Jiakuo Zuo, Yuanwei Liu, Liang Yang, Lingyang Song, Ying-Chang Liang
A reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) enhanced non-orthogonal multiple access assisted backscatter communication (RIS-NOMABC) system is considered. A joint optimization problem over power reflection coefficients and phase shifts is formulated. To solve this non-convex problem, a low complexity algorithm is proposed by invoking the alternative optimization, successive convex approximation and manifold optimization algorithms. Numerical results corroborate that the proposed RIS-NOMABC system outperforms the conventional non-orthogonal multiple access assisted backscatter communication (NOMABC) system without RIS, and demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
Huiyuan Yang, Xiaojun Yuan, Jun Fang, Ying-Chang Liang
By reconfiguring the propagation environment of electromagnetic waves artificially, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have been regarded as a promising and revolutionary hardware technology to improve the energy and spectrum efficiency of wireless networks. In this paper, we study a RIS aided multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless power transfer (WPT) system, where the transmitter is equipped with a constant-envelope analog beamformer. First, we maximize the total received power of the users by jointly optimizing the beamformer at transmitter and the phase-shifts at the RIS, and propose two alternating optimization based suboptimal solutions by leveraging the semidefinite relaxation (SDR) and the successive convex approximation (SCA) techniques respectively. Then, considering the user fairness, we formulate another problem to maximize the total received power subject to the users' individual minimum received power constraints. A low complexity iterative algorithm based on both alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and SCA techniques is proposed to solve this problem. In the case of multiple users, we further analyze the asymptotic performance as the number of RIS elements approaches infinity, and bound the performance loss caused by RIS phase quantization. Numerical results show the correctness of the analysis results and the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.
Wei Yang Bryan Lim, Nguyen Cong Luong, Dinh Thai Hoang, Yutao Jiao, Ying-Chang Liang, Qiang Yang, Dusit Niyato, Chunyan Miao
In recent years, mobile devices are equipped with increasingly advanced sensing and computing capabilities. Coupled with advancements in Deep Learning (DL), this opens up countless possibilities for meaningful applications. Traditional cloudbased Machine Learning (ML) approaches require the data to be centralized in a cloud server or data center. However, this results in critical issues related to unacceptable latency and communication inefficiency. To this end, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has been proposed to bring intelligence closer to the edge, where data is produced. However, conventional enabling technologies for ML at mobile edge networks still require personal data to be shared with external parties, e.g., edge servers. Recently, in light of increasingly stringent data privacy legislations and growing privacy concerns, the concept of Federated Learning (FL) has been introduced. In FL, end devices use their local data to train an ML model required by the server. The end devices then send the model updates rather than raw data to the server for aggregation. FL can serve as an enabling technology in mobile edge networks since it enables the collaborative training of an ML model and also enables DL for mobile edge network optimization. However, in a large-scale and complex mobile edge network, heterogeneous devices with varying constraints are involved. This raises challenges of communication costs, resource allocation, and privacy and security in the implementation of FL at scale. In this survey, we begin with an introduction to the background and fundamentals of FL. Then, we highlight the aforementioned challenges of FL implementation and review existing solutions. Furthermore, we present the applications of FL for mobile edge network optimization. Finally, we discuss the important challenges and future research directions in FL
Jungang Ge, Ying-Chang Liang
In this paper, we propose an reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) enhanced spectrum sensing system, in which the primary transmitter is equipped with single antenna, the secondary transmitter is equipped with multiple antennas, and the RIS is employed to improve the detection performance. Without loss of generality, we adopt the maximum eigenvalue detection approach, and propose a corresponding analytical framework based on large dimensional random matrix theory, to evaluate the detection probability in the asymptotic regime. Besides, the phase shift matrix of the RIS is designed with only the statistical channel state information (CSI), which is shown to be quite effective when the RIS-related channels are of Rician fading or line-of-sight (LoS). With the designed phase shift matrix, the asymptotic distributions of the equivalent channel gains are derived. Then, we provide the theoretical predictions about the number of reflecting elements (REs) required to achieve a detection probability close to 1. Finally, we present the Monte-Carlo simulation results to evaluate the accuracy of the proposed asymptotic analytical framework for the detection probability and the validity of the theoretical predictions about the number of REs required to achieve a detection probability close to 1. Moreover, the simulation results show that the proposed RIS-enhanced spectrum sensing system can substantially improve the detection performance.
Jingren Xu, Xin Kang, Ronghaixiang Zhang, Ying-Chang Liang, Sumei Sun
This paper investigates a master unmanned aerial vehicle (MUAV)-powered Internet of Things (IoT) network, in which we propose using a rechargeable auxiliary UAV (AUAV) equipped with an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) to enhance the communication signals from the MUAV and also leverage the MUAV as a recharging power source. Under the proposed model, we investigate the optimal collaboration strategy of these energy-limited UAVs to maximize the accumulated throughput of the IoT network. Depending on whether there is charging between the two UAVs, two optimization problems are formulated. To solve them, two multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approaches are proposed, which are centralized training multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient (CT-MADDPG) and multi-agent deep deterministic policy option critic (MADDPOC). It is shown that the CT-MADDPG can greatly reduce the requirement on the computing capability of the UAV hardware, and the proposed MADDPOC is able to support low-level multi-agent cooperative learning in the continuous action domains, which has great advantages over the existing option-based hierarchical DRL that only support single-agent learning and discrete actions.
Ruizhe Long, Huayan Guo, Gang Yang, Ying-Chang Liang, Rui Zhang
In this paper, a novel technique, called symbiotic radio (SR), is proposed for passive Internet-of-Things (IoT), in which a backscatter device (BD) is integrated with a primary transmission. The primary transmitter is designed to assist the primary and BD transmissions, and the primary receiver decodes the information from the primary transmitter as well as the BD. We consider a multiple-input single-output (MISO) SR and the symbol period for BD transmission is designed to be either the same as or much longer than that of the primary system, resulting in parasitic or commensal relationship between the primary and BD transmissions. We first derive the achievable rates for the primary system and the BD transmission. Then, we formulate two transmit beamforming optimization problems, i.e., the weighted sum-rate maximization problem and the transmit power minimization problem, and solve these non-convex problems by applying semi-definite relaxation technique. In addition, a novel transmit beamforming structure is proposed to reduce the computational complexity of the solutions. Simulation results show that when the BD transmission rate is properly designed, the proposed SR not only enables the opportunistic transmission for the BD via energy-efficient passive backscattering, but also enhances the achievable rate of the primary system by properly exploiting the additional signal path from the BD.
Wenjing Zhao, Gongpu Wang, Saman Atapattu, Ruisi He, Ying-Chang Liang
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.
Junjie Tan, Sa Xiao, Shiying Han, Ying-Chang Liang
License-assisted access LTE (LAA-LTE) has been proposed to deal with the intense contradiction between tremendous mobile traffic demands and crowded licensed spectrums. In this paper, we investigate the coexistence mechanism for LAA-LTE based heterogenous networks (HetNets). A joint resource allocation and network access problem is considered to maximize the normalized throughput of the unlicensed band while guaranteeing the quality-of-service requirements of incumbent WiFi users. A two-level learning-based framework is proposed to solve the problem by decomposing it into two subproblems. In the master level, a Q-learning based method is developed for the LAA-LTE system to determine the proper transmission time. In the slave one, a game-theory based learning method is adopted by each user to autonomously perform network access. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution.
Feifei Gao, Rui Zhang, Ying-Chang Liang, Xiaodong Wang
This paper addresses the design issues of the multi-antenna-based cognitive radio (CR) system that is able to operate concurrently with the licensed primary radio (PR) system. We propose a practical CR transmission strategy consisting of three major stages: environment learning, channel training, and data transmission. In the environment learning stage, the CR transceivers both listen to the PR transmission and apply blind algorithms to estimate the spaces that are orthogonal to the channels from the PR. Assuming time-division duplex (TDD) based transmission for the PR, cognitive beamforming is then designed and applied at CR transceivers to restrict the interference to/from the PR during the subsequent channel training and data transmission stages. In the channel training stage, the CR transmitter sends training signals to the CR receiver, which applies the linear-minimum-mean-square-error (LMMSE) based estimator to estimate the effective channel. Considering imperfect estimations in both learning and training stages, we derive a lower bound on the ergodic capacity achievable for the CR in the data transmission stage. From this capacity lower bound, we observe a general learning/training/throughput tradeoff associated with the proposed scheme, pertinent to transmit power allocation between training and transmission stages, as well as time allocation among learning, training, and transmission stages. We characterize the aforementioned tradeoff by optimizing the associated power and time allocation to maximize the CR ergodic capacity.
Lan Zhang, Rui Zhang, Ying-Chang Liang, Yan Xin, Shuguang Cui
This paper studies the capacity of the multi-antenna or multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) secrecy channels with multiple eavesdroppers having single/multiple antennas. It is known that the MIMO secrecy capacity is achievable with the optimal transmit covariance matrix that maximizes the minimum difference between the channel mutual information of the secrecy user and those of the eavesdroppers. The MIMO secrecy capacity computation can thus be formulated as a non-convex max-min problem, which cannot be solved efficiently by standard convex optimization techniques. To handle this difficulty, we explore a relationship between the MIMO secrecy channel and the recently developed MIMO cognitive radio (CR) channel, in which the multi-antenna secondary user transmits over the same spectrum simultaneously with multiple primary users, subject to the received interference power constraints at the primary users, or the so-called ``interference temperature (IT)'' constraints. By constructing an auxiliary CR MIMO channel that has the same channel responses as the MIMO secrecy channel, we prove that the optimal transmit covariance matrix to achieve the secrecy capacity is the same as that to achieve the CR spectrum sharing capacity with properly selected IT constraints. Based on this relationship, several algorithms are proposed to solve the non-convex secrecy capacity computation problem by transforming it into a sequence of CR spectrum sharing capacity computation problems that are convex. For the case with single-antenna eavesdroppers, the proposed algorithms obtain the exact capacity of the MIMO secrecy channel, while for the case with multi-antenna eavesdroppers, the proposed algorithms obtain both upper and lower bounds on the MIMO secrecy capacity.
Ebrahim A. Gharavol, Ying-Chang Liang, Koenraad Mouthaan
This paper studies the problem of robust downlink beamforming design in a multiuser Multi-Input Single-Output (MISO) Cognitive Radio Network (CR-Net) in which multiple Primary Users (PUs) coexist with multiple Secondary Users (SUs). Unlike conventional designs in CR-Nets, in this paper it is assumed that the Channel State Information (CSI) for all relevant channels is imperfectly known, and the imperfectness of the CSI is modeled using an Euclidean ball-shaped uncertainty set. Our design objective is to minimize the transmit power of the SU-Transmitter (SU-Tx) while simultaneously targeting a lower bound on the received Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise-Ratio (SINR) for the SU's, and imposing an upper limit on the Interference-Power (IP) at the PUs. The design parameters at the SU-Tx are the beamforming weights, i.e. the precoder matrix. The proposed methodology is based on a worst case design scenario through which the performance metrics of the design are immune to variations in the channels. We propose three approaches based on convex programming for which efficient numerical solutions exist. Finally, simulation results are provided to validate the robustness of the proposed methods.
Rui Zhang, Ying-Chang Liang, Shuguang Cui
This article provides an overview of the state-of-art results on communication resource allocation over space, time, and frequency for emerging cognitive radio (CR) wireless networks. Focusing on the interference-power/interference-temperature (IT) constraint approach for CRs to protect primary radio transmissions, many new and challenging problems regarding the design of CR systems are formulated, and some of the corresponding solutions are shown to be obtainable by restructuring some classic results known for traditional (non-CR) wireless networks. It is demonstrated that convex optimization plays an essential role in solving these problems, in a both rigorous and efficient way. Promising research directions on interference management for CR and other related multiuser communication systems are discussed.
Ruizhe Long, Hu Zhou, Ying-Chang Liang
Active reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) has attracted significant attention in wireless communications, due to its reflecting elements (REs) capable of reflecting incident signals with not only phase shifts but also amplitude amplifications. In this paper, we are interested in active RIS-aided interference channels in which $K$ user pairs share the same time and frequency resources with the aid of active RIS. Thanks to the promising amplitude amplification capability, activating a moderate number of REs, rather than all of them, is sufficient for the active RIS to mitigate cross-channel interferences. Motivated by this, we propose a power-aware sparse reflect beamforming design for the active RIS-aided interference channels, which allows the active RIS to flexibly adjust the number of activated REs for the sake of reducing hardware and power costs. Specifically, we establish the power consumption model in which only those activated REs consume the biasing and operation power that supports the amplitude amplification, yielding an $\ell_0$-norm power consumption function. Based on the proposed model, we investigate a sum-rate maximization problem and an active RIS power minimization problem by carefully designing the sparse reflect beamforming vector. To solve these problems, we first replace the nonconvex $\ell_0$-norm function with an iterative reweighted $\ell_1$-norm function. Then, fractional programming is used to solve the sum-rate maximization, while semidefinite programming together with the difference-of-convex algorithm (DCA) is used to solve the active RIS power minimization. Numerical results show that the proposed sparse designs can notably increase the sum rate of user pairs and decrease the power consumption of active RIS in interference channels.
Lan Zhang, Rui Zhang, Ying-Chang Liang, Yan Xin, H. Vincent Poor
Owing to the structure of the Gaussian multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) broadcast channel (BC), associated optimization problems such as capacity region computation and beamforming optimization are typically non-convex, and cannot be solved directly. One feasible approach to these problems is to transform them into their dual multiple access channel (MAC) problems, which are easier to deal with due to their convexity properties. The conventional BC-MAC duality is established via BC-MAC signal transformation, and has been successfully applied to solve beamforming optimization, signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) balancing, and capacity region computation. However, this conventional duality approach is applicable only to the case, in which the base station (BS) of the BC is subject to a single sum power constraint. An alternative approach is minimax duality, established by Yu in the framework of Lagrange duality, which can be applied to solve the per-antenna power constraint problem. This paper extends the conventional BC-MAC duality to the general linear constraint case, and thereby establishes a general BC-MAC duality. This new duality is applied to solve the capacity computation and beamforming optimization for the MIMO and multiple-input single-output (MISO) BC, respectively, with multiple linear constraints. Moreover, the relationship between this new general BC-MAC duality and minimax duality is also presented. It is shown that the general BC-MAC duality offers more flexibility in solving BC optimization problems relative to minimax duality. Numerical results are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.
Rui Zhang, Feifei Gao, Ying-Chang Liang
This paper studies the transmit strategy for a secondary link or the so-called cognitive radio (CR) link under opportunistic spectrum sharing with an existing primary radio (PR) link. It is assumed that the CR transmitter is equipped with multi-antennas, whereby transmit precoding and power control can be jointly deployed to balance between avoiding interference at the PR terminals and optimizing performance of the CR link. This operation is named as cognitive beamforming (CB). Unlike prior study on CB that assumes perfect knowledge of the channels over which the CR transmitter interferes with the PR terminals, this paper proposes a practical CB scheme utilizing a new idea of effective interference channel (EIC), which can be efficiently estimated at the CR transmitter from its observed PR signals. Somehow surprisingly, this paper shows that the learning-based CB scheme with the EIC improves the CR channel capacity against the conventional scheme even with the exact CR-to-PR channel knowledge, when the PR link is equipped with multi-antennas but only communicates over a subspace of the total available spatial dimensions. Moreover, this paper presents algorithms for the CR to estimate the EIC over a finite learning time. Due to channel estimation errors, the proposed CB scheme causes leakage interference at the PR terminals, which leads to an interesting learning-throughput tradeoff phenomenon for the CR, pertinent to its time allocation between channel learning and data transmission. This paper derives the optimal channel learning time to maximize the effective throughput of the CR link, subject to the CR transmit power constraint and the interference power constraints for the PR terminals.
Zizhen Zhou, Qianqian Zhang, Jungang Ge, Ying-Chang Liang
In space-air-ground integrated networks (SAGINs), cognitive spectrum sharing has been regarded as a promising solution to improve spectrum efficiency by enabling a secondary network to access the spectrum of a primary network. However, different networks in SAGIN may have different quality of service (QoS) requirements, which can not be well satisfied with the traditional cognitive spectrum sharing architecture. For example, the aerial network typically has high QoS requirements, which however may not be met when it acts as a secondary network. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a hierarchical cognitive spectrum sharing architecture (HCSSA) for SAGINs, where the secondary networks are divided into a preferential one and an ordinary one. Specifically, the aerial and terrestrial networks can access the spectrum of the satellite network under the condition that the caused interference to the satellite terminal is below a certain threshold. Besides, considering that the aerial network has a higher priority than the terrestrial network, we aim to use a rate constraint to ensure the performance of the aerial network. Subject to these two constraints, we consider a sum-rate maximization for the terrestrial network by jointly optimizing the transmit beamforming vectors of the aerial and terrestrial base stations. To solve this non-convex problem, we propose a penalty-based iterative beamforming (PIBF) scheme that uses the penalty method and the successive convex approximation technique. Moreover, we also develop three low-complexity schemes by optimizing the normalized beamforming vectors and power control. Finally, we provide extensive numerical simulations to compare the performance of the proposed PIBF scheme and the low-complexity schemes. The results also demonstrate the advantages of the proposed HCSSA compared with the traditional cognitive spectrum sharing architecture.
Jun Wang, Ying-Chang Liang, Sumei Sun
Symbiotic radio (SR) is a promising technique to support cellular Internet-of-Things (IoT) by forming a mutualistic relationship between IoT and cellular transmissions. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-user multi-IoT-device SR system to enable massive access in cellular IoT. In the considered system, the base station (BS) transmits information to multiple cellular users, and a number of IoT devices simultaneously backscatter their information to these users via the cellular signal. The cellular users jointly decode the information from the BS and IoT devices. Noting that the reflective links from the IoT devices can be regarded as the channel uncertainty of the direct links, we apply the robust design method to design the beamforming vectors at the BS. Specifically, the transmit power is minimized under the cellular transmission outage probability constraints and IoT transmission sum rate constraints. The algorithm based on semi-definite programming and difference-of-convex programming is proposed to solve the power minimization problem. Moreover, we consider a special case where each cellular user is associated with several adjacent IoT devices and propose a direction of arrival (DoA)-based transmit beamforming design approach. The DoA-based approach requires only the DoA and angular spread (AS) of the direct links instead of the instantaneous channel state information (CSI) of the reflective link channels, leading to a significant reduction in the channel feedback overhead. Simulation results have substantiated the multi-user multi-IoT-device SR system and the effectiveness of the proposed beamforming approaches. It is shown that the DoA-based beamforming approach achieves comparable performance as the CSI-based approach in the special case when the ASs are small.
Hu Zhou, Qianqian Zhang, Ying-Chang Liang, Yiyang Pei
This paper studies the reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted symbiotic radio (SR) system, where an RIS acts as a secondary transmitter to transmit its information by leveraging the primary signal as its RF carrier and simultaneously assists the primary transmission. Conventionally, all reflecting elements of the RIS are used to transmit the secondary signal, which, however, would limit its capability for assisting the primary transmission. To address this issue, we propose a novel RIS partitioning scheme, where the RIS is partitioned into two sub-surfaces, one to assist the primary transmission and the other to transmit the secondary signal. Naturally, there exists a fundamental tradeoff between the assistance and transmission capabilities of RIS regarding the surface partitioning strategy. Considering the coupling effect between the primary and secondary transmissions, we focus on the detection of the composite signal formed by the primary and secondary ones, based on which we propose a novel two-step detector. Then, we formulate the assistance-transmission tradeoff problem to minimize the bit error rate (BER) of the composite signal by jointly optimizing the surface partitioning strategy and the phase shifts of the two sub-surfaces, such that the overall BER of RIS-assisted SR is minimized. By solving this problem, we show that the optimized surface partitioning strategy depends on the channel strength ratio of the direct link to the reflected link. Finally, extensive simulations show that our proposed RIS partitioning scheme outperforms the conventional schemes which use all reflecting elements for either assistance or transmission.
Hongxiang Xie, Feifei Gao, Shi Jin, Jun Fang, Ying-Chang Liang
In this paper, we propose a new channel estimation scheme for TDD/FDD massive MIMO systems by reconstructing uplink/downlink channel covariance matrices (CCMs) with the aid of array signal processing techniques. Specifically, the angle information and power angular spectrum (PAS) of each multi-path channel is extracted from the instantaneous uplink channel state information (CSI). Then, the uplink CCM is reconstructed and can be used to improve the uplink channel estimation without any additional training cost. In virtue of angle reciprocity as well as PAS reciprocity between uplink and downlink channels, the downlink CCM could also be inferred with a similar approach even for FDD massive MIMO systems. Then, the downlink instantaneous CSI can be obtained by training towards the dominant eigen-directions of each user. The proposed strategy is applicable for any kind of PAS distributions and array geometries. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed methods over the existing ones.
Yonghong Zeng, Ying-Chang Liang
Spectrum sensing is a fundamental component is a cognitive radio. In this paper, we propose new sensing methods based on the eigenvalues of the covariance matrix of signals received at the secondary users. In particular, two sensing algorithms are suggested, one is based on the ratio of the maximum eigenvalue to minimum eigenvalue; the other is based on the ratio of the average eigenvalue to minimum eigenvalue. Using some latest random matrix theories (RMT), we quantify the distributions of these ratios and derive the probabilities of false alarm and probabilities of detection for the proposed algorithms. We also find the thresholds of the methods for a given probability of false alarm. The proposed methods overcome the noise uncertainty problem, and can even perform better than the ideal energy detection when the signals to be detected are highly correlated. The methods can be used for various signal detection applications without requiring the knowledge of signal, channel and noise power. Simulations based on randomly generated signals, wireless microphone signals and captured ATSC DTV signals are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods.