs. Moreover, by using the proposed cost-sensitive logistic regression, significant improvements are made in the sense of higher savings.

One of the most crucial requirements for building a multi-view system is the estimation of relative poses of all cameras. An approach tailored for a RGB-D cameras based multi-view system is missing. We propose BAICP+ which combines Bundle Adjustment (BA) and Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithms to take into account both 2D visual and 3D shape information in one minimization formulation to estimate relative pose parameters of each camera. BAICP+ is generic enough to take different types of visual features into account and can be easily adapted to varying quality of 2D and 3D data. We perform experiments on real and simulated data. Results show that with the right weighting factor BAICP+ has an optimal performance when compared to BA and ICP used independently or sequentially.

This paper presents a surface and solid voxelization approach for incomplete point cloud datasets. Voxelization stands for a discrete approximation of 3-D objects into a volumetric representation, a process which is commonly employed in computer graphics and increasingly being used in computer vision. In contrast to surface voxelization, solid voxelization not only set those voxels related to the object surface but also those voxels considered to be inside the object. To that end, we first approximate the given point set, usually describing the external object surface, to an axis-aligned voxel grid. Then, we slice-wise construct a shell containing all surface voxels along each grid-axis pair. Finally, voxels inside the constructed shell are set. Solid voxelization results from the combination of all slices, resulting in a watertight and gap-free representation of the object. The experimental results show a high performance when voxelizing point cloud datasets, independently of the object's complexity, robust to noise, and handling large portions of data missing.

This paper studies the concept of jointly utilizing the data information (DI) and channel state information (CSI) in order to design symbol-level precoders for a multiple input and single output (MISO) downlink channel. In this direction, the interference among the simultaneous data streams is transformed to useful signal that can improve the signal to interference noise ratio (SINR) of the downlink transmissions. We propose a maximum ratio transmissions (MRT) based algorithm that jointly exploits DI and CSI to gain the benefits from these useful signals. In this context, a novel framework to minimize the power consumption is proposed by formalizing the duality between the constructive interference downlink channel and the multicast channels. The numerical results have shown that the proposed schemes outperform other state of the art techniques.

Cognitive radios have been proposed as agile technologies to boost the spectrum utilization. This paper tackles the problem of channel estimation and its impact on downlink transmissions in an underlay cognitive radio scenario. We consider primary and cognitive base stations, each equipped with multiple antennas and serving multiple users. Primary networks often suffer from the cognitive interference, which can be mitigated by deploying beamforming at the cognitive systems to spatially direct the transmissions away from the primary receivers. The accuracy of the estimated channel state information (CSI) plays an important role in designing accurate beamformers that can regulate the amount of interference. However, channel estimate is affected by interference. Therefore, we propose different channel estimation and pilot allocation techniques to deal with the channel estimation at the cognitive systems, and to reduce the impact of contamination at the primary and cognitive systems. In an effort to tackle the contamination problem in primary and cognitive systems, we exploit the information embedded in the covariance matrices to successfully separate the channel estimate from other users' channels in correlated cognitive single input multiple input (SIMO) channels. A minimum mean square error (MMSE) framework is proposed by utilizing the second order statistics to separate the overlapping spatial paths that create the interference. We validate our algorithms by simulation and compare them to the state of the art techniques.

Previous analysis has shown that applying Bayes minimum risk to detect credit card fraud leads to better results measured by monetary savings, as compared with traditional methodologies. Nevertheless, this approach requires good probability estimates that not only separate well between positive and negative examples, but also assess the real probability of the event. Unfortunately, not all classification algorithms satisfy this restriction. In this paper, two different methods for calibrating probabilities are evaluated and analyzed in the context of credit card fraud detection, with the objective of finding the model that minimizes the real losses due to fraud. Even though under-sampling is often used in the context of classification with unbalanced datasets, it is shown that when probabilistic models are used to make decisions based on minimizing risk, using the full dataset provides significantly better results. In order to test the algorithms, a real dataset provided by a large European card processing company is used. It is shown that by calibrating the probabilities and then using Bayes minimum Risk the losses due to fraud are reduced. Furthermore, because of the good overall results, the aforementioned card processing company is currently incorporating the methodology proposed in this paper into their fraud detection system. Finally, the methodology has been tested on a different application, namely, direct marketing.

Estimating the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) of the Primary Users' (PUs) signals over a wideband spectrum accurately is crucial in order to fully exploit an under-utilized primary spectrum using underlay Cognitive Radio (CR) techniques. In this context, we study an SNR estimation problem for a wideband CR under practical correlated scenarios in compressive settings. We carry out detailed theoretical analysis for the considered scenarios and then derive the expressions for the asymptotic eigenvalue probability distribution function (aepdf) of the measured signal's covariance matrix using asymptotic Random Matrix Theory. Subsequently, based on the derived aepdfs, we present a technique to estimate the PU SNR over a wideband spectrum with compressive measurements. The performance of the proposed technique is evaluated in terms of normalized Mean Square Error (MSE) and it is shown that the SNR of the PU signals over the wideband spectrum can be reliably estimated using the proposed technique.

We consider the problem of estimating a deterministic unknown vector which depends linearly on$n$noisy measurements, additionally contaminated with (possibly unbounded) additive outliers. The measurement matrix of the model (i.e., the matrix involved in the linear transformation of the sought vector) is assumed known, and comprised of standard Gaussian i.i.d. entries. The outlier variables are assumed independent of the measurement matrix, deterministic or random with possibly unknown distribution. Under these assumptions we provide a simple proof that the minimizer of the Huber penalty function of the residuals converges to the true parameter vector with a$\sqrt n $-rate, even when outliers are dense, in the sense that there is a constant linear fraction of contaminated measurements which can be arbitrarily close to one. The constants influencing the rate of convergence are shown to explicitly depend on the outlier contamination level.

Rain attenuation is among the major impairments for satellite systems operating in the K-band and above. In this paper, we investigate the impact of spatially correlated rain attenuation on the performance of a multibeam satellite return link. For a comprehensive assessment, an analytical model for the antenna pattern that generates the beams is also proposed. We focus on theoutage capacityof the link and obtain analytical approximations at high and low signal-to-noise ratio. The derived approximations provide insights into the effect of key system parameters such as the interuser distance, the satellite beam radius, or the rain intensity, and simulation results show that it fits tightly with the Monte Carlo results. Additionally, the derived expressions can be easily particularized for the single-user case, providing some novel insights.

We consider a multiuser multiple-input single-output interference channel where the receivers are characterized by both quality-of-service (QoS) and radio-frequency (RF) energy harvesting (EH) constraints. We consider the power splitting RF-EH technique where each receiver divides the received signal into two parts a) for information decoding and b) for battery charging. The minimum required power that supports both the QoS and the RF-EH constraints is formulated as an optimization problem that incorporates the transmitted power and the beamforming design at each transmitter as well as the power splitting ratio at each receiver. We consider both the cases of fixed beamforming and when the beamforming design is incorporated into the optimization problem. For fixed beamforming we study three standard beamforming schemes, the zero-forcing (ZF), the regularized zero-forcing (RZF) and the maximum ratio transmission (MRT); a hybrid scheme, MRT-ZF, comprised of a linear combination of MRT and ZF beamforming is also examined. The optimal solution for ZF beamforming is derived in closed-form, while optimization algorithms based on second-order cone programming are developed for MRT, RZF and MRT-ZF beamforming to solve the problem. In addition, the joint-optimization of beamforming and power allocation is studied using semidefinite programming (SDP) with the aid of rank relaxation.

Relaying has been extensively studied during the last decades and has found numerous applications in wireless communications. The simplest relaying method, namely amplify and forward, has shown potential in MIMO multiple access systems, when Gaussian fading channels are assumed for both hops. However, in some cases ill conditioned channels may appear on the second hop. For example, this impairment could affect cooperative BS systems with microwave link backhauling, which involves strong line of sight channels with insufficient scattering. In this paper, we consider a large system analysis of such as system model focusing on the joint MMSE filtering receiver. Analytical methods based on free probability are presented for calculating the MMSE error and average SINR, while the performance degradation of the system throughput due to second hop ill-conditioning is studied.

This paper addresses training-based channel estimation in distributed amplify-and-forward (AF) multi-input multi-output (MIMO) multi-relay networks. To reduce channel estimation overhead and delay, a training algorithm that allows for simultaneous estimation of the entire MIMO cooperative network's channel parameters at the destination node is proposed. The exact Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) for the problem is presented in closed-form. Channel estimators that are capable of estimating the overall source-relay-destination channel parameters at the destination are also derived. Numerical results show that while reducing delay, the proposed channel estimators are close to the derived CRLB over a wide range of signal-to-noise ratio values and outperform existing channel estimation methods. Finally, extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed training method and channel estimators can be effectively deployed in combination with cooperative optimization algorithms to significantly enhance the performance of AF relaying MIMO systems in terms of average-bit-error-rate.

In addition to spectrum sensing capability required by a Cognitive Radio (CR), Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) estimation of the primary signals is crucial in order to adapt its coverage area dynamically using underlay techniques. Furthermore, in practical scenarios, the fading channel may be correlated due to various causes such as insufficient scattering in the propagation path and antenna mutual coupling. In this context, we consider the SNR estimation problem for a CR in the presence of channel correlation. We study an eigenvalue-based SNR estimation technique for large-scale CR networks using asymptotic Random Matrix Theory (RMT). We carry out detailed theoretical analysis of the signal plus noise hypothesis to derive the asymptotic eigenvalue probability distribution function (a.e.p.d.f.) of the received signal's covariance matrix in the presence of the correlated channel. Then an SNR estimation technique based on the derived a.e.p.d.f. is proposed for PU SNR in the presence of channel correlation and its performance is evaluated in terms of normalized Mean Square Error (MSE). It is shown that the PU SNR can be accurately estimated in the presence of channel correlation using the proposed technique even in low SNR region.

Herein, we consider asymptotic performance analysis of eigenvalue-based blind Spectrum Sensing (SS) techniques for large-scale Cognitive Radio (CR) networks using Random Matrix Theory (RMT). Different methods such as Scaled Largest Value (SLE), Standard Condition Number (SCN), John's detection and Spherical Test (ST) based detection are considered. The asymptotic sensing bounds for John's detection and ST based detection techniques are derived under a noise only hypothesis for sensing the presence of Primary Users (PUs). These asymptotic bounds are then used as thresholds for the SS decision and their performance is compared with other techniques in terms of probability of correct detection under both hypotheses. It is noted that the SLE detector is the best for a range of scenarios, followed by JD, SCN, ST. Furthermore, it is shown that noise correlation significantly degrades the performance of ST and JD detectors in practical scenarios.

With the growing application of high order modulation techniques, the mitigation of the non-linear distortions introduced by the power amplification, has become a major issue in telecommunication. More sophisticated techniques to counteract the strong generated interferences need to be investigated in order to achieve the desired power and spectral efficiency. This work proposes a novel approach for the definition of a transmitter technique (predistortion) that outperforms the standard methods with respect to both performance and efficiency.

Recent literature on robust statistical inference suggests that promising outlier rejection schemes can be based on accounting explicitly for sparse gross errors in the modeling, and then relying on compressed sensing ideas to perform the outlier detection. In this paper, we consider two models for recovering a sparse signal from noisy measurements, possibly also contaminated with outliers. The models considered here are a linear regression model, and its natural one-bit counterpart where measurements are additionally quantized to a single bit. Our contributions can be summarized as follows: We start by providing conditions for identification and the Cramér-Rao Lower Bounds (CRLBs) for these two models. Then, focusing on the one-bit model, we derive conditions for consistency of the associated Maximum Likelihood estimator, and show the performance of relevant l1-based relaxation strategies by comparing against the theoretical CRLB.

The constantly increasing demand for interactive broadband satellite communications is driving current research towards novel system architectures that reuse frequency in a more aggressive manner. To this end, the topic of dual satellite systems, in which satellites share spatial (i.e. same coverage area) and spectral (i.e. full frequency reuse) degrees of freedom is introduced. In each multibeam satellite, multiuser interferences are mitigated by employing zero forcing precoding with realistic per antenna power constraints. However, the two sets of users that the transmitters are separately serving, interfere. The present contribution, proposes the partial cooperation, herein referred to as coordination, between the two coexisting transmitters in order to reduce interferences and enhance the performance of the whole system, while maintaining moderate system complexity. In this direction, a heuristic, iterative, low complexity algorithm that allocates users in the two interfering sets is proposed. This novel algorithm, improves the performance of each satellite and of the overall system, simultaneously. The first is achieved by maximizing the orthogonality between users allocated in the same set, hence optimizing the zero forcing performance, whilst the second by minimizing the level of interferences between the two sets. Simulation results show that the proposed method, compared to conventional techniques, significantly increases spectral efficiency.

This paper considers a Fractional Sampling (FS) technique to enhance the Spectrum Sensing (SS) efficiency of a Cognitive Radio (CR) using a decision statistic based on asymptotic Random Matrix Theory (RMT). Firstly, the effect of noise correlation on eigenvalue based SS is studied analytically and by numerical evaluation. Secondly, new bounds for the Standard Condition Number (SCN) are proposed to enhance the SS efficiency in correlated noise scenarios. It is shown that proposed FS method can enhance SS efficiency up to certain FS rates at the expense of receiver complexity and no performance advantage is obtained if the FS rate is increased beyond this limit. As a result, a method for determining the operating point for the FS rate in terms of sensing performance and complexity is suggested.

This paper deals with a multiple-input single-output (MISO) network where the receivers are characterized by both quality-of-service (QoS) and radio-frequency (RF) energy harvesting (EH) constraints. We consider the power splitting RF-EH technique where each receiver divides the received signal into two parts a) the first part for information decoding and b) the second part for battery charging. The minimum required energy that supports both the QoS and the RF-EH constraints at each receiver is formulated by an optimization problem and is discussed for two standard beamforming designs, the zero-forcing (ZF) and the maximum ratio transmission (MRT). The optimal solution for ZF beamforming is derived in closed-form, while optimization algorithms based on second-order cone programming (SOCP) and Linear Programming (LP) are developed for MRT beamforming to solve the problem. Numerical results indicate that MRT significantly outperforms ZF in terms of transmitted power, as the associated cross-interference becomes beneficial from an EH standpoint, while ZF always ensures the existence of a solution for the optimization problem considered.

We enhance the resolution of depth videos acquired with low resolution time-of-flight cameras. To that end, we propose a new dedicated dynamic super-resolution that is capable to accurately super-resolve a depth sequence containing one or multiple moving objects without strong constraints on their shape or motion, thus clearly outperforming any existing super-resolution techniques that perform poorly on depth data and are either restricted to global motions or not precise because of an implicit estimation of motion. The proposed approach is based on a new data model that leads to a robust registration of all depth frames after a dense upsampling. The textureless nature of depth images allows to robustly handle sequences with multiple moving objects as confirmed by our experiments.

Credit card fraud is a growing problem that affects card holders around the world. Fraud detection has been an interesting topic in machine learning. Nevertheless, current state of the art credit card fraud detection algorithms miss to include the real costs of credit card fraud as a measure to evaluate algorithms. In this paper a new comparison measure that realistically represents the monetary gains and losses due to fraud detection is proposed. Moreover, using the proposed cost measure a cost sensitive method based on Bayes minimum risk is presented. This method is compared with state of the art algorithms and shows improvements up to 23% measured by cost. The results of this paper are based on real life transactional data provided by a large European card processing company.

Energy efficient communication has emerged as one of the key areas of research due to its impact on industry and environment. Any potential degree of freedom (DoF) available in the system should be exploited smartly to design energy efficient systems. This paper proposes a framework for achieving energy efficiency for the data loss tolerant applications by exploiting the multiuser diversity and DoFs available through the packet loss pattern. For a real time application, there is a constraint on the maximum number of packets to be dropped successively that must be obeyed. We propose a channel-aware energy efficient scheduling scheme which schedules the packets such that the constraint on the average packet drop rate and the maximum number of successively dropped packets is fulfilled for the case when a finite number of unscheduled packets can be buffered. We analyze the scheme in the large user limit and show the energy gain due to buffering on the proposed scheme.

Exploiting transmit diversity amid a high number of multiple gateways (GW) is a new research challenge in Q/V band satellite communication providing data rates of hundreds of Gbit/s. In this paper, we propose a practical switching strategy in a scenario with N+P GWs (N active and P redundant GWs) towards achieving GW transmit diversity. Differently from other works, the treatment in this paper is analytical and explores two key factors: outage performance and switching rate in detail. Further, the interplay between the number of redundant and active GWs on the availability is illustrated highlighting the contribution of the work towards system sizing.

Channel estimation attacks can degrade the performance of the legitimate system and facilitate eavesdropping. It is known that pilot contamination can alter the legitimate transmit precoder design and strengthen the quality of the received signal at the eavesdropper, without being detected. In this paper, we devise a technique which employs random pilots chosen from a known set of phase-shift keying (PSK) symbols to detect pilot contamination. The scheme only requires two training periods without any prior channel knowledge. Our analysis demonstrates that using the proposed technique in a massive MIMO system, the detection probability of pilot contamination attacks can be made arbitrarily close to 1. Simulation results reveal that the proposed technique can significantly increase the detection probability and is robust to noise power as well as the eavesdropper's power.

Interference Alignment (IA) has been considered a promising technique for spectral coexistence of different wireless systems in an underlay cognitive mode. Furthermore, Frequency Packing (FP) can be considered as an important technique for enhancing the spectrum efficiency in spectrum-limited satellite applications. In this paper, we consider a spectral coexistence scenario of a multibeam satellite and a monobeam satellite with the monobeam satellite as primary and the multibeam satellite as secondary. In this context, this paper focuses on examining the effect of FP on the performance of multi-carrier based IA technique. For this purpose, different IA techniques such as coordinated IA, uncoordinated IA and static IA have been considered. The effect of FP on the performance of different IA techniques in the considered scenario is evaluated in terms of system sum rate and primary rate protection ratio. It is shown that the system sum rate increases with the FP factor for all the techniques and the primary rate is perfectly protected with the coordinated IA technique even with dense FP.

Multi-User Detection (MUD) techniques are currently being examined as promising technologies for the next generation of broadband, interactive, multibeam satellite communication (SatCom) systems. Results in the existing literature have shown that when full frequency and polarization reuse is employed and user signals are jointly processed at the gateway, more than threefold gains in terms of spectral efficiency over conventional systems can be obtained. However, the information theoretic results for the capacity of the multibeam satellite channel are given under ideal assumptions, disregarding the implementation constraints of such an approach. Considering a real system implementation, the adoption of full resource reuse is bound to increase the payload complexity and power consumption. Since these novel techniques require extra payload resources, fairness issues in the comparison among the two approaches arise. The present contribution evaluates in a fair manner, the performance of the return link (RL) of a SatCom system serving mobile users that are jointly decoded at the receiver. In this context, the throughput performance of the assumed system is compared to that of a conventional one, under the constraint of equal physical layer resource utilization; thus the comparison can be regarded as fair. Results show, that even when systems operate under the same payload requirements as the conventional systems, a significant gain can be realized, especially in the high SNR region. Finally, existing analytical formulas are also employed to provide closed form descriptions of the performance of clustered systems, thus introducing insights on how the performance scales with respect to the system parameters.

This work addresses scheduling in a cognitive radio scenario where a minimum throughput for the downlink primary network (PN) is guaranteed to each user with an associated violation probability (probability of not obtaining the guaranteed throughput). The primary network is surrounded by multiple downlink secondary networks, each aiming to maximize its network throughput. Scheduling in PN is performed independent of the secondary networks. Some information about the PN is available at the central scheduler that is responsible for scheduling the secondary networks. The contribution of this work is to apply a novel scheduler to the PN which is more robust to QoS degradations resulting from the secondary networks than other state of the art schedulers. This is validated by numerical simulations of the cognitive radio network.

The usable satellite spectrum is becoming scarce due to continuously increasing demand for broadcast, multimedia and interactive services. In this context, cognitive satellite communications has received important attention lately in the research community. Exploring efficient spectrum sharing techniques for enhancing spectral efficiency in satellite communication has become an important research challenge. In this paper, we study the main aspects of satellite cognitive communications and present possible practical scenarios for hybrid/dual cognitive satellite systems. Furthermore, suitable cognitive techniques for the considered scenarios are identified. More specifically, Spectrum Sensing (SS), interference modeling, and beamforming techniques are discussed for hybrid cognitive scenario and SS, interference alignment, and cognitive beamhopping techniques are discussed for dual satellite systems. This paper concludes by providing interesting open research issues in this domain.

This paper studies the impact of jamming on the design of three-node two-hop cooperative amplify-and-forward (AF) communications with both half-duplex and full-duplex relaying. For the half-duplex relaying, the jammer is smart such that it can optimally allocate jamming power between listening and forwarding phases. Given separate source and relay power constraints, we derive the optimal jamming power allocation; with a total source and relay power constraint, we model the interaction between the legitimate system and the jammer as a noncooperative game and prove the existence and uniqueness of the Nash Equilibrium (NE). It is found that due to the fact that the end performance is limited by the weaker phase, the legitimate systems tries to balance the performance of two phases while the jammer attacks the system by making the two hops imbalanced. While for the full-duplex relaying, we show that if the self-interference can be properly controlled, it can bring substantial performance gain. Simulation results verify our analysis.

Harvest-use (HU) is an energy harvesting (EH) architecture where the received energy cannot be stored and immediately must be consumed in order to maintain operability. Due to its current limited application interest, this architecture has not yet been examined in the literature and its deployment to communication system is an open problem. This paper deals with the application of HU architecture to communication systems and investigates cooperative protocols where the relay node has HU capabilities. We show that HU relaying introduces a trade-off between EH time and relaying (data communication) time; this trade-off is discussed for two fundamental relaying policies a) Amplify-and-forward (AF) with half-duplex (HD) relaying and b) AF with full-duplex (FD) relaying. The optimal time split is formulated as an optimization problem and an approximation is given in a closed form. Numerical results show that FD outperforms HD and is introduced as an efficient relaying policy for HU cooperative systems.

This study presents a real‐time refinement procedure for depth data acquired by RGB‐D cameras. Data from RGB‐D cameras suffer from undesired artefacts such as edge inaccuracies or holes owing to occlusions or low object remission. In this work, the authors use recent depth enhancement filters intended for time‐of‐flight cameras, and extend them to structured light‐based depth cameras, such as the Kinect camera. Thus, given a depth map and its corresponding two‐dimensional image, we correct the depth measurements by separately treating its undesired regions. To that end, the authors propose specific confidence maps to tackle areas in the scene that require a special treatment. Furthermore, in the case of filtering artefacts, the authors introduce the use of RGB images as guidance images as an alternative to real‐time state‐of‐the‐art fusion filters that use greyscale guidance images. The experimental results show that the proposed fusion filter provides dense depth maps with corrected erroneous or invalid depth measurements and adjusted depth edges. In addition, the authors propose a mathematical formulation that enables to use the filter in real‐time applications.

We employ orthogonal random beamforming (ORBF) for the worst-case multi-user downlink scenario where each user is wiretapped by one eavesdropper. Two opportunistic scheduling techniques that ensure confidentiality by exploiting multi-user diversity are investigated; the first technique (optimal) requires limited feedback of the effective signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) from all the users and the eavesdroppers while the second technique (suboptimal) incorporates SIR knowledge from only the legitimate users. By using extreme value theory, we derive the achievable SIR-based secrecy sum-rate and the associated scaling laws for both scheduling techniques.

We study the diversity unfairness associated with the conventional Tomlinson–Harashima precoding (THP) in multiuser multiple-input multiple-output downlink transmission. A single-retransmission scheme that combines two THP signals at each user with a complementary multi-user suppression order is investigated. For a system with$M$antennas at the transmitter and a single antenna at each user, the proposed scheme provides a diversity order$M+1$for all users and ensures diversity fairness. We study two retransmission policies, where the users either consider only the current received codeword or combine both codewords for decoding. An asymptotic analysis of the outage probability for both THP retransmission schemes is provided. In addition, a power allocation policy that minimizes the outage probability and accommodates the same coding gain at each user is discussed by formulating a geometric optimization problem.

For distributed multi-user and multi-relay cooperative networks, the received signal may be affected by multiple timing offsets (MTOs) and multiple channels that need to be jointly estimated for successful decoding at the receiver. This paper addresses the design of optimal training sequences for efficient estimation of MTOs and multiple channel parameters. A new hybrid Cramer-Rao lower bound (HCRB) for joint estimation of MTOs and channels is derived. Subsequently, by minimizing the derived HCRB as a function of training sequences, three training sequence design guidelines are derived and according to these guidelines, two training sequences are proposed. In order to show that the proposed design guidelines also improve estimation accuracy, the conditional Cramer-Rao lower bound (ECRB), which is a tighter lower bound on the estimation accuracy compared to the HCRB, is also derived. Numerical results show that the proposed training sequence design guidelines not only lower the HCRB, but they also lower the ECRB and the mean-square error of the proposed maximum a posteriori estimator. Moreover, extensive simulations demonstrate that application of the proposed training sequences significantly lowers the bit-error rate performance of multi-relay cooperative networks when compared to training sequences that violate these design guidelines.

We consider precoder design for maximizing the weighted sum rate (WSR) of successive zero-forcing dirty paper coding (SZF-DPC). For this problem, the existing precoder designs often assume a sum power constraint (SPC) and rely on the singular value decomposition (SVD). The SVD-based designs are known to be optimal but require high complexity. We first propose a low-complexity optimal precoder design for SZF-DPC under SPC, using the QR decomposition. Then, we propose an efficient numerical algorithm to find the optimal precoders subject to per-antenna power constraints (PAPCs). To this end, the precoder design for PAPCs is formulated as an optimization problem with a rank constraint on the covariance matrices. A well-known approach to solve this problem is to relax the rank constraints and solve the relaxed problem. Interestingly, for SZF-DPC, we are able to prove that the rank relaxation is tight. Consequently, the optimal precoder design for PAPCs is computed by solving the relaxed problem, for which we propose a customized interior-point method that exhibits a superlinear convergence rate. Two suboptimal precoder designs are also presented and compared to the optimal ones. We also show that the proposed numerical method is applicable for finding the optimal precoders for block diagonalization scheme.

In addition to Spectrum Sensing (SS) capability required by a Cognitive Radio (CR), Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) estimation of the primary signals at the CR receiver is crucial in order to adapt its coverage area dynamically using underlay techniques. In practical scenarios, channel and noise may be correlated due to various reasons and SNR estimation techniques with the assumption of white noise and uncorrelated channel may not be suitable for estimating the primary SNR. In this paper, firstly, we study the performance of different eigenvalue-based SS techniques in the presence of channel or/and noise correlation. Secondly, we carry out detailed theoretical analysis of the signal plus noise hypothesis to derive the asymptotic eigenvalue probability distribution function (a.e.p.d.f.) of the received signal's covariance matrix under the following two cases: (i) correlated channel and white noise, and (ii) correlated channel and correlated noise, which is the main contribution of this paper. Finally, an SNR estimation technique based on the derived a.e.p.d.f is proposed in the presence of channel/noise correlation and its performance is evaluated in terms of normalized Mean Square Error (MSE). It is shown that the PU SNR can be reliably estimated when the CR sensing module is aware of the channel/noise correlation.

We consider the beamformer design for multiple-input multiple-output (MISO) broadcast channels (MISO BCs) using zero-forcing dirty paper coding (ZF-DPC). Assuming a sum power constraint (SPC), most previously proposed beamformer designs are based on the QR decomposition (QRD), which is a natural choice to satisfy the ZF constraints. However, the optimality of the QRD-based design for ZF-DPC has remained unknown. In this paper, first, we analytically establish that the QRD-based design is indeed optimal for any performance measure under a SPC. Then, we propose an optimal beamformer design method for ZF-DPC with per-antenna power constraints (PAPCs), using a convex optimization framework. The beamformer design is first formulated as a rank-1-constrained optimization problem. Exploiting the special structure of the ZF-DPC scheme, we prove that the rank constraint can be relaxed and still provide the same solution. In addition, we propose a fast converging algorithm to the beamformer design problem, under the duality framework between the BCs and multiple access channels (MACs). More specifically, we show that a BC with ZF-DPC has the dual MAC with ZF-based successive interference cancellation (ZF-SIC). In this way, the beamformer design for ZF-DPC is transformed into a power allocation problem for ZF-SIC, which can be solved more efficiently.

This paper studies the cooperation between a primary system and a cognitive system in a cellular network where the cognitive base station (CBS) relays the primary signal using amplify-and-forward or decode-and-forward protocols, and in return it can transmit its own cognitive signal. While the commonly used half-duplex (HD) assumption may render the cooperation less efficient due to the two orthogonal channel phases employed, we propose that the CBS can work in a full-duplex (FD) mode to improve the system rate region. The problem of interest is to find the achievable primary-cognitive rate region by studying the cognitive rate maximization problem. For both modes, we explicitly consider the CBS transmit imperfections, which lead to the residual self-interference associated with the FD operation mode. We propose closed-form solutions or efficient algorithms to solve the problem when the related residual interference power is non-scalable or scalable with the transmit power. Furthermore, we propose a simple hybrid scheme to select the HD or FD mode based on zero-forcing criterion, and provide insights on the impact of system parameters. Numerical results illustrate significant performance improvement by using the FD mode and the hybrid scheme.

Next generation networks are moving towards the convergence of mobile, fixed and broadcasting services in one standard platform, which requires the co-existence of satellite and terrestrial networks in the same spectrum. This framework has motivated the concept of cognitive Satellite Communication (SatComs). In this aspect, the problem of exploiting Spectrum Sensing (SS) techniques for a dual polarized fading channel is considered. In this paper, the performance of Energy Detection (ED) technique is evaluated in the context of a co-existence scenario of a satellite and a terrestrial link. Diversity combining techniques such as Equal Gain Combining (EGC) and Selection Combining (SC) are considered to enhance the SS efficiency. Furthermore, analytical expressions for probability of detection (Pd) and probability of false alarm (Pf) are presented for these techniques in the considered fading channel and the sensing performance is studied through analytical and simulation results. Moreover, the effect of Cross Polar Discrimination (XPD) on the sensing performance is presented and it is shown that SS efficiency improves for low XPD.

We consider the problem of detecting a sparse random signal from the compressive measurements without reconstructing the signal. Using a subspace model for the sparse signal where the signal parameters are drawn according to Gaussian law, we obtain the detector based on Neyman-Pearson criterion and analytically determine its operating characteristics when the signal covariance is known. These results are extended to situations where the covariance cannot be estimated. The results can be used to determine the number of measurements needed for a particular detector performance and also illustrate the presence of an optimal support for a given number of measurements.

We consider a worst-case robust precoding design for multi-input multi-output (MIMO) communication systems with imperfect channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT). Instead of a particular choice, we consider a general imperfect CSIT model that only assumes the channel errors to be within a convex set, which includes most common imperfect CSIT models as special cases. The robust precoding design is formulated as a maximin problem, aiming at maximizing the worst-case received signal-to-noise ratio or minimizing the worst-case error probability. It is shown that the robust precoder can be easily obtained by solving a convex problem. We further provide an equivalent but more practical form of the convex problem that can be efficiently handled with common optimization methods and software packages.

We consider the beamformer design for zero-forcing dirty paper coding (ZF-DPC), a suboptimal transmission technique for MISO broadcast channels (MISO BCs). Beamformers for ZF-DPC are designed to maximize a performance measure, subject to some power constraints and zero-interference constraints. For the sum rate maximization problem under a total power constraint, the existing beamformer designs in the literature are based on the QR decomposition (QRD), which is used to satisfy the ZF constraints. However, the optimality of the QRD-based design is still unknown. First, we prove that the QRD-based design is indeed optimal for ZF-DPC for any performance measure under a sum power constraint. For the per-antenna power constraints, the QRD-based designs become suboptimal, and we propose an optimal design, using a convex optimization framework. Low-complexity suboptimal designs are also presented.

This paper considers the precoder designs for successive zero-forcing dirty paper coding (SZF-DPC), a suboptimal transmission technique for MIMO broadcast channels (MIMO BCs). Existing precoder designs for SZF-DPC often consider a sum power constraint. In this paper, we address the precoder design for SZF-DPC with per-antenna power constraints (PAPCs), which has not been well studied. First, we formulate the precoder design as a rank-constrained optimization problem, which is generally difficult to handle. To solve this problem, we follow a relaxation approach, and prove that the optimal solution of the relaxed problem is also optimal for the original problem. Considering the relaxed problem, we propose a numerically efficient algorithm to find the optimal solution, which exhibits a fast convergence rate. Suboptimal precoder designs, with lower computational complexity, are also presented, and compared with the optimal ones in terms of achievable sum rate and computational complexity.

Successive zero-forcing dirty paper coding (SZF-DPC) is a simplified alternative to DPC for MIMO broadcast channels (MIMO BCs). In the SZF-DPC scheme, the noncausally-known interference is canceled by DPC, while the residual interference is suppressed by the ZF technique. Due to the ZF constraints, the precoders are constrained to lie in the null space of a matrix. For the sum rate maximization problem under a sum power constraint, the existing precoder designs naturally rely on the singular value decomposition (SVD). The SVD-based design is optimal but needs high computational complexity. Herein, we propose two low-complexity optimal precoder designs for SZF-DPC, all based on the QR decomposition (QRD), which requires lower complexity than SVD. The first design method is an iterative algorithm to find an orthonormal basis of the null space of a matrix that has a recursive structure. The second proposed method, which will be shown to require the lowest complexity, results from applying a single QRD to the matrix comprising all users' channel matrices. We analytically and numerically show that the two proposed precoder designs are optimal.

We propose an extension of our previous work on spatial domain Time-of-Flight (ToF) data enhancement to the temporal domain. Our goal is to generate enhanced depth maps at the same frame rate of the 2-D camera that, coupled with a ToF camera, constitutes a hybrid ToF multi-camera rig. To that end, we first estimate the motion between consecutive 2-D frames, and then use it to predict their corresponding depth maps. The enhanced depth maps result from the fusion between the recorded 2-D frames and the predicted depth maps by using our previous contribution on ToF data enhancement. The experimental results show that the proposed approach overcomes the ToF camera drawbacks; namely, low resolution in space and time and high level of noise within depth measurements, providing enhanced depth maps at video frame rate.

Multibeam systems with hundreds of beams have been recently deployed in order to provide higher capacities by employing fractional frequency reuse. Furthermore, employing full frequency reuse and precoding over multiple beams has shown great throughput potential in literature. However, feeding all this data from a single gateway is not feasible based on the current frequency allocations. In this context, we investigate a range of scenarios involving beam clusters where each cluster is managed by a single gateway. More specifically, the following cases are considered for handling intercluster interference: a) conventional frequency colouring, b) joint processing within cluster, c) partial CSI sharing among clusters, d) partial CSI and data sharing among clusters. CSI sharing does not provide considerable performance gains with respect to b) but combined with data sharing offers roughly a 40% improvement over a) and a 15% over b).

This paper addresses coordinated downlink beamforming optimization in multicell time division duplex (TDD) systems where a small number of parameters are exchanged between cells but with no data sharing. With the goal to reach the point on the Pareto boundary with max-min rate fairness, we first develop a two-step centralized optimization algorithm to design the joint beamforming vectors. This algorithm can achieve a further sum-rate improvement over the max-min optimal performance, and is shown to guarantee max-min Pareto optimality for scenarios with two base stations (BSs) each serving a single user. To realize a distributed solution with limited intercell communication, we then propose an iterative algorithm by exploiting an approximate uplink-downlink duality, in which only a small number of positive scalars are shared between cells in each iteration. Simulation results show that the proposed distributed solution achieves a fairness rate performance close to the centralized algorithm while it has a better sum-rate performance, and demonstrates a better tradeoff between sum-rate and fairness than the Nash Bargaining solution especially at high signal-to-noise ratio.

An increasing number of hybrid mobile systems comprising a satellite and a terrestrial component are becoming standardized and realized. The next generation of these systems will employ higher dimensions adopting multiple-input multiple-output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) techniques. In this work, we build upon recent studies of dual polarization MIMO for each component and propose the use of full-rate full-diversity (FRFD) codes adopting a space-frequency paradigm. We also propose a scheme taking advantage of the separation between the subcarriers to enhance the coding gain. By critically assessing the different options for the 4 transmit, 2 receive hybrid scenario taking into account system and channel particularities, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme is a solution for enhancing the performance of next generation hybrid mobile satellite systems.

Security threats introduced due to the vulnerability of the transmission medium may hinder the proliferation of Ka band multibeam satellite systems for civil and military data applications. This paper sets the analytical framework and then studies physical layer security techniques for fixed legitimate receivers dispersed throughout multiple beams, each possibly surrounded by multiple (passive) eavesdroppers. The design objective is to minimize via transmit beamforming the costly total transmit power on board the satellite, while satisfying individual intended users' secrecy rate constraints. Assuming state-of-the-art satellite channel models, when perfect channel state information (CSI) about the eavesdroppers is available at the satellite, a partial zero-forcing approach is proposed for obtaining a low-complexity sub-optimal solution. For the optimal solution, an iterative algorithm combining semi-definite programming relaxation and the gradient-based method is devised by studying the convexity of the problem. Furthermore, the use of artificial noise as an additional degree-of-freedom for protection against eavesdroppers is explored. When only partial CSI about the eavesdroppers is available, we study the problem of minimizing the eavesdroppers' received signal to interference-plus-noise ratios. Simulation results demonstrate substantial performance improvements over existing approaches.

Multibeam satellite systems have been employed to provide interactive broadband services to geographical areas under-served by terrestrial infrastructure. In this context, this paper studies joint multiuser linear precoding design in the forward link of fixed multibeam satellite systems. We provide a generic optimization framework for linear precoding design to handle any objective functions of data rate with general linear and nonlinear power constraints. To achieve this, an iterative algorithm which optimizes the precoding vectors and power allocation alternatingly is proposed and most importantly, the proposed algorithm is proved to always converge. The proposed optimization algorithm is also applicable to nonlinear dirty paper coding. As a special case, a more efficient algorithm is devised to find the optimal solution to the problem of maximizing the proportional fairness among served users. In addition, the aforementioned problems and algorithms are extended to the case that each terminal has multiple co-polarization or dual-polarization antennas. Simulation results demonstrate substantial performance improvement of the proposed schemes over conventional multibeam satellite systems, zero-forcing and regularized zero-forcing precoding schemes in terms of meeting the traffic demand, e.g., using real beam patterns, over twice higher throughput can be achieved compared with the conventional scheme. The performance of the proposed linear precoding scheme is also shown to be very close to the dirty paper coding.

We present an adaptive multi-lateral filter for real-time low-resolution depth map enhancement. Despite the great advantages of Time-of-Flight cameras in 3-D sensing, there are two main drawbacks that restricts their use in a wide range of applications; namely, their fairly low spatial resolution, compared to other 3-D sensing systems, and the high noise level within the depth measurements. We therefore propose a new data fusion method based upon a bilateral filter. The proposed filter is an extension the pixel weighted average strategy for depth sensor data fusion. It includes a new factor that allows to adaptively consider 2-D data or 3-D data as guidance information. Consequently, unwanted artefacts such as texture copying get almost entirely eliminated, outperforming alternative depth enhancement filters. In addition, our algorithm can be effectively and efficiently implemented for real-time applications.

In conventional multibeam satellite systems, frequency and polarization orthogonalization have been traditionally employed for mitigating interbeam interference. However, the paradigm of multibeam joint precoding allows for full frequency reuse while assisting beam-edge users. In this paper, the performance of linear beamforming is investigated in terms of meeting traffic demands. More importantly, generic linear constraints are considered over the transmit covariance matrix in order to model the power pooling effect which can be implemented through flexible traveling wave tube amplifiers (TWTAS) or multiport amplifiers. The performance of this scheme is compared against conventional spotbeam systems based on the rate-balancing objective. In this context, it is shown that significantly higher spectral efficiency can be achieved through beamforming, while flexible power constraint offers better rate-balancing.

Feedback of channel state information (CSI) is necessary to achieve high throughput and low outage probability in multiuser multi antenna systems. There are two types of CSI: directional and quality information. Many papers have analyzed the importance of these in asymptotic regimes. However, we show that such results should be handled with care, as very different conclusions can be drawn depending on the spatial correlation and number of users. There fore, we propose a quantization framework and evaluate the tradeoff between directional and quality feedback under practical conditions.

We define a new reduced model to represent coloured images. We propose to use two components for a full definition of a colour instead of three. To that end we take advantage of the geometrical structure of the HCL conical colour space and approximate its circular base by a spiral. We thus write chroma as a function of hue. The resulting spiral is therefore defined by one parameter only. This parameter is then combined with luminance in order to represent all the colour information. Our experiments show that our proposed model ensures an accurate representation of coloured digital images. Further more, it preserves the perceptual properties of the original HCL representation.

Spectrum sharing between two independent, co-existing transmit-receive pairs (TRPs) is formulated as a non-cooperative game with the TRPs as players, their individual link rates as payoffs and power allocation over the utilized spectral bands as the strategy. A Nash Equilibrium (NE) corresponds to the outcome of such a game and TRPs iteratively use the water-filling algorithm according to an agreed order for achieving the NE. Dynamics of this distributed algorithm is studied to determine the conditions for convergence and characterize the resulting NE. A sufficient condition on global convergence is derived and is shown to be tighter than existing ones. Further, a novel characterization of the globally achievable NE based on necessary conditions is presented. Some of these results are also extended to multiple NE scenarios where local convergence is exhibited.

Finding the least squares (LS) solution s to a system of linear equations Hs = y where H, y are given and s is a vector of binary variables, is a well known NP-hard problem. In this paper, we consider binary LS problems under the assumption that the coefficient matrix H is also unknown, and lies in a given uncertainty ellipsoid. We show that the corresponding worst-case robust optimization problem, although NP-hard, is still amenable to semidefinite relaxation (SDR)-based approximations. However, the relaxation step is not obvious, and requires a certain problem reformulation to be efficient. The proposed relaxation is motivated using Lagrangian duality and simulations suggest that it performs well, offering a robust alternative over the traditional SDR approaches for binary LS problems.

Multicell joint decoding (MJD) has been widely studied during the last decades as a new communication paradigm which can overcome the interference-limited nature of cellular systems. From a practical point of view, a feasible solution is to exploit clusters of cooperating Base Stations (BSs) with intracluster MJD. However, the clusters would still be affected by intercluster cochannel interference. In this paper, the corresponding channel model is established incorporating four impairments, namely additive white Gaussian noise, flat fading, path loss and cochannel interference. The asymptotic capacity limit of this channel is calculated based on an asymptotic free probability approach which exploits the additive and multiplicative free convolution in the R- and Σ-transform domain respectively, as well as properties of the η and Stieltjes transform. Numerical results are utilized to verify the accuracy of the derived closed-form expressions and evaluate the effect of the cochannel interference.

We present a novel approach for joint transmitter-receiver design in the uplink of a wireless multiple-input multiple-output communication system. It applies to, e.g., a fast-fading frequency-division duplexing system with periodic pilot signaling from each user -- a scenario hindering transmitter optimization based on channel state information (CSI), while CSI-based receiver optimization is possible. Each user multiplexes data onto several, independently coded subchannels processed by a linear precoder, and detected at a base station (BS) employing zero-forcing decision feedback (DF) equalization, eliminating all interference prior to detection. We target the problem of jointly designing fixed linear precoders for all users as well as a fixed detection order for the DF receiver based on long-term channel statistics. We propose an efficiently implementable alternating-minimization technique that is verified numerically to converge fast, and to outperform the popular V-BLAST scheme -- a computationally more complex ordered-DF receiver with limited applicability by requiring equal-rate subchannels in the system.

This paper discusses the performance of Golden codes in a hybrid satellite/terrestrial system framework employing dual polarized MIMO-OFDM transmissions. Although the use of Golden codes in satellite and terrestrial scenarios has been studied independently, a realistic performance assessment must involve both components taking into account the relative delay between their reception. In fact, this work exploits the relative delay to create a multipath scenario and further improve the coding gain of the Golden codes, which is otherwise fixed. This is made possible by utilizing the Golden code in a Space-Frequency coding framework instead of the traditional Space-Time paradigm. The separation between the subcarriers constituting a Golden code is shown to be central to the coding gain enhancement and an algorithm to choose this separation is provided.

Coordinated multi-point processing has shown great potential for cellular networks, while multiple antenna systems (MIMO) is the key to next generation wireless communications. Full exploitation of MIMO technology, however, demands high antenna separation at the transceivers. This paper investigates the use of dual polarized antennas as a mean to overcome hardware size limitations. Uplink ergodic sum-rate capacity of a multicell joint processing (MJP) system employing dual polarized antennas is evaluated through theoretical analysis. Results are supported by numerical simulations. The designed system incorporates uniformly distributed users, path loss and Rayleigh fading, thus extending the well known Wyner model. Optimal and MMSE receiver architectures are compared in terms of capacity and complexity. System capacity is calculated with respect to cell size or cross polar discrimination (XPD). The results support the use of dual-polar decoding for low XPD, dense cellular systems while per polarization processing is acceptable in high XPD, sparse systems.

Multicell joint processing has been proven to be very efficient in overcoming the interference-limited nature of the cellular paradigm. However, for reasons of practical implementation global multicell joint decoding is not feasible and thus clusters of cooperating Base Stations have to be considered. In this context, intercluster interference has to be mitigated in order to harvest the full potential of multicell joint processing. In this paper, interference alignment is investigated as a means of intercluster interference mitigation and its performance is compared to global multicell joint processing. Both scenarios are modelled and analyzed using the per-cell ergodic sum-rate capacity as a figure of merit. In this process, a number of theorems are derived for analytically expressing the asymptotic eigenvalue distributions of the channel covariance matrices. The analysis is based on principles from Free Probability theory and especially properties in the R and Stieltjes transform domain.

Base station cooperation can theoretically improve the throughput of multicell systems by coordinating interference and serving cell edge terminals through multiple base stations. In practice, the extent of cooperation is limited by the increase in backhaul signaling and computational demands. To address these concerns, we propose a novel distributed cooperation structure where each base station has responsibility for the interference towards a set of terminals, while only serving a subset of them with data. Weighted sum rate maximization is considered, and conditions for beamforming optimality and the optimal transmission structure are derived using Lagrange duality theory. This leads to distributed low-complexity transmission strategies, which are evaluated on measured multiantenna channels in a typical urban multicell environment.

We address the problem of combining limited feedback information with long-term channel statistical information in the design of downlink SDMA schemes. A novel combining method is developed to improve the quality of channel knowledge at the base station. More specifically, a set of novel feedback parameters is proposed and a related method is developed to estimate a representation of the multiuser channel vectors at the base station. This method utilizes the hybrid information by combining instantaneous channel feedback and long-term channel statistics, and is based on a channel phase codebook designed using the generalized Lloyd algorithm. The estimated channel knowledge at the base station can be used for joint design of multiuser precoding and opportunistic scheduling. The advantage of the proposed scheme over existing CSI quantization based SDMA schemes is further confirmed by computer simulations.

This paper introduces a new multi-lateral filter to fuse low-resolution depth maps with high-resolution images. The goal is to enhance the resolution of Time-of-Flight sensors and, at the same time, reduce the noise level in depth measurements. Our approach is based on the joint bilateral upsampling, extended by a new factor that considers the low reliability of depth measurements along the low-resolution depth map edges. Our experimental results show better performances than alternative depth enhancing data fusion techniques.

Multicell joint processing has been shown to efficiently suppress inter-cell interference, while providing a high capacity gain due to spatial multiplexing across distributed Base Stations (BSs). However, the complexity of the optimal joint decoder in the multicell uplink channel grows exponentially with the number of users, making it prohibitive to implement in practice. In this direction, this paper investigates the uplink capacity performance of multicell joint linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) filtering, followed by single-user decoding. The considered cellular multiple-access channel model assumes both Rayleigh and Rician flat fading, path loss, distributed users and correlated multiple antennas at the base station side. The case of Rayleigh fading is tackled using a free probability approach, while the case of Rician fading is addressed through a deterministic equivalent calculated using non-linear programming techniques. In this context, it is shown that LMMSE can provide high spectral efficiencies in practical macrocellular scenarios.

This paper describes an implementation of a realtime multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) communication system, with cross-layer channel-aware scheduling. The system is implemented using software reconfigurable nodes that may be configured as either user terminals, or as base stations, communicating in the GSM 1800 uplink band. Three different commonly used scheduling algorithms (based on channel state information fed back by the receiver nodes) are studied and compared experimentally for three different signal to noise ratios in an indoor non line of sight environment. It is shown that channel-aware scheduling increases not only the system throughput, but also the fairness. Further, using the possibility of changing antenna polarization through software controlled switches, the multiuser gains may be increased even further, both in total throughput as well as fairness.

One way of modelling the wireless channel is in a statistical manner, based on a few parameters describing the characteristics of the environment. In most current wireless channel models, these key parameters are assumed independent between separate links, i.e. on the channels modelling the propagation between one base station and several mobile stations, or one mobile station and several base stations. In practice, dependencies between these wireless channels is expected and as a consequence, system performance evaluations based on models with independent links may be inaccurate. Herein, we consider simulations of a system that depend on the spatial nature of the channel. In particular, we study a system with multi-user scheduling using a single carrier. We investigate the impact of angle spread correlations on multi-user diversity gains using opportunistic scheduling. To facilitate this, a novel method of modelling the angle spread correlations for multi-user system simulations is developed. It is shown that in systems with multiple user scheduling, modelling the angle spread autocorrelation is necessary to obtain reliable system performance results, especially as the number of simultaneous scheduled users increases.

\boldmath The impact of transmission design and spatial correlation on the symbol error rate (SER) is analyzed for multi-antenna communication links. The receiver has perfect channel state information (CSI), while the transmitter has either statistical or no CSI. The transmission is based on orthogonal space-time block codes (OSTBCs) and linear precoding. The precoding strategy that minimizes the worst-case SER is derived for the case when the transmitter has no CSI. Based on this strategy, the intuitive result that spatial correlation degrades the SER performance is proved mathematically. In the case when the transmitter knows the channel statistics, the correlation matrix is assumed to be jointly-correlated (a generalization of the Kronecker model). The eigenvectors of the SER-optimal precoding matrix are shown to originate from the correlation matrix and the remaining power allocation is a convex problem. Equal power allocation is SER-optimal at high SNR. Beamforming is SER-optimal at low SNR, or for increasing constellation sizes, and its optimality range is characterized. A heuristic low-complexity power allocation is proposed and evaluated numerically. Finally, it is proved analytically that receive-side correlation always degrades the SER. Transmit-side correlation will however improve the SER at low to medium SNR, while its impact is negligible at high SNR.

We address fixed satellite broadcast reception with the goal of decreasing the aperture of the receiving antenna. The front-end antenna size is commonly determined by the presence of interference from adjacent satellites. A small antenna aperture leads to interference from neighboring satellites utilizing the same frequency bands. We propose a reception system with M multiple input elements and with subsequent joint detection of desired and interfering signals that provides reliable communication in the presence of multiple interfering signals. An iterative least squares technique is adopted combining spatial and temporal processing and achieving robustness against pointing errors. Simulation results show how the proposed joint spatial and temporal adapted mechanism outperforms the simple combination of existing techniques under interference overloaded conditions. Also, we demonstrate how to accurately synchronize the signals as part of the detection procedure. The technique is evaluated in a realistic simulation study representing the conditions encountered in a DVB-S2 broadcast scenario.

This paper considers downlink multiantenna communication with base stations that perform cooperative precoding in a distributed fashion. Most previous work in the area has assumed that transmitters have common knowledge of both data symbols of all users and full or partial channel state information (CSI). Herein, we assume that each base station only has local CSI, either instantaneous or statistical. For the case of instantaneous CSI, a parametrization of the beamforming vectors used to achieve the outer boundary of the achievable rate region is obtained for two multi-antenna transmitters and two single-antenna receivers. Distributed generalizations of classical beamforming approaches that satisfy this parametrization are provided, and it is shown how the distributed precoding design can be improved using the so-called virtual SINR framework. Conceptually analog results for both the parametrization and the beamforming design are derived in the case of local statistical CSI. Heuristics on the distributed power allocation are provided in both cases, and the performance is illustrated numerically.

We consider the interaction of several transmit-receive pairs coexisting in the same area and communicating using the same portion of the spectrum. Using a game theoretic framework, each pair is regarded as a player whose payoff function is the individual link rate and power is allocated using the iterative water-filling algorithm. We find properties of the resulting Nash equilibria and derive conditions for when various operating points are achievable. The analysis presented herein extends previous work by characterizing the set of stable solutions for a multi-user system. Also, we show how the game can be modified to obtain better operating points in terms of sum rate compared to the iterative water-filling algorithm. The increase in performance corresponding to one such modification is evaluated and compared to the iterative water-filling algorithm by numerical simulations.

Training-based estimation of channel state information in multi-antenna systems is analyzed herein. Closed-form expressions for the general Bayesian minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimators of the channel matrix and the squared channel norm are derived in a Rayleigh fading environment with known statistics at the receiver side. When the second-order channel statistics are available also at the transmitter, this information can be exploited in the training sequence design to improve the performance. Herein, mean square error (MSE) minimizing training sequences are considered. The structure of the general solution is developed, with explicit expressions at high and low SNRs and in the special case of uncorrelated receive antennas. The optimal length of the training sequence is equal or smaller than the number of transmit antennas.

The symbol error performance of spatially correlated multi-antenna systems is analyzed herein. When the transmitter only has statistical channel information, the use of space-time block codes still permits spatial multiplexing and mitigation of fading. The statistical information can be used for precoding to optimize some quality measure. Herein, we analyze the performance in terms of the symbol error rate (SER). It is shown analytically that spatial correlation at the receiver decreases the performance both without precoding and with an SER minimizing precoder. Without precoding, correlation should also be avoided at the transmitter side, but with an SER minimizing precoder the performance is actually improved by increasing spatial correlation at the transmitter. The structure of the optimized precoder is analyzed and the asymptotic properties at high and low SNRs are characterized and illustrated numerically.

This paper considers the joint design of bit loading, precoding and receive filters for a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) digital communication system employing decision feedback (DF) detection at the receiver. Both the transmitter as well as the receiver are assumed to know the channel matrix perfectly. It is well known that, for linear MIMO transceivers, a diagonal transmission (i.e., orthogonalization of the matrix channel) is optimal for some criteria. Surprisingly, it was shown five years ago that for the family of Schur-convex functions an additional rotation of the symbols is necessary. However, if the bit loading is optimized jointly with the linear transceiver, then the rotation is unnecessary. Similarly, for DF MIMO transceivers, a rotation of the symbols is sometimes needed. The main result of this paper shows that for a DF MIMO transceiver where the bit loading is jointly optimized with the transceiver filters, the rotation of the symbols becomes unnecessary and, consequently, also the DF part of the receiver is not required.

This letter studies the collaborative use of amplify-and-forward (AF) relays to form a virtual multiple-input single-output (MISO) beamforming system with the aid of perfect channel state information (CSI) in a flat-fading channel. In particular, we optimize the relay weights jointly to maximize the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the destination terminal with both individual and total power constraints at the relays. We show that the optimal collaborative-relay beamforming (CRB) solution achieves the full diversity of a MISO antenna system. Another main contribution of this letter is a distributed algorithm that allows each individual relay to learn its own weight, based on the Karush–Kuhn–Tucker (KKT) analysis.

Herein, we treat Space Division Multiple Access (SDMA) based on partial channel state information and limited feedback. We propose a novel framework utilizing subspace packings, where beamforming, feedback, and scheduling are integrated. Advantages of the proposed framework are that the fed back supportable rates are based on the post-scheduling SINR and that the feedback implicitly contains information about the spatial compatibility of the users. The feasibility region of packings of different dimensions is indicated by the allocation outage probability which is derived. Grassmannian subspace packings, DFT-based packings, and non-orthogonal Grassmannian packings are formulated and studied as candidates. Numerical simulations show better performance for the proposed scheme compared to conventional channel quantization at the receiver with zero-forcing transmission in i.i.d. Rayleigh fading. Finally, we propose and evaluate a beam-graph method to further reduce the feedback load, that can be used in the context of tracking quantized beamformers.

A scenario consisting of two transmitter-receiver pairs coexisting in the same area and communicating using the same portion of the spectrum is considered. Decentralized coding strategies are employed at the transmitter side and no cooperation is assumed between the two systems. We investigate the structure of Nash equilibria corresponding to simultaneous water-filling solutions and propose a scheme that improves overall performance of systems with weak mutual interference. The resulting scheme provides a spectrum sharing rule in the form of a modified utility function. The conditions for optimality are presented and a numerical example illustrates the performance compared to a scheme employing the link rate as utility function.

In wireless multiple antenna and multi-user systems, the spatial dimensions may be exploited to increase the performance by means of antenna gain, spatial diversity, and multi-user diversity. A limiting factor in such systems is the channel information required by the transmitter to control the intra-cell interference. Herein, the properties of spatially correlated channels with longterm statistical information at the transmitter and fixed-rate feedback of the quantized Euclidean channel norm are analyzed using a spectral subspace decomposition framework. A spatial division multiple access scheme is proposed with interference suppression at the receiver and joint scheduling and zero-forcing beamforming at the transmitter. Closed-form expressions for first and second order moments of the feedback conditional channel statistics are derived. It is shown that only a few bits of feedback are required to achieve reliable rate estimation and weighted sum-rate maximization.

We consider the communication of digital signals over a multiple- input multiple-output wireless channel, using a linear precoder at the transmitter and a non-linear decision feedback equalizer at the receiver. This receiver structure can exploit the signal constellation properties by using successive quantization and interference cancellation. Recently, optimal precoder designs have been found for a wide range of performance measures assuming that perfect channel- state information (CSI) is available. Herein, we propose a design taking CSI uncertainty into account by utilizing the first and second order statistics of the channel. The resulting precoder exhibits improved performance compared to similar methods based on long- term statistics.

The performance of multiuser MIMO systems can be significantly increased by channel aware scheduling and signal processing at the transmitters based on channel state information. In the multiple-antenna uplink multi-carrier scenario, the base station decides centrally on the optimal signal processing and spectral power allocation as well as scheduling. An interesting challenge is the reduction of the overhead in order to inform the mobiles about their transmit strategies. In this work, we propose to reduce the feedback by chunk processing and quantization. We maximize the weighted sum rate of a MIMO OFDM MAC under individual power constraints and chunk size constraints. An efficient iterative algorithm is developed and convergence proved. The feedback overhead as a function of the chunk size is considered in the rate computation and the optimal chunk size is determined by numerical simulations for various channel models. Finally, the issues of finite modulation and coding schemes as well as quantization of the preceding matrices are addressed.

This paper considers the problem of optimizing a Schur-convex objective under a linearly shifted, or skewed, majorization constraint. Similar to the case with a regular majorization constraint, the solution is found to be the same for the entire class of cost functions. Furthermore, it is shown that the problem is equivalent to identifying the convex hull under a simple polygon defined by the constraint parameters. This leads to an algorithm that produces the exact optimum with linear computational complexity. As an application, we present a novel precoder design for a multi-input multi-output communication system with heterogeneous signal constellations utilizing decision feedback detection at the receiver.

This paper considers quantization and exact minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimation of the squared Frobenius norm and the squared spectral norm of a Rayleigh fading multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel with one-sided spatial correlation. The Frobenius and spectral norms are of great importance when describing the achievable capacity of many wireless communication systems; in particularly, they correspond to the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of space-time block coded and maximum ratio combining transmissions, respectively. Herein, a general quantization framework is presented, where the quantization levels are determined to maximize the feedback entropy. Quantization based on the post-user-selection distribution is discussed, and analyzed for a specific scheduler. Finally, exact results on MMSE estimation of the capacity and the SNR, conditioned on a quantized channel norm, are presented.

In this paper the autocorrelation properties of shadow fading and angle spread at both the base station (BS) and at the mobile station (MS) are analyzed using urban macro cellular measurement data. The shadow fading parameter is shown to have a longer decorrelation distance than the angle spread at both the BS and at the MS. Furthermore, we observe variations in the shadow fading that depend on the direction of the MS movement due to street canyons. The same dependence is not observed in the angle spreads. These results indicate that the origin of the angle spread is local to the transmitter and receiver, while the shadow fading depends on the intermediate environment.

In this paper, we consider the detection of binary (antipodal) signals transmitted in a spatially multiplexed fashion over a fading multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) channel and where the detection is done by means of semidefinite relaxation (SDR). The SDR detector is an attractive alternative to maximum-likelihood (ML) detection since the complexity is polynomial rather than exponential. Assuming that the channel matrix is drawn with independent identically distributed (i.i.d.) real-valued Gaussian entries, we study the receiver diversity and prove that the SDR detector achieves the maximum possible diversity. Thus, the error probability of the receiver tends to zero at the same rate as the optimal ML receiver in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) limit. This significantly strengthens previous performance guarantees available for the semidefinite relaxation detector. Additionally, it proves that full diversity detection is also possible in certain scenarios when using a noncombinatorial receiver structure.

In this work, we analyze opportunistic beamforming with finite number of single-antenna users under the constraint that the feedback overhead from the mobiles to the base is constant. First, we characterize the impact of the fading variances of the users and the spatial correlation on the sum rate of TDMA based opportunistic beamforming using majorization theory. Further, we describe quantitatively the high-SNR behavior in terms of throughput slope and power offset. Next, the impact of the fading variances of the users on an upper bound of the sum rate for space division multiple access (SDMA) based opportunistic beamforming is derived which is tight for high SNR. We propose to adapt the number of active beams to the SNR and the number of active users in a cell and illustrate the corresponding optimization problem by simulations.

In [3], a low-resolution range sensor was investigated for an occupant classification system that distinguish person from child seats or an empty seat. The optimal deployment of vehicle airbags for maximum protection moreover requires information about the occupant's size and position. The detection of occupant's position involves the detection and localization of occupant's head. This is a challenging problem as the approaches based on local shape analysis (in 2D or 3D) alone are not robust enough as other parts of the person's body like shoulders, knee may have similar shapes as the head. This paper discusses and investigate the potential of a Reeb graph approach to describe the topology of vehicle occupants in terms of a skeleton. The essence of the proposed approach is that an occupant sitting in a vehicle has a typical topology which leads to different branches of a Reeb Graph and the possible location of the occupant's head are thus the end points of the Reeb graph. The proposed method is applied on real 3D range images and is compared to Ground truth information. Results show the feasibility of using topological information to identify the position of occupant's head.

Herein, the design of linear dispersion codes for block based multiple-input multiple-output communication systems is investigated. The receiver as well as the transmitter are assumed to have perfect knowledge of the channel, and the receiver is assumed to employ maximum likelihood detection. We propose to use linear precoding and lattice invariant operations to transform the channel matrix into a lattice with large coding gain. With appropriate approximations, it is shown that this corresponds to selecting lattices with good sphere packing properties. Lattice invariant transformations are then used to minimize the power consumption. An algorithm for this power minimization is presented along with a lower bound on the optimization. Numerical results indicate that there is a potential gain of several dB by using the method compared to channel inversion with adaptive bit loading.

Spatial division multiple access (SDMA) systems efficiently take advantage of the spatial dimensions of the channel to increase the performance of the system. A major difficulty, common to all SDMA systems, is the requirement of channel knowledge at the transmitter to enable transmission of multiple streams without catastrophic interference. Herein we show that, in wide area scenarios, statistical channel information combined with the Euclidean norm of the channel realization, fed back from the users, provide sufficient information for SDMA systems to efficiently allocate users in time and space. A joint beamforming and scheduling algorithm is proposed for the downlink, which extends the proportional fair scheduling criterion to an SDMA setting, resulting in a weighted sum rate maximization.

The fixed-complexity sphere decoder (FSD) has been previously proposed for multiple input-multiple output (MIMO) detection to overcome the two main drawbacks of the original sphere decoder (SD), namely its variable complexity and sequential structure. As such, the FSD is highly suitable for hardware implementation and has shown remarkable performance through simulations. Herein, we explore the theoretical aspects of the algorithm and prove that the FSD achieves the same diversity order as the maximum likelihood detector (MLD). Further, we show that the coding loss can be made negligible in the high signal to noise ratio (SNR) regime with a significantly lower complexity than that of the MLD.

The type and quality of the channel state information at the transmitter of a fading multiple-input multiple-output system greatly affects the ergodic capacity of the wireless link. In order to compare and unify the different proposals of transmit strategies for different scenarios, recently classes of MIMO channels are introduced that share a common optimal transmit strategy. In this work, we derive the ergodic capacity achieving transmit strategy for the class of unitary invariant norm feedback which complements statistical channel information at the transmitter. The impact of the short-term feedback quality is illustrated by the beamforming optimality range. The higher the feedback norm is the more likely is single stream beam-forming to be optimal.

A novel method is proposed for estimation of the mutual coupling matrix of an antenna array. The method extends previous work by incorporating an unknown phase center and the element factor (antenna radiation pattern) in the model, and treating these as nuisance parameters during the estimation of coupling. To facilitate this, a parametrization of the element factor based on a truncated Fourier series is proposed. The Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) for the estimation problem is derived and used to analyze how the required amount of measurement data increases when introducing a more and more flexible model for the element factor. Finally, the performance of the proposed estimator is illustrated using data from measurements on an 8-element antenna array.