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Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted terahertz (THz) communication is emerging as a key technology to support ultra-high data rates in future sixth-generation networks. However, the acquisition of accurate channel state information (CSI) in such systems is challenging due to the passive nature of RIS and the hybrid beamforming architecture typically employed in THz systems. To address these challenges, we propose a novel low-complexity two-phase channel estimation scheme for RIS-assisted THz systems with beam split effect. In the proposed scheme, we first estimate the full CSI over a small subset of subcarriers, then extract angular information at both the base station and RIS. Subsequently, we recover the full CSI across remaining subcarriers by determining the corresponding spatial directions and angle-excluded coefficients. Theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance in terms of normalized mean-square error while significantly reducing computational complexity compared to existing algorithms.

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) emerges as an efficient and promising technology for the next wireless generation networks and has attracted a lot of attention owing to the capability of extending wireless coverage by reflecting signals toward targeted receivers. In this paper, we consider a RIS-assisted high-speed train (HST) communication system to enhance wireless coverage and improve coverage probability. First, coverage performance of the downlink single-input-single-output system is investigated, and the closed-form expression of coverage probability is derived. Moreover, travel distance maximization problem is formulated to facilitate RIS discrete phase design and RIS placement optimization, which is subject to coverage probability constraint. Simulation results validate that better coverage performance and higher travel distance can be achieved with deployment of RIS. The impacts of some key system parameters including transmission power, signal-to-noise ratio threshold, number of RIS elements, number of RIS quantization bits, horizontal distance between base station and RIS, and speed of HST on system performance are investigated. In addition, it is found that RIS can well improve coverage probability with limited power consumption for HST communications., Comment: 14 figures, accepted by IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology

As the Internet of Things (IoT) advances by leaps and bounds, a multitude of devices are becoming interconnected, marking the onset of an era where all things are connected. While this growth opens up opportunities for novel products and applications, it also leads to increased energy demand and battery reliance for IoT devices, creating a significant bottleneck that hinders sustainable progress. At this juncture, backscatter communication (BackCom), as a low-power and passive communication method, emerges as one of the promising solutions to this energy impasse by reducing the manufacturing costs and energy consumption of IoT devices. However, BackCom systems face challenges such as complex interference environments, including direct link interference (DLI) and mutual interference (MI) between tags, which can severely disrupt the efficiency of BackCom networks. Moreover, double-path fading is another major issue that leads to the degraded system performance. To fully unleash the potential of BackComs, the purpose of this paper is to furnish a comprehensive review of existing solutions with a focus on combatting these specific interference challenges and overcoming dual-path fading, offering an insightful analysis and comparison of various strategies for effectively mitigating these issues. Specifically, we begin by introducing the preliminaries for the BackCom, including its history, operating mechanisms, main architectures, etc, providing a foundational understanding of the field. Then, we delve into fundamental issues related to BackCom systems, such as solutions for the DLI, the MI, and the double-path fading. This paper thoroughly provides state-of-the-art advances for each case, particularly highlighting how the latest innovations in theoretical approaches and system design can strategically address these challenges.

The critical distinction between the emerging intelligent transparent surface (ITS) and intelligent reflection surface (IRS) is that the incident signals can penetrate the ITS instead of being reflected, which enables the ITS to combat the severe signal penetration loss for high-speed railway (HSR) wireless communications. This paper thus investigates the channel estimation problem for an ITS-assisted HSR network where the ITS is embedded into the carriage window. We first formulate the channels as functions of physical parameters, and thus transform the channel estimation into a parameter recovery problem. Next, we design the first two pilot blocks within each frame and develop a serial low-complexity channel estimation algorithm. Specifically, the channel estimates are initially obtained, and each estimate is further expressed as the sum of its perfectly known value and the estimation error. By leveraging the relationship between channels for the two pilot blocks, we recover the Doppler shifts from the channel estimates, based on which we can further acquire other channel parameters. Moreover, the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) for each parameter is derived as a performance benchmark. Finally, we provide numerical results to establish the effectiveness of our proposed estimators., Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures

In this paper, we investigate the two-way communication between two users assisted by a re-configurable intelligent surface (RIS). The scheme that two users communicate simultaneously over Rayleigh fading channels is considered. The channels between the two users and RIS can either be reciprocal or non-reciprocal. For reciprocal channels, we determine the optimal phases at the RIS to maximize the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR). We then derive exact closed-form expressions for the outage probability and spectral efficiency for single-element RIS. By capitalizing the insights obtained from the single-element analysis, we introduce a gamma approximation to model the product of Rayleigh random variables which is useful for the evaluation of the performance metrics in multiple-element RIS. Asymptotic analysis shows that the outage decreases at $\left(\log(\rho)/\rho\right)^L$ rate where $L$ is the number of elements, whereas the spectral efficiency increases at $\log(\rho)$ rate at large average SINR $\rho$. For non-reciprocal channels, the minimum user SINR is targeted to be maximized. For single-element RIS, closed-form solution is derived whereas for multiple-element RIS the problem turns out to be non-convex. The latter one is solved through semidefinite programming relaxation and a proposed greedy-iterative method, which can achieve higher performance and lower computational complexity, respectively.

In this letter, the channel estimation problem is studied for wireless communication systems assisted by large intelligent surface. Due to features of assistant channel, channel estimation (CE) problem for the investigated system is shown as a constrained estimation error minimization problem, which differs from traditional CE problems. A Lagrange multiplier and dual ascent-based estimation scheme is then designed to obtain a closed-form solution for the estimator iteratively. Moreover, the Cramer-Rao lower bounds are deduced for performance evaluation. Simulation results show that the designed scheme could improve estimation accuracy up to 18%, compared with least square method in low signal-to-noise ratio regime., Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, journal

High-mobility wireless communications have been receiving a lot attentions. In this paper, we consider the highmobility uplink transmission from a high-speed terminal (HST) to a base station (BS). We propose two transmit diversity schemes for high-mobility massive communications with angle domain Doppler compensation. In the first scheme, we propose the idea of block-wise angle domain Doppler compensation, such that the uplink equivalent channel would exhibit the feature of nearly perfect independent block fading. The signal space diversity encoding technique is then exploited to achieve transmit diversity. In the second scheme, the multiple parallel beamformers with Doppler compensation are exclusively occupied to transmit multiple orthogonal space-time block coding (OSTBC) data streams. Both analysis and numerical results verify that both the proposed schemes can achieve transmit diversity and outperform the conventional scheme., Comment: 4 pages,4 figures

This paper investigates the end-to-end throughput maximization problem for a two-hop multiple-relay network, with relays powered by simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) technique. Nonlinearity of energy harvester at every relay node is taken into account and two models for approximating the nonlinearity are adopted: logistic model and linear cut-off model. Decode-and-forward (DF) is implemented, and time switching (TS) mode and power splitting (PS) mode are considered. Optimization problems are formulated for TS mode and PS mode under logistic model and linear cut-off model, respectively. End-to-end throughput is aimed to be maximized by optimizing the transmit power and bandwidth on every source-relay-destination link, and PS ratio and/or TS ratio on every relay node. Although the formulated optimization problems are all non-convex. Through a series of analysis and transformation, and with the aid of bi-level optimization and monotonic optimization, etc., we find the global optimal solution of every formulated optimization problem. In some case, a simple yet optimal solution of the formulated problem is also derived. Numerical results verify the effectiveness of our proposed methods.

By allowing a mobile device to offload computation-intensive tasks to a base station, mobile edge computing (MEC) is a promising solution for saving the mobile device's energy. In real applications, the offloading may span multiple fading blocks. In this paper, we investigate energy-efficient offloading over multiple fading blocks with random channel gains. An optimization problem is formulated, which optimizes the amount of data for offloading to minimize the total expected energy consumption of the mobile device. Although the formulated optimization problem is non-convex, we prove that the objective function of the problem is piecewise convex, and accordingly develop an optimal solution for the problem. Numerical results verify the correctness of our findings and the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Ambient backscatter, an emerging green communication technology, has aroused great interest from both academia and industry. One open problem for ambient backscatter communication (AmBC) systems is channel estimation for a massive-antenna reader. In this paper, we focus on channel estimation problem in AmBC systems with uniform linear array (ULA) at the reader which consists of large number of antennas. We first design a two-step method to jointly estimate channel gains and direction of arrivals (DoAs), and then refine the estimates through angular rotation. Additionally, Cramer-Rao lower bounds (CRLBs) are derived for both the modulus of the channel gain and the DoA estimates. Simulations are then provided to validate the analysis, and to show the efficiency of the proposed approach., Comment: 5 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 29 March, 2019

Existing studies about ambient backscatter communication mostly assume flat-fading channels. However, frequency-selective channels widely exist in many practical scenarios. Therefore, this paper investigates ambient backscatter communication systems over frequency-selective channels. In particular, we propose an interference-free transceiver design to facilitate signal detection at the reader. Our design utilizes the cyclic prefix (CP) of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) source symbols, which can cancel the signal interference and thus enhance the detection accuracy at the reader. Meanwhile, our design leads to no interference on the existing OFDM communication systems. Next we suggest a chi-square based detector for the reader and derive the optimal detection threshold. Simulations are then provided to corroborate our proposed studies., Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1812.11278

In this letter, we study the ambient backscatter communication systems over frequency-selective channels. Specifically, we propose an interference-free transceiver design to facilitate signal detection at the reader. Our design utilizes the cyclic prefix (CP) of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) source symbols, which can cancel the signal interference and thus enhance the detection accuracy at the reader. Meanwhile, our design results in no interference on the existing OFDM communication systems. We also suggest a maximum likelihood (ML) detector for the reader and derive two detection thresholds. Simulations are then provided to corroborate our proposed studies., Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1901.00368

This paper addresses the problem of outage characterization of an ambient backscatter communication system with a pair of passive tag and reader. In particular, an exact expression for the effective channel distribution is derived. Then, the outage probability at the reader is analyzed rigorously. Since the expression contains an infinite sum, a tight truncation error bound has been derived to facilitate precise numerical evaluations. Furthermore, an asymptotic expression is provided for high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime., Comment: IEEE Communications Letter, 4 figures

We study a novel communication mechanism, ambient backscatter, that utilizes radio frequency (RF) signals transmitted from an ambient source as both energy supply and information carrier to enable communications between low-power devices. Different from existing non-coherent schemes, we here design the semi-coherent detection, where channel parameters can be obtained from unknown data symbols and a few pilot symbols. We first derive the optimal detector for the complex Gaussian ambient RF signal from likelihood ratio test and compute the corresponding closed-form bit error rate (BER). To release the requirement for prior knowledge of the ambient RF signal, we next design a suboptimal energy detector with ambient RF signals being either the complex Gaussian or the phase shift keying (PSK). The corresponding detection thresholds, the analytical BER, and the outage probability are also obtained in closed-form. Interestingly, the complex Gaussian source would cause an error floor while the PSK source does not, which brings nontrivial indication of constellation design as opposed to the popular Gaussian-embedded literatures. Simulations are provided to corroborate the theoretical studies., Comment: 30 pages, 11 figures

This paper studies the intercept behavior of an industrial wireless sensor network (WSN) consisting of a sink node and multiple sensors in the presence of an eavesdropping attacker, where the sensors transmit their sensed information to the sink node through wireless links. Due to the broadcast nature of radio wave propagation, the wireless transmission from the sensors to the sink can be readily overheard by the eavesdropper for interception purposes. In an information-theoretic sense, the secrecy capacity of the wireless transmission is the difference between the channel capacity of the main link (from sensor to sink) and that of the wiretap link (from sensor to eavesdropper). If the secrecy capacity becomes non-positive due to the wireless fading effect, the sensor's data transmission could be successfully intercepted by the eavesdropper and an intercept event occurs in this case. However, in industrial environments, the presence of machinery obstacles, metallic frictions and engine vibrations makes the wireless fading fluctuate drastically, resulting in the degradation of the secrecy capacity. As a consequence, an optimal sensor scheduling scheme is proposed in this paper to protect the legitimate wireless transmission against the eavesdropping attack, where a sensor with the highest secrecy capacity is scheduled to transmit its sensed information to the sink. Closed-form expressions of the probability of occurrence of an intercept event (called intercept probability) are derived for the conventional round-robin scheduling and the proposed optimal scheduling schemes. Also, an asymptotic intercept probability analysis is conducted to provide an insight into the impact of the sensor scheduling on the wireless security. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed sensor scheduling scheme outperforms the conventional round-robin scheduling in terms of the intercept probability., Comment: 8 pages, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 2015

In this paper, we consider a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system consisting of one source, one destination and one eavesdropper, where each node is equipped with an arbitrary number of antennas. To improve the security of source-destination transmissions, we investigate the antenna selection at the source and propose the optimal antenna selection (OAS) and suboptimal antenna selection (SAS) schemes, depending on whether the source node has the global channel state information (CSI) of both the main link (from source to destination) and wiretap link (from source to eavesdropper). Also, the traditional space-time transmission (STT) is studied as a benchmark. We evaluate the secrecy performance of STT, SAS, and OAS schemes in terms of the probability of zero secrecy capacity. Furthermore, we examine the generalized secrecy diversity of STT, SAS, and OAS schemes through an asymptotic analysis of the probability of zero secrecy capacity, as the ratio between the average gains of the main and wiretap channels tends to infinity. This is different from the conventional secrecy diversity which assumes an infinite signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) received at the destination under the condition that the eavesdropper has a finite received SNR. It is shown that the generalized secrecy diversity orders of STT, SAS, and OAS schemes are the product of the number of antennas at source and destination. Additionally, numerical results show that the proposed OAS scheme strictly outperforms both the STT and SAS schemes in terms of the probability of zero secrecy capacity., Comment: 11 pages; IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 2015

In this paper, we explore the physical-layer security of a multi-user wireless system that consists of multiple users intending to transmit to a base station (BS), while multiple eavesdroppers attempt to tap the user transmissions. We examine the employment of multi-user scheduling for improving the transmission security against eavesdropping and propose a multi-user scheduling scheme, which only requires the channel state information (CSI) of BS without the need of the passive eavesdroppers' CSI. We also consider the round-robin scheduling for comparison purposes. The closed-form secrecy outage probability expressions of the round-robin scheduling and proposed multi-user scheduling are derived over Rayleigh fading channels. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed multi-user scheduling outperforms the round-robin scheduling in terms of the secrecy outage probability. As the number of users increases, the secrecy outage probability of round-robin scheduling keeps unchanged. By contrast, the secrecy outage performance of the proposed multi-user scheduling improves significantly with an increasing number of users., Comment: 5 pages