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

Trusted Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface for Multi-User Quantum Key Distribution

We consider a multi-user quantum key distribution (QKD) system based on free-space optics (FSO) in terrestrial environment. Due to obstacles in the signal path, FSO-QKD is heavily affected by decoherence and other harmful effects. In order to avoid the performance degradation, trusted nodes (TNs) are introduced in the QKD network. However, in absence of alternative signal routes, the classical data and the quantum key are relayed by the same TN, which makes it a promising target for an eavesdropping attack. In order to address this issue, we explore the use of a trusted reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) that passively reflects the classical signals and manipulates them to make the encryption consistent with the distributed keys. The concept is supported by numerical simulations with multiple FSO-QKD users and an eavesdropper. We demonstrate that the level of data protection is very high with the proposed concept even in case of a successful attack on the trusted RIS and a complete key acquisition by the eavesdropper

Efficient Detectors for Telegram Splitting based Transmission in Low Power Wide Area Networks with Bursty Interference

Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) networks are known to be highly vulnerable to external in-band interference in terms of packet collisions which may substantially degrade the system performance. In order to enhance the performance in such cases, the telegram splitting (TS) method has been proposed recently. This approach exploits the typical burstiness of the interference via forward error correction (FEC) and offers a substantial performance improvement compared to other methods for packet transmissions in LPWA networks. While it has been already demonstrated that the TS method benefits from knowledge on the current interference state at the receiver side, corresponding practical receiver algorithms of high performance are still missing. The modeling of the bursty interference via Markov chains leads to the optimal detector in terms of a-posteriori symbol error probability. However, this solution requires a high computational complexity, assumes an a-priori knowledge on the interference characteristics and lacks flexibility. We propose a further developed scheme with increased flexibility and introduce an approach to reduce its complexity while maintaining a close-to-optimum performance. In particular, the proposed low complexity solution substantially outperforms existing practical methods in terms of packet error rate and therefore is highly beneficial for practical LPWA network scenarios.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Communication

Coverage Probability of STAR-RIS assisted Massive MIMO systems with Correlation and Phase Errors

© 2022 IEEE. This is the accepted manuscript version of an article which has been published in final form http://doi.org/ 10.1109/LWC.2022.3179653In this letter, we investigate a simultaneous transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) assisting a massive multiple-input multiple-output (mMIMO) system. In particular, we derive a closed-form expression for the coverage probability of a STAR-RIS assisted mMIMO system while accounting for correlated fading and phase-shift errors. Notably, the phase configuration takes place at every several coherence intervals by optimizing the coverage probability since the latter depends on statistical channel state information (CSI) in terms of large-scale statistics. As a result, we achieve a reduced complexity and overhead for the optimization of passive beamforming, which are increased in the case of STAR-RIS networks with instantaneous CSI. Numerical results corroborate our analysis, shed light on interesting properties such as the impact of the number of RIS elements and the effect of phase errors, along with affirming the superiority of STAR-RIS against reflective-only RIS.Peer reviewe

Receive Beamforming for Ultrareliable Random Access based SWIPT

Ultrareliable uplink communication based on random access poses novel research challenges for the receiver design. Here, the uncertainty imposed by the random access and a large amount of interfering transmissions is the limiting factor for the system performance. Recently, this type of communication has been addressed in context of simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT). The need to adapt the power splitting to the signal states according to the underlying random access has been tackled by introducing a predictor, which determines the valid states of the received signal based on the long-term observation. Hence, the power splitting factor is scaled accordingly in order to guarantee ultrareliable communication and maximized harvested energy.In this work, we extend the considered SWIPT scenario by introducing multiple antennas at the receiver side. Through this, the received energy can be substantially increased, if the energy harvesting parameters and the spatial filter coefficients are jointly optimized. Hence, we propose an optimization procedure, which aims at maximizing the harvested energy under the ultrareliability constraint. The mentioned prediction method is then combined with the optimization solution and the resulting system performance is numerically evaluated

Successive Convex Approximation for Transmit Power Minimization in SWIPT-Multicast Systems

We propose a novel technique for total transmit power minimization and optimal precoder design in wireless multi-group (MG) multicasting (MC) systems. The considered framework consists of three different systems capable of handling heterogeneous user types viz., information decoding (ID) specific users with conventional receiver architectures, energy harvesting (EH) only users with non-linear EH module, and users with joint ID and EH capabilities having separate units for the two operations, respectively. Each user is categorized under unique group(s), which can be of MC type specifically meant for ID users, and/or an energy group consisting of EH explicit users. The joint ID and EH users are a part of the (last) EH group as well as any one of the MC groups distinctly. In this regard, we formulate an optimization problem to minimize the total transmit power with optimal precoder designs for the three aforementioned scenarios, under constraints on minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio and harvested energy by the users with respective demands. The problem may be adapted to the well-known semi-definite program, which can be typically solved via relaxation of rank-1 constraint. However, the relaxation of this constraint may in some cases lead to performance degradation, which increases with the rank of the solution obtained from the relaxed problem. Hence, we develop a novel technique motivated by the feasible-point pursuit and successive convex approximation method in order to address the rank-related issue. The benefits of the proposed method are illustrated under various operating conditions and parameter values, with comparison between the three above-mentioned scenarios

Coverage Probability of STAR-RIS assisted Massive MIMO systems with Correlation and Phase Errors

© 2022 IEEE. This is the accepted manuscript version of an article which has been published in final form http://doi.org/ 10.1109/LWC.2022.3179653In this letter, we investigate a simultaneous transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) assisting a massive multiple-input multiple-output (mMIMO) system. In particular, we derive a closed-form expression for the coverage probability of a STAR-RIS assisted mMIMO system while accounting for correlated fading and phase-shift errors. Notably, the phase configuration takes place at every several coherence intervals by optimizing the coverage probability since the latter depends on statistical channel state information (CSI) in terms of large-scale statistics. As a result, we achieve a reduced complexity and overhead for the optimization of passive beamforming, which are increased in the case of STAR-RIS networks with instantaneous CSI. Numerical results corroborate our analysis, shed light on interesting properties such as the impact of the number of RIS elements and the effect of phase errors, along with affirming the superiority of STAR-RIS against reflective-only RIS.Peer reviewe

Efficient Preamble Detection and Time-of-Arrival Estimation for Single-Tone Frequency Hopping Random Access in NB-IoT

The narrowband internet of things (NB-IoT) standard is a new cellular wireless technology, which has been introduced by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) with the goal to connect massive low-cost, low-complexity and long-life IoT devices with extended coverage. In order to improve power efficiency, 3GPP proposed a new Random Access (RA) waveform for NB-IoT based on a single-tone frequencyhopping scheme. RA handles the first connection between user equipments (UEs) and the base station (BS). Through this, UEs can be identified and synchronized with the BS. In this context, receiver methods for the detection of the new waveform should satisfy the requirements on the successful user detection as well as the timing synchronization accuracy. This is not a trivial task, especially in the presence of radio impairments like carrier frequency offset (CFO) which constitutes one of the main radio impairments besides the noise. In order to tackle this problem, we propose a new receiver method for NB-IoT Physical Random Access Channel (NPRACH). The method is designed to eliminate perfectly the CFO without any additional computational complexity and supports all NPRACH preamble formats. The associated performance has been evaluated under 3GPP conditions. We observe a very high performance compared both to 3GPP requirements and to the existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of detection accuracy and complexity

Random Access based Reliable Uplink Communication and Power Transfer using Dynamic Power Splitting

Large communication networks, e.g. Internet of Things (IoT), are known to be vulnerable to co-channel interference. One possibility to address this issue is the use of orthogonal multiple access (OMA) techniques. However, due to a potentially very long duty cycle, OMA is not well suited for such schemes. Instead, random medium access (RMA) appears more promising. An RMA scheme is based on transmission of short data packets with random scheduling, which is typically unknown to the receiver. The received signal, which consists of the overlapping packets, can be used for energy harvesting and powering of a relay device. Such an energy harvesting relay may utilize the energy for further information processing and uplink transmission. In this paper, we address the design of a simultaneous information and power transfer scheme based on randomly scheduled packet transmissions and reliable symbol detection. We formulate a prediction problem with the goal to maximize the harvested power for an RMA scenario. In order to solve this problem, we propose a new prediction method, which shows a significant performance improvement compared to the straightforward baseline scheme. Furthermore, we investigate the complexity of the proposed method and its vulnerability to imperfect channel state information