In this paper, we present an overview of the time-reversal (TR) wireless paradigm for green Internet of Things (IoT). It is shown that the TR technique is a promising technique that focuses signal waves in both time and space domains. The unique asymmetric architecture significantly reduces the cost of the terminal devices, the total number of which is expected to be very large for IoT. The focusing effect of the TR technique can harvest the energy of all the multi-paths at the receiver, which improves the energy efficiency of the wireless transmission and thus the battery life of terminal devices in IoT. Facilitated by the high-resolution spatial focusing, the TR division multiple access scheme leverages the uniqueness of the multi-path profiles in the rich-scattering environment and maps them into location-specific signatures, so that spatial multiplexing can be achieved for multiple users operating on the same spectrum. In addition, the TR system can easily support heterogeneous terminal devices by providing various quality-of-service (QoS) options through adjusting the waveform and rate backoff factor. Finally, the unique location-specific signature in TR system can provide additional physical-layer security and thus can enhance the privacy and security of customers in IoT. All the advantages show that the TR technique is a promising paradigm for IoT.

The concept of Time-Reversal Division Multiple Access (TRDMA) has recently been proposed as a promising medium access technology for wireless broadband communications. Previous work on TRDMA mainly focuses on the multi-user downlink system. In this paper, we first introduce a TRDMA-based multi-user uplink architecture and then propose a 2D parallel interference cancellation scheme to enhance system performance. The TRDMA uplink architecture keeps the cost of end-users at a minimum level, and reuses the processing power at the base station that has already been made available for the downlink. The proposed 2D parallel interference cancellation scheme utilizes tentative decisions of detected symbols to effectively cancel both inter-symbol interference and inter-user interference, which significantly improve the bit-error-rate (BER) performance in high SNR regime. To further improve BER performance, a multi-stage processing can be implemented by cascading multiple stages of the proposed 2D interference cancellation, with a total delay that increases linearly with the number of stages, but independent of the number of users. The BER performance of the single-stage cancellation is analyzed, and the approximated theoretical result well matches the simulation results. Simulations are provided for up-to 3 stages of interference cancellation and compared with the basic TRDMA system without interference cancellation.

The concept of Time Reversal Division Multiple Access (TRDMA) has recently been proposed as a promising medium access technology for the multi-user wireless broadband communications. Compared with the existing multi-carrier technology like OFDM/OFDMA, the TRDMA provides a cost-effective single-carrier alternative technology to combat the inter-symbol interference (ISI) for broadband communications, and at the same time leverages the degrees of freedom in a large number of multi-paths to form a unique high-resolution spatial focusing effect. Previous work on TRDMA mainly focus on the multi-user downlink system. In this paper, we first introduce a TRDMA-based multi-user uplink architecture and then propose a 2-dimensional (2D) parallel interference cancellation scheme to further enhance the system performance. The TRDMA uplink architecture keeps the cost of end-users at a minimum level, and reuses the processing power at the base station (BS) that has already been made available for the downlink. The proposed 2D parallel interference cancellation scheme utilizes the tentative decisions of detected symbols to effectively cancel the interference in both the time domain (i.e. ISI) and the user domain (i.e. inter-user interference (IUI)), which significantly improve the bit-errorrate performance in the high signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) regime. Simulation results are provided and compared with the basic TRDMA system without interference cancellation.

The spatial and time focusing effects of time-reversal technology make it an ideal candidate for the low interference downlink system to relieve the coexistence issues among different wireless communication systems. The transmitting power would be concentrated at the intended receiver and the leakage to unintended receivers would be automatically suppressed. In this paper, a time-reversal based secondary user downlink system with the coexistence of primary users is proposed. The primary user's performance loss is investigated in terms of effective SINR degradation and achievable data rate deduction. It is illustrated through numerical examples that the time-reversal downlink system relieves the primary user's performance loss as well as achieves satisfying power efficiency compared with the traditional direct transmission.

With the advance of semiconductor technologies, the performance of analog-to-digital converter (ADC) has been improved a lot during the past decade in terms of both sampling rate and resolution. The cost has gone down dramatically that makes the wideband communication much affordable. Under such circumstances, a natural question to ask is: Is there a low complexity high energy-efficient solution to high throughput wideband communications? In this letter, we explore this question by studying time-reversal communications. We find that compared with that of OFDM system, the computational complexity of a time-reversal system at the transmitter side is lower since it requires similar additions but no multiplications. Furthermore, the computational complexity of a time-reversal system at the receiver side is negligible since only onetap detection is performed, which means that the overall computational complexity of time-reversal system is much lower than that of OFDM system. Moreover, we find that when the bandwidth is large enough, time-reversal system can achieve much higher achievable rate than OFDM system. Therefore, time-reversal technique is a desired solution to low complexity high throughput wideband communications when more bandwidth is available.

With the explosive deployment of the information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructures, the rising cost of energy and increased environmental awareness has sparked a keen interest in the development and deployment of energy-efficient communication technologies. As a major player in the ICT sector, the energy efficiency of the mobile cellular networks can be significantly improved by switching off some base stations during off-peak periods. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient BS switching strategy, and use cooperative communication techniques among the base stations to effectively extend network coverage. We incorporate both the path-loss and fading effects in our system model, and derive closed-form expressions for two important quality of service metrics, the call-blocking probability and the channel outage probability. The proposed scheme guarantees the quality of service of the user equipments by identifying the user equipments situated at the worst-case locations. The energy-saving performance is evaluated and compared with the conventional uni-pattern operation. Both analytical and numerical results show that the proposed energy-efficient switching strategy, facilitated by BS cooperation, can provide significant energy-saving potential for the cellular networks with guaranteed quality of service.

While demand response has achieved promising results on making the power grid more efficient and reliable, the additional dynamics and flexibility brought by demand response also increase the uncertainty and complexity of the centralized load forecast. In this paper, we propose a game theoretic demand response scheme that can transform the traditional centralized load prediction structure into a distributed load prediction system by the participation of customers. Moreover, since customers are generally rational and thus naturally selfish, they may cheat if cheating can improve their payoff. Therefore, enforcing truth-telling is crucial. We prove analytically and demonstrate with simulations that the proposed game theoretic scheme is cheat-proof, i.e., all customers are motivated to report and consume their true optimal demands and any deviation will lead to a utility loss. We also prove theoretically that the proposed demand response scheme can lead to the solution that maximizes social welfare and is proportionally fair in terms of utility function. Moreover, we propose a simple dynamic pricing algorithm for the power substation to control the total demand of all customers to meet the target demand curve. Finally, simulations are shown to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed game theoretic algorithm.

The rising cost of energy and increased environmental awareness have sparked a keen interest in the development and deployment of energy-efficient communication technologies. The energy efficiency of cellular networks can be increased significantly by selectively switching off some of the base stations (BSs) during periods of low traffic load. In this paper, we propose a scalable BS switching strategy and use cooperative communications and power control to extend network coverage to the service areas of the switched-off BSs. The outage probability and the achievable power savings of the proposed scheme are analyzed, both analytically and numerically, and a potential of up to 50% power saving is observed in the numerical results.

The multi-path effect makes high speed broadband communications a very challenging task due to the severe inter-symbol interference (ISI). By concentrating energy in both the spatial and temporal domains, time-reversal (TR) transmission technique provides a great potential of low-complexity energy-efficient communications. In this paper, a novel concept of time-reversal division multiple access (TRDMA) is proposed as a wireless channel access method based on its high-resolution spatial focusing effect. It is proposed to use TR structure in multi-user downlink systems over multi-path channels, where signals of different users are separated solely by TRDMA. Both the single-transmit-antenna scheme and its enhanced version with multiple transmit antennas are developed and evaluated in this paper. The system performance is investigated in terms of its effective signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), the achievable sum rate and the achievable rates with outage. And some further discussions regarding its advantage over conventional rake receivers and the impact of spatial correlations between users are given at the end of this paper. It is shown in both analytical and simulation results that desirable properties and satisfying performances can be achieved in the proposed TRDMA multi-user downlink system, which makes TRDMA a promising candidate for future energy-efficient low-complexity broadband wireless communications.

Multi-path effect makes high speed broadband communications a very challenging task due to the severe inter-symbol interference (ISI). By concentrating energy in both spatial and temporal domains, time-reversal (TR) transmission technique provides a great potential of low-complexity energy-efficient communications. In this paper, we develop a new concept of time-reversal division multiple access (TRDMA) as a wireless channel access method based on its high-resolution spatial focusing effect. We propose to use TR structure in a multi-user downlink system over large delay spread channels, where the signals of different users are separated solely by TRDMA. Both the single-transmit-antenna scheme and its enhanced version with multiple-transmit-antenna are developed and evaluated in this paper. We investigate the system performance in terms of the effective SINR and the achievable sum rate of the multi-user system. It is shown in both analytical and simulation results that satisfying performances can be achieved in the proposed TRDMA multi-user downlink system.

Green wireless communications have received considerable attention recently in hope of finding novel solutions to improve energy efficiency for the ubiquity of wireless applications. In this paper, we argue and show that the time-reversal (TR) signal transmission is an ideal paradigm for green wireless communications because of its inherent nature to fully harvest energy from the surrounding environment by exploiting the multi-path propagation to re-collect all the signal energy that would have otherwise been lost in most existing communication paradigms. A green wireless technology must ensure low energy consumption and low radio pollution to others than the intended user. In this paper, we show through theoretical analysis, numerical simulations and experiment measurements that the TR wireless communications, compared to the conventional direct transmission using a Rake receiver, reveals significant transmission power reduction, achieves high interference alleviation ratio, and exhibits large multi-path diversity gain. As such it is an ideal paradigm for the development of green wireless systems. The theoretical analysis and numerical simulations show an order of magnitude improvement in terms of transmit power reduction and interference alleviation. Experimental measurements in a typical indoor environment also demonstrate that the transmit power with TR based transmission can be as low as 20% of that without TR, and the average radio interference (thus radio pollution) even in a nearby area can be up to 6dB lower. A strong time correlation is found to be maintained in the multi-path channel even when the environment is varying, which indicates high bandwidth efficiency can be achieved in TR radio communications.