A non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) empowered integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) framework is investigated. A dual-functional base station serves multiple communication users employing NOMA, while the superimposed NOMA communication signal is simultaneously exploited for target sensing. A beamforming design problem is formulated to maximize the weighted sum of the communication throughput and the effective sensing power. To solve this problem, an efficient double-layer penalty-based algorithm is proposed by invoking successive convex approximation (SCA). Numerical results show that the proposed NOMA-ISAC approaches the ideal ISAC system and outperforms the conventional ISAC in the underloaded regime experiencing high-correlated channels and in the overloaded regime.
Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has emerged as a cost-effective solution to enhance wireless communication performance via passive signal reflection. Existing works on IRS have mainly focused on investigating IRS's passive beamforming/reflection design to boost the communication rate for users assuming that their channel state information (CSI) is fully or partially known. However, how to exploit IRS to improve the wireless transmission reliability without any CSI, which is typical in high-mobility/delay-sensitive communication scenarios, remains largely open. In this paper, we study a new IRS-aided communication system with the IRS integrated to its aided access point (AP) to achieve both functions of transmit diversity and passive beamforming simultaneously. Specifically, we first show an interesting result that the IRS's passive beamforming gain in any direction is invariant to the common phase-shift applied to all of its reflecting elements. Accordingly, we design the common phase-shift of IRS elements to achieve transmit diversity at the AP side without the need of any CSI of the users. In addition, we propose a practical method for the users to estimate the CSI at the receiver side for information decoding. Meanwhile, we show that the conventional passive beamforming gain of IRS can be retained for the other users with their CSI known at the AP. Furthermore, we derive the asymptotic performance of both IRS-aided transmit diversity and passive beamforming in closed-form, by considering the large-scale IRS with an infinite number of elements. Numerical results validate our analysis and show the performance gains of the proposed IRS-aided simultaneous transmit diversity and passive beamforming scheme over other benchmark schemes.
This paper proposes a deep learning approach to a class of active sensing problems in wireless communications in which an agent sequentially interacts with an environment over a predetermined number of time frames to gather information in order to perform a sensing or actuation task for maximizing some utility function. In such an active learning setting, the agent needs to design an adaptive sensing strategy sequentially based on the observations made so far. To tackle such a challenging problem in which the dimension of historical observations increases over time, we propose to use a long short-term memory (LSTM) network to exploit the temporal correlations in the sequence of observations and to map each observation to a fixed-size state information vector. We then use a deep neural network (DNN) to map the LSTM state at each time frame to the design of the next measurement step. Finally, we employ another DNN to map the final LSTM state to the desired solution. We investigate the performance of the proposed framework for adaptive channel sensing problems in wireless communications. In particular, we consider the adaptive beamforming problem for mmWave beam alignment and the adaptive reconfigurable intelligent surface sensing problem for reflection alignment. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed deep active sensing strategy outperforms the existing adaptive or nonadaptive sensing schemes.
Optical wireless communication (OWC) has the potential to provide high communication speeds that support the massive use of the Internet that is expected in the near future. In OWC, optical access points (APs) are deployed on the celling to serve multiple users. In this context, efficient multiple access schemes are required to share the resources among the users and align multi-user interference. Recently, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been studied to serve multiple users simultaneously using the same resources, while a different power level is allocated to each user. Despite the acceptable performance of NOMA, users might experience a high packet loss due to high noise, which results from the use of successive interference cancelation (SIC). In this work, random linear network coding (RLNC) is proposed to enhance the performance of NOMA in an optical wireless network where users are divided into multicast groups, and each group contains users that slightly differ in their channel gains. Moreover, a fixed power allocation (FPA) strategy is considered among these groups to avoid complexity. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated in terms of total packet success probability. The results show that the proposed scheme is more suitable for the network considered compared to other benchmark schemes such as traditional NOMA and orthogonal transmission schemes. Moreover, the total packet success probability is highly affected by the level of power allocated to each group in all the scenarios.
The implementation of integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) highly depends on the effective beamforming design exploiting accurate instantaneous channel state information (ICSI). However, channel tracking in ISAC requires large amount of training overhead and prohibitively large computational complexity. To address this problem, in this paper, we focus on ISAC-assisted vehicular networks and exploit a deep learning approach to implicitly learn the features of historical channels and directly predict the beamforming matrix for the next time slot to maximize the average achievable sum-rate of system, thus bypassing the need of explicit channel tracking for reducing the system signaling overhead. To this end, a general sum-rate maximization problem with Cramer-Rao lower bounds-based sensing constraints is first formulated for the considered ISAC system. Then, a historical channels-based convolutional long short-term memory network is designed for predictive beamforming that can exploit the spatial and temporal dependencies of communication channels to further improve the learning performance. Finally, simulation results show that the proposed method can satisfy the requirement of sensing performance, while its achievable sum-rate can approach the upper bound obtained by a genie-aided scheme with perfect ICSI available.
In ultra-dense millimeter wave (mmWave) networks, mmWave signals suffer from severe path losses and are easily blocked by obstacles. Meanwhile, ultra-dense deployment causes excessive handovers, which reduces the data link reliability. To alleviate the above issues, the novel technology, known as multi-connectivity enabled user association (MCUA) is incorporated in this letter. We aim to jointly optimize MCUAs and downlink (DL) power allocations (PAs) to maximize the DL rate of each user simultaneously, rather than total. This is a non-convex nonlinear 0-1 mixed integer multi-objective optimization problem and quite complicated. To solve it, we first use the weighted sum method to scalarize it as a single-objective optimization problem (SOOP), and then relax the binary association variables to real ones. Considering that the relaxed SOOP is still non-convex, we perform a series of transformations upon it and make it a differential of convex programming. Finally, we develop an iterative algorithm based on the convex-concave procedure to solve the SOOP. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and Terahertz (THz) technology are envisioned to play paramount roles in next-generation wireless communications. In this paper, we present a novel secure UAV-assisted mobile relaying system operating at THz bands for data acquisition from multiple ground user equipments (UEs) towards a destination. We assume that the UAV-mounted relay may act, besides providing relaying services, as a potential eavesdropper called the untrusted UAV-relay (UUR). To safeguard end-to-end communications, we present a secure two-phase transmission strategy with cooperative jamming. Then, we devise an optimization framework in terms of a new measure $-$ secrecy energy efficiency (SEE), defined as the ratio of achievable average secrecy rate to average system power consumption, which enables us to obtain the best possible security level while taking UUR's inherent flight power limitation into account. For the sake of quality of service fairness amongst all the UEs, we aim to maximize the minimum SEE (MSEE) performance via the joint design of key system parameters, including UUR's trajectory and velocity, communication scheduling, and network power allocation. Since the formulated problem is a mixed-integer nonconvex optimization and computationally intractable, we decouple it into four subproblems and propose alternative algorithms to solve it efficiently via greedy/sequential block successive convex approximation and non-linear fractional programming techniques. Numerical results demonstrate significant MSEE performance improvement of our designs compared to other known benchmarks.
The Internet of Things (IoT) brings connectivity to a massive number of devices that demand energy-efficient solutions to deal with limited battery capacities, uplink-dominant traffic, and channel impairments. In this work, we explore the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with configurable antennas as a flexible solution for serving low-power IoT networks. We formulate an optimization problem to set the position and antenna beamwidth of the UAV, and the transmit power of the IoT devices subject to average-Signal-to-average-Interference-plus-Noise Ratio ($\bar{\text{S}}\overline{\text{IN}}\text{R}$) Quality of Service (QoS) constraints. We minimize the worst-case average energy consumption of the latter, thus, targeting the fairest allocation of the energy resources. The problem is non-convex and highly non-linear; therefore, we re-formulate it as a series of three geometric programs that can be solved iteratively. Results reveal the benefits of planning the network compared to a random deployment in terms of reducing the worst-case average energy consumption. Furthermore, we show that the target $\bar{\text{S}}\overline{\text{IN}}\text{R}$ is limited by the number of IoT devices, and highlight the dominant impact of the UAV hovering height when serving wider areas. Our proposed algorithm outperforms other optimization benchmarks in terms of minimizing the average energy consumption at the most energy-demanding IoT device, and convergence time.
Radar sensing will be integrated into the 6G communication system to support various applications. In this integrated sensing and communication system, a radar target may also be a communication channel scatterer. In this case, the radar and communication channels exhibit certain joint burst sparsity. We propose a two-stage joint pilot optimization, target detection and channel estimation scheme to exploit such joint burst sparsity and pilot beamforming gain to enhance detection/estimation performance. In Stage 1, the base station (BS) sends downlink pilots (DP) for initial target search, and the user sends uplink pilots (UP) for channel estimation. Then the BS performs joint target detection and channel estimation based on the reflected DP and received UP signals. In Stage 2, the BS exploits the prior information obtained in Stage 1 to optimize the DP signal to achieve beamforming gain and further refine the performance. A Turbo Sparse Bayesian inference algorithm is proposed for joint target detection and channel estimation in both stages. The pilot optimization problem in Stage 2 is a semi-definite programming with rank-1 constraints. By replacing the rank-1 constraint with a tight and smooth approximation, we propose an efficient pilot optimization algorithm based on the majorization-minimization method. Simulations verify the advantages of the proposed scheme.
Spectrum sensing is a key enabling technique for cognitive radio (CR), which provides essential information on the spectrum availability. However, due to severe wireless channel fading and path loss, the primary user (PU) signals received at the CR or secondary user (SU) can be practically too weak for reliable detection. To tackle this issue, we consider in this letter a new intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided spectrum sensing scheme for CR, by exploiting the large aperture and passive beamforming gains of IRS to boost the PU signal strength received at the SU to facilitate its spectrum sensing. Specifically, by dynamically changing the IRS reflection over time according to a given codebook, its reflected signal power varies substantially at the SU, which is utilized for opportunistic signal detection. Furthermore, we propose a weighted energy detection method by combining the received signal power values over different IRS reflections, which significantly improves the detection performance. Simulation results validate the performance gain of the proposed IRS-aided spectrum sensing scheme, as compared to different benchmark schemes.
In this paper, an interference-aware path planning scheme for a network of cellular-connected unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is proposed. In particular, each UAV aims at achieving a tradeoff between maximizing energy efficiency and minimizing both wireless latency and the interference level caused on the ground network along its path. The problem is cast as a dynamic game among UAVs. To solve this game, a deep reinforcement learning algorithm, based on echo state network (ESN) cells, is proposed. The introduced deep ESN architecture is trained to allow each UAV to map each observation of the network state to an action, with the goal of minimizing a sequence of time-dependent utility functions. Each UAV uses ESN to learn its optimal path, transmission power level, and cell association vector at different locations along its path. The proposed algorithm is shown to reach a subgame perfect Nash equilibrium (SPNE) upon convergence. Moreover, an upper and lower bound for the altitude of the UAVs is derived thus reducing the computational complexity of the proposed algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves better wireless latency per UAV and rate per ground user (UE) while requiring a number of steps that is comparable to a heuristic baseline that considers moving via the shortest distance towards the corresponding destinations. The results also show that the optimal altitude of the UAVs varies based on the ground network density and the UE data rate requirements and plays a vital role in minimizing the interference level on the ground UEs as well as the wireless transmission delay of the UAV.