arXiv subjects

Onel L. Alcaraz López

Publications and source records attributed to Onel L. Alcaraz López.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Radio Stripe-Based Distributed ISAC System with Dynamic Sensing-Communication Reconfiguration

Integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) has emerged as an intrinsic service of upcoming 6G wireless systems, enabling the reuse of communication signals for environmental sensing and supporting context-aware network functionalities. Meanwhile, the evolution of the wireless infrastructure toward distributed systems creates new opportunities for collaborative sensing from spatially separated nodes. Motivated by this trend, this work investigates a radio stripe aided ISAC system as a low-complexity implementation of a distributed system. We study the trade-off between achievable sum rate and sensing precision when downlink signals are used for target localization within the service area. By exploiting the architectural homogeneity of the radio stripes transceivers, each unit can be dynamically configured to operate in either communication or sensing mode. We formulate a targets localization problem considering the measurements of multiple sensing-communication configurations. Due to the large number of measurements and the continuity of the search space, we propose discretizing the service are and then solve the estimation problem in batches. The targets are finally estimated using a fusion strategy. Our results show that increasing the number devices and sensing APUs boosts sensing precision at the expense of degrading the sum rate. The latter remains constant for a given number of communication APUs regardless of their positions. Moreover, changing the number of antennas reveals a non-monotonic impact on sensing performance due to the trade-off between array gain and illumination uniformity.

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arXiv2025

Extreme Value Theory-enhanced Radio Maps for Handovers in Ultra-reliable Communications

Efficient handover (HO) strategies are essential for maintaining the stringent performance requirements of ultra-reliable communication (URC) systems. This work introduces a novel HO framework designed from a physical-layer perspective, where the decision-making process focuses on determining the optimal time and location for performing HOs. Leveraging extreme value theory (EVT) and statistical radio maps, the proposed method predicts signal behaviour and enables efficient resource allocation. The framework ensures seamless HOs and improved system performance by facilitating effective resource transitions and coordination across spatial locations while incorporating mechanisms to mitigate the ping-pong effect. Comparative evaluations demonstrate that this strategy provides superior service availability and energy efficiency than traditional HO mechanisms, highlighting its effectiveness in URC environments.

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arXiv2025

Federated Learning-Distillation Alternation for Resource-Constrained IoT

Federated learning (FL) faces significant challenges in Internet of Things (IoT) networks due to device limitations in energy and communication resources, especially when considering the large size of FL models. From an energy perspective, the challenge is aggravated if devices rely on energy harvesting (EH), as energy availability can vary significantly over time, influencing the average number of participating users in each iteration. Additionally, the transmission of large model updates is more susceptible to interference from uncorrelated background traffic in shared wireless environments. As an alternative, federated distillation (FD) reduces communication overhead and energy consumption by transmitting local model outputs, which are typically much smaller than the entire model used in FL. However, this comes at the cost of reduced model accuracy. Therefore, in this paper, we propose FL-distillation alternation (FLDA). In FLDA, devices alternate between FD and FL phases, balancing model information with lower communication overhead and energy consumption per iteration. We consider a multichannel slotted-ALOHA EH-IoT network subject to background traffic/interference. In such a scenario, FLDA demonstrates higher model accuracy than both FL and FD, and achieves faster convergence than FL. Moreover, FLDA achieves target accuracies saving up to 98% in energy consumption, while also being less sensitive to interference, both relative to FL.

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arXiv2025

Dimensioning and Optimization of Reliability Coverage in Local 6G Networks

Enabling vertical use cases for the sixth generation (6G) wireless networks, such as automated manufacturing, immersive extended reality (XR), and self-driving fleets, will require network designs that meet reliability and latency targets in well-defined service areas. In order to establish a quantifiable design objective, we introduce the novel concept of reliability coverage, defined as the percentage area covered by communication services operating under well-defined reliability and performance targets. Reliability coverage allows us to unify the different network design tasks occurring at different time scales, namely resource orchestration and allocation, resulting in a single framework for dimensioning and optimization in local 6G networks. The two time scales, when considered together, yield remarkably consistent results and allow us to observe how stringent reliability/latency requirements translate into the increased wireless network resource demands.

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arXiv2024

EVT-enriched Radio Maps for URLLC

This paper introduces a sophisticated and adaptable framework combining extreme value theory with radio maps to spatially model extreme channel conditions accurately. Utilising existing signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) measurements and leveraging Gaussian processes, our approach predicts the tail of the SNR distribution, which entails estimating the parameters of a generalised Pareto distribution, at unobserved locations. This innovative method offers a versatile solution adaptable to various resource allocation challenges in ultra-reliable low-latency communications. We evaluate the performance of this method in a rate maximisation problem with defined outage constraints and compare it with a benchmark in the literature. Notably, the proposed approach meets the outage demands in a larger percentage of the coverage area and reaches higher transmission rates.

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arXiv2024

Energy-Efficient Analog Beamforming for RF-WET with Charging Time Constraint

Internet of Things (IoT) sustainability may hinge on radio frequency wireless energy transfer (RF-WET). However, energy-efficient charging strategies are still needed, motivating our work. Specifically, this letter proposes a time division scheme to efficiently charge low-power devices in an IoT network. For this, a multi-antenna power beacon (PB) drives the devices' energy harvesting circuit to the highest power conversion efficiency point via energy beamforming, thus achieving minimum energy consumption. Herein, we adopt the analog multi-antenna architecture due to its low complexity, cost, and energy consumption. The proposal includes a simple yet accurate model for the transfer characteristic of the energy harvesting circuit, enabling the optimization framework. The results evince the effectiveness of our RF-WET strategy over a benchmark scheme where the PB charges all the IoT devices simultaneously. Furthermore, the performance increases with the number of PB antennas.

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arXiv2023

Sustainable RF Wireless Energy Transfer for Massive IoT: enablers and challenges

Reliable energy supply remains a crucial challenge in the Internet of Things (IoT). Although relying on batteries is cost-effective for a few devices, it is neither a scalable nor a sustainable charging solution as the network grows massive. Besides, current energy-saving technologies alone cannot cope, for instance, with the vision of zero-energy devices and the deploy-and-forget paradigm which can unlock a myriad of new use cases. In this context, sustainable radio frequency wireless energy transfer emerges as an attractive solution for efficiently charging the next generation of ultra low power IoT devices. Herein, we highlight that sustainable charging is broader than conventional green charging, as it focuses on balancing economy prosperity and social equity in addition to environmental health. We discuss the economic implications of powering energy transmitters with ambient energy sources, and reveal insights on their optimal deployment. Moreover, we overview different methods for modeling the energy arrival process of ambient energy sources and discuss their application in different use cases. We highlight the potential of integrating sustainable WET with energy harvesting from nearby transmitters and discuss enhancements in energy receiver design. We also illustrate the role of different technologies in enabling sustainable WET and exemplify various use cases. Besides, we reveal insights into low-complexity architectures designed at the energy transmitters. We highlight relevant research challenges and candidate solutions.

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arXiv2023

Energy-Aware Federated Learning with Distributed User Sampling and Multichannel ALOHA

Distributed learning on edge devices has attracted increased attention with the advent of federated learning (FL). Notably, edge devices often have limited battery and heterogeneous energy availability, while multiple rounds are required in FL for convergence, intensifying the need for energy efficiency. Energy depletion may hinder the training process and the efficient utilization of the trained model. To solve these problems, this letter considers the integration of energy harvesting (EH) devices into a FL network with multi-channel ALOHA, while proposing a method to ensure both low energy outage probability and successful execution of future tasks. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of this method, particularly in critical setups where the average energy income fails to cover the iteration cost. The method outperforms a norm based solution in terms of convergence time and battery level.

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arXiv2023

Extreme Value Theory-based Robust Minimum-Power Precoding for URLLC

Channel state information (CSI) is crucial for achieving ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) in wireless networks. The main associated problems are the CSI acquisition time, which impacts the delay requirements of time-critical applications, and the estimation accuracy, which degrades the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), thus, reducing reliability. In this work, we formulate and solve a minimum-power precoding design problem simultaneously serving multiple URLLC users in the downlink with imperfect CSI availability. Specifically, we develop an algorithm that exploits state-of-the-art precoding schemes such as the maximal ratio transmission (MRT) and zero-forcing (ZF), and adjust the power of the precoders to compensate for the channel estimation error uncertainty based on the extreme value theory (EVT) framework. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our method and show its superiority concerning worst-case robust precoding, which is used as a benchmark.

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arXiv2023

Fitting the Distribution of Linear Combinations of t-Variables with more than 2 Degrees of Freedom

The linear combination of Student's $t$ random variables (RVs) appears in many statistical applications. Unfortunately, the Student's $t$ distribution is not closed under convolution, thus, deriving an exact and general distribution for the linear combination of $K$ Student's $t$ RVs is infeasible, which motivates a fitting/approximation approach. Here, we focus on the scenario where the only constraint is that the number of degrees of freedom of each $t-$RV is greater than two. Notice that since the odd moments/cumulants of the Student's $t$ distribution are zero, and the even moments/cumulants do not exist when their order is greater than the number of degrees of freedom, it becomes impossible to use conventional approaches based on moments/cumulants of order one or higher than two. To circumvent this issue, herein we propose fitting such a distribution to that of a scaled Student's $t$ RV by exploiting the second moment together with either the first absolute moment or the characteristic function (CF). For the fitting based on the absolute moment, we depart from the case of the linear combination of $K= 2$ Student's $t$ RVs and then generalize to $K\ge 2$ through a simple iterative procedure. Meanwhile, the CF-based fitting is direct, but its accuracy (measured in terms of the Bhattacharyya distance metric) depends on the CF parameter configuration, for which we propose a simple but accurate approach. We numerically show that the CF-based fitting usually outperforms the absolute moment -based fitting and that both the scale and number of degrees of freedom of the fitting distribution increase almost linearly with $K$.

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arXiv2022

Robust Downlink Multi-Antenna Beamforming with Heterogenous CSI: Enabling eMBB and URLLC Coexistence

Two of the main problems to achieve ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC) are related to instantaneous channel state information (I-CSI) acquisition and the coexistence with other service modes such as enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB). The former comes from the non-negligible time required for accurate I-CSI acquisition, while the latter, from the heterogeneous and conflicting requirements of different nodes sharing the same network resources. In this paper, we leverage the I-CSI of multiple eMBB links and the channel measurement's history of a URLLC user for multi-antenna beamforming design. Specifically, we propose a precoding design that minimizes the transmit power of a base station (BS) providing eMBB and URLLC services with signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and outage constraints, respectively, by modifying existing I-CSI-based precoding schemes to account for URLLC channel history information. Moreover, we illustrate and validate the proposed method by adopting zero-forcing (ZF) and the transmit power minimization (TPM) precoding with SINR constraints. We show that the ZF implementation outperforms TPM in adverse channel conditions as in Rayleigh fading, while the situation is rapidly reversed as the channel experiences some line-of-sight (LOS). Finally, we determine the confidence levels at which the target outage probabilities are reached. For instance, we show that outage probabilities below $10^{-3}$ are achievable with more than 99$\%$ confidence for both precoding schemes under favorable LOS conditions with 16 transmit antennas and 500 samples of URLLC channel history.

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arXiv2022

Latency-Aware Multi-antenna SWIPT System with Battery-Constrained Receivers

Power splitting (PS) based simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) is considered in a multi-user multiple-input-single-output broadcast scenario. Specifically, we focus on jointly configuring the transmit beamforming vectors and receive PS ratios to minimize the total transmit energy of the base station under the user-specific latency and energy harvesting (EH) requirements. The battery depletion phenomenon is avoided by preemptively incorporating information regarding the receivers' battery state and EH fluctuations into the resource allocation design. The resulting time-average sum-power minimization problem is temporally correlated, non-convex (including mutually coupled latency-battery queue dynamics), and in general intractable. We use the Lyapunov optimization framework and derive a dynamic control algorithm to transform the original problem into a sequence of deterministic and independent subproblems, which are then solved via two alternative approaches: i) semidefinite relaxation combined with fractional programming, and ii) successive convex approximation. Furthermore, we design a low-complexity closed-form iterative algorithm exploiting the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker optimality conditions for a specific scenario with delay bounded batteryless receivers. Numerical results provide insights on the robustness of the proposed design to realize an energy-efficient SWIPT system while ensuring latency and EH requirements in a time dynamic mobile access network.

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arXiv2021

Self-energy recycling for low-power reliable networks: Half-duplex or Full-duplex?

Self-energy recycling (sER), which allows transmit energy re-utilization, has emerged as a viable option for improving the energy efficiency (EE) in low-power Internet of Things networks. In this work, we investigate its benefits also in terms of reliability improvements and compare the performance of full-duplex (FD) and half-duplex (HD) schemes when using multi-antenna techniques in a communication system. We analyze the trade-offs when considering not only the energy spent on transmission but also the circuitry power consumption, thus making the analysis of much more practical interest. In addition to the well known spectral efficiency improvements, results show that FD also outperforms HD in terms of reliability. We show that sER introduces not only benefits in EE matters but also some modifications on how to achieve maximum reliability fairness between uplink and downlink transmissions, which is the main goal in this work. In order to achieve this objective, we propose the use of a dynamic FD scheme where the small base station (SBS) determines the optimal allocation of antennas for transmission and reception. We show the significant improvement gains of this strategy for the system outage probability when compared to the simple HD and FD schemes.

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arXiv2021

Massive Wireless Energy Transfer with Multiple Power Beacons for very large Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) comprises an increasing number of low-power and low-cost devices that autonomously interact with the surrounding environment. As a consequence of their popularity, future IoT deployments will be massive, which demands energy-efficient systems to extend their lifetime and improve the user experience. Radio frequency wireless energy transfer has the potential of powering massive IoT networks, thus eliminating the need for frequent battery replacement by using the so-called power beacons (PBs). In this paper, we provide a framework for minimizing the sum transmit power of the PBs using devices' positions information and their current battery state. Our strategy aims to reduce the PBs' power consumption and to mitigate the possible impact of the electromagnetic radiation on human health. We also present analytical insights for the case of very distant clusters and evaluate their applicability. Numerical results show that our proposed framework reduces the outage probability as the number of PBs and/or the energy demands increase.

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arXiv2021

On the Optimal Deployment of Power Beacons for Massive Wireless Energy Transfer

Wireless energy transfer (WET) is emerging as an enabling green technology for Internet of Things (IoT) networks. WET allows the IoT devices to wirelessly recharge their batteries with energy from external sources such as dedicated radio frequency transmitters called power beacons (PBs). In this paper, we investigate the optimal deployment of PBs that guarantees a network-wide energy outage constraint. Optimal positions for the PBs are determined by maximizing the average incident power for the worst location in the service area since no information about the sensor deployment is provided. Such network planning guarantees the fairest harvesting performance for all the IoT devices. Numerical simulations evidence that our proposed optimization framework improves the energy supply reliability compared to benchmark schemes. Additionally, we show that although both, the number of deployed PBs and the number of antennas per PB, introduce performance improvements, the former has a dominant role. Finally, our proposal allows to extend the coverage area while keeping the total power budget fixed, which additionally reduces the level of electromagnetic radiation in the vicinity of PBs.

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arXiv2021

On the SIR Meta Distribution in Massive MTCNetworks with Scheduling and Data Aggregation

Data aggregation is an efficient approach to handle the congestion introduced by a massive number of machine type devices (MTDs). The aggregators not only collect data but also implement scheduling mechanisms to cope with scarce network resources. We use the concept of meta distribution (MD) of the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) to gain a complete understanding of the per-link reliability and describe the performance of two scheduling methods for data aggregation of machine type communication (MTC): random resource scheduling (RRS) and channel-aware resource scheduling (CRS). The results show the fraction of users in the network that achieves a target reliability, which is an important aspect to consider when designing wireless systems with stringent service requirements.

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arXiv2021

Massive Wireless Energy Transfer: Enabling Sustainable IoT Towards 6G Era

Recent advances on wireless energy transfer (WET) make it a promising solution for powering future Internet of Things (IoT) devices enabled by the upcoming sixth generation (6G) era. The main architectures, challenges and techniques for efficient and scalable wireless powering are overviewed in this paper. Candidates enablers such as energy beamforming (EB), distributed antenna systems (DAS), advances on devices' hardware and programmable medium, new spectrum opportunities, resource scheduling and distributed ledger technology are outlined. Special emphasis is placed on discussing the suitability of channel state information (CSI)-limited/free strategies when powering simultaneously a massive number of devices. The benefits from combining DAS and EB, and from using average CSI whenever available, are numerically illustrated. The pros and cons of the state-of-the-art CSI-free WET techniques in ultra-low power setups are thoroughly revised, and some possible future enhancements are outlined. Finally, key research directions towards realizing WET-enabled massive IoT networks in the 6G era are identified and discussed in detail.

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arXiv2020

Enabling URLLC for Low-Cost IoT Devices via Diversity Combining Schemes

Supporting Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication (URLLC) in the Internet of Things (IoT) era is challenging due to stringent constraints on latency and reliability combined with the simple circuitry of IoT nodes. Diversity is usually required for sustaining the reliability levels of URLLC, but there is an additional delay associated to auxiliary procedures to be considered, specially when communication includes low-cost IoT devices. Herein, we analyze Selection Combining (SC) and Switch and Stay Combining (SSC) diversity schemes as plausible solutions for enabling ultra-reliable low-latency downlink communications to low-cost IoT devices. We demonstrate the necessity of considering the time spent in auxiliary procedures, which has not been traditionally taken into account, while we show its impact on the reliability performance. We show there is an optimum number of receive antennas, which suggests that under certain conditions it might be required to turn off some of them, specially under the SC operation. We highlight the superiority of SSC with respect to SC as long the associated Signal-to-Noise Ratio threshold is properly selected. We propose using a fixed threshold relying only on long-term channel fading statistics, which leads to near-optimum results.

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