Massive Access in Cell-Free Massive MIMO-Based Internet of Things: Cloud Computing and Edge Computing Paradigms

This paper studies massive access in cell-free massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) based Internet of Things and solves the challenging active user detection (AUD) and channel estimation (CE) problems. For the uplink transmission, we propose an advanced frame structure design to reduce the access latency. Moreover, by considering the cooperation of all access points (APs), we investigate two processing paradigms at the receiver for massive access: cloud computing and edge computing. For cloud computing, all APs are connected to a centralized processing unit (CPU), and the signals received at all APs are centrally processed at the CPU. While for edge computing, the central processing is offloaded to part of APs equipped with distributed processing units, so that the AUD and CE can be performed in a distributed processing strategy. Furthermore, by leveraging the structured sparsity of the channel matrix, we develop a structured sparsity-based generalized approximated message passing (SS-GAMP) algorithm for reliable joint AUD and CE, where the quantization accuracy of the processed signals is taken into account. Based on the SS-GAMP algorithm, a successive interference cancellation-based AUD and CE scheme is further developed under two paradigms for reduced access latency. Simulation results validate the superiority of the proposed approach over the state-of-the-art baseline schemes. Besides, the results reveal that the edge computing can achieve the similar massive access performance as the cloud computing, and the edge computing is capable of alleviating the burden on CPU, having a faster access response, and supporting more flexible AP cooperation.Comment: 17 pages, 16 figures. The current version has been accepted by IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC) Special Issue on Massive Access for 5G and Beyon

6G Network AI Architecture for Everyone-Centric Customized Services

Mobile communication standards were developed for enhancing transmission and network performance by using more radio resources and improving spectrum and energy efficiency. How to effectively address diverse user requirements and guarantee everyone's Quality of Experience (QoE) remains an open problem. The Sixth Generation (6G) mobile systems will solve this problem by utilizing heterogenous network resources and pervasive intelligence to support everyone-centric customized services anywhere and anytime. In this article, we first coin the concept of Service Requirement Zone (SRZ) on the user side to characterize and visualize the integrated service requirements and preferences of specific tasks of individual users. On the system side, we further introduce the concept of User Satisfaction Ratio (USR) to evaluate the system's overall service ability of satisfying a variety of tasks with different SRZs. Then, we propose a network Artificial Intelligence (AI) architecture with integrated network resources and pervasive AI capabilities for supporting customized services with guaranteed QoEs. Finally, extensive simulations show that the proposed network AI architecture can consistently offer a higher USR performance than the cloud AI and edge AI architectures with respect to different task scheduling algorithms, random service requirements, and dynamic network conditions

Throughput Maximization for RIS-Assisted UAV-Enabled WPCN

This paper investigates a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled wireless powered communication network (WPCN). In the system, a UAV acts as a hybrid access point (HAP) to charge usersin the downlink (DL) and receive messages in the uplink (UL). In particular, the RIS is exploited to significantly enhance the efficiency of both the DL and UL transmission. Our objective is to enhance the minimum throughput among all ground users by jointly optimizing the horizontal location of UAVs, the transmit power of users, transmission time allocation, and passive beamforming vectors at the RIS. To address this problem, we present an alternating optimization-based algorithm with low complexity to decompose the problem into four subproblemsand solve them sequentially. In particular, we derive a lower bound of the composite channel gain to tighten the constraints and employ successive convex approximation (SCA) to optimize the horizontal location of the UAV. The transmit power closedform optimum solutions are then obtained, and the problem oftime allocation is reformulated as a linear programming problem. Finally, we optimize the passive beamforming vectors by adopting semi-definite relaxation (SDR). The effectiveness of the algorithm is supported by numerical results, which also demonstrate that the RIS-assisted UAV-enabled WPCN outperforms the traditional WPCN in terms of the minimum throughput.<br/