Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is an enabling technology to engineer the radio signal propagation in wireless networks. By smartly tuning the signal reflection via a large number of low-cost passive reflecting elements, IRS is capable of dynamically altering wireless channels to enhance the communication performance. It is thus expected that the new IRS-aided hybrid wireless network comprising both active and passive components will be highly promising to achieve a sustainable capacity growth cost-effectively in the future. Despite its great potential, IRS faces new challenges to be efficiently integrated into wireless networks, such as reflection optimization, channel estimation, and deployment from communication design perspectives. In this paper, we provide a tutorial overview of IRS-aided wireless communications to address the above issues, and elaborate its reflection and channel models, hardware architecture and practical constraints, as well as various appealing applications in wireless networks. Moreover, we highlight important directions worthy of further investigation in future work.

Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Aided Wireless Communications: A Tutorial

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) are an emerging transmission technology for application to wireless communications. RISs can be realized in different ways, which include (i) large arrays of inexpensive antennas that are usually spaced half of the wavelength apart; and (ii) metamaterial-based planar or conformal large surfaces whose scattering elements have sizes and inter-distances much smaller than the wavelength. Compared with other transmission technologies, e.g., phased arrays, multi-antenna transmitters, and relays, RISs require the largest number of scattering elements, but each of them needs to be backed by the fewest and least costly components. Also, no power amplifiers are usually needed. For these reasons, RISs constitute a promising software-defined architecture that can be realized at reduced cost, size, weight, and power (C-SWaP design), and are regarded as an enabling technology for realizing the emerging concept of smart radio environments (SREs). In this paper, we (i) introduce the emerging research field of RIS-empowered SREs; (ii) overview the most suitable applications of RISs in wireless networks; (iii) present an electromagnetic-based communication-theoretic framework for analyzing and optimizing metamaterial-based RISs; (iv) provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of research; and (v) discuss the most important research issues to tackle. Owing to the interdisciplinary essence of RIS-empowered SREs, finally, we put forth the need of reconciling and reuniting C. E. Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication with G. Green’s and J. C. Maxwell’s mathematical theories of electromagnetism for appropriately modeling, analyzing, optimizing, and deploying future wireless networks empowered by RISs.

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Smart Radio Environments Empowered by Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: How It Works, State of Research, and The Road Ahead

In this chapter we deal with the following nonlinear fractional programming problem: 

$$P:\mathop{{\max }}\limits_{{x \in s}} q(x) = (f(x) + \alpha )/((x) + \beta )$$

where f, g: R n → R, α, β ∈ R, S ⊆ R n . To simplify things, and without restricting the generality of the problem, it is usually assumed that, g(x) + β + 0 for all x ∈ S,S is non-empty and that the objective function has a finite optimal value.

Nonlinear Fractional Programming

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have found numerous applications and are expected to bring fertile business opportunities in the next decade. Among various enabling technologies for UAVs, wireless communication is essential and has drawn significantly growing attention in recent years. Compared to the conventional terrestrial communications, UAVs’ communications face new challenges due to their high altitude above the ground and great flexibility of movement in the 3-D space. Several critical issues arise, including the line-of-sight (LoS) dominant UAV-ground channels and induced strong aerial-terrestrial network interference, the distinct communication quality-of-service (QoS) requirements for UAV control messages versus payload data, the stringent constraints imposed by the size, weight, and power (SWAP) limitations of UAVs, as well as the exploitation of the new design degree of freedom (DoF) brought by the highly controllable 3-D UAV mobility. In this article, we give a tutorial overview of the recent advances in UAV communications to address the above issues, with an emphasis on how to integrate UAVs into the forthcoming fifth-generation (5G) and future cellular networks. In particular, we partition our discussion into two promising research and application frameworks of UAV communications, namely UAV-assisted wireless communications and cellular-connected UAVs, where UAVs are integrated into the network as new aerial communication platforms and users, respectively. Furthermore, we point out promising directions for future research.

Accessing From the Sky: A Tutorial on UAV Communications for 5G and Beyond

What is a reconfigurable intelligent surface? What is a smart radio environment? What is a metasurface? How do metasurfaces work and how to model them? How to reconcile the mathematical theories of communication and electromagnetism? What are the most suitable uses and applications of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces in wireless networks? What are the most promising smart radio environments for wireless applications? What is the current state of research? What are the most important and challenging research issues to tackle? 
These are a few of the many questions that we investigate in this short opus, which has the threefold objective of introducing the emerging research field of smart radio environments empowered by reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, putting forth the need of reconciling and reuniting C. E. Shannon's mathematical theory of communication with G. Green's and J. C. Maxwell's mathematical theories of electromagnetism, and reporting pragmatic guidelines and recipes for employing appropriate physics-based models of metasurfaces in wireless communications.

Smart Radio Environments Empowered by Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: How it Works, State of Research, and Road Ahead.

In this letter, we propose intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) aided multi-antenna physical layer security. We present a power efficient scheme to design the secure transmit power allocation and the surface reflecting phase shift. It aims to minimize the transmit power subject to the secrecy rate constraint at the legitimate user. Due to the non-convex nature of the formulated problem, we propose an alternative optimization algorithm and the semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation to deal with this issue. Also, the closed-form expression of the optimal secure beamformer is derived. Finally, simulation results are presented to validate the proposed algorithm, which highlights the performance gains of the IRS to improve the secure transmission.

Intelligent Reflecting Surface Aided Multi-Antenna Secure Transmission

Cognitive radio (CR) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) have been deemed two promising technologies due to their potential to achieve high spectral efficiency and massive connectivity. This paper studies a multiple-input single-output NOMA CR network relying on simultaneous wireless information and power transfer conceived for supporting a massive population of power limited battery-driven devices. In contrast to most of the existing works, which use an ideally linear energy harvesting model, this study applies a more practical non-linear energy harvesting model. In order to improve the security of the primary network, an artificial-noise-aided cooperative jamming scheme is proposed. The artificial-noise-aided beamforming design problems are investigated subject to the practical secrecy rate and energy harvesting constraints. Specifically, the transmission power minimization problems are formulated under both perfect channel state information (CSI) and the bounded CSI error model. The problems formulated are non-convex, hence they are challenging to solve. A pair of algorithms either using semidefinite relaxation (SDR) or a cost function are proposed for solving these problems. Our simulation results show that the proposed cooperative jamming scheme succeeds in establishing secure communications and NOMA is capable of outperforming the conventional orthogonal multiple access in terms of its power efficiency. Finally, we demonstrate that the cost function algorithm outperforms the SDR-based algorithm.

Artificial Noise Aided Secure Cognitive Beamforming for Cooperative MISO-NOMA Using SWIPT

In this paper, we study different secrecy rate optimization techniques for a multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) secrecy channel, where a multiantenna cooperative jammer is employed to improve secret communication in the presence of a multiantenna eavesdropper. Specifically, we consider two optimization problems, namely, power minimization and secrecy rate maximization. These problems are not jointly convex in terms of the transmit covariance matrices of the legitimate transmitter and the cooperative jammer. To circumvent these nonconvexity issues, we alternatively design the transmit covariance matrix of the legitimate transmitter and the cooperative jammer. For a given transmit covariance matrix at the cooperative jammer, we solve the power minimization and secrecy rate maximization problems based on a Taylor series expansion. Then, we propose two iterative algorithms to solve these approximated problems. In addition, we develop a robust scheme by incorporating channel uncertainties associated with the eavesdropper. By exploiting S-Procedure , we show that these robust optimization problems can be formulated into semidefinite programming. Moreover, we consider the secrecy rate maximization problem based on game theory, where the jammer introduces charges for its jamming service based on the amount of the interference caused to the eavesdropper. This secrecy rate maximization problem is formulated into a Stackelberg game where the jammer and the transmitter are the leader and the follower of the game, respectively. For the proposed game, Stackelberg equilibrium is analytically derived. Simulation results have been provided to validate the convergence and performance of the proposed algorithms. In addition, it is shown that the proposed robust scheme outperforms the nonrobust scheme in terms of the achieved secrecy rate and the worst-case secrecy rate. Finally, the Stackelberg equilibrium solution has been validated through numerical results.

Secrecy Rate Optimizations for a MIMO Secrecy Channel With a Cooperative Jammer

With the emergence of diverse mobile applications (such as augmented reality), the quality of experience of mobile users is greatly limited by their computation capacity and finite battery lifetime. Mobile edge computing (MEC) and wireless power transfer are promising to address this issue. However, these two techniques are susceptible to propagation delay and loss. Motivated by the chance of short-distance line-of-sight achieved by leveraging unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications, an UAV-enabled wireless powered MEC system is studied. A power minimization problem is formulated subject to the constraints on the number of the computation bits and energy harvesting causality. The problem is non-convex and challenging to tackle. An alternative optimization algorithm is proposed based on sequential convex optimization. Simulation results show that our proposed design is superior to other benchmark schemes and the proposed algorithm is efficient in terms of the convergence.

UAV-Enabled Mobile Edge Computing: Offloading Optimization and Trajectory Design

This paper investigates a wireless powered sensor network, where multiple sensor nodes are deployed to monitor a certain external environment. A multiantenna power station (PS) provides the power to these sensor nodes during wireless energy transfer phase, and consequently the sensor nodes employ the harvested energy to transmit their own monitoring information to a fusion center during wireless information transfer (WIT) phase. The goal is to maximize the system sum throughput of the sensor network, where two different scenarios are considered, i.e., PS and the sensor nodes belong to the same or different service operator(s). For the first scenario, we propose a global optimal solution to jointly design the energy beamforming and time allocation. We further develop a closed-form solution for the proposed sum throughput maximization. For the second scenario in which the PS and the sensor nodes belong to different service operators, energy incentives are required for the PS to assist the sensor network. Specifically, the sensor network needs to pay in order to purchase the energy services released from the PS to support WIT. In this case, this paper exploits this hierarchical energy interaction, which is known as energy trading . We propose a quadratic energy trading -based Stackelberg game , linear energy trading -based Stackelberg game , and social welfare scheme, in which we derive the Stackelberg equilibrium for the formulated games, and the optimal solution for the social welfare scheme. Finally, numerical results are provided to validate the performance of our proposed schemes.

Zheng Chu

Papers

Intelligent Reflecting Surface Aided Multi-Antenna Secure Transmission

Artificial Noise Aided Secure Cognitive Beamforming for Cooperative MISO-NOMA Using SWIPT

Secrecy Rate Optimizations for a MIMO Secrecy Channel With a Cooperative Jammer

UAV-Enabled Mobile Edge Computing: Offloading Optimization and Trajectory Design

Wireless Powered Sensor Networks for Internet of Things: Maximum Throughput and Optimal Power Allocation