Covert communications enable a transmitter to send information reliably in the presence of an adversary, who looks to detect whether the transmission took place or not. We consider covert communications over quasi-static block fading channels, where users suffer from channel uncertainty. We investigate the adversary Willies optimal detection performance in two extreme cases, i.e., the case of perfect channel state information (CSI) and the case of channel distribution information (CDI) only. It is shown that in the large detection error regime, Willies detection performances of these two cases are essentially indistinguishable, which implies that the quality of CSI does not help Willie in improving his detection performance. This result enables us to study the covert transmission design without the need to factor in the exact amount of channel uncertainty at Willie. We then obtain the optimal and suboptimal closed-form solution to the covert transmission design. Our result reveals fundamental difference in the design between the case of quasi-static fading channel and the previously studied case of non-fading AWGN channel.
Channel matrix sparsification is considered as a promising approach to reduce the progressing complexity in large-scale cloud-radio access networks (C-RANs) based on ideal channel condition assumption. In this paper, the research of channel sparsification is extend to practical scenarios, in which the perfect channel state information (CSI) is not available. First, a tractable lower bound of signal-to-interferenceplus-noise ratio (SINR) fidelity, which is defined as a ratio of SINRs with and without channel sparsification, is derived to evaluate the impact of channel estimation error. Based on the theoretical results, a Dinkelbach-based algorithm is proposed to achieve the global optimal performance of channel matrix sparsification based on the criterion of distance. Finally, all these results are extended to a more challenging scenario with pilot contamination. Finally, simulation results are shown to evaluate the performance of channel matrix sparsification with imperfect CSIs and verify our analytical results.
Resource allocation in wireless networks, such as device-to-device (D2D) communications, is usually formulated as mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problems, which are generally NP-hard and difficult to get the optimal solutions. Traditional methods to solve these MINLP problems are all based on mathematical optimization techniques, such as the branch-and-bound (B&B) algorithm that converges slowly and has forbidding complexity for real-time implementation. Therefore, machine leaning (ML) has been used recently to address the MINLP problems in wireless communications. In this paper, we use imitation learning method to accelerate the B&B algorithm. With invariant problem-independent features and appropriate problem-dependent feature selection for D2D communications, a good auxiliary prune policy can be learned in a supervised manner to speed up the most time-consuming branch process of the B&B algorithm. Moreover, we develop a mixed training strategy to further reinforce the generalization ability and a deep neural network (DNN) with a novel loss function to achieve better dynamic control over optimality and computational complexity. Extensive simulation demonstrates that the proposed method can achieve good optimality and reduce computational complexity simultaneously.
Information transmission over a multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) fading channel with imperfect channel state information (CSI) is investigated, under a new receiver architecture which combines the recently proposed generalized nearest neighbor decoding rule (GNNDR) and a successive procedure in the spirit of successive interference cancellation (SIC). Recognizing that the channel input-output relationship is a nonlinear mapping under imperfect CSI, the GNNDR is capable of extracting the information embedded in the joint observation of channel output and imperfect CSI more efficiently than the conventional linear scheme, as revealed by our achievable rate analysis via generalized mutual information (GMI). Numerical results indicate that the proposed scheme achieves performance close to the channel capacity with perfect CSI, and significantly outperforms the conventional pilot-assisted scheme, which first estimates the CSI and then uses the estimated CSI as the true one for coherent decoding.