Green Communication via Power-optimized HARQ Protocols

Recently, efficient use of energy has become an essential research topic for green communication. This paper studies the effect of optimal power controllers on the performance of delay-sensitive communication setups utilizing hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ). The results are obtained for repetition time diversity (RTD) and incremental redundancy (INR) HARQ protocols. In all cases, the optimal power allocation, minimizing the outage-limited average transmission power, is obtained under both continuous and bursting communication models. Also, we investigate the system throughput in different conditions. The results indicate that the power efficiency is increased substantially, if adaptive power allocation is utilized. For instance, assume Rayleigh-fading channel, a maximum of two (re)transmission rounds with rates $\{1,\frac{1}{2}\}$ nats-per-channel-use and an outage probability constraint ${10}^{-3}$. Then, compared to uniform power allocation, optimal power allocation in RTD reduces the average power by 9 and 11 dB in the bursting and continuous communication models, respectively. In INR, these values are obtained to be 8 and 9 dB, respectively.Comment: Accepted for publication on IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technolog

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces for Wireless Communications: Principles, Challenges, and Opportunities

Recently there has been a flurry of research on the use of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) in wireless networks to create smart radio environments. In a smart radio environment, surfaces are capable of manipulating the propagation of incident electromagnetic waves in a programmable manner to actively alter the channel realization, which turns the wireless channel into a controllable system block that can be optimized to improve overall system performance. In this article, we provide a tutorial overview of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) for wireless communications. We describe the working principles of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) and elaborate on different candidate implementations using metasurfaces and reflectarrays. We discuss the channel models suitable for both implementations and examine the feasibility of obtaining accurate channel estimates. Furthermore, we discuss the aspects that differentiate RIS optimization from precoding for traditional MIMO arrays highlighting both the arising challenges and the potential opportunities associated with this emerging technology. Finally, we present numerical results to illustrate the power of an RIS in shaping the key properties of a MIMO channel.Comment: to appear in the IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications and Networking (TCCN

Event-Driven Optimal Feedback Control for Multi-Antenna Beamforming

Transmit beamforming is a simple multi-antenna technique for increasing throughput and the transmission range of a wireless communication system. The required feedback of channel state information (CSI) can potentially result in excessive overhead especially for high mobility or many antennas. This work concerns efficient feedback for transmit beamforming and establishes a new approach of controlling feedback for maximizing net throughput, defined as throughput minus average feedback cost. The feedback controller using a stationary policy turns CSI feedback on/off according to the system state that comprises the channel state and transmit beamformer. Assuming channel isotropy and Markovity, the controller's state reduces to two scalars. This allows the optimal control policy to be efficiently computed using dynamic programming. Consider the perfect feedback channel free of error, where each feedback instant pays a fixed price. The corresponding optimal feedback control policy is proved to be of the threshold type. This result holds regardless of whether the controller's state space is discretized or continuous. Under the threshold-type policy, feedback is performed whenever a state variable indicating the accuracy of transmit CSI is below a threshold, which varies with channel power. The practical finite-rate feedback channel is also considered. The optimal policy for quantized feedback is proved to be also of the threshold type. The effect of CSI quantization is shown to be equivalent to an increment on the feedback price. Moreover, the increment is upper bounded by the expected logarithm of one minus the quantization error. Finally, simulation shows that feedback control increases net throughput of the conventional periodic feedback by up to 0.5 bit/s/Hz without requiring additional bandwidth or antennas.Comment: 29 pages; submitted for publicatio