Spectral Efficiency Maximization for Mixed-Structure Cognitive Radio Hybrid Wideband Millimeter-Wave Transceivers in Relay-Assisted Multi-User Multiple-Input Multiple-Output Systems.

This paper proposes a cognitive radio network (CRN)-based hybrid wideband precoding for maximizing spectral efficiency in millimeter-wave relay-assisted multi-user (MU) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. The underlying problem is NP-hard and non-convex due to the joint optimization of hybrid processing components and the constant amplitude constraint imposed by the analog beamformer in the radio frequency (RF) domain. Furthermore, the analog beamforming solution common to all sub-carriers adds another layer of design complexity. Two hybrid beamforming architectures, i.e., mixed and fully connected ones, are taken into account to tackle this problem, considering the decode-and-forward (DF) relay node. To reduce the complexity of the original optimization problem, an attempt is made to decompose it into sub-problems. Leveraging this, each sub-problem is addressed by following a decoupled design methodology. The phase-only beamforming solution is derived to maximize the sum of spectral efficiency, while digital baseband processing components are designed to keep interference within a predefined limit. Computer simulations are conducted by changing system parameters under different accuracy levels of channel-state information (CSI), and the obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique. Additionally, the mixed structure shows better energy efficiency performance compared to its counterparts and outperforms benchmarks.

Robust Coding of Eye Position in Posterior Parietal Cortex despite Context-Dependent Tuning.

Neurons in posterior parietal cortex (PPC) encode many aspects of the sensory world (e.g., scene structure), the posture of the body, and plans for action. For a downstream computation, however, only some of these dimensions are relevant; the rest are "nuisance variables" because their influence on neural activity changes with sensory and behavioral context, potentially corrupting the read-out of relevant information. Here we show that a key postural variable for vision (eye position) is represented robustly in male macaque PPC across a range of contexts, although the tuning of single neurons depended strongly on context. Contexts were defined by different stages of a visually guided reaching task, including (1) a visually sparse epoch, (2) a visually rich epoch, (3) a "go" epoch in which the reach was cued, and (4) during the reach itself. Eye position was constant within trials but varied across trials in a 3 × 3 grid spanning 24° × 24°. Using demixed principal component analysis of neural spike-counts, we found that the subspace of the population response encoding eye position is orthogonal to that encoding task context. Accordingly, a context-naive (fixed-parameter) decoder was nevertheless able to estimate eye position reliably across contexts. Errors were small given the sample size (∼1.78°) and would likely be even smaller with larger populations. Moreover, they were comparable to that of decoders that were optimized for each context. Our results suggest that population codes in PPC shield encoded signals from crosstalk to support robust sensorimotor transformations across contexts.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Neurons in posterior parietal cortex (PPC) which are sensitive to gaze direction are thought to play a key role in spatial perception and behavior (e.g., reaching, navigation), and provide a potential substrate for brain-controlled prosthetics. Many, however, change their tuning under different sensory and behavioral contexts, raising the prospect that they provide unreliable representations of egocentric space. Here, we analyze the structure of encoding dimensions for gaze direction and context in PPC during different stages of a visually guided reaching task. We use demixed dimensionality reduction and decoding techniques to show that the coding of gaze direction in PPC is mostly invariant to context. This suggests that PPC can provide reliable spatial information across sensory and behavioral contexts.

On the Performance of Decode-and-Forward Equal-Gain-Combining Relay Systems over Weibull Fading Channels.

Relay-assisted wireless communications, where both the relay and the final destiny employ diversity-combining techniques, represent a compelling strategy for improving the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for mobile terminals, mainly at millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequency bands. In this sense, this work considers a wireless network that employs a dual-hop decode-and-forward (DF) relaying protocol, in which the receivers at the relay and at the base station (BS) use an antenna array. Moreover, it is considered that the received signals are combined at reception using equal-gain-combining (EGC). Recent works have enthusiastically employed the Weibull distribution so as to emulate the small-scale fading behavior in mmWave frequencies, which also motivates its use in the present work. For this scenario, exact and asymptotic expressions for the system's outage probability (OP) and average bit error probability (ABEP) are derived in closed form. Useful insights are gained from these expressions. More precisely, they illustrate how the system and fading parameters affect the performance of the DF-EGC system. Monte Carlo simulations corroborate the accuracy and validity of the derived expressions. Furthermore, the mean achievable rate of the considered system is also evaluated via simulations. Useful insights regarding the system performance are obtained from these numerical results.

Performance Comparison of Relay-Based Covert Communications: DF, CF and AF.

In this paper, we investigate the performance of covert communications in different types of a relay system: decode-and-forward (DF), compress-and-forward (CF) and amplify-and-forward (AF). We consider a source node that attempts to send both public and covert messages to a destination node through a relay on which a covert message detector is embedded. By taking the minimum detection error probability (DEP) at the relay into account, we optimize the power distribution between the public and covert messages to achieve the maximum covert rate. We further make a delay-aware comparison among DF, CF and AF relay systems with the obtained closed-form covert rates and conduct an extensive examination on the asymptotic behaviors in different limits. Our analyses reveal that CF or AF tend to outperform DF for high source transmit power or low relay transmit power, while various system parameters such as the processing delay, minimum required quality of service for public messages and DEP threshold lead to different performance relationships among DF, CF and AF for high relay transmit power. Numerical results verify our investigation into the performance comparison in various channel models.

A Joint Extraction Model for Entity Relationships Based on Span and Cascaded Dual Decoding.

The entity-relationship joint extraction model plays a significant role in entity relationship extraction. The existing entity-relationship joint extraction model cannot effectively identify entity-relationship triples in overlapping relationships. This paper proposes a new joint entity-relationship extraction model based on the span and a cascaded dual decoding. The model includes a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) encoding layer, a relational decoding layer, and an entity decoding layer. The model first converts the text input into the BERT pretrained language model into word vectors. Then, it divides the word vectors based on the span to form a span sequence and decodes the relationship between the span sequence to obtain the relationship type in the span sequence. Finally, the entity decoding layer fuses the span sequences and the relationship type obtained by relation decoding and uses a bi-directional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) neural network to obtain the head entity and tail entity in the span sequence. Using the combination of span division and cascaded double decoding, the overlapping relations existing in the text can be effectively identified. Experiments show that compared with other baseline models, the F1 value of the model is effectively improved on the NYT dataset and WebNLG dataset.

Robust Transceiver Design for IRS-Assisted Cascaded MIMO Communication Systems.

Intelligent reconfigurable surfaces (IRSs) have gained much attention due to their passive behavior that can be a successor to relays in many applications. However, traditional relay systems might still be a perfect choice when reliability and throughput are the main concerns in a communication system. In this work, we use an IRS along with a decode-and-forward relay to provide a possible solution to address one of the main challenges of future wireless networks which is providing reliability. We investigate a robust transceiver design against the residual self-interference (RSI), which maximizes the throughput rate under self-interference channel uncertainty-bound constraints. The yielded problem turns out to be a non-convex optimization problem, where the non-convex objective is optimized over the cone of semidefinite matrices. We propose a novel mathematical method to find a lower bound on the performance of the IRS that can be used as a benchmark. Eventually, we show an important result in which, for the worst-case scenario, IRS can be helpful only if the number of IRS elements are at least as large as the size of the interference channel. Moreover, a novel method based on majorization theory and singular value decomposition (SVD) is proposed to find the best response of the transmitters and relay against worst-case RSI. Furthermore, we propose a multi-level water-filling algorithm to obtain a locally optimal solution iteratively. We show that our algorithm performs better that the state of the art in terms of time complexity as well as robustness. For instance, our numerical results show that the acheivable rate can be increased twofold and almost sixfold, respectively, for the case of small and large antenna array at transceivers.

Design and Synchronization Procedures of a D&F Co-Operative 5G Network Based on SDR Hardware Interface: Performance Analysis.

Software defined radio (SDR) is a commonly used platform for its ease of operation and cost-effectiveness for the development and testing of real wireless communication systems. By supporting high transmission rates and enabling fast and cost-effective deployments, mainly in millimeter-wave (mmWave), the co-operative 5G network has been standardized by 3GPP Release 16. In this paper, a decode-and-forward (D&F) co-operative hardware network is proposed as one of the key technologies for future 5G/6G wireless networks. The proposed system consists of an emulated base station processing unit (gnodeB), a D&F protocol and the user equipment (UE). In particular, the design of the D&F relay node is based on an MIMO layer 2 relay technology. A testbed based on an SDR platform and MatlabTM software, in which the physical broadcast channel (PBCH) transmission, physical downlink control channel (PDCCH), physical downlink shared channel (PDSCH), and downlink shared channel (DL-SCH) for transport channel coding, according to the 3GPP standardized 5G downlink signal, has been designed. The key performance indicators (KPIs), namely EVM, BER, and throughput, were measured for 5G signals with 64-QAM and 256-QAM modulation schemes. The obtained results show that the D&F co-operative 5G network achieves substantially improved KPIs in the communication between the gnodeB and the UE in an outdoor-to-indoor scenario. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that the D&F protocol presents a good performance and behavior being compared to one commercial equipment.

Efficient Polar Coded Selective Decode-and-Forward with Cooperative Decision Threshold in Cooperative Multi-Relay Transmissions.

In some satellite Internet of Things (IoT) devices with terrain shielding, the qualities of the direct source-destination (S-D) channel are poor, requiring cooperative communications with multi-relays to be employed. In order to solve error propagation of current decode-and-forward (DF) on such occasions, an efficient polar coded selective decode-and-forward (SDF) cooperation method is proposed with a new decision threshold derived from channel state information (CSI). First, the proposed threshold is derived from the CSI by exploiting the channel gain ratio of optimal relay-destination link (R-D) with source-relay (S-R) link. The above R-D link possesses good channel quality among all links in the system. Second, when the channel gain ratio of certain relay links is larger than the aforementioned decision threshold, the source and all these relays cooperatively send messages together to the destination to accomplish perfect SDF transmission. Otherwise, all relays are frozen and the messages are directly transmitted through the S-D link. If it fails anyway, a retransmission is subsequently tried in the next transmission cycle. In addition, a polar code for fading channels is designed and adaptively adjusted to a proper code rate according to channel quality to attain good bit error rate (BER) performance. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves about 0.9 and 0.5 dB gain at BER of 10-4, respectively, in multi-relay cooperative communications with multi-path fading channels compared with those of non-cooperation and existing polar coded cooperation channels. Therefore, the proposed polar coded SDF (PCSDF) scheme can improve both the BER and the outage probability (OP) performance in multi-relay cooperative systems, making it quite suitable for heterogeneous network applications in cooperative satellite IoT systems involving sixth-generation (6G) communications.

Outage Performance of Wireless Powered Decode-and-Forward Relaying Networks in Rician Fading.

This paper investigates the outage performance of simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT)-enabled relay networks with the decode-and-forward relaying protocol, where the effect of the energy triggering threshold at the relay on the system performance is considered. The closed-form expressions of the system outage probability and throughput are derived in Rician channel fading. Monte Carlo Simulation method is used to verify the accuracy of the derived closed-form expressions. The effects of some system parameters on the system performances are discussed via simulations, which show that the system outage probability increases with the increase of the minimum transmission rate required by the users and also decreases with the increase of the energy conversion efficiency. Besides, the system throughput increaseswith the increment of the transmit power of the source node, as well as the energy conversion efficiency. Additionally, the outage performance of the system with the equal two-hop distance is better than that of the system with unequal two-hop distance.

A Study of Physical Layer Security in SWIPT-Based Decode-and-Forward Relay Networks with Dynamic Power Splitting.

In this paper, we study the physical layer security for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT)-based half-duplex (HD) decode-and-forward relaying system. We consider a system model including one transmitter that tries to transmit information to one receiver under the help of multiple relay users and in the presence of one eavesdropper that attempts to overhear the confidential information. More specifically, to investigate the secrecy performance, we derive closed-form expressions of outage probability (OP) and secrecy outage probability for dynamic power splitting-based relaying (DPSBR) and static power splitting-based relaying (SPSBR) schemes. Moreover, the lower bound of secrecy outage probability is obtained when the source's transmit power goes to infinity. The Monte Carlo simulations are given to corroborate the correctness of our mathematical analysis. It is observed from simulation results that the proposed DPSBR scheme outperforms the SPSBR-based schemes in terms of OP and SOP under the impact of different parameters on system performance.

Outage Analysis of the Power Splitting Based Underlay Cooperative Cognitive Radio Networks.

In the present paper, we investigate the performance of the simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) based cooperative cognitive radio networks (CCRNs). In particular, the outage probability is derived in the closed-form expressions under the opportunistic partial relay selection. Different from the conventional CRNs in which the transmit power of the secondary transmitters count merely on the aggregate interference measured on the primary networks, the transmit power of the SWIPT-enabled transmitters is also constrained by the harvested energy. As a result, the mathematical framework involves more correlated random variables and, thus, is of higher complexity. Monte Carlo simulations are given to corroborate the accuracy of the mathematical analysis and to shed light on the behavior of the OP with respect to several important parameters, e.g., the transmit power and the number of relays. Our findings illustrate that increasing the transmit power and/or the number of relays is beneficial for the outage probability.

A Two-Hop mmWave MIMO NR-Relay Nodes to Enhance the Average System Throughput and BER in Outdoor-to-Indoor Environments.

Millimeter-Wave (mmWave) bands are receiving enormous attention in 5G mobile communications, due to the capability to provide a multi-gigabit transmission rate. In this paper, a two-hop architecture for 5G communications with the capacity to support high end-to-end performance due to the use of Relay Nodes (RNs) in mmWave-bands is presented. One of the novelties of the paper is the implementation of Amplify-and-Forward (A&F) and Decode-and-Forward (D&F) RNs along with a mmWave-band transceiver chain (Tx/Rx). In addition, two approaches for channel estimation were implemented at the D&F RN for decoding the backhaul link. One of them assumes complete knowledge of the channel (PCE), and the other one performs the channel estimation through Least Square (LS) estimator. A large number of simulations, using MATLABTM and SimulinkTM software, were performed to verify the potential benefits of the proposal two-hop 5G architecture in an outdoor-to-indoor scenario. The main novelty in performing these simulations is the use of signals with 5G features, as DL-SCH transport channel coding, PDSCH generation, and SS Burst generation, which is another of the main contributions of the paper. On the other hand, mmWave transmitter and receiver chains were designed and implemented with off-the shelf components. The simulations show that the two-hop network substantially improves the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Bit Error Rate (BER), and Throughput, in the communications between the logical 5G Radio Node (gNodeB), and the New Radio User Equipment (NR-UE). For example, a throughput improvement of 22 Mbps is obtained when a 4 × 4 × 2 MIMO D&F with LS architecture is used versus a SISO D&F with PCE architecture for Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) = 20 dB and 64-QAM signal. This improvement reaches 96 Mbps if a 256-QAM signal is considered. The improvement in BER is 11 dB and 10.5 dB, respectively, for both cases. This work also shows that the obtained results with D&F RNs are better than with A&F RNs. For example, an improvement of 17 Mbps in the use of SISO D&F with LS vs. SISO A&F, for the 64-QAM signal is obtained. Besides, this paper constitutes a first step to the implementation of a mmWave MIMO 5G cooperative network platform.

Performance Enhancement for Full-Duplex Relaying with Time-Switching-Based SWIPT in Wireless Sensors Networks.

Full-duplex (FD) with simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) in wireless ad hoc networks has received increased attention as a technology for improving spectrum and energy efficiency. This paper studies the outage performance for a SWIPT-based decode-and-forward (DF) FD relaying network consisting of a single-antenna source S, a two-antenna relay R, and a multi-antenna destination D. Specifically, we propose four protocols, namely static time-switching factor with selection combining (STSF-SC), static time-switching factor with maximal ratio combining (STSF-MRC), optimal dynamic time-switching factor with selection combining (ODTSF-SC), and optimal dynamic time-switching factor with maximal ratio combining (ODTSF-MRC) to fully investigate the outage performance of the proposed system. In particular, the optimal time-switching factor from the ODTSF-SC and ODTSF-MRC methods is designed to maximize the total received data at the destination. In this context, we derive exact closed-formed expressions for all schemes in terms of the outage probability (OP). Finally, the Monte Carlo simulations are conducted to corroborate the theoretical analysis's correctness and the proposed schemes' effectiveness.

Performance Analysis of Underlay Cognitive Radio System with Self-Sustainable Relay and Statistical CSI.

The relentlessly increasing number of small-sized devices with limited powering and computational capabilities requires the adoption of new approaches to spectrum access. In this paper, we analyze an underlay cooperative cognitive wireless system based on available statistical channel state information (CSI) that is applicable to the cognitive system with limited computational resources due to its low complexity. We considered the scenario where the primary and the cognitive network coexist in the same spectrum band, under the constraints of interference threshold and maximal tolerable outage permitted by the primary user. The communication in the secondary decode-and-forward (DF) relaying system is established via a self-sustainable relay, which harvests energy from both cognitive and primary transmitters. The closed-form expressions for the outage probability of the cognitive network are derived, which are valid for both time-switching relaying (TSR) and power-splitting relaying (PSR) protocols. We analyze the influence of both cognitive and primary systems as well as the impact of channel parameters on the cognitive system outage performance. The derived analytical results are corroborated by an independent simulation method.

Opportunistic DF-AF Selection Relaying in Hybrid Wireless and Power Line Communication for Indoor IoT Networks.

This manuscript investigates the system performance of hybrid wireless and power line communication networks for indoor Internet of Things applications. Differentiating itself from the existing literature, the performance of the direct link and dual-hop energy harvesting relay-aided links is analyzed under the condition of indoor fading modeled by log-normal distribution. Moreover, the manuscript presents the analytical expressions of the successful transmission probability of the deployed opportunistic decode-and-forward and amplify-and-forward relay selection scheme, and validates them with Monte Carlo simulations. Moreover, the impact of different system parameters on the successful transmission probability is revealed. For the considered hybrid system, in general, the opportunistic decode-and-forward relaying scheme outperforms the opportunistic amplify-and-forward relaying scheme. As importantly, increasing the source to relay distance and power splitting ratio over certain limits significantly deteriorates the system performance, indicated by the decrease in the successful transmission probability.

On the Use of NB-IoT over GEO Satellite Systems with Time-Packed Optical Feeder Links for Over-the-Air Firmware/Software Updates of Machine-Type Terminals.

The verticals of 5G, such as the automotive, smart grid, and smart cities sectors, will bring new sensors and IoT devices requiring Internet connectivity. Most of these machine-type terminals will be sparsely distributed, covering a very large geographical area and, from time to time, will have to update their software, firmware, and/or other relevant data. Given this situation, one viable solution to implement the "Over-the-Air" update of these IoT terminals can be done with the aid of GEO satellite systems. However, due to the ultra-dense radio frequency reuse factor that contemporary High-Throughput Satellite (HTS) systems implement in the access link to serve the IoT terminals, the use of a time-packed Free Space Optical (FSO) link represents a practical solution to avoid the bottleneck that the satellite gateway experiences in the feeder link. The performance of both Detect-and-Forward and Decode-and-Forward relaying strategies are studied, assuming that the single-carrier M-PAM symbols that are transmitted on the optical feeder link are mapped into M-QAM symbols that modulate the multiple sub-carriers of the OFDM-based radio access link. In addition, the benefits of encapsulating the NB-IoT frames into DVB-S2(X) satellite frames is also analyzed in detail. The effects of the impairments introduced in both the optical feeder and radio access links are characterized in detail, and the end-to-end error correction capabilities of the Modulation and Coding Schemes (MCS) defined in the contemporary releases of the NB-IoT and DVB-S2(X) standards are studied for different working regimes.

Secure Polar Coding for the Primitive Relay Wiretap Channel.

With the emergence of wireless networks, cooperation for secrecy is recognized as an attractive way to establish secure communications. Departing from cryptographic techniques, secrecy can be provided by exploiting the wireless channel characteristics; that is, some error-correcting codes besides reliability have been shown to achieve information-theoretic security. In this paper, we propose a polar-coding-based technique for the primitive relay wiretap channel and show that this technique is suitable to provide information-theoretic security. Specifically, we integrate at the relay an additional functionality, which allows it to smartly decide whether it will cooperate or not based on the decoding detector result. In the case of cooperation, the relay operates in a decode-and-forward mode and assists the communication by transmitting a complementary message to the destination in order to correctly decode the initial source's message. Otherwise, the communication is completed with direct transmission from source to the destination. Finally, we first prove that the proposed encoding scheme achieves weak secrecy, then, in order to overcome the obstacle of misaligned bits, we implement a double-chaining construction, which achieves strong secrecy.

Performance Optimization of Hybrid Satellite-Terrestrial Relay Network Based on CR-NOMA.

The non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme realizes the transmission of multiple user signals at the same time and frequency resource block through power domain multiplexing, which improves the system transmission rate and user fairness. In this paper, we propose a joint relay-and-antenna selection scheme based on the cognitive radio scenario. This scheme can achieve the maximum communication rate of the secondary user when the primary user maintains the optimal outage performance. In the considered system both terrestrial relays and users are deployed with multi-antenna configurations and the terrestrial relays adopt the decode-and-forward (DF) strategy to achieve communication between satellites and users. Then, we derive the exact outage probability expression of each user in the system and the asymptotic probability expression under high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Numeric results demonstrate that increasing the number of relays and antennas on the terrestrial nodes can both improve system outage performance. Moreover, the number of relays imposes a more obvious effect on the achievable system performance.

Performance Analysis of Cooperative NOMA Networks with Imperfect CSI over Nakagami-m Fading Channels.

In this paper, we investigate a downlink cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) network with decode-and-forward relaying, where two scenarios of user relaying with direct link and user relaying without direct link are discussed in detail. More particularly, the performance of cooperative NOMA system under the assumption of imperfect channel state information (ipCSI) is studied over Nakagami-m fading channels. To evaluate the outage performance of the above discussed two scenarios, the closed-form expressions of outage probability for a pair of users are derived carefully. The diversity orders of users are achieved in the high signal-to-noise region. An error floor appears in the outage probability owing to the existence of channel estimation errors under ipCSI conditions. Simulation results verify the validity of our analysis and show that: (1) NOMA is superior to conventional orthogonal multiple access; (2) The best user relaying location for cooperative NOMA networks should be near to the base station; and (3) The outage performance of distant user with direct link significantly outperforms distant user without direct link by comparing the two scenarios.

Outage Analysis of Parasitic Ambient Backscatter Communication in Decode-and-Forward Relay Networks with SWIPT.

In this paper, we investigate the outage performance of simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) based Decode-and-Forward (DF) relay networks, where the relay needs to simultaneously forward information for two relaying links, primary relaying link and parasitic relaying link. The primary relaying link is the traditional source-relay-destination relay system. While in the parasitic relaying link, the parasitic source, i.e., Internet-of-Things (IoT) tag, is not connected to the stable power source and thus has to backscatter the signals from the primary source to convey its information. The relay not only harvests energy from Radio Frequency (RF) signals from both sources but also forwards messages to their corresponding destinations. The primary source and destination are unaware of the parasitic backscatter transmission, but the relay and parasitic destination can employ successive interference cancellation (SIC) detector to eliminate the interference from the primary link and detect the message from the parasitic source. In order to investigate the interplay between the primary and parasitic relaying links, the outage probabilities of both relaying links are derived. Besides, the effects of system parameters, i.e., power splitting coefficient, forwarding power allocation coefficient and backscatter reflection coefficient, on the system performance are discussed. Simulation results verify our theoretical analysis. In the meanwhile, it is revealed that the advised relaying system has far larger sum throughput than the one with only primary relaying link and the parasitic relaying link can gain considerable throughput at the cost of negligible degradation of primary throughput.