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We investigate the benefits of integrating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) elements to passively relay information sampled by Internet of Things devices (IoTDs) to the base station (BS). In order to maintain the freshness of relayed information, an optimization problem with the objective of minimizing the expected sum Age-of-Information (AoI) is formulated to optimize the altitude of the UAV, the communication schedule, and phases-shift of RIS elements. In the absence of prior knowledge of the activation pattern of the IoTDs, proximal policy optimization algorithm is developed to solve this mixed-integer non-convex optimization problem. Numerical results show that our proposed algorithm outperforms all others in terms of AoI.

With the growing market of Electric Vehicles (EV), the procurement of their charging infrastructure plays a crucial role in their adoption. Within the revolution of Internet of Things, the EV charging infrastructure is getting on board with the introduction of smart Electric Vehicle Charging Stations (EVCS), a myriad set of communication protocols, and different entities. We provide in this article an overview of this infrastructure detailing the participating entities and the communication protocols. Further, we contextualize the current deployment of EVCSs through the use of available public data. In the light of such a survey, we identify two key concerns, the lack of standardization and multiple points of failures, which renders the current deployment of EV charging infrastructure vulnerable to an array of different attacks. Moreover, we propose a novel attack scenario that exploits the unique characteristics of the EVCSs and their protocol (such as high power wattage and support for reverse power flow) to cause disturbances to the power grid. We investigate three different attack variations; sudden surge in power demand, sudden surge in power supply, and a switching attack. To support our claims, we showcase using a real-world example how an adversary can compromise an EVCS and create a traffic bottleneck by tampering with the charging schedules of EVs. Further, we perform a simulation-based study of the impact of our proposed attack variations on the WSCC 9 bus system. Our simulations show that an adversary can cause devastating effects on the power grid, which might result in blackout and cascading failure by comprising a small number of EVCSs.

Light-fidelity (LiFi) is a fully-networked bidirectional optical wireless communication (OWC) technology that is considered as a promising solution for high-speed indoor connectivity. Unlike in conventional radio frequency wireless systems, the OWC channel is not isotropic, meaning that the device orientation affects the channel gain significantly. However, due to the lack of proper channel models for LiFi systems, many studies have assumed that the receiver is vertically upward and randomly located within the coverage area, which is not a realistic assumption from a practical point of view. In this paper, novel realistic and measurement-based channel models for indoor LiFi systems are proposed. Precisely, the statistics of the channel gain are derived for the case of randomly oriented stationary and mobile users. For stationary users, two channel models are proposed, namely, the modified truncated Laplace (MTL) model and the modified Beta (MB) model. For mobile users, two channel models are proposed, namely, the sum of modified truncated Gaussian (SMTG) model and the sum of modified Beta (SMB) model. Based on the derived models, the impact of random orientation and spatial distribution of users is investigated, where we show that the aforementioned factors can strongly affect the channel gain and the system performance.

In this letter, we investigate the amalgamation between the reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) technology and the joint transmission coordinated multipoint (JT-CoMP) in order to enhance the performance of a cell-edge user equipment (UE) in a two-user non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) group without deteriorating the performance of the NOMA cell-center UE. The RIS is adopted to construct a strong combined channel gain at the cell-edge UE, while JT-CoMP is used to mitigate the effects of inter-cell interference (ICI). In this proposed framework, we derive first a closed-form expression for the ergodic rate of the cell-edge UE, and then we evaluate the network spectral efficiency. We validate the derived expression through Monte-Carlo simulations, where we demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework compared to other multiple access techniques proposed in the literature.

Cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (C-NOMA) is a novel multiple access technology that is considered as a promising solution for 5G and beyond. The technique has been proposed as a combination between NOMA and cooperative communications, such as device-to-device (D2D) communications. In this letter, we will address some limitations of the state-of-the-art C-NOMA model and promote an enhancement to the contemporary version. The improvement is based on an exhaustive exploitation of the antennas mounted at the users devices. Based on this, we revisit the rate analysis and the performance optimization of C-NOMA systems. Simulation results reveal the robustness of the proposed scheme in the presence of high self-interference (SI) and insightful comparisons with other previously proposed schemes in the literature are provided.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are envisioned to play a key role in intelligent transportation systems to complement the communication infrastructure in future smart cities. UAV-assisted vehicular networking research typically adopts throughput and latency as the main performance metrics. These conventional metrics, however, are not adequate to reflect the freshness of the information, an attribute that has been recently identified as a critical requirement to enable services such as autonomous driving and accident prevention. In this paper, we consider a UAV-assisted single-hop vehicular network, wherein sensors (e.g., LiDARs and cameras) on vehicles generate time sensitive data streams, and UAVs are used to collect and process this data while maintaining a minimum age of information (AoI). We aim to jointly optimize the trajectories of UAVs and find scheduling policies to keep the information fresh under minimum throughput constraints. The formulated optimization problem is shown to be mixed integer non-linear program (MINLP) and generally hard to be solved. Motivated by the success of machine learning (ML) techniques particularly deep learning in solving complex problems with low complexity, we reformulate the trajectories and scheduling policies problem as a Markov decision process (MDP) where the system state space considers the vehicular network dynamics. Then, we develop deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to learn the vehicular environment and its dynamics in order to handle UAVs’ trajectory and scheduling policy. In particular, we leverage Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) for learning the trajectories of the deployed UAVs to efficiently minimize the Expected Weighted Sum AoI (EWSA). Simulations results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design and show the deployed UAVs adapt their velocities during the data collection mission in order to minimize the AoI.

The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) has brought an array of different services, from smart health-care, to smart transportation, all the way to smart cities. For a truly connected environment, different sectors need to collaborate. One use case of such overlap is between smart grids and Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) giving rise to Electric Vehicles and their charging infrastructure. Being such a lucrative opportunity for investors and the research community, many efforts have been made toward providing the end-user with an extraordinary Quality of Service (QoS). However, given the current protocols and deployment of the Electric Vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure, some key challenges still need to be addressed. In particular, we identify two main EV challenges: (1) vulnerable charging stations and EVs, and (2) non-optimal charging schedules. With these issues in mind, we evaluate the integration of Blockchain and AI with the EV charging infrastructure. Specifically, we discuss the current AI and Blockchain charging solutions available in the market. In addition, we propose a couple of use cases where both technologies complement each other for a secure, efficient and decentralized charging ecosystem. This article serves as starting point for stakeholders and policymakers to help identify potential directions and implementations of better charging systems for EVs.

The wireless industry is moving towards developing smart cellular architectures that dynamically adjust the use of the network elements according to the service demand, and automating their operations in order to minimize both capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operation expenditure (OPEX). This involves developing efficient and unsupervised radio access network (RAN) planning, which has a direct impact on the system performance and CAPEX. This intelligent cellular planning aims at providing the base stations (BSs) configurations (e.g., coverage, user associations and antenna radiation pattern) that minimize the number of deployed BSs and meet the requirements in terms of coverage and capacity. The cellular planning optimization problem has been shown to be complex and non-scalable. Moreover, most of the existing cellular planning techniques result in an over or under provisioning architecture. Motivated by the above, we propose in this paper a novel and efficient unsupervised planning process. We make use of statistical machine learning (SML) to solve the problem at hand. The core idea of SML is that the planning parameters are treated as random variables. The parameters that maximize the corresponding joint probability distribution, conditioned on observations of users’ positions, are learned or inferred using Gibbs sampling theory and Bayes’ theory. To apply this theory to the planning problem, we make significant efforts to properly formulate the problem to be able to incorporate the constraints into the inference process and extract the planning parameters from the inferred model. Through several numerical examples, we compare the performance of the proposed approach to clustering-based and optimization-based existing planning approaches, and demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. We also demonstrate how our approach can leverage existing cellular infrastructures into the new design.

The agility of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been recently harnessed in developing potential solutions that provide seamless coverage for vehicles in areas with poor cellular infrastructure. In this letter, multiple UAVs are deployed to provide the needed cellular coverage to vehicles traveling with random speeds over a given highway segment. This letter minimizes the number of deployed UAVs and optimizes their trajectories to offer prevalent communication coverage to all vehicles crossing the highway segment while saving energy consumption of the UAVs. Due to varying traffic conditions on the highway, a reinforcement learning approach is utilized to govern the number of needed UAVs and their trajectories to serve the existing and newly arriving vehicles. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design and show that during the mission time, a minimum number of UAVs adapt their velocities in order to cover the vehicles.

We study in this paper the secrecy performance of the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) visible light communication (VLC) wiretap channel. The underlying system model comprises three nodes: one transmitter, equipped with multiple fixtures of LEDs, one legitimate receiver and one eavesdropper, each equipped with multiple photo-diodes (PDs). The VLC channel is modeled as a real-valued amplitude-constrained Gaussian channel and the eavesdropper is assumed to be randomly located in the coverage area. We propose a low-complexity precoding scheme that aims at enhancing the secrecy performance of the system. Specifically, assuming discrete input signaling, we derive an average achievable secrecy rate for the underlying system in a closed-form, and the derived expression is a function of the precoding matrix and the input distribution using stochastic geometry. Then, we propose a low-complexity design of the precoding matrix based on the generalized singular value decomposition (GSVD) of the channel matrices of the system. We examine the resulting average achievable secrecy rate using the truncated discrete generalized normal (TDGN) distribution, which is the best-known discrete distribution available in the literature. Finally, we validate the proposed scheme through extensive simulations and we demonstrate its superiority when compared to other schemes reported in the literature.

The global evolution of wireless technologies and intelligent sensing devices are transforming the realization of smart cities. Among the myriad of use cases, there is a need to support applications whereby low-resource IoT devices need to upload their sensor data to a remote control centre by target hard deadlines; otherwise, the data becomes outdated and loses its value, for example, in emergency or industrial control scenarios. In addition, the IoT devices can be either located in remote areas with limited wireless coverage or in dense areas with relatively low quality of service. This motivates the utilization of UAVs to offload traffic from existing wireless networks by collecting data from time-constrained IoT devices with performance guarantees. To this end, we jointly optimize the trajectory of a UAV and the radio resource allocation to maximize the number of served IoT devices, where each device has its own target data upload deadline. The formulated optimization problem is shown to be mixed integer non-convex and generally NP-hard. To solve it, we first propose the high-complexity branch, reduce and bound (BRB) algorithm to find the global optimal solution for relatively small scale scenarios. Then, we develop an effective sub-optimal algorithm based on successive convex approximation in order to obtain results for larger networks. Next, we propose an extension algorithm to further minimize the UAV’s flight distance for cases where the initial and final UAV locations are known a priori. We demonstrate the favourable characteristics of the algorithms via extensive simulations and analysis as a function of various system parameters, with benchmarking against two greedy algorithms based on distance and deadline metrics.

Along with the dramatic increase in the number of IoT devices, different IoT services with heterogeneous QoS requirements are evolving with the aim of making the current society smarter and more connected. In order to deliver such services to the end users, the network infrastructure has to accommodate the tremendous workload generated by the smart devices and their heterogeneous and stringent latency and reliability requirements. This would only be possible with the emergence of ultra reliable low latency communications (uRLLC) promised by 5G. Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has emerged as an enabling technology to help with the realization of such services by bringing the remote computing and storage capabilities of the cloud closer to the users. However, integrating uRLLC with MEC would require the network operator to efficiently map the generated workloads to MEC nodes along with resolving the trade-off between the latency and reliability requirements. Thus, we study in this paper the problem of Workload Assignment (WA) and formulate it as a Mixed Integer Program (MIP) to decide on the assignment of the workloads to the available MEC nodes. Due to the complexity of the WA problem, we decompose the problem into two subproblems; Reliability Aware Candidate Selection (RACS) and Latency Aware Workload Assignment (LAWA-MIP). We evaluate the performance of the decomposition approach and propose a more scalable approach; Tabu meta-heuristic (WA-Tabu). Through extensive numerical evaluation, we analyze the performance and show the efficiency of our proposed approach under different system parameters.

Next-generation cellular systems are anticipated to support 100 times higher data rates (ultra-high rate) compared with the fourth generation (4G) of cellular systems. It is, therefore, necessary to develop novel spectrally efficient uplink/downlink techniques. Multiple techniques have been proposed, including the so-called non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique. However, the spectral efficiency gains achieved by NOMA over OMA techniques have been shown to be modest. Recently, we proposed a spectrally efficient technique for the downlink channel, which involves exploiting similarities among users’ short bit blocks, where we showed that spectral efficiency gains of up to three times that of OMA schemes can be achieved. However, the technique cannot be extended to the uplink scenario because users are not aware of each other’s bit block. To this end, we propose in this paper a spectrally efficient scheme for the uplink channel, where we exploit the similarity between the short bit blocks of the uplink and downlink sequences corresponding to one user. The downlink bit sequences are those received by a user from the base station (BS). It is assumed that the BS keeps track of the bit sequences transmitted on the downlink channel to different users. The uplink and downlink bit sequences, which are assumed to be uncorrelated, are divided into bit blocks of short lengths, and then, the similarity between those blocks is extracted. Once each user determines its similarity index (i.e., the number of similar bit blocks) between its own bit sequence and its respective downlink bit sequence, this information is communicated with the BS, which will, in turn, select the user with the largest similarity index to transmit during that resource block. The same process repeats every resource block where the user with the maximum similarity index is always selected. We propose a simple overhead exchange algorithm that facilitates the exchange of the information on the similarity indexes between the users and the BS, where we assume that this exchange of information is done through a control channel. The performance of the proposed scheme and the overhead exchange algorithm is investigated analytically and by Monte Carlo simulations. Among the parameters that we incorporate into the analysis are the user density, the length of bit blocks used to check the similarity index, and the channel correlation. We show that spectral efficiency gains of approximately two times that of OMA schemes can be achieved.

Quadratic cost function such as Mean Squared Error (MSE) has been a widely used objective function for training deep neural networks to develop energy forecasting models in Smart Grids. In this work, Penalizing Underestimation Logarithmic Squared Error (PULSE), a novel objective function is proposed with the aim of reducing the tendency of deep learning models to underestimate the target variable. Stacked Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks are adopted on the time series load demand data to investigate the performance of the proposed cost function against the widely used MSE cost function. The evaluation is performed using open-source real-world electricity load diagrams dataset covering a period of three years. The performance of the proposed scheme is examined with deep learning models through several experiments. The results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is able to eliminate the tendency to underestimate and provides competitively accurate load demand forecasting results. The results are additionally compared against the state-of-the-art machine learning models developed in the literature. The proposed cost function maintains the RMSE around 4*10-2 kWh which is also the RMSE for deep learning models with MSE cost function and delivers 25% improvement in MAPE while also eliminating the underestimation of load demand.

This paper proposes a novel framework to emerge the reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) in cellular networks wherein enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) and ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (URLLC) services coexist. In order to avoid the violation in the URLLC latency requirements, the framework proposes RIS phase shift matrix that enhances the URLLC reliability is proactively designed at the beginning of the time slot. The system model consists of a single base station (BS) and a single RIS which deployed to enhance the channel environments of the eMBB and the URLLC users. To allocates the eMBB users, we formulate a time-slot basis eMBB allocation problem which has the goal of maximizing the eMBB sum-rate by jointly optimizing the power allocation at the BS and the RIS phase shift matrix while satisfying the eMBB rate constraint. Since the formulated problem is a non-convex problem which hard to be solved directly, we adopt the alternating optimization approach to decompose the eMBB allocation problem optimization problem into a power allocation and a RIS phase shift matrix sub-problems. Then, the URLLC allocation problem is formulated as a multi-objective problem with the goal of maximizing the URLLC admitted packets and minimizing the eMBB rate loss by jointly optimizing the power and frequency allocation. Then, we proposed a heuristic algorithm to allocate the URLLC load. The proposed algorithm has a low time complexity which makes it a efficient method for multiplexing URLLC and eMBB traffics. Finally, simulation results show that using only 60 RIS elements, we observe that the proposed scheme achieves around 99.99% URLLC packets admission rate compared to 95.6% when there is no RIS, while also achieving up to 70% enhancement on the eMBB rates.

Light-fidelity (LiFi) is a fully-networked bidirectional optical wireless communication (OWC) technology that is considered as a promising solution for high-speed indoor connectivity aimed for future sixth generation (6G) wireless networks. In the LiFi physical layer, the majority of the power allocation problems for mobile users investigated and reported in the literature are non-convex. These problems may be solved using dual decomposition techniques or heuristics that require iterative algorithms, and often, cannot be computed in real time due to the high computational load. In this paper, a proactive power allocation (PPA) approach that can alleviate the aforementioned issues is proposed. The core of the PPA approach is two cascaded neural networks consisting of one convolution neural network (CNN) and one long-short-term-memory (LSTM) network that are jointly capable of predicting posterior positions and orientations of mobile users following random trajectories in indoor environments. Afterwards, the predicted parameters are fed into the expression of the channel coefficients of the mobile users. Finally, the resulting predicted channel coefficients are exploited for deriving near-optimal power allocation schemes prior to the intended service time, which enables near-optimal and real-time service for mobile LiFi users.

Ultra-Reliable and Low Latency Communications (URLLC) is one of the essential services in 5G networks and beyond. The coexistence of URLLC alongside other service classes, namely, enhanced Mobile BroadBand (eMBB) and massive Machine-Type Communications (mMTC), calls for developing spectrally efficient multiplexing techniques. In this work, we study the problem of scheduling URLLC traffic in a downlink system with the presence of eMBB traffic class. Based on the superposition/puncturing scheme, a resource allocation problem is formulated with the objective to minimize the eMBB data rate loss while satisfying eMBB and URLLC quality of service (QoS) constraints. The resulting problem is formulated as a mixed integer non-linear programming (MINLP) which is generally NP hard and hence complex to solve. Hence, we derive its feasibility region as well as the optimal solutions for the power and spectral resource allocation. Subsequently, we propose a low complexity algorithm to serve URLLC traffic. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves higher reliability for URLLC and higher eMBB data rate compared to the puncturing schemes. The results also show that the eMBB QoS requirements, which are represented by the eMBB rate loss threshold, has a negative effect on the URLLC reliability for high URLLC load. Therefore, the eMBB rate and the eMBB loss threshold should be jointly optimized considering QoS of both eMBB and URLLC. Index Terms—eMBB, multiplexing, puncturing, superposition, URLLC, 6G.

This letter jointly investigates the trajectory and radio resource optimization for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to fully deliver critical data in vehicular networks during disaster situations. We aim to minimize the number of deployed UAVs to fully serve all vehicles. The formulated problem is generally NP-hard. To solve it, we employ a sequence of convex approximates. Then, we develop an efficient algorithm to sequentially solve this problem. Our numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed design and show that during the mission time, the UAVs adapt their velocities in order to fulfill the requirement of each vehicle.

The proliferation of smart connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices is bringing tremendous challenges in meeting the performance requirement of their supported real-time applications due to their limited resources in terms of computing, storage, and battery life. In addition, the considerable amount of data they generate brings extra burden to the existing wireless network infrastructure. By enabling distributed computing and storage capabilities at the edge of the network, multi-access edge computing (MEC) serves delay sensitive, computationally intensive applications. Managing the heterogeneity of the workload generated by IoT devices, especially in terms of computing and delay requirements, while being cognizant of the cost to network operators, requires an efficient dimensioning of the MEC-enabled network infrastructure. Hence, in this paper, we study and formulate the problem of MEC resource provisioning and workload assignment for IoT services (RPWA) as a mixed integer program to jointly decide on the number and the location of edge servers and applications to deploy, in addition to the workload assignment. Given its complexity, we propose a decomposition approach to solve it which consists of decomposing RPWA into the delay aware load assignment sub-problem and the mobile edge servers dimensioning sub-problem. We analyze the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm through extensive simulations and highlight valuable performance trends and trade-offs as a function of various system parameters.

In this paper, we tackle the problem of joint angle and delays estimation (JADE) of multiple reflections of a known signal impinging on multiple receiving antennae. Based on the importance sampling (IS) concept, we propose a new non-iterative maximum likelihood (ML) estimator that enjoys guaranteed global optimality and enhanced high-resolution capabilities for both single- and multi-carrier models. The new ML approach succeeds in transforming the original multi-dimensional optimization problem into multiple two-dimensional ones thereby resulting in huge computational savings. Moreover, it does not suffer from the off-grid problems that are inherent to most existing JADE techniques. By exploiting the sparsity feature of a carefully designed pseudo-pdf that is intrinsic to the new estimator, we also propose a novel approach that enables the accurate detection of the unknown number of paths over a wide range of practical signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). Computer simulations show the distinct advantage of the new ML estimator over state-of-the art JADE techniques both in the single- and multi-carrier scenarios. Most remarkably, they suggest that the proposed IS-based ML JADE is statistically efficient as it almost reaches the Camer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) even in the adverse conditions of low SNR levels. Using real-world channel measurements collected from four access points (APs) with IEEE 802.11ac standard’s setup parameters in an indoor environment, we also show that the proposed ML estimator achieves a localization performance below 15 cm accuracy.

This paper investigates the secrecy performance of the multiple-input single-output visible light communication (VLC) wiretap channel. The considered system model comprises three nodes: a transmitter (Alice) equipped with multiple fixtures of LEDs, a legitimate receiver (Bob), and an eavesdropper (Eve), each equipped with one photo-diode. The VLC channel is modeled as a real-valued amplitude-constrained Gaussian channel. Eve is assumed to be randomly located in the same area as Bob. Due to this, artificial noise-based beamforming is adopted as a transmission strategy in order to degrade Eve’s signal-to-noise ratio. Assuming discrete input signaling, we derive an achievable secrecy rate in a closed-form expression as a function of the beamforming vectors and the input distribution. We investigate the average secrecy performance of the system using stochastic geometry to account for the location randomness of Eve. We also adopt the truncated discrete generalized normal (TDGN) as a discrete input distribution. We present several examples through which we confirm the accuracy of the analytical results via Monte Carlo simulations. The results also demonstrate that the TDGN distribution, albeit being not optimal, yields performance close to the secrecy capacity.

We study, in this paper, the secrecy performance of a multi-user (MU) multiple-input single-output visible light communication broadcast channel with confidential messages. The underlying system model comprises $K +1$ nodes: a transmitter (Alice) equipped with $N$ fixtures of LEDs and $K$ spatially dispersed users, each equipped with a single photo-diode. The MU channel is modeled as deterministic and real-valued and assumed to be perfectly known to Alice, since all users are assumed to be active. We consider typical secrecy performance measures, namely, the max–min fairness, the harmonic mean, the proportional fairness, and the weighted fairness. For each performance measure, we derive an achievable secrecy rate for the system as a function of the precoding matrix. As such, we propose algorithms that yield the best precoding matrix for the derived secrecy rates, where we analyze their convergence and computational complexity. In contrast, what has been considered in the literature so far is zero-forcing (ZF) precoding, which is suboptimal. We present several numerical examples through which we demonstrate the substantial improvements in the secrecy performance achieved by the proposed techniques compared with those achieved by the conventional ZF. However, this comes at a slight increase in the complexity of the proposed techniques compared with ZF.

The notion of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) for 5G essentially relies on the availability of the channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT). Such knowledge is used to judiciously allocate power among users to make their signals separable at their respective receivers while employing successive interference cancellation (SIC). Feeding back the CSI from the users to the BS (transmitter) is obviously bandwidth consuming. Reducing such an overhead is of great importance and has been of interest in recent years. Furthermore, existing NOMA techniques become inapplicable when the CSI is unavailable at the BS. In this case, the BS has only the option of allocating power among users blindly, including equal power splitting, which has been shown to yield poor performance in terms of outage probability and error probability. This motivates us to develop a NOMA scheme that does not require CSI knowledge at the BS. We make use of a nonlinear interference alignment technique that we have proposed recently, namely, interference dissolution, to develop the proposed NOMA scheme, which allows the BS to communicate with two users simultaneously while keeping signals perfectly separable at their respective receivers. We develop the proposed scheme for multiple-input single-output and single-input single-output downlink channels. We analyze the proposed technique analytically in terms of the achievable degrees-of-freedom and achievable rate per user. We show that the proposed NOMA scheme outperforms existing NOMA techniques in terms of the outage probability and error probability.

This paper studies the coexistence of enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) and ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (URLLC) services in a cellular network that is assisted by a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS). The system model consists of one base station (BS) and one RIS that is deployed to enhance the performance of both eMBB and URLLC in terms of the achievable data rate and reliability, respectively. We formulate two optimization problems, a time slot basis eMBB allocation problem and a mini-time slot basis URLLC allocation problem. The eMBB allocation problem aims at maximizing the eMBB sum rate by jointly optimizing the power allocation at the BS and the RIS phase-shift matrix while satisfying the eMBB rate constraint. On the other hand, the URLLC allocation problem is formulated as a multi-objective problem with the goal of maximizing the URLLC admitted packets and minimizing the eMBB rate loss. This is achieved by jointly optimizing the power and frequency allocations along with the RIS phase-shift matrix. In order to avoid the violation in the URLLC latency requirements, we propose a novel framework in which the RIS phase-shift matrix that enhances the URLLC reliability is proactively designed at the beginning of the time slot. For the sake of solving the URLLC allocation problem, two algorithms are proposed, namely, an optimization-based URLLC allocation algorithm and a heuristic algorithm. The simulation results show that the heuristic algorithm has a low time complexity, which makes it practical for real-time and efficient multiplexing between eMBB and URLLC traffic. In addition, using only 60 RIS elements, we observe that the proposed scheme achieves around 99.99\% URLLC packets admission rate compared to 95.6\% when there is no RIS, while also achieving up to 70\% enhancement on the eMBB sum rate.

In this paper machine learning (ML) models have been developed for the application of big data load forecasting using parallel computation. The load forecasting models’ performance is directly linked to system execution capacity, memory, thread count, balancing the load, and available resources. This paper is focused on two main challenges. The first challenge is to reduce the execution time of the ML models and the second one is to choose the suitable tree-based model for effective load forecasting. The paper conducts a comprehensive evaluation of the load forecasting using real-world data on energy consumption. Comprehensive results are obtained to show that the performance of random search to tune the ML models exhibits competitive performances whilst not losing the accuracy of the models and gaining a competitive advantage on the run time.

This paper investigates the performance of cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (C-NOMA) in a cellular downlink system. The system model consists of a base station (BS) serving multiple users, where users that have the capability of full-duplex (FD) communications can assist the transmissions between the BS and users with poor channel quality through device-to-device (D2D) communications. To maximize the achievable sum rate of the whole system while guaranteeing a certain quality of service (QoS) for all users, we formulate and solve a novel optimization problem that jointly determines the optimal D2D user pairing and the optimal power control scheme. The formulated problem is a mixed-integer non-linear program (MINLP), which has extremely high complexity. To overcome this issue, a two-step policy is proposed to solve the problem in polynomial time. First, we derive a closed-form expression of the optimal power control scheme that maximizes the sum rate of a given pair of users with a required QoS. Then, using the derived closed-form in the first step, we employ the Hungarian algorithm as the pairing policy in multi-user settings. Our simulation results show that the proposed scheme prevails some previously proposed heuristic approach for the given problem.

Ultra Reliable and Low Latency Communications (URLLC) is deemed to be an essential service in 5G systems and beyond to accommodate a wide range of emerging applications with stringent latency and reliability requirements. Coexistence of URLLC alongside other service categories calls for developing spectrally efficient multiplexing techniques. Specifically, coupling URLLC and conventional enhanced Mobile BroadBand (eMBB) through superposition/puncturing naturally arises as a promising option due to the tolerance of the latter in terms of latency and reliability. The idea here is to transmit URLLC packets over resources occupied by ongoing eMBB transmissions while minimizing the impact on the eMBB transmissions. In this paper, we propose a novel downlink URLLC-eMBB multiplexing technique that exploits possible similarities among URLLC and eMBB symbols, with the objective of reducing the size of the punctured eMBB symbols. We propose that the base station scans the eMBB traffic' symbol sequences and punctures those that have the highest symbol similarity with that of the URLLC users to be served. As the eMBB and URLLC may use different constellation sizes, we introduce the concept of symbol region similarity to accommodate the different constellations. We assess the performance of the proposed scheme analytically, where we derive closed-form expressions for the symbol error rate (SER) of the eMBB and URLLC services. {We also derive an expression for the eMBB loss function due to puncturing in terms of the eMBB SER}. We demonstrate through numerical and simulation results the efficacy of the proposed scheme where we show that 1) the eMBB spectral efficiency is improved by puncturing fewer symbols, 2) the SER and reliability performance of eMBB are improved, and 3) the URLLC data is accommodated within the specified delay constraint while maintaining its reliability.

Light-fidelity (LiFi) is a fully-networked bidirectional optical wireless communication (OWC) technology that is considered as a promising solution for high-speed indoor connectivity. In this paper, the joint estimation of user 3D position and user equipment (UE) orientation in indoor LiFi systems with unknown emission power is investigated. Existing solutions for this problem assume either ideal LiFi system settings or perfect knowledge of the UE states, rendering them unsuitable for realistic LiFi systems. In addition, these solutions consider the non-line-of-sight (NLOS) links of the LiFi channel gain as a source of deterioration for the estimation performance instead of harnessing these components in improving the position and the orientation estimation performance. This is mainly due to the lack of appropriate estimation techniques that can extract the position and orientation information hidden in these components. In this paper, and against the above limitations, the UE is assumed to be connected with at least one access point (AP), i.e., at least one active LiFi link. Fingerprinting is employed as an estimation technique and the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is used as an estimation metric, where both the line-of-sight (LOS) and NLOS components of the LiFi channel are considered. Motivated by the success of deep learning techniques in solving several complex estimation and prediction problems, we employ two deep artificial neural network (ANN) models, one based on the multilayer perceptron (MLP) and the second on the convolutional neural network (CNN), that can map efficiently the instantaneous received SNR with the user 3D position and the UE orientation. Through numerous examples, we investigate the performance of the proposed schemes in terms of the average estimation error, precision, computational time, and the bit error rate. We also compare this performance to that of the k-nearest neighbours (KNN) scheme, which is widely used in solving wireless localization problems. It is demonstrated that the proposed schemes achieve significant gains and are superior to the KNN scheme.

This paper investigates the performance of coop- erative non-orthogonal multiple access (C-NOMA) in cellulardownlink systems. The system model consists of a base station(BS) that needs to serve multiple users within a region of service.A subset of the users, especially those located close to thecell edge, undergo severe fading and suffer from poor channelquality and low achievable rates. To overcome this problem, C-NOMA is proposed as the system design methodology, in whichusers that have the capability of full-duplex (FD) communicationcan assist the transmissions between the BS and users withpoor channel quality through device-to-device (D2D) communi-cations. To harness both the multiplexing gain from NOMA andthe diversity gain from FD-D2D communications, we formulateand solve a novel optimization problem that jointly deter-mines D2D user pairing and power allocation. The formulatedproblem is a mixed-integer non-linear program (MINLP) withprohibitively high complexity. To overcome this issue, a two-steppolicy is proposed to solve the problem in polynomial time. Oursimulation results show that with reasonable assumptions, theproposed scheme always outperforms some existing schemesin the literature, and that, under undesirable conditions, e.g.,poor D2D channel conditions or imperfect self-interference (SI)cancellation, the proposed scheme is reduced to conventionalNOMA.

In this paper, a data-driven approach has been used to identify and categorize fault in the electrical power system. The proposed methodology involves efficient analysis of the data with feature vectors including the area or zone of the bus. The training is done on machine learning models to classify and identify the location of the fault. Three-phase, line to ground, line-to-line to ground, line-to-line, loss of line with no fault and loss of load at bus faults are simulated to generate labeled data with type of fault and location of fault. Two algorithms have been proposed to choose the measurements selection strategy, and results have been stated. The proposed methodology proves its validity for identification of the fault without necessary measurement of the voltage of each node. The proposed approach works with a minimum number of buses required to be as few as 5-7% of the measured buses. The accuracy, capabilities, and limitations of the proposed algorithm are verified on IEEE 68 bus model. The highest classification accuracy attained on one of the test cases is 91%.

We propose in this paper a physical-layer security (PLS) scheme for dual-hop cooperative networks in an effort to enhance the communications secrecy. The underlying model comprises a transmitting node (Alice), a legitimate node (Bob), and an eavesdropper (Eve). It is assumed that there is no direct link between Alice and Bob, and the communication between them is done through trusted relays over two phases. In the first phase, precoding-aided spatial modulation (PSM) is employed, owing to its low interception probability, while simultaneously transmitting a jamming signal from Bob. In the second phase, the selected relay detects and transmits the intended signal, whereas the remaining relays transmit the jamming signal received from Bob. We analyze the performance of the proposed scheme in terms of the ergodic secrecy capacity (ESC), the secrecy outage probability (SOP), and the bit error rate (BER) at Bob and Eve. We obtain closed-form expressions for the ESC and SOP and we derive very tight upper-bounds for the BER. We also optimize the performance with respect to the power allocation among the participating relays in the second phase. We provide examples with numerical and simulation results through which we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. Qatar Foundation; Qatar National Research Fund Scopus

We study in this letter the secrecy performance of a degraded single-input single-output visible-light communication wiretap channel. It has been shown in the literature that the secrecy capacity-achieving input distribution for this system is discrete with a finite support set. However, neither the secrecy capacity nor its achieving distribution has been derived in closed-form. In this letter, we derive in closed-form the achievable secrecy rate as a function of the discrete input distribution. We propose a class of discrete input distributions in an effort to enhance the achievable secrecy rate and approach the secrecy capacity. We also derive expressions for the achievable secrecy rate for different scenarios including the one in which the locations of the terminals are randomly located. We provide several examples that demonstrate the accuracy of the derived expressions and show the substantial secrecy rate improvements provided by the proposed scheme over existing ones.

In this paper, we study the achievable secure degrees-of-freedom (sdof) for the multiple-input single-output (MISO) wiretap channel with an unknown eavesdropper. It is assumed that the eavesdropper’s (Eve’s) channel state information (CSI) is unknown to the transmitter (Alice) and legitimate receiver (Bob). Recent studies have shown that the achievable sdof in the sense of strong secrecy is zero when Eve’s number of antennas is equal to or more than Bob’s number of antennas, which is the scenario considered in this paper. To this end, we propose a novel precoding technique and a coding strategy that together achieve full sdof in the sense of strong secrecy without knowing Eve’s CSI and without using artificial noise. The proposed precoding method uses the CSI of the Alice-Bob channel in a nonlinear fashion, which makes the transmitted symbols undecodable at Eve. The proposed coding scheme is based on the channel resolvability concept and ensures strong secrecy. Achieving full sdof with an unknown Eve’s CSI is significant, because it is contrary to what is believed about the achievable sdof for the MISO wiretap channel in the sense of strong secrecy. We also show that the proposed scheme achieves near Alice-Bob’s channel capacity in the sense of strong secrecy with a probability approaching one at finite signal-to-noise ratio.

In this paper, we address the problem of time delay estimation (TDE) from single-carrier (SC) or multi-carrier (MC) direct-sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) multipath transmissions in the presence of multiple transmit and/or receive antennas that will characterize future 5G radio interface technologies (RITs), such as coded-domain nonorthogonal multiple access. We derive for the first time a closed-form expression for the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) and develop two maximum likelihood (ML) multipath TDEs for SC DSSS single-input multiple-output (SIMO) in the non-data-aided (NDA) case. The first TDE, based on iterative expectation maximization (EM), provides accurate estimates whenever a good initial guess of the parameters is available at the receiver. The second TDE implements the ML criterion in a non-iterative way and finds the global maximum of the compressed likelihood function using the importance sampling (IS) technique without requiring any initialization. We also extend both the SC DSSS SIMO CRLB and the two new SC DSSS SIMO ML NDA TDEs to MC DSSS RITs and to multiple-input multiple-output structures with any diversity versus multiplexing pre-coding type before generalizing them all to the data-aided (DA) case. Simulations suggest that the EM TDE is suitable for large observation in space, time, and/or frequency, whereas the IS TDE is preferred in the opposite case of very short data records. Moreover, we show in the NDA case, both analytically and by simulations, that spatial (transmit and receive), temporal, and frequency samples interchangeably have the same impact on estimation accuracy and performance bound regardless of the channel correlation type and amount present in each dimension. Furthermore, we are able to properly cope with such channel correlations that do indeed arise in practice and, hence, become very challenging both in estimation and CRLB derivation in the DA case, but that have been so far overlooked in previous works.

We consider physical layer security in a multi-input multi-output multi-eavesdropper wiretap channel and present an exact solution to the problem of secrecy rate maximization. A system model with multiple multi-antenna eavesdroppers and multiple multi-antenna full-duplex receivers is considered, which is general enough such that models existing in the literature may be considered as special cases. In particular, we perform joint beamforming and artificial noise optimization in an effort to maximize the achievable secrecy rate. The optimization is performed in the presence of artificial noise generated by both transmitter and legitimate receivers. The resulting optimization problem is non-convex and difficult to solve. We develop a minorization-maximization algorithm to solve the problem exactly and the results can therefore be used to benchmark existing methods. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach. This work was made possible by NPRP grant NPRP 8-052-2-029 from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of Qatar Foundation). Scopus

The performance of different multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) techniques, i.e., spatial multiplexing (SMX), spatial modulation (SM) and spatial repetition coding (SRC), are studied in this paper considering a number of possible receiver designs for handheld devices for Light-Fidelity (LiFi) applications. It is demonstrated that the multi-directional receiver (MDR), as a simple yet effective and practical receiver structure, significantly improves the performance compared to a conventional benchmark receiver design, called screen receiver (SR). In MDR, multiple photodetectors (PDs) are placed on different sides of a handheld device, e.g., a smartphone. The channel condition number, defined as the ratio of maximum to minimum eigenvalues of the channel matrix, is statistically studied for MDR and SR. It is observed that the highly reduced values of channel condition numbers for MDR result in more than 16 dB reduction of required signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for SMX and SM at a target bit error ratio (BER). It is shown that, particularly for a high target spectral efficiency, incorporating MDR in conjunction with an appropriate MIMO technique can be a effective solution for future LiFi applications.

This paper studies the signal to noise ratio (SNR) statistics of mobile users with random orientations in an indoor visible light communication (VLC) system. The considered system model consists of an access point (AP) and a mobile user device (UD) with a random orientation, which makes the instantaneous received SNR random. The distance between the AP and the UD is modeled through the random waypoint (RWP) mobility model, whereas uniform incidence angle is used to model the random orientation of the UD. Novel closed- form expressions for the probability density function and the cumulative distribution function of the instantaneous received SNR are derived. Based on this, closed-form expressions of typical performance measures, such as the outage rate probability (ORP) and the average symbol error probability (SEP) are also derived. The accuracy of the derived expressions are validated through extensive simulations and the effect of mobility and random orientation of the UD on the performance of the system are then evaluated. Our results show that the UD's random orientation degrades the system performance.

In recent years, providing connectivity to fast-moving vehicles on highways has been the focus of the wireless research community. In this paper, in the context of V2X, we propose using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to serve vehicles on a highway, where a UAV is dispatched in disaster situations (such as floods or earthquakes) to serve these vehicles, or to provide better coverage when vehicles are out of reach of road side units. We consider free flow scenario where vehicles moving between two road-side units and where the infrastructure is partially or totally unavailable. Our goal is to guarantee a certain Quality of Service (QoS) for each vehicle on the highway by jointly optimizing the UAV trajectory and the radio resource allocation. We show that during the UAV flight time, the UAV adapts its velocity to the velocities of the vehicles in the served cluster, to maximize the minimum average rate for each vehicle. Our findings are verified through Monte-Carlo simulation where we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed design under different UAVs types.

Based on the concept of reconfigurable antennas (RAs), space-shift keying (SSK)-RA has been recently proposed as a novel transmission scheme to improve the performance of SSK. In this context, it has been shown that RAs’ reconfigurable properties can be used as additional degrees of freedom to enhance the throughput, implementation complexity, and error performance of SSK. In this paper, we study the implementation of SSK-RA within underlay cognitive radio systems in an effort to improve the performance of the secondary user while verifying the constraints set by the primary user (PU). Taking advantage of the interplay between RAs and the propagation channels for both the secondary and interference links, we propose an RA-based scheme with beam-direction reconfiguration aiming at improving the secondary system’s performance while verifying an outage interference constraint to the PU. In this paper, we analyze the performance of the proposed scheme in Rician fading channels and provide simulation examples confirming these analytical results. The proposed schemes are shown to offer enhanced bit error rate performance and lower implementation complexity when compared with conventional antenna-based spectrum sharing systems.

In this paper, we study the performance of single carrier (SC) modulation with frequency-domain equalization (FDE) over underwater acoustic (UWA) channels. The underlying channels are time-varying intersymbol interference (ISI) channels, where time variation arises from the relative motion between the transceivers, which induces one or more Doppler scaling factors. We study two scenarios: a point-to-point (P2P) system, where each cluster of paths has its own distinct Doppler scaling factor, and a multiple access (MAC) system, where $M$ users communicate with a multiple-antenna common receiver in which each user has its own Doppler scaling factor. First, the maximum likelihood (ML) receiver is derived for both scenarios, and it is shown that a preprocessing stage is necessary to reduce the time variation; this is referred to as multiple resampling (MR). The proposed receiver consists of multiple branches where each branch corresponds to a cluster/user and performs frequency shifting and resampling followed by an integrator. Since the output of the MR stage is contaminated by ISI for P2P systems and ISI and interuser interference for MAC systems, an additional equalization stage is necessary, which is ideally the ML sequence detector (MLSD). Since the complexity of MLSD exponentially grows with the number of symbols per block, the alphabet size, and the number of users, a linear minimum-mean-square-error FDE equalizer is used instead. To further reduce the complexity, instead of resampling the received signal multiple times by different scaling factors, it is resampled only by one scaling factor, which is a function of all Doppler scaling factors. The resulting suboptimal preprocessing scheme is called single resampling (SR). Simulation results for uncoded systems show that MR outperforms its SR counterpart at the expense of some additional hardware complexity. Moreover, it is shown that SC-FDE is more resilient than orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) to the Doppler scaling effect in UWA channels at lower overall complexity for the MR case, whereas both have the same overall complexity for the SR case.