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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]

Mobile and wireless communications are playing an irreplaceable role in our daily life. 5G is highly expected and can be considered as the convergence of mobile and wireless communications. This topic becomes one of the hottest research topics recently, and papers on this topic have been paid much attention. lists the top ten papers published in the IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques (TMTT) in 2019 with the highest numbers of Full Text View since published. Seven papers are about millimeter-waves (mm-waves), and because mm-waves multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) will be adopted globally, the 24.25–27.5-GHz band and 27–29.5-GHz bands are now approved worldwide as the standard 5G communication bands. The most popular paper is published by Asbeck et al. [item 1) in the Appendix] for mm-wave power amplifiers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the secure transmission in a multiuser broadcast channel where only the statistical channel state information of the eavesdropper is available. We propose to apply secret dirty-paper coding (S-DPC) in this scenario to support the secure transmission of one user and the normal (unclassified) transmission of the other users. By adopting the S-DPC and encoding the secret message in the first place, all the information-bearing signals of the normal transmission are treated as noise by potential eavesdroppers and thus provide secrecy for the secure transmission. In this way, the proposed approach exploits the intrinsic secrecy of multiuser broadcasting and can serve as an energy-efficient alternative to the traditional artificial noise (AN) scheme. To evaluate the secrecy performance of this approach and compare it with the AN scheme, we propose two S-DPC-based secure transmission schemes for maximizing the secrecy rate under constraints on the secrecy outage probability (SOP) and the normal transmission rates. The first scheme directly optimizes the covariance matrices of the transmit signals, and a novel approximation of the intractable SOP constraint is derived to facilitate the optimization. The second scheme combines zero-forcing dirty-paper coding and AN, and the optimization involves only power allocation. We establish efficient numerical algorithms to solve the optimization problems for both schemes. Theoretical and simulation results confirm that, in addition to supporting the normal transmission, the achievable secrecy rates of the proposed schemes can be close to that of the traditional AN scheme, which supports only the secure transmission of one user. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A generalization of the problem of writing on dirty paper is considered in which one transmitter sends a common message to multiple receivers. Each receiver experiences on its link an additive interference (in addition to the additive noise), which is known noncausally to the transmitter but not to any of the receivers. Applications range from wireless multiple-antenna multicasting to robust dirty paper coding. We develop results for memoryless channels in Gaussian and binary special cases. In most cases, we observe that the availability of side information at the transmitter increases capacity relative to systems without such side information, and that the lack of side information at the receivers decreases capacity relative to systems with such side information. For the noiseless binary case, we establish the capacity when there are two receivers. When there are many receivers, we show that the transmitter side information provides a vanishingly small benefit. When the interference is large and independent across the users, we show that time sharing is optimal. For the Gaussian case, we present a coding scheme and establish its optimality in the high signal-to-interference-plus-noise limit when there are two receivers. When the interference power is large and independent across all the receivers, we show that time-sharing is again optimal. Connections to the problem of robust dirty paper coding are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems are of interest for meeting the expected demand for higher data rates and lower delays in future wireless packet data systems. In such systems, it is optimal to simultaneously transmit to multiple users compared with a single user in a single-input-single-output system. In addition, multicarrier systems are of interest to combat frequency-selective fading that is experienced over the larger bandwidth that these future broadband systems will use. The use of dirty paper coding further complicates the matter, because the order in which the users are encoded will affect the rates that they can achieve. A well-designed cross-layer scheduling algorithm must take into account the multiple dimensions of this resource-allocation problem and other quality-of-service (QoS) parameters to fully exploit the communications channel. The scheduling problem is often expressed in terms of optimizing some utility function. Unfortunately, the search space for this optimization problem is extremely large, which prohibits an optimal exhaustive search. To this end, we investigate the use of genetic algorithms to reduce the complexity of the scheduling. This paper builds upon prior work that implements scheduling via genetic algorithms in the context of single-carrier systems using zero-forcing beamforming (ZFB). In this paper, we investigate how the genetic algorithm can be adapted to account for the effect of encoding order on the scheduling and how the scheduling can be extended to a multicarrier system. In particular, we investigate the maximum throughput and proportionally fair scheduling criteria. We demonstrate that the performance of the genetic algorithm is near optimal compared with an exhaustive search at a greatly reduced computational complexity. Furthermore, in the case of a multicarrier orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) system, an increase in capacity is shown relative to the single-carrier case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider transmission over the ergodic fading multiple-antenna broadcast (MIMO-BC) channel with partial channel state information at the transmitter and full information at the receiver. Over the equivalent non-fading channel, capacity has recently been shown to be achievable using transmission schemes that were designed for the "dirty paper" channel. We focus on a similar "fading paper" model. The evaluation of the fading paper capacity is difficult to obtain. We confine ourselves to the linear-assignment capacity, which we define, and use convex analysis methods to prove that its maximizing distribution is Gaussian. We compare our fading-paper transmission to an application of dirty paper coding that ignores the partial state information and assumes the channel is fixed at the average fade. We show that a gain is easily achieved by appropriately exploiting the information. We also consider a cooperative upper bound on the sum-rate capacity as suggested by Sato. We present a numeric example that indicates that our scheme is capable of realizing much of this upper bound. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a review of the authors' work on inkjet-printed flexible antennas, fabricated on paper substrates, is given. This is presented as a system-level solution for ultra-low-cost mass production of UHF radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags and wireless sensor nodes (WSN), in an approach that could be easily extended to other microwave and wireless applications. First, we discuss the benefits of using paper as a substrate for high-frequency applications, reporting its very good electrical/dielectric performance up to at least 1 GHz. The RF characteristics of the paper-based substrate are studied by using a microstrip-ring resonator, in order to characterize the dielectric properties (dielectric constant and loss tangent). We then give details about the inkjet-printing technology, including the characterization of the conductive ink, which consists of nano-silver particles. We highlight the importance of this technology as a fast and simple fabrication technique, especially on flexible organic (e.g., LCP) or paper-based substrates. A compact inkjet-printed UHF "passive RFID" antenna, using the classic T-match approach and designed to match the IC's complex impedance, is presented as a demonstration prototype for this technology. In addition, we briefly touch upon the state-of-the-art area of fully-integrated wireless sensor modules on paper. We show the first-ever two-dimensional sensor integration with an RFID tag module on paper, as well as the possibility of a three-dimensional multilayer paper-based RF/microwave structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This letter presents two results for multiuser wireless systems employing dirty-paper coding strategies along with greedy scheduling over the broadcast multiple-input multiple-output channel. Specifically, an efficient and suboptimal downlink scheduler is proposed to approximate the maximum sum rate using equal power allocation, and it is shown to approach the maximum sum rate of optimal power allocation for a large number of users under optimal scheduling. The second result demonstrates that the average maximum sum rate can be tightly upper bounded when spatial multiplexing is maximized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates an optimization of the conventional relay selection for multirelay environments. In contrast with previously reported selection schemes, where a selected relay accesses the channel in a dedicated cooperative slot, the proposed scheme recovers the bandwidth loss of the half-duplex constraint by allowing two relays to simultaneously access the channels. Based on an appropriate dirty-paper coding (DPC) technique among relays, the proposed scheme enables a relay to establish communication with the destination at the same time that another relay forwards the data from the source. It is proven that the interplay between relay selection and the superposition DPC weight factor provides a tradeoff between relaying and new data performance. Hence, an appropriate codesign of the superposition DPC parameter and opportunistic relay selection can achieve efficient communication for the new data without affecting the relaying performance. The proposed scheme is compared with conventional relaying approaches, and its enhancements are provided through theoretical studies and numerical results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the telecommunication industry has evolved to provide services for new types of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in addition to basic mobile phone or internet services. Topics include the extended reality devices, sensors, and ground and aerial robots, to name a few. With the deployment of these new services, it is difficult for the wireless network to support ubiquitous connections with diverse quality-of-service (QoS) requirements.

The article reports that looking to 2030 and beyond, revolutionary enhancement of data transmission rates in sixth generation (6G) and beyond systems are required to meet the challenge of increasing communication traffic due to the massive exchange of information. Development of technologies and systems enabling Terabit-per-second (Tbps) wireless communications need to support long term exponential capacity increase of mobile communication networks.

In this paper, the feasibility of inkjet printing of circuit and microwave structures on paper-based substrates is investigated for the first time in the implementation of a complete low-cost wireless platform for sensors. First, the system-level design of the module including the amplifier characterization were carried out to ensure optimum performance of the sensor modules in the UHF bands used in RF identification communication. These results were then used to design two different antenna structures, which are printed on paper along with their respective circuit layouts using inket-printing technology. Different techniques were investigated for the assembly of circuit components on the silver printed layouts. Finally, wireless link measurements on the assembled prototypes verified the good performance on the wireless and sensing sides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper demonstrates the design of an 800-MHz solar-powered active wireless beacon composed of an antenna and an integrated oscillator on a low-cost paper substrate. Inkjet printing is used to fabricate the conductive circuit traces and the folded slot antenna, while the oscillator circuit is designed using off-the-shelf components mounted on the paper substrate. Flexible, low-cost, amorphous silicon (a-Si) solar cells are placed on top of the slot ground and provide autonomous operation of the active circuit eliminating the use of a battery. A prototype is built and characterized in terms of phase noise, radiation patterns, and the effect of solar irradiance. Such low-cost flexible circuits can find significant applications as beacon generator circuits for real-time identification and position purposes, wearable biomonitoring as well as solar-to-wireless power transfer topologies. The measured phase noise is -\116 dBc/\Hz at 1-MHz offset, while drain current is 4 mA and supply voltage is 1.8 V. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the ratification of the IEEE 802.11ad amendment to the 802.11 standard in December 2012, a major step has been taken to bring consumer wireless communication to the millimeter wave band. However, multi-gigabit-per-second throughput and small interference footprint come at the price of adverse signal propagation characteristics, and require a fundamental rethinking of Wi-Fi communication principles. This article describes the design assumptions taken into consideration for the IEEE 802.11ad standard and the novel techniques defined to overcome the challenges of mm-Wave communication. In particular, we study the transition from omnidirectional to highly directional communication and its impact on the design of IEEE 802.11ad. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this correspondence, we compare the achievable throughput for the optimal strategy of dirty paper coding (DPC) to that achieved with suboptimal and lower complexity linear precoding techniques (zero-forcing and block diagonalization). Both strategies utilize all available spatial dimensions and therefore have the same multiplexing gain, but an absolute difference in terms of throughput does exist. The sum rate difference between the two strategies is analytically computed at asymptotically high SNR. Furthermore, the difference is not affected by asymmetric channel behavior when each user has a different average SNR. Weighted sum rate maximization is also considered. In the process, it is shown that allocating user powers in direct proportion to user weights asymptotically maximizes weighted sum rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless data broadcast allows a large number of users to retrieve data simultaneously in mobile databases, resulting in an efficient way of using the scarce wireless bandwidth. However, the efficiency of data access methods is limited by an inherent property that data can only be accessed strictly sequentially by users. To properly cope with the inherent property, this paper presents three predaclaration-based transaction processing methods that yield a significant performance improvement in wireless data broadcast. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this special issue is to publish papers related to the basic physics of Electromagnetism in thecontext of radio wave propagation, see editorial of Part I. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consider several source nodes communicating across a wireless network to a destination node with the help of several layers of relay nodes. Recent work by Avestimehr has approximated the capacity of this network up to an additive gap. The communication scheme achieving this capacity approximation is based on compress-and-forward, resulting in noise accumulation as the messages traverse the network. As a consequence, the approximation gap increases linearly with the network depth. This paper develops a computation alignment strategy that can approach the capacity of a class of layered, time-varying wireless relay networks up to an approximation gap that is independent of the network depth. This strategy is based on the compute-and-forward framework, which enables relays to decode deterministic functions of the transmitted messages. Alone, compute-and-forward is insufficient to approach the capacity as it incurs a penalty for approximating the wireless channel with complex-valued coefficients by a channel with integer coefficients. Here, this penalty is circumvented by carefully matching channel realizations across time slots to create integer-valued effective channels that are well suited to compute-and-forward. Unlike prior constant gap results, the approximation gap obtained in this paper also depends closely on the fading statistics, which are assumed to be i.i.d. Rayleigh. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Piergiorgio L. E. Uslenghi Letters Prize Paper Award was established in 2009 to recognize the best contribution published in the IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters during the previous year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the winners in the Harold A. Wheeler Applications Prize Paper Award for 2017. It highlight the significance of the award which recognizes authors of the best applications paper published in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Transactions on Antennas and Propagation. The winners include Dia'aaldin J. Bisharat, Shaowei Liao and Quan Xue.

Recently, the vector dirty paper coding (DPC) achievable rate region has been shown to be the capacity region of a multiple-input multiple-output Gaussian broadcast channel (MIMO GBC). With DPC, the multiuser interference noncausally known at the transmitter can be completely removed. In this paper, we present a vector DPC structure for MIMO GBC. It is a generalization of the single antenna superposition dirty paper coding for the scalar Gaussian dirty paper problem proposed by Bennatan et al. In a theoretical random code setting, this construction is shown to be able to achieve the promised rate performance of the MIMO GBC. We also implement it with existing vector quantizer and capacity-achieving channel coding. "Combined with iterative decoding, a design example validates the effectiveness of our methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prospective authors are requested to submit new, unpublished manuscripts for inclusion in the upcoming event described in this call for papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly applied to surveillance tasks, thanks to their excellent mobility and flexibility. Different from existing works using UAVs for video surveillance, this paper employs a UAV team to carry out collaborative radio surveillance on ground moving nodes and disguise the purpose of surveillance. We consider two aspects of disguise. The first is that the UAVs do not communicate with each other (or the ground nodes can notice), and each UAV plans its trajectory in a decentralized way. The other aspect of disguise is that the UAVs avoid being noticed by the nodes for which a metric quantifying the disguising performance is adopted. We present a new decentralized method for the online trajectory planning of the UAVs, which maximizes the disguising metric while maintaining uninterrupted surveillance and avoiding UAV collisions. Based on the model predictive control (MPC) technique, our method allows each UAV to separately estimate the locations of the UAVs and the ground nodes, and decide its trajectory accordingly. The impact of potential estimation errors is mitigated by incorporating the error bounds into the online trajectory planning, hence achieving a robust control of the trajectories. Computer-based simulation results demonstrate that the developed strategy ensures the surveillance requirement without losing disguising performance, and outperforms existing alternatives. Note to Practitioners—The paper is motivated by the covertness requirement in the radio surveillance (also called eavesdropping) by UAVs. In some situations, the UAV user (such as the police department) wishes to disguise the surveillance intention from the targets, and the trajectories of UAVs play a significant role in the disguising. However, the typical UAV trajectories such as standoff tracking and orbiting can easily be noticed by the targets. Considering this gap, we focus on how to plan the UAVs’ trajectories so that they are less noticeable while conducting effective eavesdropping. We formulate a path planning problem aiming at maximizing a disguising metric, which measures the magnitude of the relative position change between a UAV and a target. A decentralized method is proposed for the online trajectory planning of the UAVs based on MPC, and its robust version is also presented to account for the uncertainty in the estimation and prediction of the nodes’ states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The future connectivity landscape, and notably, the 5G wireless systems will feature Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC). The coupling of high reliability and low latency requirements in URLLC use cases makes the wireless access design very challenging, in terms of both the protocol design and of the associated transmission techniques. This paper aims to provide a broad perspective on the fundamental tradeoffs in URLLC, as well as the principles used in building access protocols. Two specific technologies are considered in the context of URLLC: massive MIMO and multi-connectivity, also termed interface diversity. This paper also touches on the importance of the proper statistical methodology for designing and assessing extremely high-reliability levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have been recently considered as a promising candidate for energy-efficient solutions in future wireless networks. Their dynamic and low-power configuration enables coverage extension, massive connectivity, and low-latency communications. Due to a large number of unknown variables referring to the RIS unit elements and the transmitted signals, channel estimation and signal recovery in RIS-based systems are the ones of the most critical technical challenges. To address this problem, we focus on the RIS-assisted wireless communication system and present two joint channel estimation and signal recovery schemes based on message passing algorithms in this paper. Specifically, the proposed bidirectional scheme applies the Taylor series expansion and Gaussian approximation to simplify the sum-product procedure in the formulated problem. In addition, the inner iteration that adopts two variants of approximate message passing algorithms is incorporated to ensure robustness and convergence. Two ambiguities removal methods are also discussed in this paper. Our simulation results show that the proposed schemes show the superiority over the state-of-art benchmark method. We also provide insights on the impact of different RIS parameter settings on the proposed schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The explosive growth of Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications such as smart cities and Industry 4.0 have led to drastic increase in demand for wireless bandwidth, hence motivating the rapid development of new techniques for enhancing spectrum utilization needed by new generation wireless communication technologies. Among others, dynamic spectrum access (DSA) is one of the most widely accepted approaches. In this paper, as an enhancement of existing works, we take into consideration of inter-node collaborations in a dynamic spectrum environment. Typically, in such distributed circumstances, intelligent dynamic spectrum access almost invariably relies on self-learning to achieve dynamic spectrum access improvement. Whereas, this paper proposes a DSA scheme based on deep reinforcement learning to enhance spectrum and access efficiency. Unlike traditional Q-learning-based DSA, we introduce the following to enhance the spectrum efficiency in dynamic IoT spectrum environments. First, deep double Q-learning is adopted to perform local self-spectrum-learning for IoT terminals in order to achieve better dynamic access accuracy. Second, to accelerate learning convergence, federated learning (FL) in edge nodes is used to improve the self-learning. Third, multiple secondary users, who do not interfere with each other and have similar operation condition, are clustered for federated learning to enhance the efficiency of deep reinforcement learning. Comparing with the traditional distributed DSA with deep learning, the proposed scheme has faster access convergence speed due to the characteristic of global optimization for federated learning. Based on this, a framework of federated deep reinforcement learning (FDRL) for DSA is proposed. Furthermore, this scheme preserves privacy of IoT users in that FDRL only requires model parameters to be uploaded to edge servers. Simulations are performed to show the effectiveness of theproposed FDRL-based DSA framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the downlink of a cognitive radio (CR) network formed by multiple primary and secondary transmitters, where each multiantenna transmitter serves a preknown set of single-antenna users. This paper assumes that the secondary and primary transmitters can simultaneously transmit their data over the same frequency bands to achieve high system spectrum efficiency. This paper considers the downlink balancing problem of maximizing the minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of the secondary transmitters subject to both the total power constraint of the secondary transmitters and the maximum interference constraint at each primary user due to secondary transmissions. This paper proposes solving the problem using the alternating direction method of multipliers, which leads to a distributed implementation through limited information exchange across the coupled secondary transmitters. This paper additionally proposes a solution that guarantees feasibility at each iteration. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed solution converges to the centralized solution in a reasonable number of iterations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The papers in this special section focus on artificial intelligence (AI) and 5G Internet of Medical Things. The recent developments in biomedical sensors, wireless communication systems, and information networks are transforming the conventional healthcare systems. The transformed healthcare systems are enabling distributed healthcare services to patients who may not be co-located with the healthcare providers, providing early diagnoses, and reducing the cost in the healthcare section. The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), which includes medical devices, wearable devices, sensors and apps, is a critical piece of the digital transformation of healthcare, as it allows new business models to emerge and enables changes in work processes, productivity improvements, cost containment and enhanced customer experiences. IoMT can help monitor, inform and notify not only care-givers, but provide healthcare providers with actual data to identify issues bef [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the 2005 Communications Society and Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award, which is given annually to an outstanding paper that was published in any of the two societies' publications during the preceding year. This year the award was given to researchers Nihar Jindal, Sriram Vishwanath, and Andrea Goldsmith for their paper "On the Duality of Gaussian Multiple-Access and Broadcast Channels," which appeared in the 2004 issue of the journal "IEEE Transaction on Information Theory." Jindal has done his B.S. in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California in Berkeley, in 1999. His research work is in the field of the applications of communication and information theory to wireless communication, with a particular focus on multiple-antenna multi-user channels, dynamic resource allocation, sensor and ad hoc networks. Vishwanath's is currently working as an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas in Austin. Goldsmith works as an assistant professor of electric engineering at Stanford University. She has done research in the field of wireless communication, information theory and adaptive resource allocation in wireless networks.

This paper investigates the interference nulling capability of reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) in a multiuser environment where multiple single-antenna transceivers communicate simultaneously in a shared spectrum. From a theoretical perspective, we show that when the channels between the RIS and the transceivers have line-of-sight and the direct paths are blocked, it is possible to adjust the phases of the RIS elements to null out all the interference completely and to achieve the maximum $K$ degrees-of-freedom (DoF) in the overall $K$ -user interference channel, provided that the number of RIS elements exceeds some finite value that depends on $K$. Algorithmically, for any fixed channel realization we formulate the interference nulling problem as a feasibility problem, and propose an alternating projection algorithm to efficiently solve the resulting nonconvex problem with local convergence guarantee. Numerical results show that the proposed alternating projection algorithm can null all the interference if the number of RIS elements is only slightly larger than a threshold of $2K(K-1)$. For the practical sum-rate maximization objective, this paper proposes to use the zero-forcing solution obtained from alternating projection as an initial point for subsequent Riemannian conjugate gradient optimization and shows that it has a significant performance advantage over random initializations. For the objective of maximizing the minimum rate, this paper proposes a subgradient projection method which is capable of achieving excellent performance at low complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an analytical performance characterization of both the uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) user-centric network multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, where a cooperating base station (BS) cluster is formed for each user individually and the clusters for different users may overlap. In this model, cooperating BSs (each equipped with multiple antennas) jointly perform zero-forcing beamforming to the set of single-antenna users associated with them. As compared with a baseline network MIMO system with disjoint BS clusters, the effect of user-centric clustering is that it improves signal strength in both the UL and DL, while reducing cluster-edge interference in the DL. This paper quantifies these effects by assuming that BSs and users form Poisson point processes and by further approximating both the signal and interference powers using Gamma distributions of appropriate parameters. We show that BS cooperation provides significant gain as compared to single-cell processing for both the UL and DL, but the advantage of user-centric clustering over the baseline disjoint clustering system is significant for the DL cluster-edge users only. Although the analytic results are derived with the assumption of perfect channel state information and infinite backhaul between the cooperating BSs, they nevertheless provide architectural insight into the design of the future cooperative cellular networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

5G wireless networks are expected to support ultra-reliable low latency communications (URLLC) traffic which requires very low packet delays (< 1 ms) and extremely high reliability (~99.999%). In this paper, we focus on the design of a wireless system supporting downlink URLLC traffic. Using a queuing network-based model for the wireless system, we characterize the effect of various design choices on the maximum URLLC load it can support, including: 1) system parameters such as the bandwidth, link SINR, and QoS requirements; 2) resource allocation schemes in orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA)-based systems; and 3) hybrid automatic repeat request schemes. Key contributions of this paper which are of practical interest are: 1) study of how the minimum required system bandwidth to support a given URLLC load scales with associated QoS constraints; 2) characterization of optimal OFDMA resource allocation schemes which maximize the admissible URLLC load; and 3) optimization of a repetition code-based packet re-transmission scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previously, companies could publish the interfaces or other aspects of their products and expect that they would become a standard. In fact, there are more examples of this failing, than examples where a company's market position made its product the de facto standard. Today, consumers and customers expect multi-vendor interoperability and will not tolerate proprietary interfaces. There is a need for market driven standards. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including a paper that deals with the integration of 802.11 a/b/g transceivers for co-existence with cellular and Bluetooth applications and another paper that deals with carrier generator systems.

For multi-user multiple-input-multiple-output (MU-MIMO) system, transmitter utilizes a pre-equalizer based precoding to cancel inter-stream interference for parallel transmission with the aid of accurate feedback of channel state information (CSI) from all receivers. The correct power scaling factor, which normalizes the symbols power of precoding to be a constant one, is required at each receiver. Due to CSI error and limitation of feed-forward link, the received inaccurate power scaling factor will shrink or expand the received constellation points which severely degrades the performance of MIMO system. In this paper, using nonlinear vector perturbation (VP) and linear zero-forcing (ZF) precoding, we analyze the impact of inaccurate power scaling factor on the performance of a MIMO precoding system. The analyzed results show that the mismatched modulo size from inaccurate power scaling factor severely degrades the performance of the VP system, especially for high order M-QAM modulation. In addition, the performance degradation is strongly related with the distribution of representation points for each M-QAM symbol. For linear ZF precoding, the performance loss from the shrinked or expanded constellation points is severe for system using high order M-QAM. In addition, to alleviate the performance degradation, we propose a VP system using partial perturbation points (PPP). By limiting the region of redundant points with vector perturbation for partial M-QAM symbols, the performance degradation due to the inaccurate power scaling factor can be alleviated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transmit power limitations and quality-impairing channels present key challenges to wireless communications. A possible solution to these problems is the application of user-cooperation techniques so as to improve link quality. This paper studies the tradeoffs involved in combining user cooperation with practical source and channel coding in systems featuring rate-adaptive source and channel coding of conversational traffic. Performance is measured through the D-SNR curve, which measures the relation between end-to-end distortion and channel signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The D-SNR curve is accurately characterized as a linear function in log-log scales. Also, it is shown that the tradeoffs involved in combining amplify-and-forward or decode-and-forward cooperation with source and channel coding translates into cooperative schemes showing a decrease in distortion at approximately half the rate as non-cooperative schemes but with larger coding gain. Because of this, the studied non-cooperative schemes show better performance only at high SNR. In addition, the D-SNR characterization is used to compare amplify-and-forward and decode-and-forward cooperation for channel codes of different strength and to study the effects of source codec efficiency, where it is shown that diversity gain is reduced proportionally to the source codec loss of efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers distributed estimation methods to enable the formation of Unmanned-Aerial-Vehicles (UAVs) that track a moving target. The UAVs (or agents) are equipped with communication devices to receive a beacon signal from the target and share information with neighboring UAVs. The shared information includes the time-of-arrival (TOA) of the beacon signal from the target and estimates on the target’s location. Every UAV processes the received information from the neighbors using a single-time-scale distributed estimation protocol. This differs from multi-time-scale protocols that require (i) many consensus iterations on a-priori estimates, (ii) fast communication among agents (in general, much faster than the sampling rate of the target dynamics), and thus, more-costly communication equipment and processing units. Further, our approach outperforms most single-time-scale methods in terms of observability assumption as these methods assume that the target is observable via the measurement data received from neighboring UAVs (referred to as local-observability). This requires more communications among the sensors. In contrast, our approach is only based on global-observability assumption, and thus, requires less networking (only strong-connectivity) and communication traffic along with less computational load by data-processing once at the same time-scale of sampling target dynamics. We consider modified time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) measurements with a constant output matrix for the linearized model. UAVs make a pre-specified formation, and by estimating the target’s location via these measurements, move along with the target. Note to Practitioners—Inspired by recent development in industrial UAVs along with emerging progress in low-cost processing units, fog computing systems, and wireless communications, this paper considers mobile tracking of a moving target via a group of wireless-connected autonomous drones. In the classical tracking methods, which are prone to single-point-of-failure, all the sensors need to send their information to a ground central station over a long-range and costly data-transmission channel. In contrast, by collaborative tracking the processing and decision-making are distributed among a swarm of drones equipped with onboard miniaturized electronic parts such as sensors, microcontrollers, microprocessors, and communication units. This article provides an efficient algorithm to enable such drones to autonomously track the moving target in real-time. Note that the cost and tracking ability of the UAV swarm are directly determined by the computational efficiency and communication burden of the estimation algorithm. In this regard, most available estimation algorithms are over budget and even infeasible due to the need for fast data-transmission channels, fast CPUs, and high network traffic. Our proposed estimation technique outperforms similar algorithms in terms of required communication bandwidth, data-transmission rate, and computational resources, which considerably reduces the hardware cost and improves tracking efficiency in real-time large-scale applications. We show the feasibility and efficiency of our distributed tracking method by simulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are at the dawn of an era in information and communication technology with unprecedented demand for connected and automated everything. Both Shannon theories and industrial advances have clearly evidenced that more densely packed networks and a much wider operating bandwidth are key drivers for meeting the escalating wireless network demands. Recently, there have been substantial research efforts on the exploitation of higher frequency bands, in particular the millimetre wave and optical wireless bands. After a decade of active research and development, and along with the maturity of device technology, Visible Light Communications (VLC) has emerged as a very promising technology to enable next generation digital innovations and support wide range of applications. This special issue on VLC focuses on three core thrusts of the discipline: Localisation, Communication and Networking. The overall aim of the special issue is to inspire multi-disciplinary international communities to work together in order to achieve further research advances. Indeed, a total of 96 high quality papers were received from both academia and industry. After a careful peer-reviewing process, 17 papers were selected based on their combined novelty, rigour, and impact. Owing to the highly selective nature of JSAC, many other interesting papers were not selected for the special issue, but we hope that these papers might appear elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper studies the outage capacity of a network consisting of a multitude of heterogeneous mobile users and operating according to the classical opportunistic beamforming framework. The base station is located at the center of the cell, which is modeled as a disk of finite radius. The random user locations are modeled using a homogeneous spatial Poisson point process. The received signals are impaired by both fading and location dependent path loss. For this system, we first derive an expression for the beam outage probability. This expression holds for all path loss models that satisfy some mild conditions. Then, we focus on two specific path loss models (i.e., an unbounded model and a more realistic bounded one) to illustrate the applications of our results. In the large system limit, where the cell radius tends to infinity, the beam outage capacity and its scaling behavior are derived for the selected specific path loss models. This paper also studies opportunistic schemes that achieve fairness among the heterogeneous users. Numerical evaluations are performed to give further insights and to illustrate the applicability of the outage capacity results even to a cell having a small finite radius. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The table of contents for the July 2012 issue of the journal "Proceedings of the IEEE" is presented.

A novel approach is here presented to superimpose a low-priority data stream on a high-priority data stream for OFDM systems. The main improvement with respect to conventional hierarchical modulation, which is included with the same purpose in various wireless technologies, is that the low-priority data stream can be decoded from the received subcarrier symbols without any previous equalization for multipath fading channels. As a consequence, the expected performance is nearly invariant of the channel estimation method used to equalize the channel. The low-priority stream is inserted adopting a gain-invariant dirty paper coding based on Rational Dither Modulation, which was proposed for data hiding applications. In this paper an analysis of the developed system is presented and several simulations have been carried out using DVB-T system parameters to verify the validity of the proposed approach. The experimental results show the better performance of the proposed method with respect to that of a conventional hierarchical modulation, particularly when the accuracy of the estimated channel response decreases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 proposes an ordered sequence detection (OSD) for digital pulse interval modulation (DPIM) in optical wireless communications. Leveraging the sparsity of DPIM sequences, OSD shows a comparable performance to the optimal maximum likelihood sequence detection with much lower complexity. Compared with the widely adopted sample-by-sample optimal threshold detection (OTD), it considerably improves the bit-error-rate (BER) performance by mitigating error propagation. Moreover, this paper proposes a barrier signal-aided digital pulse interval modulation (BDPIM), where the last of every $K$ symbols is allocated with more power as an inserted barrier signal. BDPIM with OSD (BDPIM-OSD) can limit the error propagation between two adjacent barriers. To reduce the storing delay when using OSD to detect extremely large packets, we propose BDPIM with a combination of OTD and OSD (BDPIM-OTD-OSD), within which long sequences are cut into pieces and separately detected. Approximate upper bounds of the average BER performance of DPIM-OTD, DPIM-OSD, BDPIM-OSD, and BDPIM-OTD-OSD are analysed. Simulations are conducted to corroborate our analysis. Optimal parameter settings are also investigated in uncoded and coded systems by simulations. Simulation results show that the proposed OSD and BDPIM bring significant improvement in uncoded and coded systems over various channels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a survey of various experimental data available on the value of the propagation path loss of radio waves in a cellular wireless environment. It is shown starting with the Okumuraet al.’s paper on propagation measurements and other available published experimental data that they all exhibit that the electric field varies as $\rho ^{-1.5}$ within a cellular radius of a few kilometers, where $\rho $ is the radial distance of the receiving antenna from the transmitting one. This decay in the fields is equivalent to a propagation loss of −9 dB/octave or −30 dB for a decade of the distance. This value is independent of the nature of the ground, whether it be composed of rural, urban, suburban, or water. This is the first time it is stated that the propagation path loss due to the presence of ground generates a path loss of 90 dB when the signals travel a distance of 1 km. This value is rather large when compared to a loss of 30–50 dB produced by buildings, trees, and similar artifacts. Therefore, the experimental data indicate that the effect of trees and buildings have a secondary influence on the decay of the electric field with distance, the dominant one is the propagation loss over an imperfect ground. Contemporary propagation models do not acknowledge this fact. Outside the cellular radius of a few kilometers, the path loss appears to be 12 dB/octave or 40 dB/decade of distance. In a companion paper, it will be demonstrated that the values for the path loss can be explained from an analytical standpoint without taking recourse to statistics which involves a lot of assumptions on the functional variation of the variables of interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In wireless networks, the link connectivity may be intermittent due to shadowing, burstiness of data arrival, or uncoordinated resource allocation. In this paper, we model the intermittence of links as Bernoulli distributed random channel states, termed intermittence channel states, and study the impact of the corresponding channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) in a two-user Gaussian broadcast channel (BC). Moreover, due to the heterogeneous timeliness of intermittence channel states, the CSIT considered in this paper is hybrid. More specifically, the CSIT of each link can be perfectly (causally or non-causally) available, delayed, or not available. When the links are connected, we adopt a general setting that the received signal-to-noise ratios can be different. Our contribution is the characterization of the capacity regions of intermittent Gaussian BC to within bounded gaps for all combinations of hybrid CSIT, except for scenario DN (delayed CSIT of receiver 1, no CSIT of receiver 2). For scenario DN, we propose an opportunistic physical layer network coding scheme that achieves a strictly larger degree-of-freedom (DoF) region than the no-CSIT DoF region. As a corollary, single-user CSIT is able to increase the sum DoF for intermittent Gaussian BC (also the capacity region for the erasure BC, as a by-product). This result is in sharp contrast to the recent negative result by Davoodi and Jafar, where it is shown that for fast-fading multiple-input single-output BC with continuous channel states, single-user CSIT does not help at all in terms of sum DoF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]