Multiple Access in Aerial Networks: From Orthogonal and Non-Orthogonal to Rate-Splitting

Recently, interest on the utilization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has aroused. Specifically, UAVs can be used in cellular networks as aerial users for delivery, surveillance, rescue search, or as an aerial base station (aBS) for communication with ground users in remote uncovered areas or in dense environments requiring prompt high capacity. Aiming to satisfy the high requirements of wireless aerial networks, several multiple access techniques have been investigated. In particular, space-division multiple access(SDMA) and power-domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) present promising multiplexing gains for aerial downlink and uplink. Nevertheless, these gains are limited as they depend on the conditions of the environment. Hence, a generalized scheme has been recently proposed, called rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA), which is capable of achieving better spectral efficiency gains compared to SDMA and NOMA. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of key multiple access technologies adopted for aerial networks, where aBSs are deployed to serve ground users. Since there have been only sporadic results reported on the use of RSMA in aerial systems, we aim to extend the discussion on this topic by modelling and analyzing the weighted sum-rate performance of a two-user downlink network served by an RSMA-based aBS. Finally, related open issues and future research directions are exposed.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures, submitted to IEEE Journa

Outage probability analysis of EH relay-assisted non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems over Block Rayleigh Fading Channel

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been identified as a promising multiple access technique for the fifth generation (5G) mobile networks due to its superior spectral efficiency. In this paper, we propose and investigate a Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) of energy harvesting (EH) relay assisted system over Block Rayleigh Fading Channel. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed system, the integral expression of the outage probability is analyzed and derived. Numerical results confirm that our derived analytical results match well with the Monte Carlo simulations in connection with all possible system parameter

Highly Efficient Resource Allocation Techniques in 5G for NOMA-based Massive MIMO and Relaying Systems

The explosive proliferation of smart devices in the 5-th generation (5G) network expects 1,000-fold capacity enhancement, leading to the urgent need of highly resource-efficient technologies. Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), a promising spectral efficient technology for 5G to serve multiple users concurrently, can be combined with massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) and relaying technology, to achieve highly efficient communications. Hence, this thesis studies the design and resource allocation of NOMA-based massive MIMO and relaying systems. Due to hardware constraints and channel condition variation, the first topic of the thesis develops efficient antenna selection and user scheduling algorithms for sum rate maximization in two MIMO-NOMA scenarios. In the single-band scenario, the proposed algorithm improves antenna search efficiency by limiting the candidate antennas to those are beneficial to the relevant users. In the multi-band scenario, the proposed algorithm selects the antennas and users with the highest contribution total channel gain. Numerical results show that our proposed algorithms achieve similar performance to other algorithms with reduced complexity. The second part of the thesis proposes the relaying and power allocation scheme for the NOMA-assisted relaying system to serve multiple cell-edge users. The relay node decodes its own message from the source NOMA signal and transmits the remaining part of signal to cell-edge users. The power allocation scheme is developed by minimizing the system outage probability. To further evaluate the system performance, the ergodic capacity is approximated by analyzing the interference at cell-edge users. Numerical results proves the performance improvement of the proposed system over conventional orthogonal multiple access mechanism

Performance analysis of power-splitting relaying protocol in SWIPT based cooperative NOMA systems

This paper investigates a relay assisted simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) for downlink in cellular systems. Cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (C-NOMA) is employed along with power splitting protocol to enable both energy harvesting (EH) and information processing (IP). A downlink model consists of a base station (BS) and two users is considered, in which the near user (NU) is selected as a relay to forward the received signal from the BS to the far user (FU). Maximum ratio combining is then employed at the FU to combine both the signals received from the BS and NU. Closed form expressions of outage probability, throughput, ergodic rate and energy efficiency (EE) are firstly derived for the SWIPT based C-NOMA considering both scenarios of with and without direct link between the BS and FU. The impacts of EH time, EH efficiency, power-splitting ratio, source data rate and distance between different nodes on the performance are then investigated. The simulation results show that the C-NOMA with direct link achieves an outperformed performance over C-NOMA without direct link. Moreover, the performance of C-NOMA with direct link is also higher than that for OMA. Specifically, (1) the outage probability for C-NOMA in both direct and relaying link cases is always lower than that for OMA. (2) the outage probability, throughput and ergodic rate vary according to β, (3) the EE of both users can obtain in SNR range of from -10 to 5 dB and it decreases linearly as SNR increases. Numerical results are provided to verify the findings

A Comprehensive Overview on 5G-and-Beyond Networks with UAVs: From Communications to Sensing and Intelligence

Due to the advancements in cellular technologies and the dense deployment of cellular infrastructure, integrating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into the fifth-generation (5G) and beyond cellular networks is a promising solution to achieve safe UAV operation as well as enabling diversified applications with mission-specific payload data delivery. In particular, 5G networks need to support three typical usage scenarios, namely, enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC), and massive machine-type communications (mMTC). On the one hand, UAVs can be leveraged as cost-effective aerial platforms to provide ground users with enhanced communication services by exploiting their high cruising altitude and controllable maneuverability in three-dimensional (3D) space. On the other hand, providing such communication services simultaneously for both UAV and ground users poses new challenges due to the need for ubiquitous 3D signal coverage as well as the strong air-ground network interference. Besides the requirement of high-performance wireless communications, the ability to support effective and efficient sensing as well as network intelligence is also essential for 5G-and-beyond 3D heterogeneous wireless networks with coexisting aerial and ground users. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of the latest research efforts on integrating UAVs into cellular networks, with an emphasis on how to exploit advanced techniques (e.g., intelligent reflecting surface, short packet transmission, energy harvesting, joint communication and radar sensing, and edge intelligence) to meet the diversified service requirements of next-generation wireless systems. Moreover, we highlight important directions for further investigation in future work.Comment: Accepted by IEEE JSA

Effects of residual hardware impairments on secure NOMA-based cooperative systems

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been proposed as a promising technology that is capable of improving the spectral efficiency of fifth-generation wireless networks and beyond. However, in practical communication scenarios, transceiver architectures inevitably suffer from radio frequency (RF) front-end related impairments that cause non-negligible performance degradation. This issue can be addressed by analog and digital signal processing algorithms, however, inevitable aspects of this approach such as time-varying hardware characteristics and imperfect compensation schemes result to detrimental residual distortions. In the present contribution we investigate the physical layer security of NOMA- based amplify-and-forward relay systems under such realistically incurred residual hardware impairment (RHI) effects. Exact and asymptotic analytic expressions for the corresponding outage probability (OP) and intercept probability (IP) of the considered setup over multipath fading channels are derived and corroborated by respective simulation results. Based on this, it is shown that RHI affects both the legitimate users and eavesdroppers by increasing the OP and decreasing the IP. For a fixed OP, RHI generally increases the corresponding IP, thereby reducing the secure performance of the system. Further interesting insights are provided, verifying the importance of the offered results for the effective design and deployment of secure cooperative communication systems