No Arabic abstract
Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have been recently considered as one of the emerging technologies for future communication systems by leveraging the tuning capabilities of their reflecting elements. In this paper, we investigate the potential of an RIS-based architecture for uplink sensor data transmission in an ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) context. In particular, we propose an RIS-aided grant-free access scheme for an industrial control scenario, aiming to exploit diversity and achieve improved reliability performance. We consider two different resource allocation schemes for the uplink transmissions, i.e., dedicated and shared slot assignment, and three different receiver types, namely the zero-forcing, the minimum mean squared error (MMSE), and the MMSE-successive interference cancellation receivers. Our extensive numerical evaluation in terms of outage probability demonstrates the gains of our approach in terms of reliability, resource efficiency, and capacity and for different configurations of the RIS properties. An RIS-aided grant-free access scheme combined with advanced receivers is shown to be a well-suited option for uplink URLLC.
5G New Radio (NR) is expected to support new ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) service targeting at supporting the small packets transmissions with very stringent latency and reliability requirements. Current Long Term Evolution (LTE) system has been designed based on grantbased (GB) (i.e., dynamic grant) random access, which can hardly support the URLLC requirements. Grant-free (GF) (i.e., configured grant) access is proposed as a feasible and promising technology to meet such requirements, especially for uplink transmissions, which effectively saves the time of requesting/waiting for a grant. While some basic GF access features have been proposed and standardized in NR Release-15, there is still much space to improve. Being proposed as 3GPP study items, three GF access schemes with Hybrid Automatic Repeat reQuest (HARQ) retransmissions including Reactive, K-repetition, and Proactive, are analyzed in this paper. Specifically, we present a spatiotemporal analytical framework for the contention-based GF access analysis. Based on this framework, we define the latent access failure probability to characterize URLLC reliability and latency performances. We propose a tractable approach to derive and analyze the latent access failure probability of the typical UE under three GF HARQ schemes. Our results show that under shorter latency constraints, the Proactive scheme provides the lowest latent access failure probability, whereas, under longer latency constraints, the K-repetition scheme achieves the lowest latent access failure probability, which depends on K. If K is overestimated, the Proactive scheme provides lower latent access failure probability than the K-repetition scheme.
The newly introduced ultra-reliable low latency communication service class in 5G New Radio depends on innovative low latency radio resource management solutions that can guarantee high reliability. Grant-free random access, where channel resources are accessed without undergoing assignment through a handshake process, is proposed in 5G New Radio as an important latency reducing solution. However, this comes at an increased likelihood of collisions resulting from uncontrolled channel access, when the same resources are preallocated to a group of users. Novel reliability enhancement techniques are therefore needed. This article provides an overview of grant-free random access in 5G New Radio focusing on the ultra-reliable low latency communication service class, and presents two reliability-enhancing solutions. The first proposes retransmissions over shared resources, whereas the second proposal incorporates grant-free transmission with non-orthogonal multiple access with overlapping transmissions being resolved through the use of advanced receivers. Both proposed solutions result in significant performance gains, in terms of reliability as well as resource efficiency. For example, the proposed non-orthogonal multiple access scheme can support a normalized load of more than 1.5 users/slot at packet loss rates of ~10^{-5} - a significant improvement over the maximum supported load with conventional grant-free schemes like slotted-ALOHA.
Given the proliferation of wireless sensors and smart mobile devices, an explosive escalation of the volume of data is anticipated. However, restricted by their limited physical sizes and low manufacturing costs, these wireless devices tend to have limited computational capabilities and battery lives. To overcome this limitation, wireless devices may offload their computational tasks to the nearby computing nodes at the network edge in mobile edge computing (MEC). At the time of writing, the benefits of MEC systems have not been fully exploited, predominately because the computation offloading link is still far from perfect. In this article, we propose to enhance MEC systems by exploiting the emerging technique of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS), which are capable of `reconfiguring the wireless propagation environments, hence enhancing the offloading links. The benefits of RISs can be maximized by jointly optimizing both the RISs as well as the communications and computing resource allocations of MEC systems. Unfortunately, this joint optimization imposes new research challenges on the system design. Against this background, this article provides an overview of RIS-assisted MEC systems and highlights their four use cases as well as their design challenges and solutions. Finally, their performance is characterized with the aid of a specific case study, followed by a range of future research ideas.
In the envisioned 5G, uplink grant-free multiple access will become the enabler of ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC) services. By removing the forward scheduling request (SR) and backward scheduling grant (SG), pilot-based channel estimation and data transmission are launched in one-shot communications with the aim of maintaining the reliability of $99.999% $ or more and latency of 1ms or less under 5G new radio (NR) numerologies. The problem is that channel estimation can easily suffer from pilot aware attack which significantly reduces the system reliability. To solve this, we proposed to apply the hierarchical 2-D feature coding (H2DF) coding on time-frequency-code domain to safeguard channel state information (CSI), which informs a fundamental rethinking of reliability, latency and accessibility. Considering uplink large-scale single-input multiple-output (SIMO) reception of short packets, we characterize the analytical closed-form expression of reliability and define the accessibility of system. We find two fundamental tradeoffs: reliability-latency and reliability-accessibility. With the the help of the two fundamental trade-offs, we demonstrate how CSI protection could be integrated into uplink grant-free multiple access to strengthen URLLC services comprehensively.
Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) based reflection modulation has been considered as a promising information delivery mechanism, and has the potential to realize passive information transfer of a RIS without consuming any additional radio frequency chain and time/frequency/energy resources. The existing on-off reflection modulation (ORM) schemes are based on manipulating the ``on/off states of RIS elements, which may lead to the degradation of RIS reflection efficiency. This paper proposes a frequency reflection modulation (FRM) method for RIS-aided OFDM systems. The FRM-OFDM scheme modulates the frequency of the incident electromagnetic waves, and the RIS information is embedded in the frequency-hoping states of RIS elements. Unlike the ORM-OFDM scheme, the FRM-OFDM scheme can achieve higher reflection efficiency, since the latter does not turn off any reflection element in reflection modulation. We propose a block coordinate descent (BCD) algorithm to maximize the user achievable rate for the FRM-OFDM system by jointly optimizing the phase shift of the RIS and the power allocation at the transmitter. Further, we design a bilinear message passing (BMP) algorithm for the bilinear recovery of both the user symbols and the RIS data. Numerical simulations have verified the efficiency of the designed BCD algorithm for system optimization and the BMP algorithm for signal detection, as well as the superiority of the proposed FRM-OFDM scheme over the ORM-OFDM scheme.