Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces in Challenging Environments: Underwater, Underground, Industrial and Disaster

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have been introduced to improve the signal propagation characteristics by focusing the signal power in the preferred direction, thus making the communication environment "smart". The typical use cases and applications for the "smart" environment include beyond 5G communication networks, smart cities, etc. The main advantage of employing RISs in such networks is a more efficient exploitation of spatial degrees of freedom. This advantage manifests in better interference mitigation as well as increased spectral and energy efficiency due to passive beam steering. Challenging environments comprise a range of scenarios, which share the fact that it is extremely difficult to establish a communication link using conventional technology due to many impairments typically associated with the propagation medium and increased signal scattering. Although the challenges for the design of communication networks, and specifically the Internet of Things (IoT), in such environments are known, there is no common enabler or solution for all these applications. Interestingly, the use of RISs in such scenarios can become such an enabler and a game changer technology. Surprisingly, the benefits of RIS for wireless networking in underwater and underground medium as well as in industrial and disaster environments have not been addressed yet. In this paper, we aim at filling this gap by discussing potential use cases, deployment strategies and design aspects for RIS devices in underwater IoT, underground IoT as well as Industry 4.0 and emergency networks. In addition, novel research challenges to be addressed in this context are described.Comment: 16 pages, 13 figures, submitted for publication in IEEE journa

Precoded Chebyshev-NLMS based pre-distorter for nonlinear LED compensation in NOMA-VLC

Visible light communication (VLC) is one of the main technologies driving the future 5G communication systems due to its ability to support high data rates with low power consumption, thereby facilitating high speed green communications. To further increase the capacity of VLC systems, a technique called non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been suggested to cater to increasing demand for bandwidth, whereby users' signals are superimposed prior to transmission and detected at each user equipment using successive interference cancellation (SIC). Some recent results on NOMA exist which greatly enhance the achievable capacity as compared to orthogonal multiple access techniques. However, one of the performance-limiting factors affecting VLC systems is the nonlinear characteristics of a light emitting diode (LED). This paper considers the nonlinear LED characteristics in the design of pre-distorter for cognitive radio inspired NOMA in VLC, and proposes singular value decomposition based Chebyshev precoding to improve performance of nonlinear multiple-input multiple output NOMA-VLC. A novel and generalized power allocation strategy is also derived in this work, which is valid even in scenarios when users experience similar channels. Additionally, in this work, analytical upper bounds for the bit error rate of the proposed detector are derived for square $M$-quadrature amplitude modulation.Comment: R. Mitra and V. Bhatia are with Indian Institute of Technology Indore, Indore-453552, India, Email:[email protected], [email protected]. This work was submitted to IEEE Transactions on Communications on October 26, 2016, decisioned on March 3, 2017, and revised on April 25, 2017, and is currently under review in IEEE Transactions on Communication