In this paper, we consider a novel mobile relaying technique, where the relay nodes are mounted on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and hence are capable of moving at high speed. Compared with conventional static relaying, mobile relaying offers a new degree of freedom for performance enhancement via careful relay trajectory design. We study the throughput maximization problem in mobile relaying systems by optimizing the source/relay transmit power along with the relay trajectory, subject to practical mobility constraints (on the UAV’s speed and initial/final relay locations), as well as the information-causality constraint at the relay. It is shown that for the fixed relay trajectory, the throughput-optimal source/relay power allocations over time follow a “staircase” water filling structure, with non-increasing and non-decreasing water levels at the source and relay, respectively. On the other hand, with given power allocations, the throughput can be further improved by optimizing the UAV’s trajectory via successive convex optimization. An iterative algorithm is thus proposed to optimize the power allocations and relay trajectory alternately. Furthermore, for the special case with free initial and final relay locations, the jointly optimal power allocation and relay trajectory are derived. Numerical results show that by optimizing the trajectory of the relay and power allocations adaptive to its induced channel variation, mobile relaying is able to achieve significant throughput gains over the conventional static relaying.

Throughput Maximization for UAV-Enabled Mobile Relaying Systems

This paper is on relay selection schemes for wireless relay networks. First, we derive the diversity of many single-relay selection schemes in the literature. Then, we generalize the idea of relay selection by allowing more than one relay to cooperate. The SNR-optimal multiple relay selection scheme can be achieved by exhaustive search, whose complexity increases exponentially in the network size. To reduce the complexity, several SNR-suboptimal multiple relay selection schemes are proposed, whose complexity is linear in the number of relays. They are proved to achieve full diversity. Simulation shows that they perform much better than the corresponding single relay selection methods and very close to the SNR-optimal multiple relay selection scheme. In addition, for large networks, these multiple relay selection schemes require the same amount of feedback bits from the receiver as single relay selection schemes.

Single and multiple relay selection schemes and their achievable diversity orders

What is index modulation (IM)? This is an interesting question that we have started to hear more and more frequently over the past few years. The aim of this paper is to answer this question in a comprehensive manner by covering not only the basic principles and emerging variants of IM, but also reviewing the most recent as well as promising advances in this field toward the application scenarios foreseen in next-generation wireless networks. More specifically, we investigate three forms of IM: spatial modulation, channel modulation and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) with IM, which consider the transmit antennas of a multiple-input multiple-output system, the radio frequency mirrors (parasitic elements) mounted at a transmit antenna and the subcarriers of an OFDM system for IM techniques, respectively. We present the up-to-date advances in these three promising frontiers and discuss possible future research directions for IM-based schemes toward low-complexity, spectrum- and energy-efficient next-generation wireless networks.

Index Modulation Techniques for Next-Generation Wireless Networks

Providing ubiquitous connectivity to diverse device types is the key challenge for 5G and beyond 5G (B5G). Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are expected to be an important component of the upcoming wireless networks that can potentially facilitate wireless broadcast and support high rate transmissions. Compared to the communications with fixed infrastructure, UAV has salient attributes, such as flexible deployment, strong line-of-sight connection links, and additional design degrees of freedom with the controlled mobility. In this paper, a comprehensive survey on UAV communication toward 5G/B5G wireless networks is presented. We first briefly introduce essential background and the space–air–ground integrated networks, as well as discuss related research challenges faced by the emerging integrated network architecture. We then provide an exhaustive review of various 5G techniques based on UAV platforms, which we categorize by different domains, including physical layer, network layer, and joint communication, computing, and caching. In addition, a great number of open research problems are outlined and identified as possible future research directions.

UAV Communications for 5G and Beyond: Recent Advances and Future Trends

Providing ubiquitous connectivity to diverse device types is the key challenge for 5G and beyond 5G (B5G). Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are expected to be an important component of the upcoming wireless networks that can potentially facilitate wireless broadcast and support high rate transmissions. Compared to the communications with fixed infrastructure, UAV has salient attributes, such as flexible deployment, strong line-of-sight (LoS) connection links, and additional design degrees of freedom with the controlled mobility. In this paper, a comprehensive survey on UAV communication towards 5G/B5G wireless networks is presented. We first briefly introduce essential background and the space-air-ground integrated networks, as well as discuss related research challenges faced by the emerging integrated network architecture. We then provide an exhaustive review of various 5G techniques based on UAV platforms, which we categorize by different domains including physical layer, network layer, and joint communication, computing and caching. In addition, a great number of open research problems are outlined and identified as possible future research directions.

We analyse the characteristics of the Non-Coherent (NC) Multiple Transmit/Multiple Receive (MTMR) antenna aided Multi-Carrier (MC) DS-CDMA downlink employing a serial search based acquisition scheme, when communicating over spatially uncorrelated Rayleigh channels. The associated Mean Acquisition Time (MAT) performance trends are characterised as a function of both the number of antennas and that of the number of subcarriers. It is shown that the employment of both multiple transmit antennas and multiple subcarriers is typically detrimental in terms of the achievable NC acquisition performance, while that obtained by exploiting multiple receive antennas is always beneficial, regardless whether single-path or multi-path scenarios are considered. Based on our results justified by information theoretic considerations, our acquisition design guidelines are applicable to diverse NC MTMR antenna aided scenarios.

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Non-Coherent Code Acquisition in the Multiple Transmit/Multiple Receive Antenna Aided Single- and Multi-Carrier DS-CDMA Downlink

The future wireless networks promise to provide ubiquitous connectivity to a multitude of devices with diversified traffic patterns wherever and whenever needed. For the sake of boosting resilience against faults, natural disasters, and unexpected traffic, the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted wireless communication systems can provide a unique opportunity to cater for such demands in a timely fashion without relying on the overly engineered cellular network. However, for UAV-assisted communication, issues of capacity, coverage, and energy efficiency are considered of paramount importance. The case of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is investigated for aerial base station (BS). NOMA’s viability is established by formulating the sum-rate problem constituting a function of power allocation and UAV altitude. The optimization problem is constrained to meet individual user-rates arisen by orthogonal multiple access (OMA) bringing it at par with NOMA. The relationship between energy efficiency and altitude of a UAV inspires the solution to the aforementioned problem considering two cases, namely, altitude fixed NOMA and altitude optimized NOMA. The latter allows exploiting the extra degrees of freedom of UAV-BS mobility to enhance the spectral efficiency and the energy efficiency. Hence, it saves joules in the operational cost of the UAV. Finally, a constrained coverage expansion methodology, facilitated by NOMA user rate gain is also proposed. Results are presented for various environment settings to conclude NOMA manifesting better performance in terms of sum-rate, coverage, and energy efficiency.

Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Assisted Communication

The placement of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) based aerial Base station (BS) has emerged as a viable solution to the contemplated high traffic demands of the future wireless networks. Nevertheless, the practical realization of UAVs for wireless coverage provisioning demands efficient utilization of its limited onboard energy reserves. This paper studies the power-domain Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) scheme for energy-efficient placement of the UAV-BS. The objective of maximized information bits per unit energy consumption of the UAV-BS is developed assuming a multi-Quality of Service (QoS) scenario. Also, the efficiency analysis is carried out considering the composite of energies consumed for the signal transmission and hover operation of the UAV-BS. The formulated Non-Linear Fractional Problem (NLFP) as a function of transmission power and altitude is solved by employing an alternating optimization technique based on a nested Dinkelbach structure. An investigation into the user pairing scheme also sheds new light on its effect upon the constrained feasible altitude range of the UAV-BS. Consequently, a computationally efficient approach is devised to render solution space based on the identified subset of user pairs. The numerical analyses of the proposed scheme signify a substantial increase in the energy efficiency of the NOMA based UAV-BS in comparison to the baseline scheme of Orthogonal Multiple Access (OMA). Thus, the improved energy efficiency enables enhanced coverage for the UAV-BS.

Energy-Efficient Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access for UAV Communication System

In this paper, we introduce a novel OFDM-aided multifunctional multiple-input multiple-output scheme based on multi-set space-time shift keying (MS-STSK), where the information transmitted over each subcarrier is divided into two parts: STSK codeword and the implicit antenna combination (AC) index. In MS-STSK, a unique combination of antennas can be activated at each subcarrier to convey extra information over the AC index while additionally transmitting the STSK codeword. Furthermore, inspired by the MS-STSK concept, this scheme is extended also to the frequency domain in the novel context of our multi-space-frequency STSK (MSF-STSK), where the total number of subcarriers is partitioned into blocks to implicitly carry the block’s frequency index. The proposed MSF-STSK scheme benefits from the huge bandwidths available at mmWaves for partitioning the total number of OFDM subcarriers into blocks to convey more information over the frequency domain. Both proposed systems use STSK codewords as the basic transmission block, and they can achieve higher data throughput and better BER performance than STSK. Moreover, given that the system is meant to operate at mmWaves, antenna arrays relying on several antenna elements are employed at both the transmitter and receiver for analogue beamforming with the aid of phase shifters and power amplifiers to overcome the effect of high path loss.

Multi-Set Space-Time Shift Keying and Space- Frequency Space-Time Shift Keying for Millimeter-Wave Communications

We propose a novel multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technique termed the layered multi-group steered space-time shift keying (LMG-SSTSK) for the downlink of millimeter wave (mmWave) communications, which combines the concepts of multi-user MIMO, space-time shift keying, beamforming and orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing to simultaneously convey information to multiple users. The LMG-SSTSK tackles the propagation challenges of the high-attenuation mmWave frequencies by sub-dividing the users into multiple groups. The proposed system allows more users to be served simultaneously in the downlink over the same time- and frequency-resources than a system dispensing with the proposed grouping technique.

SeungHwan Won

Papers

Non-Coherent Code Acquisition in the Multiple Transmit/Multiple Receive Antenna Aided Single- and Multi-Carrier DS-CDMA Downlink

Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Assisted Communication

Energy-Efficient Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access for UAV Communication System

Multi-Set Space-Time Shift Keying and Space- Frequency Space-Time Shift Keying for Millimeter-Wave Communications

Layered Multi-Group Steered Space-Time Shift-Keying for Millimeter-Wave Communications