No Arabic abstract
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), as aerial base stations, are a promising solution for providing wireless communications, thanks to their high flexibility and autonomy. Moreover, emerging services, such as extended reality, require high-capacity communications. To achieve this, millimeter wave (mmWave), and recently, terahertz bands have been considered for UAV communications. However, communication at these high frequencies requires a line-of-sight (LoS) to the terminals, which may be located in 3D space and may have extremely limited direct-line-of-view (LoV) due to blocking objects, like buildings and trees. In this paper, we investigate the problem of determining 3D placement and orientation of UAVs such that users have guaranteed LoS coverage by at least one UAV and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) between the UAV-user pairs are maximized. We formulate the problem as an integer linear programming(ILP) problem and prove its NP-hardness. Next, we propose a low-complexity geometry-based greedy algorithm to solve the problem efficiently. Our simulation results show that the proposed algorithm (almost) always guarantees LoS coverage to all users in all considered simulation settings.
The bistatic backscatter architecture, with its extended range, enables flexible deployment opportunities for backscatter devices. In this paper, we study the placement of power beacons (PBs) in bistatic backscatter networks to maximize the guaranteed coverage distance (GCD), defined as the distance from the reader within which backscatter devices are able to satisfy a given quality-of-service constraint. This work departs from conventional energy source placement problems by considering the performance of the additional backscatter link on top of the energy transfer link. We adopt and optimize a symmetric PB placement scheme to maximize the GCD. The optimal PB placement under this scheme is obtained using either analytically tractable expressions or an efficient algorithm. Numerical results provide useful insights into the impacts of various system parameters on the PB placement and the resulting GCD, plus the advantages of the adopted symmetric placement scheme over other benchmark schemes.
The utilization of millimeter-wave (mmWave) bands in 5G networks poses new challenges to network planning. Vulnerability to blockages at mmWave bands can cause coverage holes (CHs) in the radio environment, leading to radio link failure when a user enters these CHs. Detection of the CHs carries critical importance so that necessary remedies can be introduced to improve coverage. In this letter, we propose a novel approach to identify the CHs in an unsupervised fashion using a state-of-the-art manifold learning technique: uniform manifold approximation and projection. The key idea is to preserve the local-connectedness structure inherent in the collected unlabelled channel samples, such that the CHs from the service area are detectable. Our results on the DeepMIMO dataset scenario demonstrate that the proposed method can learn the structure within the data samples and provide visual holes in the low-dimensional embedding while preserving the CH boundaries. Once the CH boundary is determined in the low-dimensional embedding, channel-based localization techniques can be applied to these samples to obtain the geographical boundaries of the CHs.
Inter-operator spectrum sharing in millimeter-wave bands has the potential of substantially increasing the spectrum utilization and providing a larger bandwidth to individual user equipment at the expense of increasing inter-operator interference. Unfortunately, traditional model-based spectrum sharing schemes make idealistic assumptions about inter-operator coordination mechanisms in terms of latency and protocol overhead, while being sensitive to missing channel state information. In this paper, we propose hybrid model-based and data-driven multi-operator spectrum sharing mechanisms, which incorporate model-based beamforming and user association complemented by data-driven model refinements. Our solution has the same computational complexity as a model-based approach but has the major advantage of having substantially less signaling overhead. We discuss how limited channel state information and quantized codebook-based beamforming affect the learning and the spectrum sharing performance. We show that the proposed hybrid sharing scheme significantly improves spectrum utilization under realistic assumptions on inter-operator coordination and channel state information acquisition.
A K-tier heterogeneous mmWave uplink cellular network with clustered user equipments (UEs) is considered in this paper. In particular, UEs are assumed to be clustered around small-cell base stations (BSs) according to a Gaussian distribution, leading to the Thomas cluster process based modeling. Specific and practical line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) models are adopted with different parameters for different tiers. The probability density functions (PDFs) and complementary cumulative distribution functions (CCDFs) of different distances from UEs to BSs are characterized. Coupled association strategy and largest long-term averaged biased received power criterion are considered, and general expressions for association probabilities are provided. Following the identification of the association probabilities, the Laplace transforms of the inter-cell interference and the intra-cluster interference are characterized. Using tools from stochastic geometry, general expressions of the SINR coverage probability are provided. As extensions, fractional power control is incorporated into the analysis, tractable closed-form expressions are provided for special cases, and average ergodic spectral efficiency is analyzed. Via numerical and simulation results, analytical characterizations are confirmed and the impact of key system and network parameters on the performance is identified.
We consider the optimal coverage problem where a multi-agent network is deployed in an environment with obstacles to maximize a joint event detection probability. The objective function of this problem is non-convex and no global optimum is guaranteed by gradient-based algorithms developed to date. We first show that the objective function is monotone submodular, a class of functions for which a simple greedy algorithm is known to be within 0.63 of the optimal solution. We then derive two tighter lower bounds by exploiting the curvature information (total curvature and elemental curvature) of the objective function. We further show that the tightness of these lower bounds is complementary with respect to the sensing capabilities of the agents. The greedy algorithm solution can be subsequently used as an initial point for a gradient-based algorithm to obtain solutions even closer to the global optimum. Simulation results show that this approach leads to significantly better performance relative to previously used algorithms.