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Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) that enables the control of wireless propagation environment has recently emerged as a promising cost-effective technology for boosting the spectral and energy efficiency of future wireless communication systems. Prior works on IRS are mainly based on the ideal phase shift model assuming full signal reflection by each of its elements regardless of the phase shift, which, however, is practically difficult to realize. In contrast, we propose in this paper a practical phase shift model that captures the phase-dependent amplitude variation in the element-wise reflection design. Based on the proposed model and considering an IRS-aided multiuser system with one IRS deployed to assist in the downlink communications from a multi-antenna access point (AP) to multiple single-antenna users, we formulate an optimization problem to minimize the total transmit power at the AP by jointly designing the AP transmit beamforming and the IRS reflect beamforming, subject to the users’ individual signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) constraints. Iterative algorithms are proposed to find suboptimal solutions to this problem efficiently by utilizing the alternating optimization (AO) as well as penalty-based optimization techniques. Moreover, to draw essential insight, we analyze the asymptotic performance loss of the IRS-aided system that employs practical phase shifters but assumes the ideal phase shift model for beamforming optimization, as the number of IRS elements goes to infinity. Simulation results unveil substantial performance gains achieved by the proposed beamforming optimization based on the practical phase shift model as compared to the conventional ideal model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of interference alignment (IA) as a degrees-of-freedom optimal strategy motivates the need to investigate whether IA can be leveraged to aid conventional network utility maximization algorithms, which are typically only capable of finding locally optimal solutions. To test the usefulness of IA in this context, this paper proposes a two-stage optimization framework for the downlink of a $G$ -cell multi-antenna network with $K$ users/cell. The first stage of the proposed framework focuses on nulling interference from a set of dominant interferers using IA, while the second stage optimizes transmit and receive beamformers to maximize a network-wide utility using the IA solution as the initial condition. Further, this paper establishes a set of new feasibility results for partial IA that can be used to guide the number of dominant interferers to be nulled in the first stage. Through simulations on specific topologies of a cluster of base stations, it is observed that the impact of IA depends on the choice of the utility function and the presence of out-of-cluster interference. In the absence of out-of-cluster interference, the proposed framework outperforms straightforward optimization when maximizing the minimum rate, while providing marginal gains when maximizing sum rate. However, the benefit of IA is greatly diminished in the presence of significant out-of-cluster interference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the performance of energy-constrained dual-hop amplify-and-forward relaying systems with multi-antenna nodes in the presence of multiple co-channel interferers at the destination. To maximize the overall signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio, as well as the harvested energy so as to mitigate the severe effects of fading and enable long-distance wireless power transfer, hop-by-hop information and energy beamforming is proposed where the transmitted signal is steered along the strongest eigenmode of each hop. The wirelessly powered relay scavenges energy from the source information radio frequency signal through energy beamforming, where both the time-switching receiver and power-splitting receiver are considered, and then uses the harvested energy to forward the source message to the destination. To this end, tight lower and upper bound expressions for the outage probability and ergodic capacity are presented in closed form. These are employed to investigate the throughput of the delay-constrained and delay-tolerant transmission modes. In addition, the asymptotic high signal-to-noise ratio outage probability and ergodic capacity approximations are derived, where the achievable diversity order is also presented. Numerical results sustained by Monte Carlo simulations show the tightness of the proposed analytical expressions. The impact of various parameters, such as energy harvesting time, power-splitting ratio, source transmit power, and the number of antennas on the system throughput, is also considered. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The newly emerging wireless powered communication networks (WPCNs) have recently drawn significant attention, where radio signals are used to power wireless terminals for information transmission. In this paper, we study a WPCN where one multi-antenna access point (AP) coordinates energy transfer and information transfer to/from a set of single-antenna users. A harvest-then-transmit protocol is assumed where the AP first broadcasts wireless power to all users via energy beamforming in the downlink (DL), and then, the users send their independent information to the AP simultaneously in the uplink (UL) using their harvested energy. To optimize the users' throughput and yet guarantee their rate fairness, we maximize the minimum throughput among all users by a joint design of the DL–UL time allocation, the DL energy beamforming, and the UL transmit power allocation, as well as receive beamforming. We solve this nonconvex problem optimally by two steps. First, we fix the DL–UL time allocation and obtain the optimal DL energy beamforming, UL power allocation, and receive beamforming to maximize the minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio of all users. This problem is shown to be still nonconvex; however, we convert it equivalently to a spectral radius minimization problem, which can be solved efficiently by applying the alternating optimization based on the nonnegative matrix theory. Then, the optimal time allocation is found by a one-dimensional search to maximize the minimum rate of all users. Furthermore, two suboptimal designs of lower complexity are also proposed, and their throughput performance is compared against that of the optimal solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cooperative communications have received considerable attention for wireless multimedia applications as a technique to improve reliability and service coverage. To apply such cooperation over slow fading channels, we consider exploiting the spatial diversity in multiple relay networks. In this paper, we focus on amplify-and-forward relaying schemes, namely, orthogonal amplify-and-forward, selective relaying, and distributed beamforming, for the cooperative wireless multimedia transmission. Furthermore, the successive refinement source coding is exploited such that the multimedia signal is encoded into multiple layers and the quality of its reconstruction at the receiver is improved when more layers are received correctly. We study two strategies for the layered source transmission, namely, progressive transmission and superposition coding. With our developed framework, we propose suboptimal resource allocation algorithms to efficiently assign rate, power, and channel uses to different layers so as to maximize the quality of the multimedia signal reconstructed at the receiver. The proposed optimization methodology is simple and only requires the knowledge of the channel statistics compared to the existing algorithms. As a result, the receiver only requires to feedback the determined rate, power, and channel uses to the transmitter whenever the channel statistics or the layered source transmission strategy changes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]