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Imperfect Channel State Information at the Transmitter (CSIT) is inevitable in modern wireless communication networks, and results in severe multi-user interference in multi-antenna Broadcast Channel (BC). While the capacity of multi-antenna (Gaussian) BC with perfect CSIT is known and achieved by Dirty Paper Coding (DPC), the capacity and the capacity-achieving strategy of multi-antenna BC with imperfect CSIT remain unknown. Conventional approaches therefore rely on applying communication strategies designed for perfect CSIT to the imperfect CSIT setting. In this work, we break this conventional routine and make two major contributions. First, we show that linearly precoded Rate-Splitting (RS), relying on the split of messages into common and private parts and linear precoding at the transmitter, and successive interference cancellation at the receivers, can achieve larger rate region than DPC in multi-antenna BC with partial CSIT. Second, we propose a novel scheme, denoted as Dirty Paper Coded Rate-Splitting (DPCRS), that relies on RS to split the user messages into common and private parts, and DPC to encode the private parts. We show that the rate region of DPCRS in Multiple-Input Single-Output (MISO) BC with partial CSIT is enlarged beyond that of conventional DPC and that of linearly precoded RS. Gaining benefits from the capability of RS to partially decode the interference and partially treat interference as noise, DPCRS is less sensitive to CSIT inaccuracies, networks loads and user deployments compared with DPC and other existing transmission strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A memoryless bivariate Gaussian source is transmitted to a pair of receivers over an average-power limited bandwidth-matched Gaussian broadcast channel. Based on their observations, Receiver 1 reconstructs the first source component while Receiver 2 reconstructs the second source component both seeking to minimize the expected squared-error distortions. In addition to the source transmission digital information at a specified rate should be conveyed reliably to Receiver 1–the “stronger” receiver. Given the message rate we characterize the achievable distortions region. Specifically, there is an ${\sf SNR}$ -threshold below which Dirty Paper coding of the digital information against a linear combination of the source components is optimal. The threshold is a function of the digital information rate, the source correlation and the distortion at the “stronger” receiver. Above this threshold a Dirty Paper coding extension of the Tian-Diggavi-Shamai hybrid scheme is shown to be optimal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivated by the fact that living cells use molecular circuits (i.e., a set of chemical reactions) for information processing, this paper investigates the problem of designing molecular circuits for demodulation. In our earlier work, we use a Markovian approach to derive a demodulator for diffusion-based molecular communication. The demodulation filters take the form of an ordinary differential equation, which computes the log-posteriori probability of a transmission symbol being sent. This paper considers the realization of these demodulation filters using molecular circuits assuming the transmission symbols are rectangular pulses of the same duration but different amplitudes, i.e., concentration modulation. This paper makes a number of contributions. First, we use time-scale separation and renewal theory to analytically derive an approximation of the demodulation filter from our earlier work. Second, we present a method to turn this approximation into a molecular circuit. By using simulations, we show that the output of the derived molecular circuit is approximately equal to the log-posteriori probability calculated by the exact demodulation filter if the log-posteriori probability is positive. Third, we demonstrate that a biochemical circuit in yeast behaves similarly to the derived molecular demodulation filter and is therefore a candidate for implementing the derived filter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the dynamic properties of oscillating and propagating patterns in concentration of the information molecule and proposes a new modulation scheme for molecular communication. In the proposed modulation scheme, information molecules transmitted from a sender bio-nanomachine propagate in the environment, chemically react with the molecules in the environment, change their concentration, and form an oscillating and propagating pattern in the environment. A sender bio-nanomachine modulates information onto the dynamic properties of the pattern, such as the amount of change in concentration of the information molecule and the time duration of one cycle of a periodic pattern in concentration of the information molecule. Receiver bio-nanomachines receive the oscillating and propagating pattern that the sender bio-nanomachine generates and detect its dynamic properties to demodulate information. This paper implements the proposed modulation scheme using Ca2+ oscillation and propagation, a communication mechanism found in biological cells. It also demonstrates that the proposed modulation scheme allows information to be simultaneously modulated onto multiple dynamic properties of an oscillating and propagating pattern that a sender bio-nanomachine generates. The main contributions of this paper are to open a new research area of modulation schemes in molecular communication and to illustrate the possibility that biological cells use such modulation schemes for cell-to-cell communication. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The universal filtered multicarrier (UFMC) modulation is among the most considered solutions for the realization of beyond orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) air interfaces for future wireless networks. This paper focuses on the design and analysis of a UFMC transceiver equipped with multiple antennas and operating at millimeter-wave carrier frequencies. This paper provides the full mathematical model of an MIMO-UFMC transceiver, taking into account the presence of hybrid analog/digital beamformers at both ends of the communication links. Then, several detection structures are proposed, both for the case of single-packet isolated transmission and for the case of multiple-packet continuous transmission. In the latter situation, this paper also considers the case in which no guard time among adjacent packets is inserted, trading off an increased level of interference with higher values of spectral efficiency. At the analysis stage, several considered detection structures and transmission schemes are compared in terms of bit-error rate, root-mean-square error, and system throughput. The numerical results show that the proposed transceiver algorithms are effective and that the linear minimum mean-square error (MMSE) data detector is capable of well managing the increased interference brought by the removal of guard times among consecutive packets, thus yielding throughput gains of about 10%–13%. The effect of phase noise at the receiver is also numerically assessed, and it is shown that the recursive implementation of the linear MMSE exhibits some degree of robustness against this disturbance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the blind decoding of control channels for obtaining other user identities in 3GPP specification, such as high-speed packet access and long-term evolution. The reliable decoding of control channels with user identities is crucial to mitigate inter-cell interference as well as multi-user interference. This paper exploits a method of user identity filtering followed by a method of user identity detection based on the traffic persistency, which is common to all standards. Hence, the proposed methods are applicable to all the standards regulated by 3GPP specification. In particular, this paper analyzes the proposed other user identity detection algorithm under the random coding. Simulation results show that the proposed method is reliable even at low SNRs and is also aligned with the analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A hybrid communication network with a common analog source signal and independent digital data streams at the transmitters of a multiple access network is considered. The receiver has to estimate the analog signal samples with a given fidelity, and decode the digital streams with a low error probability. The main goal of this paper is to characterize the optimal tradeoff between the mean-squared error distortion in source estimation and the data rates available to each user. To this end, we consider a Gaussian multiple access channel (GMAC) setup with additive state, where the state is nothing but a scaled version of the source process itself. The state process is assumed to be non-causally available to all the transmitting nodes. The problem now becomes that of the joint state estimation and message communication in a GMAC with state. We provide a complete characterization of the optimal distortion-rate tradeoff for an $N$ —sender GMAC. Our results show that, similar to the single-user results, it is optimal to amplify the state using uncoded transmissions, whereas the digital streams are superposed using appropriate Gaussian codebooks in conjunction with dirty paper coding (DPC). Since the variance of the additive state is controlled by a scaling factor in our model, we also recover the results for communicating a common source and independent messages over a GMAC without state as a special case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces circular color shift keying (CSK) constellations in a visible light communications (VLC) system using a camera-based receiver with applications to vehicular communications, where vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications are required to improve the safety of vehicles in high traffic density. The circular CSK constellations are shown to outperform the geometric and IEEE 802.15.7 constellations in terms of bit-error probability. Afterward, the noise at the receiver is investigated and transferred from the spatial domain to an angular noise in the International Commission on Illumination (CIE) color domain, where it is shown to behave similarly to a Gaussian distribution. Based on this noise model, a closed-form expression of the bit-error rate (BER) of circular CSK constellations is derived and shown to be accurate for BER ranges corresponding to VLC applications of practical interest. Diversity techniques are also investigated, and interesting differences are noted during the analysis compared to traditional radio frequency (RF) communication scenarios. Finally, the design of a link adaptation approach maximizing the number of bits per transmitted symbol, while meeting a target BER, is proposed. Hence, this paper presents a detailed design and analysis of a novel VLC modulation technique and demonstrates its efficiency and superiority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new paradigm for spectrum sharing between cellular wireless communications (CWC) and radio astronomy systems (RAS). In contrast to the existing paradigm of geographical and spectral isolation between CWC and RAS, this paper develops a three phase spectrum access, which enables geographical and spectral coexistence between CWC and RAS. Shared spectrum access zone (SSAZ) is created around the RAS site and CWC cells within the SSAZ follow the three phase spectrum access scheme while those outside the SSAZ have full spectrum access. In addition, system characteristics-based improved spectrum sharing is developed. Furthermore, a built-in fine tuning mechanism is presented for addressing mismatches between design and practical environments as well as for facilitating service evolutions. Performance evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed paradigm offers 1) certain guaranteed spectrum access to RAS, which is impossible in the existing paradigm, 2) capability to handle higher peak and mean traffics to CWC under spectrum restructuring of both CWC and RAS bands, and 3) overall improved spectrum utilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider practical schemes for binary dirty-paper channels and broadcast channels (BCs) with two receivers and varying channel quality. With the BC application in mind, this paper proposes a new design for binary dirty paper coding (DPC). By exploiting the concept of coset binning, the complexity of the system is greatly reduced when compared to the existing works. Some design challenges of the coset binning approach are identified and addressed. The proposed binary DPC system achieves similar performance to the state-of-the-art, superposition-coding-based system while demonstrating significant advantages in terms of complexity and flexibility of system design. For binary BCs, achieving the capacity generally requires the superposition of a normal channel code and a carefully designed channel code with non-uniform bit distribution. The non-uniform bit distribution is chosen according to the channel conditions. Therefore, to achieve the capacity for binary BCs with varying channel quality, it is necessary to use quantization codes of different rates, which significantly increases the implementation complexity. In this paper, we also propose a broadcast scheme that generalizes the concept of binary DPC, which we term soft DPC. By combining soft DPC with time sharing, we achieve a large percentage of the capacity for a wide range of channel quality with little complexity overhead. Our scheme uses only one fixed pair of codes for users 1 and 2, and a single quantization code, which possesses many practical advantages over traditional time sharing and superposition coding solutions and provides strictly better performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Optimal data detection of data transmitted over a linear channel can always be implemented through the Viterbi algorithm (VA). However, in many cases of interest the memory of the channel prohibits direct application of the VA. A popular and conceptually simple method in this case, studied since the early 1970s, is to first filter the received signal in order to shorten the memory of the channel, and then to apply a VA that operates with the shorter memory. We shall refer to this general concept as a channel shortening (CS) receiver. Although studied for almost four decades, an information theoretic understanding of what such a simple receiver solution is actually doing is not available. In this paper, we show that an optimized CS receiver has a direct correspondance to the chain rule of mutual information. Furthermore, we show that the tools for analyzing the ensuing achievable rates from an optimized CS receiver are precisely the same as those used for analyzing the achievable rates of a minimum mean-square-error (MMSE) receiver. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Minimizing the symbol error in the uplink of multi-user multiple input multiple output systems is important, because the symbol error affects the achieved signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and thereby the spectral efficiency of the system. Despite the vast literature available on minimum mean squared error (MMSE) receivers, previously proposed receivers for block fading channels do not minimize the symbol error in time-varying Rayleigh fading channels. Specifically, we show that the true MMSE receiver structure does not only depend on the statistics of the CSI error, but also on the autocorrelation coefficient of the time-variant channel. It turns out that calculating the average SINR when using the proposed receiver is highly non-trivial. In this paper, we employ a random matrix theoretical approach, which allows us to derive a quasi-closed form for the average SINR, which allows to obtain analytical exact results that give valuable insights into how the SINR depends on the number of antennas, employed pilot and data power and the covariance of the time-varying channel. We benchmark the performance of the proposed receiver against recently proposed receivers and find that the proposed MMSE receiver achieves higher SINR than the previously proposed ones, and this benefit increases with increasing autoregressive coefficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider device-to-device (D2D) communication that is underlaid in a multi-cell massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system and proposes a new framework for power control and pilot allocation. In this scheme, the cellular users (CUs) in each cell get orthogonal pilots which are reused with reuse factor one across cells, while all the D2D pairs share another set of orthogonal pilots. We derive a closed-form capacity lower bound for the CUs with different receive processing schemes. In addition, we derive a capacity lower bound for the D2D receivers and a closed-form approximation of it. We provide power control algorithms to maximize the minimum spectral efficiency (SE) and to maximize the product of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratios in the network. Different from prior works, in our proposed power control schemes, we consider joint pilot and data transmission optimization. Finally, we provide a numerical evaluation, where we compare our proposed power control schemes with the maximum transmit power case and the case of conventional multi-cell massive MIMO without D2D communication. Based on the provided results, we conclude that our proposed scheme increases the sum SE of multi-cell massive MIMO networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses point-to-point communication over block-fading channels with independent fading blocks. When both channel state information at the transmitter and receiver (CSIR) are available, most achievable schemes use separable coding, i.e., coding independently and in parallel over different fading states. Unfortunately, separable coding has drawbacks, including large memory requirements at both communication ends. In this paper, a lattice coding and decoding scheme is proposed that achieves the ergodic capacity without separable coding, with lattice codebooks and decoding decision regions that are universal across channel realizations. We first demonstrate this result for fading distributions with discrete, finite support whose sequences are robustly typical. Results are then extended to continuous fading distributions, as well as multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. In addition, a variant of the proposed scheme is presented for the MIMO ergodic fading channel with CSIR only, where we prove the existence of a universal codebook that achieves rates within a constant gap to capacity for finite-support fading distributions. The gap is small compared with other schemes in the literature. Extension to continuous-valued fading is also provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) transmission employing antenna polarization multiplexing and higher order modulation (HoM) schemes can significantly increase the spectral efficiency (SE) of the existing wireless backhaul links. However, the benefits of each of these SE enhancement techniques come with a price. While FTN introduces inter-symbol interference, a dual-polarized (DP) transmission suffers from cross-polarization interference (XPI), and HoM makes a communication system vulnerable to phase-noise (PN) distortions. In this paper, we investigate, for the first time, a DP-FTN HoM transmission system. We propose a XPI cancellation and PN mitigation structure, coupled with adaptive decision-feedback equalization or linear precoding, to jointly mitigate interference and accomplish carrier-phase tracking. The DP systems combined with the FTN signaling presented in this paper offer more than 150% increase in SE compared with a single-polarized Nyquist transmission. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithms is demonstrated through computer simulations of a coded DP-FTN microwave communication system in the presence of PN. Numerical results suggest that with the proposed interference cancellation methods, a DP-FTN transmission can yield a 3–5.5-dB performance improvement over an equivalent DP-Nyquist system that employs a higher modulation order to achieve the same data rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the design and analysis of minimum mean square error (MMSE) turbo decision feedback equalization (DFE), with expectation propagation (EP), for single carrier modulations. Classical non iterative DFE structures have substantial advantages at high-data rates, even compared with turbo linear equalizers-interference cancellers (LE-IC), hence making turbo DFE-IC schemes an attractive solution. In this paper, we derive an iterative DFE-IC, capitalizing on the use of soft feedback based on expectation propagation, along with the use of prior information for improved filtering and interference cancellation. This turbo iterative DFE-IC significantly outperforms turbo LE-IC, especially at high-spectral efficiency and also exhibits performance improvements over existing DFE-IC variants. The proposed scheme can also be self-iterated, as done in the recent trend on EP-based equalizers, and it is shown to be an attractive alternative to linear self-iterated receivers. For time-varying (TV) filter equalizers, an efficient matrix inversion scheme is also proposed, considerably reducing the computational complexity relative to existing methods. Using finite-length and asymptotic analysis on a severely selective channel, the proposed DFE-IC is shown to achieve higher rates than known alternatives, with better waterfall thresholds and faster convergence, while keeping a similar computational complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers a diffusion-based molecular communication system, where the transmitter uses reaction shift keying (RSK) as the modulation scheme. We focus on the demodulation of RSK signal at the receiver. The receiver consists of a front-end molecular circuit and a back-end demodulator. The front-end molecular circuit is a set of chemical reactions consisting of multiple chemical species. The optimal demodulator computes the posteriori probability of the transmitted symbols given the history of the observation. The derivation of the optimal demodulator requires the solution to a specific Bayesian filtering problem. The solution to this Bayesian filtering problem had been derived for a few specific molecular circuits and specific choice(s) of observed chemical species. The derivation of such solution is also lengthy. The key contribution of this paper is to present a general solution to this Bayesian filtering problem, which can be applied to any molecular circuit and any choice of observed species. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is concerned with the security problem of Time of Arrival (ToA) based localization schemes in a wireless sensor network (WSN) with multiple attackers and this paper focuses on defending against external attacks, especially under cooperative external attackers. The prior scheme for defending against the attacks in the localization scheme often introduce high communication overhead and their security relies on the capability of the attackers. In this paper, we propose a lightweight secure ToA-based localization scheme in a WSN by exploiting the noise feature caused by external distance attacks. In comparison with the prior scheme, our scheme provides lower communication overhead and a higher level of security. We theoretically analyze the performance of the proposed scheme over fading channels and derive the closed-form expressions. We implemented our scheme and conducted extensive performance comparisons through simulations. Our experimental results show that the closed-form expressions for the detection performance perfectly match with their simulation results as we expected. The communication overhead of the proposed scheme is saved by 72.8% than that of the prior scheme for different numbers of anchors and is independent of the times of measurements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider a single-hop wireless sensor network in which each sensor node has an individual elastic data stream to transmit to each other node. We refer to this traffic pattern as unicast in this paper. The network has multiple slotted channels available for the data transmissions. To guarantee successful unicast within a bounded delay, we consider deterministic schemes that pre-assign each node a periodic schedule sequence to schedule transmitting and receiving at each time slot. The sequence period should be minimized since it upper bounds the unicast delay. We have investigated both synchronous TDMA sequences and asynchronous sequences. Since accurate time synchronization is difficult to achieve in sensor networks, we mainly present analysis and design for asynchronous sequences. In this paper, for a group-based channel assignment, we present a lower bound on the common period and propose a sequence construction method by which the period can achieve the same order as the lower bound. We also analyze optimal transmitting and receiving probabilities for two random schemes and compare their frequency utilization efficiency. Finally, unicast delay and energy consumption performance are compared by simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hardware non-idealities are among the main performance restrictions for upcoming wireless communication systems. Asymmetric hardware distortions (HWD) happen when the impairments of the I/Q branches are correlated or imbalanced, which in turn generate improper additive interference at the receiver side. When the interference is improper, as well as in other interference-limited scenarios, improper Gaussian signaling (IGS) has been shown to provide rate and/or power efficiency benefits. In this paper, we investigate the rate benefits of IGS in a two-user interference channel (IC) with additive asymmetric HWD when interference is treated as noise. We propose two iterative algorithms to optimize the parameters of the improper transmit signals. We first rewrite the rate region as an pseudo-signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (PSINR) region and employ majorization minimization and fractional programming to find a suboptimal solution for the achievable user rates. Then, we propose a simplified algorithm based on a separate optimization of the powers and complementary variances of the users, which exhibits lower computational complexity. We show that IGS can improve the performance of the two-user IC with additive HWD. Our proposed algorithms outperform proper Gaussian signaling and competing IGS algorithms in the literature that do not consider asymmetric HWD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers a multiple-access system with multiple-packet reception (MPR) capability $\gamma $ , i.e., a packet can be successfully received as long as it overlaps with $\gamma -1$ or fewer other packets at any instant during its lifetime. To efficiently utilize the MPR capability, this paper generalizes $p$ -persistent carrier-sense multiple access (CSMA) to consider that a user with carrier sensing capability $c$ adopts the transmission probability $p_{n}$ if this user has sensed $n$ ongoing transmissions for $n=0,1,\ldots ,c-1$. This paper aims to model the characteristics of such CSMA and to design transmission probabilities for achieving maximum saturation throughput. To this end, we first formulate such CSMA as a parameterized Markov decision process (MDP) and use the long-run average performance to evaluate the saturation throughput. Second, by observing that the exact values of optimal transmission probabilities are in general infeasible to find, we modify this MDP to establish an upper bound on the maximum throughput, and modify this MDP again to propose a heuristic design with near-optimal performance. Simulations with respect to a wide range of configurations are provided to validate our study. The throughput performance under more general models and the robustness of our design are also investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a transmission control scheme for the approximate message passing (AMP)-based joint user identification and channel estimation in massive connectivity networks. In the proposed transmission control scheme, a transmission control function is designed to determine a user’s transmission probability, when it has a transmission demand. By employing a step transmission control function for the proposed scheme, we derive the channel distribution experienced by the receiver to describe the effect of transmission control on the design of AMP algorithm. Based on that, we modify the AMP algorithm by designing a minimum mean squared error (MMSE) denoiser, to jointly identify the user activity and estimate their channels. We further derive the false alarm and missed detection probabilities to characterize the user identification performance of the proposed scheme. Closed-form expressions of the average packet delay and the network throughput are obtained. Furthermore, we optimize the transmission control function to maximize the network throughput. We demonstrate that the proposed scheme can significantly improve the user identification and channel estimation performance, reduce the average delay, and boost the throughput, compared to the conventional scheme without transmission control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In coded caching, a single server is connected to a set of users through a shared bottleneck link, which is assumed to be error free. During non-peak hours, all the users fill their local cache with portions of the files available. During the delivery phase, each user requests a file and the server delivers coded transmissions to meet the demands. In this paper, the links between the server and the users are assumed to be error prone. Prefetching errors are also considered. A new delivery scheme is required to meet the demands of each user even after receiving a finite number of transmissions in error in the presence of erroneous portions of files in the cache. The minimum average rate and minimum peak rate for this problem are characterized. Closed form expressions for average and peak rates for a particular caching scheme, namely, symmetric batch prefetching are established when there are no prefetching errors. An optimal linear error correcting delivery scheme is proposed for coded caching problems with symmetric batch prefetching in the absence of prefetching errors. In addition to this, lower bounds are established for the optimal rate required when there are prefetching errors in symmetric batch prefetching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops novel deep learning-based architectures and design methodologies for an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) receiver under the constraint of one-bit complex quantization. Single bit quantization reduces greatly the complexity and power consumption but makes accurate channel estimation and data detection difficult. This is particularly true for multicarrier waveforms that have high peak-to-average power ratio in the time domain and fragile subcarrier orthogonality in the frequency domain. The severe distortion for one-bit quantization typically results in an error floor even at moderately low signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) such as 5 dB. For channel estimation (using pilots), we design a novel generative supervised deep neural network that can be trained with a reasonable number of pilots. After channel estimation, a neural network-based receiver—specifically, an autoencoder—jointly learns a precoder and decoder for data symbol detection. Since quantization prevents end-to-end training, we propose a two-step sequential training policy for this model. With synthetic data, our deep learning-based channel estimation can outperform least squares channel estimation for unquantized (full-resolution) OFDM at average SNRs up to 14 dB. For data detection, our proposed design achieves lower bit error rate (BER) in fading than unquantized OFDM at average SNRs up to 10 dB. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivated by the idea of “transmitting energy and information simultaneously,” we investigate, in this paper, the impact of constraints on the amount of energy that individual symbols carry, i.e., minimum amplitude constraints. We consider a Gaussian mixture noise channel with both minimum and peak amplitude constraints. First, we prove that the capacity-achieving input has a discrete distribution with a finite number of probability mass points. Then, we further investigate the number and positions of the probability mass points for the capacity-achieving input. Specifically, when the interference is constant and known at both the transmitter and the receiver, it can be totally eliminated so that the channel operates like an AWGN channel. In this case, we give a theorem to determine whether the optimal input is binary. For more general cases, such as non-binary inputs and non-constant interference, we investigate optimal inputs and capacities via numerical computations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Underwater environments create a challenging channel for communications. In this paper, we design a novel receiver system by exploring the machine learning technique–Deep Belief Network (DBN) – to combat the signal distortion caused by the Doppler effect and multi-path propagation. We evaluate the performance of the proposed receiver system in both simulation experiments and sea trials. Our proposed receiver system comprises of DBN based de-noising and classification of the received signal. First, the received signal is segmented into frames before the each of these frames is individually pre-processed using a novel pixelization algorithm. Then, using the DBN based de-noising algorithm, features are extracted from these frames and used to reconstruct the received signal. Finally, DBN based classification of the reconstructed signal occurs. Our proposed DBN based receiver system does show better performance in channels influenced by the Doppler effect and multi-path propagation with a performance improvement of 13.2dB at 10−3 Bit Error Rate (BER). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The visible light communication (VLC) can provide data transmission via the illumination light emitting diodes (LED). This paper introduces a new model to analyze the bit error rate (BER) of binary phase modulation in VLC for an arbitrary modulation depth and data duty cycle while taking into account both the Gaussian and signal-dependent shot noise. The impact of the driver design on the BER and its impact on ripple have not been considered in detail before. We compare two different LED driver schemes, namely directly adapting the driver control loop and binary shunting. We address data rate, BER, and power efficiency, for which we propose to use the extra energy per symbol above unmodulated light. We further introduce an analysis of the effect that (truncated) ripple interference has in the (matched or other) filter of the receiver. Ripple causes a harmful interference in VLC, and thus a BER expression is derived to include its effect. Two approximations are proposed to model the ripple interference, and their accuracies are compared by simulations. A low-pass filtering is proposed to alleviate the impact of ripple interference in VLC system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A transmitter sends a packetized message over a fading channel using packet-level erasure coding and physical-layer channel coding of each resultant packet. Given an overall code rate, this paper finds the optimal rates of the erasure code and the channel code to minimize the transmit power required for a certain message error probability. This paper considers a practically important fading model in which the number of block fades in a transmitted channel codeword increases with the codeword length. Such a model applies, for example, in a time-varying channel with a fixed coherence time. The rate at which diversity grows with codeword length plays an important role in the optimization problem. If the diversity growth factor is large enough, then the erasure code plays a minor role, having an optimal rate that is essentially nondecreasing with decreasing overall rate. We prove analytically that, on a channel with linear growth in diversity, as overall rate decreases, the optimal erasure code rate eventually increases to its maximum possible value (e.g., a rate of 1 for an erasure code with no overhead). Additionally, we also consider the optimization problem of minimizing the message error probability given a transmit power. Numerical results again show that erasure coding is not necessary when overall code rates are sufficiently low. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers the problem of analytically assessing the maximum achievable rates (capacity) of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmissions when the receiver, for complexity reasons, only accounts for the common phase error (CPE) effect due to phase noise impairments with inter-carrier interference (ICI) treated as noise. By recognizing that the functional form of the CPE with respect to the phase noise realization is actually a free design parameter, determination of the capacity is posed as a functional optimization problem with respect to the, so-called, CPE function. A simple lower bound of the capacity is obtained, revealing the performance degradation due to the unknown CPE at the receiver, as well as the suboptimal performance achieved in severe phase noise conditions by the conventional CPE function that is routinely employed in previous works. The existence of an optimal number of subcarriers that balances the effects of the (unknown) CPE and ICI is highlighted and critical system design/operation issues, such as selection of the CPE function and effect of unknown channel on the achievable rate, are discussed. The analysis in this paper can be employed for determining the suitability of OFDM in phase noise channels and provides a tractable utility function for resource allocation purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper studies lossy transmission of a memoryless bivariate Gaussian source over a bandwidth-mismatched memoryless Gaussian broadcast channel with two receivers, where each receiver is interested in reconstructing only one source component. For both bandwidth expansion and compression regimes, novel hybrid digital/analog (HDA) coding schemes are proposed. With appropriate choice of parameters, our schemes are shown to specialize to separate source–channel coding studied by Gao and Tuncel, and is, therefore, superior to it in both bandwidth regimes. Our scheme for bandwidth expansion also outperforms the HDA coding scheme of Behroozi et al. On the other hand, if a proposed conjecture (supported by numerical observations) is indeed true, the same superiority follows for the bandwidth compression regime as well. Finally, when the bandwidth expansion/compression ratio approaches 1, both of our schemes become optimal as their performance approaches that of the bandwidth-matched scheme of Tian et al. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, a simple energy-efficient physical layer modulation scheme termed as random number modulation (RNM) is proposed. It is a class of new systems that harness the randomness of pseudo random number generators (RNGs) for efficient communication, and adds a new degree of freedom to digital communication systems. It is also highly adaptable to high-rate, low-latency, and low-rate, high-energy efficiency scenarios. This paper includes a detailed system model, preliminary performance analysis, and extended discussions. The performance of the proposed system is analyzed in terms of symbol and block error probabilities, energy efficiency, and latency. It is shown that there is a fundamental tradeoff between the energy efficiency and the latency of the proposed system, and they can be easily software programmable allowing devices to adapt to different circumstances and environments rapidly. Based upon the basic system model herein, it is anticipated that more sophisticated RNM systems can be developed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Linear coding schemes have been the main choice of coding for the additive white Gaussian noise broadcast channel (AWGN-BC) with noiseless feedback in the literature. The achievable rate regions of these schemes go well beyond the capacity region of the AWGN-BC without feedback. In this paper, a concatenated coding design for the $K$-user AWGN-BC with noisy feedback is proposed that relies on linear schemes as inner codes to achieve rate tuples outside the no-feedback capacity region. The boundary of an achievable rate region of purely linear coding schemes for noiseless feedback is shown to be arbitrarily closely approached by the concatenated coding scheme for sufficiently small feedback noise levels. Then, a linear coding scheme for the $K$-user symmetric AWGN-BC with noisy feedback is presented and optimized for use in the concatenated coding scheme. For noiseless feedback, the presented linear coding scheme achieves the optimal sum-rate of linear-feedback coding. An upper bound on the inner code blocklength needed to achieve a sum-rate above no-feedback sum-capacity is derived. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In a diffusion-based molecular communication network, transmitters and receivers communicate by using signalling molecules (or ligands) in a fluid medium. This paper assumes that the transmitter uses different chemical reactions to generate different emission patterns of signalling molecules to represent different transmission symbols, and the receiver consists of receptors. When the signalling molecules arrive at the receiver, they may react with the receptors to form ligand-receptor complexes. Our goal is to study the demodulation in this setup assuming that the transmitter and receiver are synchronised. We derive an optimal demodulator using the continuous history of the number of complexes at the receiver as the input to the demodulator. We do that by first deriving a communication model which includes the chemical reactions in the transmitter, diffusion in the transmission medium and the ligand-receptor process in the receiver. This model, which takes the form of a continuous-time Markov process, captures the noise in the receiver signal due to the stochastic nature of chemical reactions and diffusion. We then adopt a maximum a posteriori framework and use Bayesian filtering to derive the optimal demodulator. We use numerical examples to illustrate the properties of this optimal demodulator. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper studies a multiple-input–single-output (MISO) broadcast channel (BC) featuring simultaneous wireless information and power transfer, where a multiantenna access point (AP) delivers both information and energy via radio signals to multiple single-antenna receivers simultaneously, and each receiver implements either information decoding (ID) or energy harvesting (EH). In particular, pseudorandom sequences that are a priori known and therefore can be cancelled at each ID receiver are used as the energy signals, and the information-theoretically optimal dirty paper coding is employed for the information transmission. We characterize the capacity region for ID receivers by solving a sequence of weighted sum-rate (WSR) maximization (WSRMax) problems subject to a maximum sum-power constraint for the AP, and a set of minimum harvested power constraints for individual EH receivers. The problem corresponds to a new form of WSRMax problem in MISO-BC with combined maximum and minimum linear transmit covariance constraints (MaxLTCCs and MinLTCCs), which differs from the celebrated capacity region characterization problem for MISO-BC under a set of MaxLTCCs only and is challenging to solve. By extending the general BC–multiple-access-channel duality, which is only applicable to WSRMax problems with MaxLTCCs, and applying the ellipsoid method, we propose an efficient iterative algorithm to solve this problem globally optimally. Furthermore, we also propose two suboptimal algorithms with lower complexity by assuming that the information and energy signals are designed separately. Finally, numerical results are provided to validate our proposed algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, the role of feedback in two-way full-duplex Gaussian channel (TW-FD-GC) is revisited. First, we propose a practical coding scheme for the TW-FD-GC, which is based on the noisy type of the well-known Schalkwijk-Kailath (SK) feedback scheme. We show that though this scheme cannot achieve the capacity of the TW-FD-GC, the codeword length that achieves desired decoding error probability is extremely short. Then, we further prove that the proposed scheme is secure by itself, i.e., the achievable rate region of the proposed scheme is also an achievable secrecy rate region of the two-way full-duplex Gaussian wiretap channel (TW-FD-GWTC). In addition, for the TW-FD-GWTC, numerical result shows that the secrecy sum rate of our proposed scheme can be as large as those achieved by existing schemes in the literature for some cases. Next, we extend the proposed scheme to the TW-FD-GC with Gaussian state interference non-causally known by the corresponding transmitter. We show that the interference can be perfectly canceled by this extended scheme. Finally, we prove that this extended scheme is also secure by itself, and numerical result shows that this extended scheme may perform better than the existing ones in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiple-input multiple-output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM), a fundamental transmission scheme, promises high throughput and robustness against multipath fading. However, these benefits rely on the efficient detection strategy at the receiver and come at the expense of the extra bandwidth consumed by the cyclic prefix (CP). We use the iterative orthogonal approximate message passing (OAMP) algorithm in this paper as the prototype of the detector because of its remarkable potential for interference suppression. However, OAMP is computationally expensive for the matrix inversion per iteration. We replace the matrix inversion with the conjugate gradient (CG) method to reduce the complexity of OAMP. We further unfold the CG-based OAMP algorithm into a network and tune the critical parameters through deep learning (DL) to enhance detection performance. Simulation results and complexity analysis show that the proposed scheme has significant gain over other iterative detection methods and exhibits comparable performance to the state-of-the-art DL-based detector at a reduced computational cost. Furthermore, we design a highly efficient CP-free MIMO-OFDM receiver architecture to remove the CP overhead. This architecture first eliminates the intersymbol interference by buffering the previously recovered data and then detects the signal using the proposed detector. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the designed receiver offers a higher spectral efficiency than traditional receivers. Finally, over-the-air tests verify the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed scheme in realistic environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past few years, the use of wireless sensor networks in a range of Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios has grown in popularity. Since IoT sensor devices have restricted battery power, a proper IoT data aggregation approach is crucial to prolong the network lifetime. To this end, current approaches typically form a virtual aggregation backbone based on a connected dominating set or maximal independent set to utilize independent transmissions of dominators. However, they usually have a fairly long aggregation delay because the dominators become bottlenecks for receiving data from all dominatees. The problem of time-efficient data aggregation in multichannel duty-cycled IoT sensor networks is analyzed in this paper. We propose a novel aggregation approach, named LInk-delay-aware REinforcement (LIRE), leveraging active slots of sensors to explore a routing structure with pipeline links, then scheduling all transmissions in a bottom-up manner. The reinforcement schedule accelerates the aggregation by exploiting unused channels and time slots left off at every scheduling round. LIRE is evaluated in a variety of simulation scenarios through theoretical analysis and performance comparisons with a state-of-the-art scheme. The simulation results show that LIRE reduces more than 80% aggregation delay compared to the existing scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider a mobile molecular communication (MC) system consisting of two mobile nanomachines, a transmitter and a receiver, propelled by a positive drift velocity and Brownian motion in a realistic blood-vessel-type flow regime. Considering the nonlinear movement of the nanomachines, an extended Kalman filter is employed to estimate the distance from the transmitter. Furthermore, based on the predicted distance, to keep the number of received molecules for bit 1 at a stable level, we employ power control on the number of transmitted molecules based on the distance between the transmitter and the receiver and the residual molecules in the channel from the previous transmission. Finally, the optimal detection threshold is obtained by minimizing the error probability. It is verified that a fixed optimal detection threshold can be effective for the power control scheme in the mobile MC. The bit error rate (BER) performance of our scheme is verified via simulation results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing demands of power supply and data rate for mobile devices promote the research of simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT). Optical SWIPT, as known as simultaneous light information and power transfer (SLIPT), has the potential for providing high-capacity communication and high-power wireless charging. However, SLIPT technologies based on light-emitting diodes have low efficiency due to energy dissipation over the air. Laser-based SLIPT technologies need strict positioning accuracy and scanning resolution, which may lead to the increase of costs and complexity. In this paper, we propose a mobile SLIPT scheme based on spatially separated laser resonator (SSLR) and intra-cavity second harmonic generation. The power and data are transferred via separated frequencies, while they share the same self-aligned resonant beam path, without the needs of receiver positioning and beam steering. We establish the analysis model of the resonant beam power and its second harmonic power. Numerical results show that the proposed system can achieve watt-level battery charging power and above 10-bit/s/Hz achievable rate at 6-m distance, which satisfies the requirements of most indoor mobile devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a precoded faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) signaling technique for time-domain single-carrier index-modulated symbol transmission. More precisely, eigenvalue decomposition (EVD) precoding is adopted for the FTN transmission of data bits modulated by single-carrier time-domain index modulation (IM). While the FTN scheme increases the spectral efficiency and data rate by increasing the density of transmit symbols, the time-domain IM works towards the same objective while maintaining symbol sparsity. We analytically derive the constrained capacity of the proposed system. Our simulation results show that the proposed scheme has better bit error ratio (BER) performance than the conventional FTN-IM scheme, particularly for the scenario of a higher packing ratio. With the proposed scheme, a 2.5 dB performance gain is observed at the BER of 10−4, where the packing ratio is 0.7 and the roll-off factor is 0.5 in the channel-uncoded scenario. We further analyze our scheme’s performance by characterizing its minimum Euclidean distance and inter-symbol interference. Furthermore, we present a three-stage serially concatenated iterative detection architecture for the proposed EVD-FTN-IM signaling scheme. It is demonstrated in our simulations that a near-capacity BER performance is achievable in the proposed turbo-coded FTN-IM scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Terahertz (THz) band communications are envisioned as a key technology for 6G and Beyond. As a fundamental wireless infrastructure, THz communication can boost abundant promising applications. In 2014, our team published two comprehensive roadmaps for the development and progress of THz communication networks, which helped the research community to start research on this subject afterwards. The topic of THz communications became very important and appealing to the research community due to 6G wireless systems design and development in recent years. Many papers are getting published covering different aspects of wireless systems using the THz band. With this paper, our aim is looking back to the last decade and revisiting the old problems and pointing out what has been achieved in the research community so far. Furthermore, in this paper, open challenges and new research directions still to be investigated for the THz band communication systems are presented, by covering diverse topics ranging from devices, channel behavior, communication and networking, to physical testbeds and demonstration systems. The key aspects presented in this paper will enable THz communications as a pillar of 6G and Beyond wireless systems in the next decade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Iterative decoding is an efficient error-correction tool based on the exchange of extrinsic probabilities between the constituent decoders. In this paper, the properties of the mutual information between the extrinsic LLR at the output of two constituent decoders are analyzed with application to turbo and LDPC codes. This is a bridge between information-theoretic analysis and practical implementations. It is proved here that the mutual information between extrinsics is a lower bound of the mutual information between each extrinsic and the transmitted message. In addition, an efficient online evaluation is provided in the paper with accuracy validated through numerical experiments. As an application, the mutual information between extrinsics is used for designing efficient stopping criterion and error detection rules at the decoder side. Two online methods for the estimation of optimal scaling factor to be applied to the extrinsic LLR are also derived. In contrast with most references, an analytical expression is obtained that does not require estimation of the actual transmitted bits. All results in the paper are derived for Gaussian distributed LLR with independent mean and variance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyzes the reliability and throughput of the telegram-splitting concept in the presence of inter-system and intra-system interference. Using telegram splitting, the data of one telegram is split into multiple sub-packets, which are then transmitted with temporal spacing. As a result, collisions with other telegrams destroy only some sub-packets that can be recovered using forward error correction. Consequently, the reliability of the data transmission in case of inter- and intra-system interference—a significant problem in license-exempt bands—is highly improved. In this paper, probabilities for the resulting telegram error rate of random media access systems using telegram splitting are derived. Furthermore, the achievable throughput is analyzed. The theoretical considerations in addition to simulation results prove the significant gain of the telegram-splitting concept for telemetry systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates a cache-aided cloud radio access network (C-RAN), comprising a central unit, $K$ base stations (BSs) each with $N_{T}$ antennas, and $M$ users each with $N_{R}$ antennas, where each BS and user have local caches to store some popular contents from the central unit. For this cache-aided network, we propose the linear network coded (NC) wireless caching that consists of linear wireless network coding assisted cache placement phase and signal-space alignment (SSA) enabled content delivery phase. In the cache placement phase, we design a joint NC caching function at the BSs to store linear combinations of messages from the central unit, as a form of linear wireless network coding. In the content delivery phase, we design the SSA pattern based on the NC caching to guide the precoding designs at BSs. Then, each user can reliably decode its requested messages by receiver shaping and reverse NC operation. The primary contribution of this work is to achieve the coding gain induced by the integration of linear wireless network coding and SSA, which has been not exploited in the field of wireless coded caching. In particular, to deal with high temporal variability of user requests, we show that the proposed cache placement is invariant to different user requests in the worst-case caching, without any shared caching messages at different BSs. Furthermore, we verify that the proposed scheme is also compatible with the insufficient caching scenario at the BSs. In addition, we analyze the achievable sum degrees of freedom (DoF) for the proposed caching network. Both analytical and numerical results verify that the proposed caching scheme achieves a higher sum DoF than the existing related works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a broadcast strategy for the single-user slowly fading channel in which the transmission power is supplied by an energy harvesting unit. In this strategy, the channel state information (CSI) is known only to the receiver, and the transmitter is assumed to be oblivious to the CSI. The broadcast approach enables preventing outage events in the face of the lack of CSI at the transmitter. In the proposed broadcast approach, the transmitter splits its message into multiple superimposed information layers. This facilitates sustaining reliably decodable transmission rates adapted to the unknown state of the randomly-varying fading state of the channel. The objective is to characterize the optimal allocation of the randomly varying harvested power over time and across information layers in the contexts of maximizing the average communication rate and minimizing the likelihood of outage. First, the setting in which the transmitter has non-causal and complete information about the state of the energy harvesting process is considered. A closed-form characterization of the optimal allocation of power across layers is established, and an algorithm that analytically determines the exact optimal allocation of power over time is provided. Furthermore, an online algorithm is proposed for a setting in which the energy harvesting process is known only causally to the transmitter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Downlink transmission into frequency-selective links experiencing different coherence bandwidths and coherence times has obvious practical relevance, but is often addressed via assuming for all users the coherence conditions corresponding to the fastest, most dispersive user. This paper demonstrates an alternative approach that directly exploits the differences between coherence bandwidth and coherence time of users under frequency-selective conditions, showing that it can lead to significant new efficiencies and gains. More specifically, we study a two-user downlink frequency-selective channel under three broad conditions of disparity between the link qualities: when the disparity is in coherence time, in coherence bandwidth, and in both coherence time and coherence bandwidth. Each of the coherence scenarios calls for a distinct treatment; for each, we provide an analysis demonstrating the gains in achievable rates due to exploiting coherence disparity. Numerical simulations demonstrate the advantages of the proposed schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visible light communications (VLC) has been studied thoroughly in recent years as an alternative or complementary technology to radio frequency communications. The reliability of VLC channels highly depends on the availability and alignment of line of sight links. In this paper, we study the effect of random receiver orientation for mobile users over VLC downlink channels, which affects the existence and quality of line of sight links. Based on the statistics of the receiver location and relative orientation with respect to the transmitter LED, we develop an analytical framework to characterize the statistical distribution of VLC downlink channels, which is then utilized to obtain the outage probability and the bit error rate. Our analysis is generalized for arbitrary distributions of relative orientation and location for a single transmitter, and extended to multiple transmitter case for some certain scenarios. Extensive Monte Carlo simulations show a perfect match between the analytical and the simulation data in terms of both the statistical channel distribution and the resulting bit error rate. Our results also characterize the channel attenuation due to random receiver orientation and location for various scenarios of interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes how the distortion created by hardware impairments in a multiple-antenna base station affects the uplink spectral efficiency (SE), with a focus on massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO). This distortion is correlated across the antennas but has been often approximated as uncorrelated to facilitate (tractable) SE analysis. To determine when this approximation is accurate, basic properties of distortion correlation are first uncovered. Then, we separately analyze the distortion correlation caused by third-order non-linearities and by quantization. Finally, we study the SE numerically and show that the distortion correlation can be safely neglected in massive MIMO when there are sufficiently many users. Under independent identically distributed Rayleigh fading and equal signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), this occurs for more than five transmitting users. Other channel models and SNR variations have only minor impact on the accuracy. We also demonstrate the importance of taking the distortion characteristics into account in the receive combining. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chemical reactions are a prominent feature of molecular communication systems, with no direct parallels in wireless communications. While chemical reactions may be used inside the transmitter nodes, receiver nodes, or the communication medium, we focus on its utility in the medium in this paper. Such chemical reactions can be used to perform computation over the medium as molecules diffuse and react with each other (physical-layer computation). We propose the use of chemical reactions for the following purposes: 1) to reduce signal-dependent observation noise of receivers by reducing the signal density; 2) to realize molecular physical-layer network coding (PNC) by performing the natural XOR operation inside the medium; and 3) to reduce the inter-symbol interference (ISI) of other transmitters by canceling out the remaining molecules from previous transmissions. To make the ideas formal, we consider an explicit two-way relaying example with a transparent receiver (which has a signal-dependent noise). The proposed ideas are used to define a modulation scheme (which we call the PNC scheme). We compare the PNC with a previously proposed scheme for this problem, where the XOR operation is performed at the relay node (using a molecular logic gate). We call the latter, the straightforward network coding (SNC). It is observed that in addition to the simplicity of the proposed PNC scheme, it outperforms the SNC scheme especially when we consider ISI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider diffusion-based molecular communication with and without drift between two static nano-machines. We employ type-based information encoding, releasing a single molecule per information bit. At the receiver, we consider an asynchronous detection algorithm which exploits the arrival order of the molecules. In such systems, transposition errors fundamentally undermine reliability and capacity. Thus, in this paper, we study the impact of transpositions on the system performance. Toward this, we present an analytical expression for the exact bit error probability (BEP) caused by transpositions and derive computationally tractable approximations of the BEP for diffusion-based channels with and without drift. Based on these results, we analyze the BEP when background is not negligible and derive the optimal bit interval that minimizes the BEP. Simulation results confirm the theoretical results and show the error and goodput performance for different parameters such as block size or noise generation rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]