Search

The ever-increasing popularity of web APIs allows app developers to leverage a set of existing APIs to achieve their sophisticated objectives. The heavily fragmented distribution of web APIs makes it challenging for an app developer to find appropriate and compatible web APIs. Currently, app developers usually have to manually discover candidate web APIs, verify their compatibility and select appropriate and compatible ones. This process is cumbersome and requires detailed knowledge of web APIs which is often too demanding. It has become a major obstacle to further and broader applications of web APIs. To address this issue, we first propose a web API correlation graph built on extensive data about the compatibility between web APIs. Then, we propose WAR (Web APIs Recommendation), the first data-driven approach for web APIs recommendation that integrates API discovery, verification and selection operations based on keywords search over the web API correlation graph. WAR assists app developers without detailed knowledge of web APIs in searching for appropriate and compatible APIs by typing a few keywords that represent the tasks required to achieve app developers’ objectives. We conducted large-scale experiments on 18,478 real-world APIs and 6,146 real-world apps to demonstrate the usefulness and efficiency of WAR.

This article investigates the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted wireless powered Internet-of-Things system, where a UAV takes off from a data center, flies to each of the ground sensor nodes (SNs) in order to transfer energy and collect data from the SNs, and then returns to the data center. For such a system, an optimization problem is formulated to minimize the average Age of Information (AoI) of the data collected from all ground SNs. Since the average AoI depends on the UAV's trajectory, the time required for energy harvesting (EH) and data collection for each SN, these factors need to be optimized jointly. Moreover, instead of the traditional linear EH model, we employ a nonlinear model because the behavior of the EH circuits is nonlinear by nature. To solve this nonconvex problem, we propose to decompose it into two subproblems, i.e., a joint energy transfer and data collection time allocation problem and a UAV's trajectory planning problem. For the first subproblem, we prove that it is convex and give an optimal solution by using Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions. This solution is used as the input for the second subproblem, and we solve optimally it by designing dynamic programming (DP) and ant colony (AC) heuristic algorithms. The simulation results show that the DP-based algorithm obtains the minimal average AoI of the system, and the AC-based heuristic finds solutions with near-optimal average AoI. The results also reveal that the average AoI increases as the flying altitude of the UAV increases and linearly with the size of the collected data at each ground SN.

Mobile users could offload some computations from the mobile devices to the nearby geo-distributed Fog servers which are provided by Fog computing infrastructure to release the computation workloads, and therefore improve quality of experience for themselves. However, mobile users may mistakenly offload their computations to the Fog servers which have been injected by some attackers, and these compromised Fog servers would possibly establish man-in-the-middle attack during the offloading procedure, and therefore induce privacy leaking and security issues. Meanwhile, as most of mobile users have natural mobility features, there still needs mobility-aware offloading technique for improving the offloading efficiency. Also, for Fog computing provider, to charge service fees for offloading service in a distributed fashion is necessary for providing geo-distributed offloading service. All of these challenges above motivate us to bring blockchain technique into Fog computing so as to verify authenticity of each Fog server. Hence, we propose a new B lockchain-based M obility-aware O ffloading (i.e., BMO) mechanism in this paper and we modeled the offloading problem in our proposed environment. Concretely, our BMO constantly maintains a set of candidate authorized Fog servers by leveraging blockchain, and the offloading decision could be made in a real-time fashion in mobile devices according to mobility prediction of users. Experimental results have demonstrated the feasibility and efficiency of BMO.

High data rate wireless links are an affordable and easily deployable solution to replace or complement fibre. The wide frequency band available at millimetre waves above 100 GHz can support multi-gigabit per second data rate. However, the high attenuation due to rain and humidity poses a substantial obstacle to long-range links. This study describes a wireless system being developed for point-to-point links at D-band (DLINK), above 150 GHz, to enable a full fibre-on-air link with more than 1 km range and unprecedented data rate up to 45 Gb/s. The upper end of the D-band spectrum is used (151.5–174.8 GHz) in full frequency division duplex transmission. The DLINK system consists of a transmitter using a directly modulated resonant tunnelling diode oscillator powered by novel travelling wave tubes. The performance and the small footprint of the front end will make the DLINK system highly competitive to the point-to-point links presently available in the market at frequencies below 100 GHz. The innovative approach and the design are oriented to large-scale productions to satisfy the high data traffic demand of the new 5G infrastructure.

This article investigates the unmanned-aerial-vehicle (UAV)-enabled wireless powered cooperative mobile edge computing (MEC) system, where a UAV installed with an energy transmitter (ET) and an MEC server provides both energy and computing services to sensor devices (SDs). The active SDs desire to complete their computing tasks with the assistance of the UAV and their neighboring idle SDs that have no computing task. An optimization problem is formulated to minimize the total required energy of UAV by jointly optimizing the CPU frequencies, the offloading amount, the transmit power, and the UAV’s trajectory. To tackle the nonconvex problem, a successive convex approximation (SCA)-based algorithm is designed. Since it may be with relatively high computational complexity, as an alternative, a decomposition and iteration (DAI)-based algorithm is also proposed. The simulation results show that both proposed algorithms converge within several iterations, and the DAI-based algorithm achieve the similar minimal required energy and optimized trajectory with the SCA-based one. Moreover, for a relatively large amount of data, the SCA-based algorithm should be adopted to find an optimal solution, while for a relatively small amount of data, the DAI-based algorithm is a better choice to achieve smaller computing energy consumption. It also shows that the trajectory optimization plays a dominant factor in minimizing the total required energy of the system and optimizing acceleration has a great effect on the required energy of the UAV. Additionally, by jointly optimizing the UAV’s CPU frequencies and the amount of bits offloaded to UAV, the minimal required energy for computing can be greatly reduced compared to other schemes and by leveraging the computing resources of idle SDs, the UAV’s computing energy can also be greatly reduced.

The development of modellings and analytical tools to structurise and study the allocation of resources through noble user competitions become essential, especially considering the increased degree of heterogeneity in application and service demands that will be cornerstone in future communication systems. Stochastic asymmetric Blotto games appear promising to modelling such problems, and devising their Nash equilibrium (NE) strategies by anticipating the potential outcomes of user competitions. In this regard, this paper approaches the generic energy efficiency problem with a new stochastic asymmetric Blotto game paradigm to enable the derivation of joint optimal bandwidth and transmit power allocations by setting multiple users to compete in multiple auction-like contests for their individual resource demands. The proposed modelling innovates by abstracting the notion of fairness from centrally-imposed to distributed-competitive, where each user’s pay-off probability is expressed as quantitative bidding metric, so as, all users’ actions can be interdependent, i.e., each user attains its utility given the allocations of other users, which eliminates the chance of low valued carriers not being claimed by any user, and, in principle, enables the full utilisation of wireless resources. We also contribute by resolving the allocation problem with low complexity using new mathematical techniques based on Charnes-Cooper transformation, which eliminate the additional coefficients and multipliers that typically appear during optimisation analysis, and derive the joint optimal strategy as a set of linear single-variable functions for each user. We prove that our strategy converges towards a unique, monotonous and scalable NE, and examine its optimality, positivity and feasibility properties in detail. Simulation comparisons with relevant studies confirm the superiority of our approach in terms of higher energy efficiency performance, fairness index and quality-of-service provision.

With the explosive emergence of computation-intensive and latency-sensitive applications, data processing could be envisioned to perform closer to the data source. Similar to edge and fog computing, dispersed computing is considered as a complementary computing paradigm, which can excavate potential computation resources in the network to users, and serve as a supplement for sharing the computational burden when the edge is overloaded. In this article, we first make full use of idle and geographically dispersed computation resources via task offloading, contributing to conserve energy for mobile devices. Especially, a dispersed computing offloading framework concerning the interests of users and networked computation points is proposed. We further transform the initial problem into a multiobjective optimization problem subject to latency and resource constraints. To tackle such a complex problem, an energy-saving bilateral matching algorithm is designed to obtain the optimal task offloading strategy. The simulation results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm can outperform the benchmark schemes in terms of user fairness and can achieve a relatively balanced energy cost ratio. Furthermore, comparative experiments with edge computing are implemented in Amber Response and Disaster Relief scenarios, respectively, to reveal the advantages of the proposed framework.

Perspective functions have long been used to convert fractional programs into convex programs. More recently, they have been used to form tight relaxations of mixed-integer nonlinear programs with so-called indicator variables. Motivated by a practical application (maximising energy efficiency in an OFDMA system), we consider problems that have a fractional objective and indicator variables simultaneously. To obtain a tight relaxation of such problems, one must consider what we call a “bi-perspective” (Bi-P) function. An analysis of Bi-P functions leads to the derivation of a new kind of cutting planes, which we call “Bi-P-cuts”. Computational results indicate that Bi-P-cuts typically close a substantial proportion of the integrality gap.

The advent of deep-learning technology promises major leaps forward in addressing the ever-enduring problems of wireless resource control and optimization, and improving key network performances, such as energy efficiency, spectral efficiency, transmission latency, etc. Therefore, a common understanding for quantum deep-learning algorithms is that they exploit advantages of quantum hardware, enabling massive optimization speed ups, which cannot be achieved by using classical computer hardware. In this respect, this paper investigates the possibility of resolving the energy efficiency problem in wireless communications by developing a quantum neural network (QNN) algorithm of deep-learning that can be tested on a classical computer setting by using any popular numerical simulation tool, such as Python. The computed results show that our QNN algorithm can be indeed trainable and that it can lead to solution convergence during the training phase. We also show that the proposed QNN algorithm exhibits slightly faster convergence speed than its classical ANN counterpart, which was considered in our previous work. Finally, we conclude that our solution can accurately resolve the energy efficiency problem and that it can be extended to optimize other communications problems, such as the global optimal power control problem, with promising trainability and generalization ability.

We propose a novel positioning-communication integrated signal, which superposes the configurable positioning signal on the communication one to achieve a sub-meter range measurement accuracy. Different from other positioning schemes, there are multi positioning signals on different sub-carriers for different positioning users. The powers and bandwidths of these positioning signals are controllable, which reduces the near-far effect, and improves the range measurement accuracy. Other major contributions are: we analyze the interference of the positioning signal to the communication one; we give the lower-bound and measurement accuracy of the range estimation in both flat and fading channels, and derive their simple expressions. The results show the interaction between the communication and positioning signals is limited, and it is feasible to use the proposed signal for high accuracy positioning.

In this paper, we consider a cooperative underlay cognitive radio system in which one secondary user ( ${S}$ ) transmits its data to a secondary receiver with the assistance of multiple relays. In the considered underlay spectrum sharing scenario, the transmit power levers at ${S}$ and forwarding relays are adjusted simultaneously according to a given threshold interference power that the primary user can tolerate. We also consider that relays adopt threshold decode-and-forward relay scheme and harvest energy from the primary transmitter with finite energy storage capacity under time switching scheme. Three best relay selection (RS) schemes, optimal source-relay link with wireless energy harvesting (WEH), optimal relay-destination link with WEH and optimal source-relay-destination link with WEH schemes, are proposed and studied. Closed-form analytical expressions for the outage probability of these three best RS schemes are derived, respectively. Finally, our analytical results are verified by Monte-Carlo simulations.

MEC is an emerging paradigm that utilizes computing resources at the network edge to deploy heterogeneous applications and services. In the MEC system, mobile users and enterprises can offload computation-intensive tasks to nearby computing resources to reduce latency and save energy. When users make offloading decisions, the task dependency needs to be considered. Due to the NP-hardness of the offloading problem, the existing solutions are mainly heuristic, and therefore have difficulties in adapting to the increasingly complex and dynamic applications. To address the challenges of task dependency and adapting to dynamic scenarios, we propose a new DRL-based offloading framework, which can efficiently learn the offloading policy uniquely represented by a specially designed S2S neural network. The proposed DRL solution can automatically discover the common patterns behind various applications so as to infer an optimal offloading policy in different scenarios. Simulation experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed DRL-based method with different data transmission rates and task numbers. The results show that our method outperforms two heuristic baselines and achieves nearly optimal performance.

In this letter, we aim to maximize the minimum weighted achievable rate of the two links in multiple-input multiple-output full-duplex systems via precoder design. With bidirectional communication and unidirectional communication fashion considered, our system model involves limited dynamic range effect and channel estimation error. We propose D.C. (difference of two convex functions) based algorithms to solve the highly non-convex optimization problem, and the complexity, convergence and optimality of proposed algorithms are discussed.

In licensed shared access (LSA) systems, the protection of the incumbent in the shared spectrum may degrade the spectrum and energy efficiency of the licensee. In this paper, we examine the optimization of these two performance metrics in a LSA vertical sharing scenario between an airport incumbent, and a mobile network operator licensee. Considering a restriction zone of a pre-defined radius, we derive the probability of the incumbent's interference threshold and then formulate a power allocation scheme as a multi-objective optimization of both energy and spectrum efficiency. We then adopt the weighted sum method to convert this multi-objective optimization into a single objective optimization and convert that into a quasi concave optimization problem. The optimum power allocation is then obtained using fractional programming. We further investigate the impact of various critical operational parameters in conjunction with the two performance metrics. Simulation results indicate a significantly improved energy efficiency in the licensee network as well as the spectrum efficiency comparable to even when the LSA spectrum utilization is unrestricted by the incumbent's maximum interference threshold. Furthermore, we show that with careful selection of the licensee eNodeB coverage radius, transmit power, and users number per eNodeB coverage area, one can engineer the best possible trade-off between the spectrum and energy efficiency.

Localization plays a key role in Internet of Things. This paper proposes a novel intelligent cooperative multisensor localization method called the edge cloud cooperative localization (ECCL) which has the range and angle observations from the neighbor nodes along with the location observations from an absolute coordinate localization system like global positioning system. The edge cloud structure is proposed which employs several distributed Kalman filters in sensor nodes edge and a centralized cooperative fusion unit in the cloud. For a robust fusion, a cooperative redundancy validation method is proposed to detect the outliers. The proposed ECCL scheme has the advantages of both the distributed and centralized localization, which satisfies the needs of high reliability and high accuracy, especially when sensor nodes have limited computational resources. The simulation and experimental results show that our proposed ECCL algorithm outperforms the other schemes both in outlier detection and localization accuracy.

A novel front end for high data rate point to point links at D-band (151 – 174.8 GHz) will provide up to 45 Gb/s over 1 km range. The low power signal generation is provided by a low cost Resonant Tunnelling Diode (RTD) oscillator. The RTD oscillator is connected to a Traveling Wave Tube that provides up to 10 W transmission power.

Compared with traditional internal combustion engine vehicles, Electric Vehicles (EVs) have the advantage of eliminating harmful gases in the environment, with great development potential in recent years. However, because the battery capacity of EVs is limited at the current stage, where to charge (to select charging station) and when/whether to charge (order the charging priority of EVs) still limit the large-scale popularity of EVs. In this paper, we develop an Urgency First Charging (UFC) charging scheduling policy, which takes the remaining parking time and charging time of EVs as the standard of charging priority. With this, the CS benefits to the shortest trip duration (summation of travelling time through CS, and charging service time at CS) is selected as optimal solution. We have conducted simulations through Helsinki’s traffic scenarios. The results have shown that our proposed CS-Selection scheme effectively improves the charging comfort (in terms of waiting time and trip time) and charging efficiency (in terms of not-fully charged service due to limited parking duration).

LoRa has been recognized as one of the most promising low-power wide-area (LPWA) techniques. Since LoRa devices are usually powered by batteries, energy efficiency (EE) is an essential consideration. In this paper, we investigate the energy efficient resource allocation in LoRa networks to maximize the system EE (SEE) and the minimal EE (MEE) of LoRa users, respectively. Specifically, our objective is to maximize the corresponding EE by jointly exploiting user scheduling, spreading factor (SF) assignment, and transmit power allocations. To solve them efficiently, we first propose a suboptimal algorithm, including the low-complexity user scheduling scheme based on matching theory and the heuristic SF assignment approach for LoRa users scheduled on the same channel. Then, to deal with the power allocation, an optimal algorithm is proposed to maximize the SEE. To maximize the MEE of LoRa users assigned to the same channel, an iterative power allocation algorithm based on the generalized fractional programming and sequential convex programming is proposed. Numerical results show that the proposed user scheduling algorithm achieves near-optimal EE performance, and the proposed power allocation algorithms outperform the benchmarks. © 2020 IEEE.

The analytical model of trilateration localization error expresses the localization error in terms of distance estimation errors. Using the analytical model, we investigate the trilateration localization error, and derive the extreme values of its components and other novel results. We show that these extreme values occur when the distance estimation errors have opposite signs. We further show that better localization accuracy is achieved if all the distance estimation errors are negative compared to when the same magnitudes of distance estimation errors are positive. The results are applicable to all wireless communication systems and networks where trilateration and multilateration may be used for position estimation. This includes global navigation satellite systems, such as the global positioning system, wireless local area networks, wireless sensor networks, internet of things, and other miscellaneous applications. All the results are verified using simulation.

Network update enables Software-Defined Networks (SDNs) to optimize the data plane performance via southbound APIs. The single update between the initial and the final network states fail to handle high-frequency changes or the burst event during the update procedure in time, leading to prolonged update time and inefficiency. On the contrary, the continuous update can respond to the network condition changes at all times. However, existing work, especially "Update Algebra" can only guarantee blackhole- and loop-free. The congestion-free property cannot be respected during the update procedure. In this paper, we propose Coeus, a continuous network update system while maintaining blackhole-, loop- and congestion-free simultaneously. Firstly, we establish an operation-based continuous update model. Based on this model, we dynamically reconstruct an operation dependency graph to capture unexecuted update operations and the link utilization variations. Subsequently, we develop an operation composition algorithm to eliminate redundant update commands and an operation node partition algorithm to speed up the update procedure. We prove that the partition algorithm is optimal and can guarantee the consistency. Finally, extensive evaluations show that Coeus can improve the makespan by at least 179% compared with state-of-the-art approaches when the arrival rate of update events equals to three times per second.

Because of its important role in health policy-shaping, population health monitoring (PHM) is considered a fundamental block for public health services. However, traditional public health data collection approaches, such as clinic-visit-based data integration or health surveys, could be very costly and time-consuming. To address this challenge, this article proposes a cost-effective approach called Compressive Population Health (CPH), where a subset of a given area is selected in terms of regions within the area for data collection in the traditional way, while leveraging inherent spatial correlations of neighboring regions to perform data inference for the rest of the area. By alternating selected regions longitudinally, this approach can validate and correct previously assessed spatial correlations. To verify whether the idea of CPH is feasible, we conduct an in-depth study based on spatiotemporal morbidity rates of chronic diseases in more than 500 regions around London for over 10 years. We introduce our CPH approach and present three extensive analytical studies. The first confirms that significant spatiotemporal correlations do exist. In the second study, by deploying multiple state-of-the-art data recovery algorithms, we verify that these spatiotemporal correlations can be leveraged to do data inference accurately using only a small number of samples. Finally, we compare different methods for region selection for traditional data collection and show how such methods can further reduce the overall cost while maintaining high PHM quality.

Non orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and mobile edge computing (MEC) are evolving as key enablers for fifth generation (5G) networks as this combination can provide high spectral efficiency, improved quality-of-service (QoS), and lower latency. This letter aims to minimize the transaction time difference of two NOMA paired users offloading data to MEC servers by optimizing their transmission powers and computational resources of severs using a successive convex approximation method. The equalization of transaction time for paired users reduces the wastage of both frequency and computational resources, and improves effective throughput of the system to 19% on average.

Massive multiple antenna systems in conjunction with millimeter (mmWave) communication have gained tremendous attention in the recent years owing to their high speed data delivery. However, security in these networks has been overlooked; thereby necessitating a comprehensive study. This paper analyzes the physical layer security performance of the downlink of a massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)-based hybrid heterogeneous network (HetNet) where both mmWave and sub-6 GHz small cells coexist. Specifically, a tractable approach using stochastic geometry is proposed to analyze the secrecy outage probability, secrecy energy efficiency (SEE) and secrecy spectrum efficiency (SSE) of the hybrid HetNets. Our study further characterizes the impact of large antenna arrays, directional beamforming gains, transmit power, and cell density on the above mentioned secrecy performance measures. The results show that at low transmit power operation, the secrecy performance enhances for higher small cell density. It has also been observed that the higher directivity gains at mmWave cells lead to a drop in secrecy performance of the network; thus a tradeoff exists between better coverage or secrecy.

The downlink communications are vulnerable to intelligent unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) jamming attack. In this paper, we propose a novel anti-intelligent UAV jamming strategy, in which the ground users can learn the optimal trajectory to elude such jamming. The problem is formulated as a stackelberg dynamic game, where the UAV jammer acts as a leader and the ground users act as followers. First, as the UAV jammer is only aware of the incomplete channel state information (CSI) of the ground users, for the first attempt, we model such leader sub-game as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). Then, we obtain the optimal jamming trajectory via the developed deep recurrent Q-networks (DRQN) in the three-dimension space. Next, for the followers sub-game, we use the Markov decision process (MDP) to model it. Then we obtain the optimal communication trajectory via the developed deep Q-networks (DQN) in the two-dimension space. We prove the existence of the stackelberg equilibrium and derive the closed-form expression for the stackelberg equilibrium in a special case. Moreover, some insightful remarks are obtained and the time complexity of the proposed defense strategy is analyzed. The simulations show that the proposed defense strategy outperforms the benchmark strategies.

In recent years, we have witnessed dramatic developments of mobile healthcare robots, which enjoy many advantages over their human counterparts. Previous communication networks for healthcare robots always suffer from high response latency and/or time-consuming computing demands. Robust and high-speed communications and swift processing are critical, sometimes vital in particular in the case of healthcare robots, to the healthcare receivers. As a promising solution, offloading delay-sensitive and communicating-intensive tasks to the robot is expected to improve the services and benefit users. In this paper, we review several state-of-the-art technologies, such as the human–robot interface, environment and user status perceiving, navigation, robust communication and artificial intelligence, of a mobile healthcare robot and discuss in details the customized demands over offloading the computation and communication tasks. According to the intrinsic demands of tasks over the network usage, we categorize abilities of a typical healthcare robot into alternative classes: the edge functionalities and the core functionalities. Many latency-sensitive tasks, such as user interaction, or time-consuming tasks including health receiver status recognition and autonomous moving, can be processed by the robot without frequent communications with data centers. On the other hand, several fundamental abilities, such as radio resource management, mobility management, service provisioning management, need to update the main body with the cutting-edge artificial intelligence. Robustness and safety, in this case, are the primary goals in wireless communications that AI may provide ground-breaking solutions. Based on this partition, this article refers to several state-of-the-art technologies of a mobile healthcare robot and reviews some challenges to be met for its wireless communications.

Location based access in wireless sensor networks (WSN) are vulnerable to location spoofing attacks. In this paper, we investigate the physical layer (PHY-layer) authentication in the threat of an intelligent location spoofing attack. The intelligent attack can emulate the legitimate channel information and maximize its long-term cumulative reward. First, we analyze the feasibility of this intelligent attack and investigate how it threats to the networks. Specifically, we derive the optimal transmit power allocation and find the worst case for the defenders, namely optimal intelligent attack, in which the attacker can learn the intelligent attack action based on the beamforming with optimal transmit power allocation. To defend against such an intelligent attack with high accuracy and low overhead, we develop a cooperative PHY-layer authentication scheme. Then, we provide an in-depth analysis on the belief and derive the belief bounds and the closed-form expression for the belief threshold. Furthermore, considering the whole computation complexity and the double counting problem in a loopy graph, we propose the cooperative neighbour selection algorithm to accelerate belief convergence and reduce the overhead. Finally, the simulation results reveal that the proposed method can significantly improve the defense performance compared with the state-of-art methods.

Extensive deployment of heterogeneous small cells in cellular networks results in ultra-dense small cell networks (USNs). USNs have been established as one of the vital networking architectures in the 5G to expand system capacity and augment network coverage. However, intensive deployment of cells results in a complex interference problem. In this paper, we propose a distributed multi-domain interference management scheme among cooperative small cells. The proposed scheme mitigates the interference while optimizing the overall network utility. Additionally, we jointly investigate OFDMA scheduling, TDMA scheduling, interference alignment (IA), and power control. We model small cells’ coordination behavior as an overlapping coalition formation game (OCFG). In this game, each base station can make an autonomous decision and participate in more than one coalition to perform IA and suppress intra-coalition interference. To achieve this goal, we propose a distributed joint interference management (JIM) algorithm. The proposed algorithm allows each small cell base station to self-organize and interact into a stable overlapping coalition structure and reduce interference gradually from multi-domain, thus achieving an optimal tradeoff between costs and benefits. Compared with existing approaches, the proposed JIM algorithm provides appreciable performance improvement in terms of total throughput, which is demonstrated by simulation results.

In this paper, we study the achievable link-layer rate, namely, effective capacity (EC), under the per-user statistical delay quality-of-service (QoS) requirements, for a downlink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) network with $M$ users. Specifically, the $M$ users are assumed to be divided into multiple NOMA pairs. Conventional orthogonal multiple access (OMA) then is applied for inter-NOMA-pairs multiple access. Focusing on the total link-layer rate for a downlink $M$ -user network, we prove that OMA outperforms NOMA when the transmit signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is small. On the contrary, simulation results show that NOMA prevails over OMA at high values of SNR. Aware of the importance of a two-user NOMA network, we also theoretically investigate the impact of the transmit SNR and the delay QoS requirement on the individual EC performance and the total link-layer rate for a two-user network. Specifically, for delay-constrained and delay-unconstrained users, we prove that for the user with the stronger channel condition in a two-user network, NOMA prevails over OMA when the transmit SNR is large. On the other hand, for the user with the weaker channel condition in a two-user network, it is proved that NOMA outperforms OMA when the transmit SNR is small. Furthermore, for the user with the weaker channel condition, the individual EC in NOMA is limited to a maximum value, even if the transmit SNR goes to infinity. To confirm these insightful conclusions, the closed-form expressions for the individual EC in a two-user network, by applying NOMA or OMA, are derived for both users and then confirmed using Monte Carlo simulations.

The recent advances in microelectronics and communications have led to the development of large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) networks, where tremendous sensory data is generated and needs to be processed. To support real-time processing for large-scale IoT, deploying edge servers with storage and computational capability is a promising approach. In this paper, we carefully analyze the impacting factors and key challenges for edge node (EN) deployment. We then propose a novel three-phase deployment approach which considers both traffic diversity and the wireless diversity of IoT. The proposed work aims at providing real-time processing service for the IoT network and reducing the required number of ENs. We conducted extensive simulation experiments, the results show that compared to the existing works that overlooked the two kinds of diversities, the proposed work greatly reduces the number of ENs and improves the throughput between IoT and ENs.

In this paper, we concentrate on the robust multi-objective optimization (MOO) for the tradeoff between energy efficiency (EE) and spectral efficiency (SE) in device-to-device (D2D) communications underlaying heterogeneous networks (HetNets). Different from traditional resource optimization, we focus on finding robust Pareto optimal solutions for spectrum allocation and power coordination in D2D communications underlaying HetNets with the consideration of interference channel uncertainties. The problem is formulated as an uncertain MOO problem to maximize EE and SE of cellular users (CUs) simultaneously while guaranteeing the minimum rate requirements of both CUs and D2D pairs. With the aid of $\varepsilon$ -constraint method and strict robustness, we propose a general framework to transform the uncertain MOO problem into a deterministic single-objective optimization problem. As exponential computational complexity is required to solve this highly non-convex problem, the power coordination and the spectrum allocation problems are solved separately, and an effective two-stage iterative algorithm is developed. Finally, simulation results validate that our proposed robust scheme converges fast and significantly outperforms the non-robust scheme in terms of the effective EE-SE tradeoff and the quality of service satisfying probability of D2D pairs.

International audience; In this paper, a novel approach is introduced to study the achievable delay-guaranteed secrecy rate, by introducing the concept of the effective secrecy rate (ESR). This study focuses on the downlink of a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) network with one base station, multiple single-antenna NOMA users and an eavesdropper. Two possible eavesdropping scenarios are considered: 1) an internal, unknown, eavesdropper in a purely antagonistic network; and 2) an external eavesdropper in a network with trustworthy peers. For a purely antagonistic network with an internal eavesdropper, the only receiver with a guaranteed positive ESR is the one with the highest channel gain. A closed-form expression is obtained for the ESR at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) values, showing that the strongest user's ESR in the high SNR regime approaches a constant value irrespective of the power coefficients. Furthermore, it is shown the strongest user can achieve higher ESR if it has a distinctive advantage in terms of channel gain with respect to the second strongest user. For a trustworthy NOMA network with an external eavesdropper, a lower bound and an upper bound on the ESR are proposed and investigated for an arbitrary legitimate user. For the lower bound, a closed-form expression is derived in the high SNR regime. For the upper bound, the analysis shows that if the external eavesdropper cannot attain any channel state information (CSI), the legitimate NOMA user at high SNRs can always achieve positive ESR, and the value of it depends on the power coefficients. Simulation results numerically validate the accuracy of the derived closed-form expressions and verify the analytical results given in the theorems and lemmas.

Trilateration and multilateration are important location estimation techniques used in a diverse range of networks and applications. The system of equations yielded by multilateration can be reduced to simpler linear equations which can be solved to arrive at a closed form analytic solution. Exploiting this solution technique, we develop a novel and unique analytical model for the localization error resulting from trilateration. The analytical model can be used for the analysis of the localization error in all applications wherever multilateration is used for position estimation including internet of things, wireless sensor networks and global navigation satellite system thereby increasing reliability and quality of localization. As an example, we use the analytical model to corroborate the fact that localization error is a function of topology of reference positions in addition to distance estimation errors. The analytical model is verified using simulation experiments.

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has emerged as a prospective computing paradigm to provide pervasive computing and storage services for mobile and big data applications. In MEC, many small cell base stations (sBSs) are deployed to establish a mobile edge network (MEN). These sBSs can be usually accessed directly by mobile users. The computational tasks are first offloaded from mobile users to the MEN and then executed in one or several specific sBSs in the MEN. While the offloading decision has been well studied, the task execution delay on the MEN side is overlooked. This paper aims at reducing the task execution delay by task scheduling in MENs. Specifically, we jointly consider the task properties, the user mobility and network constraints. The problem is formalized as a constraint satisfaction problem and a lightweight heuristic solution is proposed for fast scheduling. We conduct simulation experiments to study the performance of the proposed work. The results show that our work is able to significantly reduce the task execution delay in MENs and thus reduces the end-to-end delay for MEC tasks.

This correspondence studies a new secrecy beamforming (SBF) scheme for multiple-input single-output non-orthogonal multiple access (MISO-NOMA) systems. In particular, the proposed SBF scheme efficiently exploits artificial noise to protect the confidential information of two NOMA assisted legitimate users, such that only the eavesdropper's channel is degraded. Considering a practical assumption of the imperfect worst-case successive interference cancellation which is a unique character in employing NOMA transmission, we derive a closed-form expression for the secrecy outage probability to characterize the secrecy performance. After that, we carry out an analysis of secrecy diversity order to provide further insights about secure MISO-NOMA transmission. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate the accuracy of the developed analytical results and the effectiveness of the proposed SBF scheme.

Automated object detection algorithm is an important research challenge in intelligent urban surveillance systems for Internet of Things (IoT) and smart cities applications. In particular, smart vehicle license plate recognition and vehicle detection are recognized as core research issues of these IoT-driven intelligent urban surveillance systems. They are key techniques in most of the traffic related IoT applications, such as road traffic real-time monitoring, security control of restricted areas, automatic parking access control, searching stolen vehicles, etc. In this paper, we propose a novel unified method of automated object detection for urban surveillance systems. We use this novel method to determine and pick out the highest energy frequency areas of the images from the digital camera imaging sensors, that is, either to pick the vehicle license plates or the vehicles out from the images. Our proposed method can not only help to detect object vehicles rapidly and accurately, but also can be used to reduce big data volume needed to be stored in urban surveillance systems.

This paper focuses on the performance evaluation of an energy harvesting (EH) equipped dual-hop relaying system for which the end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the overall system throughput are analysed. The transmitter and the relay nodes are equipped with both fixed and EH batteries. The source for harvesting at the transmitter is the solar energy, and at the relay node, the interference energy in the radio frequency is the harvesting source. Time switching scheme is used at the relay to switch between EH and decoding information. Harvest-use approach is implemented, and we investigate the effects of the harvesting energy in enhancing the performance of the relaying system by deriving estimated closed-form expressions for the cumulative distribution function of each link’s individual SNR and of the end-to-end SNR. The analytical expression for the ergodic capacity is also derived. These expressions are validated through Monte-Carlo simulations. It is also shown that with the additional EH at the transmitter (source and relay), a significant improvement in the system throughput can be achieved when fixed batteries are running on low powers.

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) can help reduce traffic accidents through broadcasting emergency messages among vehicles in advance. However, it is a great challenge to timely deliver the emergency messages to the right vehicles which are interested in them. Some protocols require to collect nearby real-time information before broadcasting a message, which may result in an increased delivery latency. In this paper, we proposed an improved position-based protocol to disseminate emergency messages among a large scale vehicle networks. Specifically, defined by the proposed protocol, messages are only broadcasted along their regions of interest, and a rebroadcast of a message depends on the information including in the message it has received. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed protocol can reduce unnecessary rebroadcasts considerably, and the collisions of broadcast can be effectively mitigated.

In this letter, we investigate the power allocation problem in nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) heterogeneous networks (HetNets), where the macrocell base station (MBS) and small cell base station (SBS) compete to maximize their own throughput with minimum rate requirement of each user. The throughput of MBS and SBS is formulated based on the equivalent channel gain, and the power allocation problem is captured as a Stackelberg game. A distributed power allocation algorithm is proposed to achieve the Stackelberg equilibrium. Simulation results demonstrate the convergence of the proposed algorithm. Meanwhile, it is verified that the combination of NOMA and HetNets possesses great potential to improve the spectrum efficiency compared to the orthogonal multiple access based HetNets.

Global navigation satellite system (GNSS) is not suitable for the dense urban or indoor environments as the satellite signals are very weak. Meanwhile, positioning is an important application of the fifth-generation (5G) communication system. GNSS/5G integrated positioning system becomes a promising research topic with the development of 5G standard. This paper focuses on the integrated methodology of GNSS and device to device (D2D) measurements in 5G communication system. We analyze the characteristics of this type of integrated system and propose a high-efficiency D2D positioning measure protocol, named crossover multiple-way ranging, which consumes less communication resources. Then, to deal with the high-dimensional state space in the integrated system, a state dimension reduction method is proposed to overcome the particle degeneracy problem of particle filter which is used to fusion GNSS and 5G D2D measurements. Three integrated algorithms in different scenarios have been proposed: the first one is the integrated algorithm when the range measurements can be measured directly. The second one is the integrated algorithm with unknown time skew and offset of each mobile terminal. The third one is the integrated algorithm in GNSS-denied environment which is prevalent in urban and indoor applications. The simulation and experimental results show that our proposed integrated methodology outperforms the nonintegrated one.

Handoff decision making is critical for mobile users to reap potential benefits from heterogeneous wireless networks. This letter proposes a biologically inspired handoff decision-making method by mimicking the dynamics which govern the adaptive behavior of an Escherichia coli cell in a time-varying environment. With the goal of guaranteeing the quality of service (QoS), we formulate a utility function that covers the demands of a user’s diverse applications and the time-varying network conditions. With this utility function, we map the dynamic heterogeneous environment to a cellular decision-making space, such that the user is induced by a cellular attractor selection mechanism to make distributed and robust handoff decisions. Furthermore, we also present a multi-attribute decision-making network selection algorithm for any user to determine an access network, which is integrated with the proposed bio-inspired decision-making mechanism. Simulation results are supplemented to show that the proposed method can achieve better QoS and fairness when it is compared with conventional methods.

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has recently received much attention as a candidate technique for the fifth generation networks. In this paper, considering both the direct and relay-aid paths, we investigate the performance of a downlink NOMA-based cooperative system and further analyze two different user ordering schemes. The outage probability, diversity gain, and ergodic rate are studied as three benchmarks to evaluate the system performance. For different user ordering schemes, the exact outage probabilities of users are first solved in the closed form. Then, the outage behavior in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region is discussed to obtain the diversity gain. In addition, the closed-form expression of ergodic rate for the strongest user and upper bounds for the rest users at high SNR is provided. Finally, numerical results verify the accuracy of our analysis and demonstrate that sorting users based on the relay-aided path can provide a larger ergodic sum rate in some cases. By contrast, sorting users based on the direct path can provide a better diversity gain, and the corresponding performance is less sensitive to relay's location.

Hybrid networks consisting of both millimeter wave (mmWave) and microwave $(\mu W)$ capabilities are strongly contested for next-generation cellular communications. A similar avenue of current research is device-to-device (D2D) communications, where users establish direct links with each other rather than using central base stations. However, a hybrid network, where D2D transmissions coexist, requires special attention in terms of efficient resource allocation. This paper investigates dynamic resource sharing between network entities in a downlink transmission scheme to maximize energy efficiency (EE) of the cellular users (CUs) served by either $(\mu W)$ macrocells or mmWave small cells while maintaining a minimum quality-of-service (QoS) for the D2D users. To address this problem, first, a self-adaptive power control mechanism for the D2D pairs is formulated, subject to an interference threshold for the CUs while satisfying their minimum QoS level. Subsequently, an EE optimization problem, which is aimed at maximizing the EE for both CUs and D2D pairs, has been solved. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm, which studies the inherent tradeoffs between system EE, system sum rate, and outage probability for various QoS levels and varying densities of D2D pairs and CUs.

Cognitive radio (CR) enables unlicensed users to sense for and access underutilized licensed channels (or white spaces) owned by the licensed users in an opportunistic manner. Clustering segregates nodes in a network into logical groups called clusters. In CR networks (CRNs), larger cluster size improves network scalability thereby contributing to reduced routing overhead; however, it reduces cluster stability as the number of available common channels in a cluster reduces resulting in increased number of re-clusterings and clustering overhead. This paper presents our proposed first-of-its-kind cluster size adjustment scheme based on an artificial intelligence approach called reinforcement learning. The proposed scheme adapts the cluster size with the amount of white spaces as time goes by in order to improve network scalability and cluster stability in CRNs. Due to the lack of progress in the investigation of cluster size adjustment schemes in the literature, this paper also analyzes their attributes, and then presents such schemes investigated in various kinds of distributed wireless networks. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme improves network scalability by creating larger clusters, and improves cluster stability by reducing the number of re-clusterings (i.e., the number of cluster splits) and clustering overhead, while reducing interference between licensed and unlicensed users in CRNs.

Wireless networks comprising unmanned aerial vehicles can offer limited connectivity in a cost-effective manner to disaster-struck regions where terrestrial infrastructure might have been damaged. While these drones offer advantages such as rapid deployment to far-flung areas, their operations may be rendered ineffective by the absence of an adequate energy management strategy. This article considers the multi-faceted applications of these platforms and the challenges thereof in the networks of the future. In addition to providing an overview of the work done by researchers in determining the features of the air-to-ground channel, the article explores the use of drones in fields as diverse as military surveillance and network rehabilitation for disaster-struck areas. It also presents a case study that envisages a scenario in which drones operate alongside conventional wireless infrastructure, thereby allowing a greater number of users to establish a line-of-sight link for communication. This study investigates a power allocation strategy for the microwave base station and the small base stations operating at 28 GHz frequency band. The self-adaptive power control strategy for drones is dependent on the maximum allowable interference threshold and minimum data rate requirements. This study highlights the importance of incorporating the drones in the multi-tier heterogeneous network to extend the network coverage and capacity.

In this paper, we investigate the resource optimization problem for device-to-device (D2D) communications in the fifth-generation cellular networks, where multiple D2D links and cellular links share the same spectrum. A general framework is proposed to jointly optimize the energy efficiency (EE), spectral efficiency (SE), and queuing delay. Specifically, we formulate the problem as a stochastic optimization model aiming at maximizing the EE and SE concurrently under the network stability constraint, where subchannel allocation and power control are jointly optimized. Afterwards, with the help of Lyapunov techniques and weighted sum method, it is then transformed into a single-objective optimization problem, which is a mixed-integer and non-convex problem. Therefore, to solve this challenging subchannel allocation and power control problem with low computational complexity, we separate it into two levels of problems, and a two-stage iterative algorithm is proposed, which only requires polynomial computational complexity. Through theoretical analysis and numerical results, the effectiveness, convergence, and optimality of the proposed algorithm are validated.

In this paper, we investigate the resource allocation problem for achieving spectral efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE) tradeoff with users’ minimum rate requirements in hybrid multi-carrier non-orthogonal multiple access (MC-NOMA) systems which incorporate both NOMA and orthogonal multiple access (OMA) modes into one unified framework. All the degrees of freedom involved in resource allocation, including the choice of multiple access (MA) modes, user clustering, subcarrier assignment, and power allocation, are jointly considered. We first formulate the SE-EE tradeoff as a multi-objective optimization (MOO) problem with minimum rate requirement constraints. Then, considering the non-convexity of the MOO problem, it is converted into a single-objective optimization (SOO) problem by utilizing weighted Tchebycheff method. Lagrangian dual decomposition and sequential convex programming are applied to solve the SOO problem. We propose a joint resource allocation algorithm which is applicable to the general case, where an arbitrary number of users can be multiplexed on the same subcarrier. Simulation results demonstrate that users’ minimum rate requirements and channel conditions have great impact on the selection of MA modes. The proposed hybrid MC-NOMA mode significantly outperforms MC-NOMA and OMA in terms of SE-EE tradeoff, and the performance gain brought by four or more users sharing the same subcarrier is minimal. Meanwhile, the hybrid MC-NOMA also shows great potential to improve the tradeoff between fairness and system efficiency.

This work considers a line-of-sight underwater acoustic sensor network (UWASN) consisting of $M$ underwater sensor nodes randomly deployed according to uniform distribution within a vertical half-disc (the so-called trusted zone). The sensor nodes report their sensed data to a sink node on water surface on a shared underwater acoustic (UWA) reporting channel in a time-division multiple-access (TDMA) fashion, while an active-yet-invisible adversary (so-called Eve) is present in the close vicinity who aims to inject malicious data into the system by impersonating some Alice node. To this end, this work first considers an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) UWA channel, and proposes a novel, multiple-features based, two-step method at the sink node to thwart the potential impersonation attack by Eve. Specifically, the sink node exploits the noisy estimates of the distance, the angle of arrival, and the location of the transmit node as device fingerprints to carry out a number of binary hypothesis tests (for impersonation detection) as well as a number of maximum likelihood hypothesis tests (for transmitter identification when no impersonation is detected). We provide closed-form expressions for the error probabilities (i.e., the performance) of most of the hypothesis tests. We then consider the case of a UWA with colored noise and frequency-dependent pathloss, and derive a maximum-likelihood (ML) distance estimator as well as the corresponding Cramer-Rao bound (CRB). We then invoke the proposed two-step, impersonation detection framework by utilizing distance as the sole feature. Finally, we provide detailed simulation results for both AWGN UWA channel and the UWA channel with colored noise. Simulation results verify that the proposed scheme is indeed effective for a UWA channel with colored noise and frequency-dependent pathloss., Comment: 13 pages and 13 figures. Accepted in IEEE Access 2018

Network planning and management are challenging issues in a two-tier network. Tailoring to cognitive radio networks (CRNs), network operations and transmissions become more challenging due to the dynamic spectrum availability. This paper proposes an adaptive network management system that provides switching between different CRN management structures in response to the spectrum availability and changes in the service time required for the radio access. The considered network management system includes conventional macrocell-only structure, and centralized/distributed structures overlaid with femtocells. Furthermore, analytical expressions of per-tier successful connection probability and throughput are provided to characterize the network performance for different network managements. Spectrum access in dynamic radio environments is formulated according to the quality of service (QoS) constraint that is related to the connection probability and outage probability. Results show that the proposed intelligent network management system improves the maximum capacity and reduces the number of blocked connections by adapting between various network managements in response to free spectrum transmission slots. A road map for the deployment and management of cognitive macro/femto networks is also presented.

This paper designs a novel non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) unicast–multicast system, where a number of unicast users (those who require different messages) and a group of multicast users (those who require identical message) share the same time/space/frequency resource. For the designed NOMA unicast–multicast system, an efficient two-phase cooperation strategy is proposed to improve the reliability of all users. In the first phase, the base station (BS) broadcasts a superposed message consisting of all users’ information. In the second phase, a multicast user is selected to forward the information intended by unsuccessfully decoded unicast and/or multicast users. Moreover, the multicast user selection is investigated under two different power allocation (PA) approaches: 1) fixed PA (FPA), in which the PA coefficients for both the phases are predetermined, and 2) dynamic PA (DPA), in which the PA coefficients for the first phase are predetermined, while the PA coefficients for the second phase are dynamically determined based on instantaneous channel information. Under the FPA approach, a best user selection (BUS) scheme (called F-BUS) is proposed to minimize the outage probability. Under the DPA approach, the local optimal PA coefficients for the second phase are derived in closed form first. Based on the derived PA coefficients, a BUS scheme (called D-BUS) is then proposed for outage probability minimization. To verify the reliability of the proposed cooperation strategy with employing the BUS schemes, we theoretically analyze the outage probability as well as diversity orders. It is shown that the proposed cooperation strategy achieves diversity orders equal to the number of multicast users, indicating that the inherent diversity orders offered by the multicast users are fully exploited. Finally, simulation results are presented to validate the theoretical results and demonstrate the advantages of the proposed cooperation strategy and the BUS schemes.

In this paper, a dual-hop decode-to-forward cooperative system is considered where multiple relays are with finite energy storage and can harvest energy from the destination. In our analysis, the relays are spatially randomly located with invoking stochastic geometry. In an effort to improve spectral efficiency, an optimal source-relay link scheme is employed. Assuming Nakagami- $m$ fading, two different scenarios are considered: 1) the single-antenna source with perfect channel state information (CSI) and 2) the multiple-antenna source with transmit antenna selection and imperfect CSI. In both scenarios, the destination node is equipped with a single transmit antenna to forward power via frequency radio signal to the relay candidates. For improving the system performance, multiple antennas at the destination are considered to process the multiple copies of the received signal from the best relay. For characterizing the performance of the proposed scenarios, exact closed-form analytical expressions for the outage probability are derived. To obtain further insights, we carry out diversity gain analysis by adopting asymptotic relative diversity. We also derive the exact closed-form analytical expression for the system throughput. Finally, simulation results are presented to corroborate the proposed analysis and to show that: 1) the system performance is improved by enlarging the area of the circle and the density of the relays and 2) the energy storage size has impacts on the performance of considered networks, which determines the maximal transmit power at relays.