arXiv subjects

Qingqing Wu

Publications and source records attributed to Qingqing Wu.

At least 253 records · Page 14Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

Codebook-Based Solutions for Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces and Their Open Challenges

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) is a revolutionary technology to cost-effectively improve the performance of wireless networks. We first review the existing framework of channel estimation and passive beamforming (CE & PBF) in RIS-assisted communication systems. To reduce the excessive pilot signaling overhead and implementation complexity of the CE & PBF framework, we conceive a codebook-based framework to strike flexible tradeoffs between communication performance and signaling overhead. Moreover, we provide useful insights into the codebook design and learning mechanisms of the RIS reflection pattern. Finally, we analyze the scalability of the proposed framework by flexibly adapting the training overhead to the specified quality-of-service requirements and then elaborate on its appealing advantages over the existing CE & PBF approaches. It is shown that our novel codebook-based framework can be beneficially applied to all RIS-assisted scenarios and avoids the curse of model dependency faced by its existing counterparts, thus constituting a competitive solution for practical RIS-assisted communication systems.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

Intelligent Reflecting Surface Enabled Multi-Target Sensing

Besides improving communication performance, intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) are also promising enablers for achieving larger sensing coverage and enhanced sensing quality. Nevertheless, in the absence of a direct path between the base station (BS) and the targets, multi-target sensing is generally very difficult, since IRSs are incapable of proactively transmitting sensing beams or analyzing target information. Moreover, the echoes of different targets reflected via the IRS-established virtual links share the same directionality at the BS. In this paper, we study a wireless system comprising a multi-antenna BS and an IRS for multi-target sensing, where the beamforming vector and the IRS phase shifts are jointly optimized to improve the sensing performance. To meet the different sensing requirements, such as a minimum received power and a minimum sensing frequency, we propose three novel IRS-assisted sensing schemes: Time division (TD) sensing, signature sequence (SS) sensing, and hybrid TD-SS sensing. First, for TD sensing, the sensing tasks are performed in sequence over time. Subsequently, a novel signature sequence (SS) sensing scheme is proposed to improve sensing efficiency by establishing a relationship between directions and SSs. To strike a flexible balance between the beam pattern gain and sensing efficiency, we also propose a general hybrid TD-SS sensing scheme with target grouping, where targets belonging to the same group are sensed simultaneously via SS sensing, while the targets in different groups are assigned to orthogonal time slots. By controlling the number of groups, the hybrid TD-SS sensing scheme can provide a more flexible balance between beam pattern gain and sensing frequency. Moreover, ...

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

Optimization for Reflection and Transmission Dual-Functional Active RIS-Assisted Systems

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) has been deemed as one of potential components of future wireless communication systems because it can adaptively manipulate the wireless propagation environment with low-cost passive devices. However, due to the severe double path loss, the traditional passive RIS can provide sufficient gain only when receivers are very close to the RIS. Moreover, RIS cannot provide signal coverage for the receivers at the back side of it. To address these drawbacks in practical implementation, we introduce a novel reflection and transmission dual-functional active RIS architecture in this paper, which can simultaneously realize reflection and transmission functionalities with active signal amplification to significantly extend signal coverage and enhance the quality-of-service (QoS) of all users. The problem of joint transmit beamforming and dual-functional active RIS design is investigated in RIS-enhanced multiuser multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) systems. Both sum-rate maximization and power minimization problems are considered. To address their non-convexity, we develop efficient iterative algorithms to decompose them into separate several design problems, which are efficiently solved by exploiting fractional programming (FP) and Riemannian-manifold optimization techniques. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed dual-functional active RIS architecture and the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms over various benchmark schemes.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2022

Phase-Coherent Charge Transport through a Porphyrin Nanoribbon

Quantum interference in nano-electronic devices could lead to reduced-energy computing and efficient thermoelectric energy harvesting. When devices are shrunk down to the molecular level it is still unclear to what extent electron transmission is phase coherent, as molecules usually act as scattering centres, without the possibility of showing particle-wave duality. Here we show electron transmission remains phase coherent in molecular porphyrin nanoribbons, synthesized with perfectly defined geometry, connected to graphene electrodes. The device acts as a graphene Fabry-Pérot interferometer, allowing direct probing of the transport mechanisms throughout several regimes, including the Kondo one. Electrostatic gating allows measurement of the molecular conductance in multiple molecular oxidation states, demonstrating a thousand-fold increase of the current by interference, and unravelling molecular and graphene transport pathways. These results demonstrate a platform for the use of interferometric effects in single-molecule junctions, opening up new avenues for studying quantum coherence in molecular electronic and spintronic devices.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2022

Joint Beamforming Design for Intelligent Omni Surface Assisted Wireless Communication Systems

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has been widely considered as one of the key enabling techniques for future wireless communication networks owing to its ability of dynamically controlling the phase shift of reflected electromagnetic (EM) waves to construct a favorable propagation environment. While IRS only focuses on signal reflection, the recently emerged innovative concept of intelligent omni-surface (IOS) can provide the dual functionality of manipulating reflecting and transmitting signals. Thus, IOS is a new paradigm for achieving ubiquitous wireless communications. In this paper, we consider an IOSassisted multi-user multi-input single-output (MU-MISO) system where the IOS utilizes its reflective and transmissive properties to enhance the MU-MISO transmission. Both power minimization and sum-rate maximization problems are solved by exploiting the second-order cone programming (SOCP), Riemannian manifold, weighted minimum mean square error (WMMSE), and block coordinate descent (BCD) methods. Simulation results verify the advancements of the IOS for wireless systems and illustrate the significant performance improvement of our proposed joint transmit beamforming, reflecting and transmitting phase-shift, and IOS energy division design algorithms. Compared with conventional IRS, IOS can significantly extend the communication coverage, enhance the strength of received signals, and improve the quality of communication links.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2022

Energy Efficient Design in IRS-Assisted UAV Data Collection System under Malicious Jamming

In this paper, we study an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) enabled data collection system, where an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is deployed to assist in the communication from a cluster of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices to a UAV in the presence of a jammer. We aim to improve the energy efficiency (EE) via the joint design of UAV trajectory, IRS passive beamforming, device power allocation, and communication scheduling. However, the formulated non-linear fractional programming problem is challenging to solve due to its non-convexity and coupled variables. To overcome the difficulty, we propose an alternating optimization based algorithm to solve it sub-optimally by leveraging Dinkelbach's algorithm, successive convex approximation (SCA) technique, and block coordinate descent (BCD) method. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed design can significantly improve the anti-jamming performance. In particular, for the remote jammer case, the proposed design can largely shorten the flight path and thus decrease the energy consumption via the signal enhancement; while for the local jammer case, which is deemed highly challenging in conventional systems without IRS since the retreating away strategy becomes ineffective, our proposed design even achieves a higher performance gain owing to the efficient jamming signal mitigation.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

Secure Intelligent Reflecting Surface Aided Integrated Sensing and Communication

In this paper, an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is leveraged to enhance the physical layer security of an integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system in which the IRS is deployed to not only assist the downlink communication for multiple users, but also create a virtual line-of-sight (LoS) link for target sensing. In particular, we consider a challenging scenario where the target may be a suspicious eavesdropper that potentially intercepts the communication-user information transmitted by the base station (BS). We investigate the joint design of the phase shifts at the IRS and the communication as well as radar beamformers at the BS to maximize the sensing beampattern gain towards the target, subject to the maximum information leakage to the eavesdropping target and the minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) required by users. Based on the availability of perfect channel state information (CSI) of all involved user links and the accurate target location at the BS, two scenarios are considered and two different optimization algorithms are proposed. For the ideal scenario where the CSI of the user links and the target location are perfectly known at the BS, a penalty-based algorithm is proposed to obtain a high-quality solution. In particular, the beamformers are obtained with a semi-closed-form solution using Lagrange duality and the IRS phase shifts are solved for in closed form by applying the majorization-minimization (MM) method. On the other hand, for the more practical scenario where the CSI is imperfect and the target location is uncertain, a robust algorithm based on the $\cal S$-procedure and sign-definiteness approaches is proposed. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in achieving a trade-off between the communication quality and the sensing quality.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

Secure UAV-to-Ground MIMO Communications: Joint Transceiver and Location Optimization

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are foreseen to constitute promising airborne communication devices as a benefit of their superior channel quality. But UAV-to-ground (U2G) communications are vulnerable to eavesdropping. Hence, we conceive a sophisticated physical layer security solution for improving the secrecy rate of multi-antenna aided U2G systems. Explicitly, the secrecy rate of the U2G MIMO wiretap channels is derived by using random matrix theory. The resultant explicit expression is then applied in the joint optimization of the MIMO transceiver and the UAV location relying on an alternating optimization technique. Our numerical results show that the joint transceiver and location optimization conceived facilitates secure communications even in the challenging scenario, where the legitimate channel of confidential information is inferior to the eavesdropping channel.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

Beamforming Optimization for Active Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Aided SWIPT

In this paper, we study an active IRS-aided simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) system. Specifically, an active IRS is deployed to assist a multi-antenna access point (AP) to convey information and energy simultaneously to multiple single-antenna information users (IUs) and energy users (EUs). Two joint transmit and reflect beamforming optimization problems are investigated with different practical objectives. The first problem maximizes the weighted sum-power harvested by the EUs subject to individual signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) constraints at the IUs, while the second problem maximizes the weighted sum-rate of the IUs subject to individual energy harvesting (EH) constraints at the EUs. The optimization problems are non-convex and difficult to solve optimally. To tackle these two problems, we first rigorously prove that dedicated energy beams are not required for their corresponding semidefinite relaxation (SDR) reformulations and the SDR is tight for the first problem, thus greatly simplifying the AP precoding design. Then, by capitalizing on the techniques of alternating optimization (AO), SDR, and successive convex approximation (SCA), computationally efficient algorithms are developed to obtain suboptimal solutions of the resulting optimization problems. Simulation results demonstrate that, given the same total system power budget, significant performance gains in terms of operating range of wireless power transfer (WPT), total harvested energy, as well as achievable rate can be obtained by our proposed designs over benchmark schemes (especially the one adopting a passive IRS). Moreover, it is advisable to deploy an active IRS in the proximity of the users for the effective operation of WPT/SWIPT.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

IRS Aided MEC Systems with Binary Offloading: A Unified Framework for Dynamic IRS Beamforming

In this paper, we develop a unified dynamic intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) beamforming framework to boost the sum computation rate of an IRS-aided mobile edge computing (MEC) system, where each device follows a binary offloading policy. Specifically, the task of each device has to be either executed locally or offloaded to MEC servers as a whole with the aid of given number of IRS beamforming vectors available. By flexibly controlling the number of IRS reconfiguration times, the system can achieve a balance between the performance and associated signalling overhead. We aim to maximize the sum computation rate by jointly optimizing the computational mode selection for each device, offloading time allocation, and IRS beamforming vectors across time. Since the resulting optimization problem is non-convex and NP-hard, there are generally no standard methods to solve it optimally. To tackle this problem, we first propose a penalty-based successive convex approximation algorithm, where all the associated variables in the inner-layer iterations are optimized simultaneously and the obtained solution is guaranteed to be locally optimal. Then, we further derive the offloading activation condition for each device by deeply exploiting the intrinsic structure of the original optimization problem. According to the offloading activation condition, a low-complexity algorithm based on the successive refinement method is proposed to obtain high-quality solutions, which is more appealing for practical systems with a large number of devices and IRS elements. Moreover, the optimal condition for the proposed low-complexity algorithm is revealed. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms and also unveil the fundamental performance-cost tradeoff of the proposed dynamic IRS beamforming framework.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

Joint Transmit Waveform and Passive Beamforming Design for RIS-Aided DFRC Systems

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is a promising technology for 6G networks owing to its superior ability to enhance the capacity and coverage of wireless communications by smartly creating a favorable propagation environment. In this paper, we investigate the potential of employing RIS in dual-functional radar-communication (DFRC) systems for improving both radar sensing and communication functionalities. In particular, we consider a RIS-assisted DFRC system in which the multi-antenna base station (BS) simultaneously performs both multi-input multi-output (MIMO) radar sensing and multi-user multi-input single-output (MU-MISO) communications using the same hardware platform. We aim to jointly design the dual-functional transmit waveform and the passive beamforming of RIS to maximize the radar output signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) achieved by space-time adaptive processing (STAP), while satisfying the communication quality-of-service (QoS) requirement under one of three metrics, the constant-modulus constraint on the transmit waveform, and the unit-modulus constraint of RIS reflecting coefficients. An efficient algorithm framework based on the alternative direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and majorization-minimization (MM) methods is developed to solve the complicated non-convex optimization problem. Simulation results verify the advancement of the proposed RIS-assisted DRFC scheme and the effectiveness of the developed ADMM-MM-based joint transmit waveform and passive beamforming design algorithm.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2022

Achieving Multi-beam Gain in Intelligent Reflecting Surface Assisted Wireless Energy Transfer

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a promising technology to boost the efficiency of wireless energy transfer (WET) systems. However, for a multiuser WET system, simultaneous multi-beam energy transmission is generally required to achieve the maximum performance, which may not be implemented by using the IRS having only a single set of coefficients. As a result, it remains unknowns how to exploit the IRS to approach such a performance upper bound. To answer this question, we aim to maximize the total harvested energy of a multiuser WET system subject to the user fairness constraints and the non-linear energy harvesting model. We first consider the static IRS beamforming scheme, which shows that the optimal IRS reflection matrix obtained by applying semidefinite relaxation is indeed of high rank in general as the number of energy receivers (ERs) increases, due to which the resulting rank-one solution by applying Gaussian Randomization may lead to significant loss. To achieve the multi-beam gain, we then propose a general time-division based novel framework by exploiting the IRS's dynamic passive beamforming. Moreover, it is able to achieve a good balance between the system performance and complexity by controlling the number of IRS shift patterns. Finally, we also propose a time-division multiple access (TDMA) based passive beamforming design for performance comparison. Simulation results demonstrate the necessity of multi-beam transmission and the superiority of the proposed dynamic IRS beamforming scheme over existing schemes.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

Energy-Efficient Backscatter Aided Uplink NOMA Roadside Sensor Communications under Channel Estimation Errors

This work presents non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) enabled energy-efficient alternating optimization framework for backscatter aided wireless powered uplink sensors communications for beyond 5G intelligent transportation system (ITS). Specifically, the transmit power of carrier emitter (CE) and reflection coefficients of backscatter aided roadside sensors are optimized with channel uncertainties for the maximization of the energy efficiency (EE) of the network. The formulated problem is tackled by the proposed two-stage alternating optimization algorithm named AOBWS (alternating optimization for backscatter aided wireless powered sensors). In the first stage, AOBWS employs an iterative algorithm to obtain optimal CE transmit power through simplified closed-form computed through Cardano's formulae. In the second stage, AOBWS uses a non-iterative algorithm that provides a closed-form expression for the computation of optimal reflection coefficient for roadside sensors under their quality of service (QoS) and a circuit power constraint. The global optimal exhaustive search (ES) algorithm is used as a benchmark. Simulation results demonstrate that the AOBWS algorithm can achieve near-optimal performance with very low complexity, which makes it suitable for practical implementations.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2022

IRS-assisted Multi-cell Multi-band Systems: Practical Reflection Model and Joint Beamforming Design

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has been regarded as a promising and revolutionary technology for future wireless communication systems owing to its capability of tailoring signal propagation environment in an energy/spectrum/hardware-efficient manner. However, most existing studies on IRS optimizations are based on a simple and ideal reflection model that is impractical in hardware implementation, which thus leads to severe performance loss in realistic wideband/multi-band systems. To deal with this problem, in this paper we first propose a more practical and more tractable IRS reflection model that describes the difference of reflection responses for signals at different frequencies. Then, we investigate the joint transmit beamforming and IRS reflection beamforming design for an IRS-assisted multi-cell multi-band system. Both power minimization and sum-rate maximization problems are solved by exploiting popular second-order cone programming (SOCP), Riemannian manifold, minimization-majorization (MM), weighted minimum mean square error (WMMSE), and block coordinate descent (BCD) methods. Simulation results illustrate the significant performance improvement of our proposed joint transmit beamforming and reflection design algorithms based on the practical reflection model in terms of power saving and rate enhancement.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2022

Elevation Angle-Dependent 3D Trajectory Design for Aerial RIS-aided Communication

This paper investigates an aerial reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided communication system under the probabilistic line-of-sight (LoS) channel, where an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with an RIS is deployed to assist two ground nodes in their information exchange. An optimization problem with the objective of maximizing the minimum average achievable rate is formulated to jointly design the communication scheduling, the RIS's phase shift, and the three-dimensional (3D) UAV trajectory. To solve such a non-convex problem, we propose an efficient iterative algorithm to obtain its suboptimal solution. Simulation results show that our proposed design significantly outperforms the existing schemes and provides new insights into the elevation angle and distance trade-off for the UAV-borne RIS communication system.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2022

Joint Active and Passive Beamforming Design for IRS-Aided Radar-Communication

In this paper, we study an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided radar-communication (Radcom) system, where the IRS is leveraged to help Radcom base station (BS) transmit the joint of communication signals and radar signals for serving communication users and tracking targets simultaneously. The objective of this paper is to minimize the total transmit power at the Radcom BS by jointly optimizing the active beamformers, including communication beamformers and radar beamformers, at the Radcom BS and the phase shifts at the IRS, subject to the minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) required by communication users, the minimum SINR required by the radar, and the cross-correlation pattern design. In particular, we consider two cases, namely, case I and case II, based on the presence or absence of the radar cross-correlation design and the interference introduced by the IRS on the Radcom BS. For case I where the cross correlation design and the interference are not considered, we prove that the dedicated radar signals are not needed, which significantly reduces implementation complexity and simplifies algorithm design. Then, a penalty-based algorithm is proposed to solve the resulting non-convex optimization problem. Whereas for case II considering the cross-correlation design and the interference, we unveil that the dedicated radar signals are needed in general to enhance the system performance. Since the resulting optimization problem is more challenging to solve as compared with the case I, the semidefinite relaxation (SDR) based alternating optimization (AO) algorithm is proposed. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed algorithms and also show the superiority of the proposed scheme over various benchmark schemes.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

Collaborative Intelligent Reflecting Surface Networks with Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is envisioned to be widely applied in future wireless networks. In this paper, we investigate a multi-user communication system assisted by cooperative IRS devices with the capability of energy harvesting. Aiming to maximize the long-term average achievable system rate, an optimization problem is formulated by jointly designing the transmit beamforming at the base station (BS) and discrete phase shift beamforming at the IRSs, with the constraints on transmit power, user data rate requirement and IRS energy buffer size. Considering time-varying channels and stochastic arrivals of energy harvested by the IRSs, we first formulate the problem as a Markov decision process (MDP) and then develop a novel multi-agent Q-mix (MAQ) framework with two layers to decouple the optimization parameters. The higher layer is for optimizing phase shift resolutions, and the lower one is for phase shift beamforming and power allocation. Since the phase shift optimization is an integer programming problem with a large-scale action space, we improve MAQ by incorporating the Wolpertinger method, namely, MAQ-WP algorithm to achieve a sub-optimality with reduced dimensions of action space. In addition, as MAQ-WP is still of high complexity to achieve good performance, we propose a policy gradient-based MAQ algorithm, namely, MAQ-PG, by mapping the discrete phase shift actions into a continuous space at the cost of a slight performance loss. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed MAQ-WP and MAQ-PG algorithms can converge faster and achieve data rate improvements of 10.7% and 8.8% over the conventional multi-agent DDPG, respectively.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2022

UAV Trajectory and Beamforming Optimization for Integrated Periodic Sensing and Communication

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is expected to bring transformative improvement to the integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system. However, due to shared spectrum resources, it is challenging to achieve a critical trade-off between these two integrated functionalities. To address this issue, we propose in this paper a new integrated \emph{periodic} sensing and communication mechanism for the UAV-enable ISAC system. Specifically, the user achievable rate is maximized via jointly optimizing UAV trajectory, transmit precoder, and sensing start instant, subject to the sensing frequency and beam pattern gain constraints. Despite that this problem is highly non-convex and involves an infinite number of variables, we obtain the optimal transmit precoder and derive the optimal achievable rate in closed-form for any given UAV location to facilitate the UAV trajectory design. Furthermore, we first prove the structural symmetry between optimal solutions in different ISAC frames without location constraints and then propose a high-quality UAV trajectory and sensing optimization algorithm for the general location-constrained case. Simulation results corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed design and also unveil a more flexible trade-off in ISAC systems over benchmark schemes.

cs.IT↗