This letter considers minimizing the bit error rate (BER) of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications assisted by intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs). By noting that increasing the number of IRS elements in the presence of phase errors does not necessarily improve the BER, it is crucial to use only the elements that contribute to reducing the BER. Consequently, we propose an efficient algorithm to activate only the elements that improve the BER. The proposed algorithm has lower complexity and comparable BER to the optimum selection process, which is an NP-hard problem. The accuracy of the estimated phase is evaluated by deriving the probability distribution function (PDF) of the least-square (LS) channel estimator, and showing that the PDF can be closely approximated by the von Mises distribution at high signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). The obtained analytical and simulation results show that using all the available reflectors can significantly deteriorate the BER, and thus, elements’ selection is necessary. In particular scenarios, using about 26% of the reflectors provides more than 10 fold BER reduction.

The synergy of nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and cognitive radio (CR) can provide efficient spectrum utilization for future wireless networks and enable supporting heterogeneous quality of service (QoS) requirements. In this context, this article aims at evaluating the throughput of a downlink CR-NOMA network where the secondary user (SU) data is opportunistically multiplexed with the primary user (PU) data using power-domain NOMA. The data multiplexing process is constrained by the PU QoS requirements. The multiplexing process can be considered seamless with respect to the PU because its receiver design will generally remain unchanged. Moreover, we consider the case where the SU detects its own data by blindly identifying the adopted transmission mode (TM) at the base station, which can be PU orthogonal multiple access PU-OMA, SU-OMA, PU/SU-NOMA, and no transmission. Consequently, the network can be classified as a hybrid underlay-interweave. The detection process is considered blind because the SU does not receive side information about the adopted TM. The obtained analytical results corroborated by Monte Carlo simulation results show that the proposed CR-NOMA network can provide substantial throughput improvement over conventional NOMA networks, particularly at low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) because the unutilized PU spectrum can be used by the SU. Moreover, in good channel conditions the PU can tolerate some interference from the SU, which may improve the channel utilization significantly.

This article reviews complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) based physically unclonable functions (PUFs) in terms of types, structures, metrics, and challenges. The article reviews and classifies the most basic PUF types. The article reviews the basic variations originated during a metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) fabrication process. Random variations at transistor level lead to acquiring unique properties for electronic chips. These variations help a PUF system to generate a unique response. This article discusses various concepts which allow for more variations at CMOS technology, layout, masking, and design levels. It also discusses various PUF related topics.

Automatic repeat request (ARQ) schemes, and in particular hybrid-ARQ (HARQ) schemes, which jointly adopt forward error correction (FEC) and ARQ, are essential to provide reliable data transmission in wireless communications systems. However, the feedback from the receiver to the transmitter and the retransmission process used in ARQ incurs significant cost in terms of power efficiency, throughput, computational power and delay. Unfortunately, such drawbacks can limit their applications to several current and emerging technologies. More specifically, the increasing number of wireless users has create spectrum scarcity, relying on small-size batteries create power constraints, deployment of real-time applications boost the demand for ultralow delay networks, and the ultra-small low-cost internet of things (IoT) devices has limited signal processing and computation capabilities. Consequently, extensive research efforts have been dedicated to overcome the limitations inherent in HARQ. This survey paper provides an extensive literature review of the state-of-the-art HARQ techniques and discusses their integration in various wireless technologies. Moreover, it provides insights on advantages and disadvantages of particular ARQ types and discusses open problems and future directions.

This paper considers applying bit loading to multicarrier non-othogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems. The objective is to maximize the system total throughput while satisfying the users’ individual quality of service (QoS) constraints. Although bit loading is generally an NP-hard problem, even for orthogonal multiple access (OMA), the mutual interference between the users and the dependence of power coefficients and modulation orders are additional challenges that add substantial complexity to the optimization problem. Therefore, we propose in this paper an efficient bit loading algorithm for multicarrier NOMA systems and compares the complexity and throughput with OMA. The obtained results show that NOMA has virtual cognition and hybrid modes of operation, NOMA/OMA, that enables NOMA to outperform OMA by 100% for the two-user scenario. The complexity of the loading process for NOMA is noticeably higher than OMA, which is due to the high computational complexity of bit error rate (BER) computation for NOMA. The obtained results show that the NOMA throughput depends on which user is loaded first, and on the initially loaded bits.

This paper presents the capacity analysis of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) communications supported by flying intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs). In the considered system, some of the UAVs are equipped with an IRS panel that applies certain phase-shifts to the incident waves before being reflected to the receiving UAV. In contrast to existing work, this letter considers the effect of imperfect phase knowledge on the system capacity, where the phase error is modeled as a von Mises random variable with parameter k. Analytical results, corroborated by Monte Carlo simulations, show that the achievable capacity is dependent on the phase error, however, the capacity loss becomes negligible at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and when k>6.

The deployment of mobile-Small cells (mScs) is widely adopted to intensify the quality-of-service (QoS) in high mobility vehicles. However, the rapidly varying interference patterns among densely deployed mScs make the resource allocation (RA) highly challenging. In such scenarios, RA problem needs to be solved nearly in real-time, which can be considered as drawback for most existing RA algorithms. To overcome this constraint and solve the RA problem efficiently, we use deep learning (DL) in this work due to its ability to leverage the historical data in RA problem and to deal with computationally expensive tasks offline. More specifically, this paper considers the RA problem in vehicular environment comprising of city buses, where DL is explored for optimization of network performance. Simulation results reveal that RA in a network using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) algorithm outperforms other machine learning (ML) and DL-based RA mechanisms. Moreover, RA using LSTM provides less accurate results as compared to existing Time Interval Dependent Interference Graph (TIDIG)-based, and Threshold Percentage Dependent Interference Graph (TPDIG)-based RA but shows improved results when compared to RA using Global Positioning System Dependent Interference Graph (GPSDIG). However, the proposed scheme is computationally less expensive in comparison with TIDIG and TPDIG-based algorithms.

This paper considers the power allocation for non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) users to enable using the successive interference cancellation (SIC) while providing reliable error performance. The derived closed-form expressions are applicable for arbitrary number of NOMA users each of which has a square or rectangular quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) constellation with arbitrary order. The obtained numerical results show that power assignment process at the transmitter for the superposition process and at the receiver for the SIC process should be performed meticulously because the power difference between the weakest and strongest users can be tremendous when the number of users or the modulation orders increase. Moreover, the derived expressions can be used to reduce the computational complexity that is required to obtain the optimal power coefficients using brute force methods by significantly reducing the search space.

This work studies the meta distribution in a partial-NOMA network to obtain fine-grained information about the network performance. As the meta distribution is approximated using the beta distribution via moment matching of the first two moments, reduced integral expressions are derived for the first two moments of the meta distribution. Accurate approximate moments are also proposed to further simplify the calculation. Security is an issue in partial-NOMA because the strong user may decode the weak user’s message in the process of decoding its own message using flexible successive interference cancellation (FSIC). Therefore, a measure of secrecy is defined in this context and the secrecy probability is derived for the case of: 1) a malicious strong user that prioritizes eavesdropping, 2) an innocent strong user that decodes the weak user’s message only when it is required to do so. The obtained results highlight the superiority of partial-NOMA over traditional NOMA in terms of secrecy. They also show that receive filtering and FSIC have a significant positive impact on the secrecy of partial- OMA. Furthermore, partial-NOMA with a small overlap of the resource-block can secure the network from the additional deterioration a malicious eavesdropper may cause.

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is a promising candidate for future mobile networks as it enables improved spectral-efficiency, massive connectivity and low latency. This paper derives exact and asymptotic bit error rate (BER) expressions under Rayleigh fading channels for NOMA systems with arbitrary number of users and arbitrary number of receiving antennas and modulation orders, including binary phase-shift keying and rectangular/square quadrature amplitude modulation. Furthermore, the power coefficients’ bounds, which ensure users’ fairness, and solve the constellation ambiguity problem, are derived for N=2 and 3 users cases with any modulation orders. In addition, this paper determines the optimal power assignment that minimizes the system’s average BER. These results provide valuable insight into the system’s BER performance and power assignment granularity. For instance, it is shown that the feasible power coefficients range becomes significantly small as the modulation order, or N, increases, where the BER performance degrades due to the increased inter-user interference. Hence, the derived expressions can be crucial for the system scheduler in allowing it to make accurate decisions of selecting appropriate N, modulation orders, and power coefficients to satisfy the users’ requirements. The presented expressions are corroborated via Monte Carlo simulations.

This work presents a performance analysis on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) assisted wireless communications systems, where one of the UAVs supports intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS). As the estimation and compensation of the end-to-end phase for each propagation path is prone to errors, imperfect phase compensation at the IRS is taken into consideration. The performance is derived in terms of symbol error rate (SER) and outage probability, where the phase error is modeled using the von Mises distribution. The air-to-air (A2A) channel for each propagation path is modeled as a single dominant line-of-sight (LoS) component, and the results are compared to the Rician channel model. The obtained results reveal that the considered A2A model can be used to accurately represent the A2A channel with Rician fading.

This paper considers the deployment of intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) technology for wireless multi-hop backhauling of multiple basestations (BSs) connected in a mesh topology. The performance of the proposed architecture is evaluated in terms of outage and symbol error probability in Rician fading channels, where closed-form expressions are derived and demonstrated to be accurate for several cases of interest. The analytical results corroborated by simulation, show that the IRS-mesh backhauling architecture has several desired features that can be exploited to overcome some of the backhauling challenges, particularly the severe attenuation at high frequencies.