This paper studies an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled wireless sensor network, in which one UAV flies in the sky to collect the data transmitted from a set of sensors via distributed beamforming. We consider the delay-sensitive application scenario, in which the sensors transmit the common/shared messages by using fixed data rates and adaptive transmit powers. Under this setup, we jointly optimize the UAV's trajectory design and the sensors' transmit power allocation, in order to minimize the transmission outage probability, subject to the UAV's flight speed constraints and the sensors' individual average power constraints. However, the formulated outage probability minimization problem is non-convex and thus difficult to be optimally solved in general. To tackle this issue, we first consider the special problem in the ideal case with the UAV's flight speed constraints ignored, for which the well-structured optimal solution is obtained to reveal the fundamental performance upper bound. Next, for the general problem with the UAV's flight speed constraints considered, we propose an efficient algorithm to solve it sub-optimally by using the techniques of convex optimization and approximation. Finally, numerical results show that our proposed design achieves significantly reduced outage probability than other benchmark schemes.
Conventional beamforming is based on channel estimation, which can be computationally intensive and inaccurate when the antenna array is large. In this work, we study the outage probability of positioning-assisted beamforming systems. Closed-form outage probability bounds are derived by considering positioning error, link distance and beamwidth. Based on the analytical result, we show that the beamwidth should be optimized with respect to the link distance and the transmit power, and such optimization significantly suppresses the outage probability.
We consider multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) serving a density of ground terminals (GTs) as base stations. The objective is to minimize the outage probability of GT-to-UAV transmissions. Optimal placement of UAVs under different UAV altitude constraints and GT densities is studied. First, using a random deployment argument, a general upper bound on the optimal outage probability is found for any density of GTs and any number of UAVs. A matching lower bound is also derived to show that the optimal outage probability decays exponentially with the number of UAVs. Next, the structure of op…
We study an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) identification network equipped with an energy harvesting (EH) technique. In the network, the UAVs harvest energy through radio frequency (RF) signals transmitted from ground control stations (GCSs) and then transmit their identification information to the ground receiver station (GRS). Specifically, we first derive a closed-form expression of the outage probability to evaluate the network performance. Then we obtain the closed-form expression of the optimal time allocation when the bandwidth is equally allocated to the UAVs. We also propose a fast-con…
As unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are expected to play a significant role in fifth generation (5G) networks, addressing spectrum scarcity in UAV communications remains a pressing issue. In this regard, the feasibility of full-duplex non-orthogonal multiple access (FD-NOMA) UAV communications to improve spectrum utilization is investigated in this paper. Specifically, closed-form outage probability expressions are presented for FD-NOMA, half-duplex non-orthogonal multiple access (HD-NOMA), and half-duplex orthogonal multiple access (HD-OMA) schemes over Rician shadowed fading channels. Extensi…
In this paper, we consider an imperfect hardware hybrid satellite-terrestrial network (HSTN) where the satellite communication with a ground user equipment (UE) is aided by the multiple amplify-and-forward (AF) three-dimensional ($3$D) mobile unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) relays. Herein, we consider that all transceiver nodes are corrupted by the radio frequency hardware impairments (RFHI). Further, a stochastic mixed mobility (MM) model is employed to characterize the instantaneous location of $3$D mobile UAV relays in a cylindrical cell with UE lying at its center on ground plane. Taking int…
In this paper, we consider a hybrid satellite-terrestrial network (HSTN) where a multiantenna satellite communicates with a ground user equipment (UE) with the help of multiple cache-enabled amplify-and-forward (AF) three-dimensional ($3$D) mobile unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) relays. Herein, we employ the two fundamental most popular content (MPC) and uniform content (UC) caching schemes for two types of mobile UAV relays, namely fully $3$D and fixed height. Taking into account the multiantenna satellite links and the random $3$D distances between UAV relays and UE, we analyze the outage prob…
Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has the potential to significantly enhance the network performance by reconfiguring the wireless propagation environments. It is however difficult to obtain the accurate downlink channel state information (CSI) for efficient beamforming design in IRS-aided wireless networks. In this article, we consider an IRS-aided downlink multiple-input single-output (MISO) network, where the base station (BS) is not required to know the underlying channel distribution. We formulate an outage probability minimization problem by jointly optimizing the beamforming vector a…
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks have grown rapidly in recent years and become attractive for various emergence communications scenarios. In this paper, we consider a UAV acting as a relay node to assist wireless transmissions from a base station (BS) to a ground user (GUs). A closed-form expression of outage probability for the BS-GUs transmission via UAV relaying is derived over Rician fading channels. We then formulate an optimization problem to minimize the outage probability of UAV relay communications with a constraint on the total transit power of the BS and GUs. It is proved that…
This paper considers beamforming for a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided multiple input single output (MISO) communication system in the presence of Rician multipath fading. Our aim is to jointly optimize the transmit beamformer and RIS phase shift matrix for maximizing the mean signal-to-noise (SNR) of the combined signal received over direct and indirect links. While numerical solutions are known for such optimization problems, this is the first paper to derive closed-form expressions for the optimal beamformer and the phase shifter for a closely related problem. In particular, …
Supporting reliable and seamless mobility for aerial users, such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), is a key challenge for the next-generation cellular systems. To tackle this challenge, we propose a joint beamforming, user association, and UAV-height control framework for cellular-connected multi-UAV networks with multiple antenna base stations (BSs). With the aim of maximizing the minimum achievable rate for UAVs subject to co-existed terrestrial user equipment's rate constraints, we devise a hierarchical bi-layer iterative algorithm to optimize BSs' beamforming vectors, UAV association mat…
In this paper, the outage probability and outage-based beam design for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) interference channels are considered. First, closed-form expressions for the outage probability in MIMO interference channels are derived under the assumption of Gaussian-distributed channel state information (CSI) error, and the asymptotic behavior of the outage probability as a function of several system parameters is examined by using the Chernoff bound. It is shown that the outage probability decreases exponentially with respect to the quality of CSI measured by the inverse of the m…
In this paper, we analyze the performance of a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) wireless system that is affected by mixture-gamma small-scale fading, stochastic disorientation, and misalignment, as well as transceivers hardware imperfections. First, we statistically characterize the end-to-end channel for both cases, i.e., in the absence as well as in the presence of disorientation and misalignment, by extracting closed-form formulas for the probability density function (PDF) and the cumulative distribution function (CDF). Building on the aforemen…
In this paper, we deal with the performance analysis of full-duplex relaying in decode-&-forward cooperative networks with multiple-antenna terminals. More specifically, by analyzing the end-to-end statistics, we derive the accurate closed-form expressions of the end-to-end outage probability for both transmit and receive ZFBF scheme over Rayleigh fading environments. Some selected results show some interesting observations useful for system designers. Specifically, we observe that the outage performance can be improved by adopting the joint ZF-based precoding with different antenna configurat…
This paper studies the UAV-enabled integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), in which UAVs are dispatched as aerial dual-functional access points (APs) for efficient ISAC. In particular, we consider a scenario with one UAV-AP equipped with a vertically placed uniform linear array (ULA), which sends combined information and sensing signals to communicate with multiple users and sense potential targets at interested areas on the ground simultaneously. Our objective is to jointly design the UAV maneuver with the transmit beamforming for optimizing the communication performance while ensuring t…
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted communication becomes a promising technique to realize the beyond fifth generation (5G) wireless networks, due to the high mobility and maneuverability of UAVs which can adapt to heterogeneous requirements of different applications. However, the movement of UAVs impose challenge for accurate beam alignment between the UAV and the ground user equipment (UE). In this letter, we propose a deep learning-based location-aware predictive beamforming scheme to track the beam for UAV communications in a dynamic scenario. Specifically, a long short-term memory (LST…
This paper analyzes MIMO systems with multichannel beamforming in Ricean fading. Our results apply to a wide class of multichannel systems which transmit on the eigenmodes of the MIMO channel. We first present new closed-form expressions for the marginal ordered eigenvalue distributions of complex noncentral Wishart matrices. These are used to characterize the statistics of the signal to noise ratio (SNR) on each eigenmode. Based on this, we present exact symbol error rate (SER) expressions. We also derive closed-form expressions for the diversity order, array gain, and outage probability. We …
User performance on a wireless network depends on whether a neighboring cochannel interferer applies a single (spatial) stream or a multi stream transmission. This work analyzes the impact of interference rank on a beamforming and orthogonal space-time block coded (OSTBC) user transmission. We generalize existing analytical results on signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) distribution and outage probability under arbitrary number of unequal power interferers. We show that higher rank interference causes lower outage probability, and can support better outage threshold especially in th…
In this work, we consider a downlink NOMA network with multiple single-antenna users and multi-antenna UAVs. In particular, the users are spatially located in several clusters by following the Poisson Cluster Process and each cluster is served by a hovering UAV with NOMA. For practical considerations, we assume that only imperfect CSI of each user is available at the UAVs. Based on this model, the problem of joint user clustering and robust beamforming design is formulated to minimize the sum transmission power, and meanwhile, guarantee the QoS requirements of users. Due to the integer variabl…
This paper studies the coordinated beamforming design problem for the multiple-input single-output (MISO) interference channel, assuming only channel distribution information (CDI) at the transmitters. Under a given requirement on the rate outage probability for receivers, we aim to maximize the system utility (e.g., the weighted sum rate, weighted geometric mean rate, and the weighed harmonic mean rate) subject to the rate outage constraints and individual power constraints. The outage constraints, however, lead to a complicated, nonconvex structure for the considered beamforming design probl…
This paper studies the outage capacity of a network consisting of a multitude of heterogenous mobile users, and operating according to the classical opportunistic beamforming framework. The base station is located at the center of the cell, which is modeled as a disk of finite radius. The random user locations are modeled using a homogenous spatial Poisson point process. The received signals are impaired by both fading and location dependent path loss. For this system, we first derive an expression for the beam outage probability. This expression holds for all path loss models that satisfy som…
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 b…
We analyze the outage performance of a two-way fixed gain amplify-and-forward (AF) relay system with beamforming, arbitrary antenna correlation, and co-channel interference (CCI). Assuming CCI at the relay, we derive the exact individual user outage probability in closed-form. Additionally, while neglecting CCI, we also investigate the system outage probability of the considered network, which is declared if any of the two users is in transmission outage. Our results indicate that in this system, the position of the relay plays an important role in determining the user as well as the system ou…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are set to feature heavily in upcoming fifth generation (5G) networks. Yet, the adoption of multi-UAV networks means that spectrum scarcity in UAV communications is an issue in need of urgent solutions. Towards this end, downlink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is investigated in this paper for multi-UAV networks to improve spectrum utilization. Using the bivariate Rician shadowed fading model, closed-form expressions for the joint probability density function (PDF), marginal cumulative distribution functions (CDFs), and outage probability expressions are …
With increasing number of antennae in base stations, there is considerable interest in using beamfomining to improve physical layer security, by creating an `exposure region' that enhances the received signal quality for a legitimate user and reduces the possibility of leaking information to a randomly located passive eavesdropper. The paper formalises this concept by proposing a novel definition for the security level of such a legitimate transmission, called the `Spatial Secrecy Outage Probability' (SSOP). By performing a theoretical and numerical analysis, it is shown how the antenna array …
In intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) aided wireless communication systems, channel state information (CSI) is crucial to achieve its promising passive beamforming gains. However, CSI errors are inevitable in practice and generally correlated over the IRS reflecting elements due to the limited training with discrete phase shifts, which degrade the data transmission rate and reliability. In this paper, we focus on investigating the effect of CSI errors to the outage performance in an IRS-aided multiuser downlink communication system. Specifically, we aim to jointly optimize the active transmi…
Thanks to the line-of-sight (LoS) transmission and flexibility, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) effectively improve the throughput of wireless networks. Nevertheless, the LoS links are prone to severe deterioration by complex propagation environments, especially in urban areas. Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs), as a promising technique, can significantly improve the propagation environment and enhance communication quality by intelligently reflecting the received signals. Motivated by this, the joint UAV trajectory and RIS's passive beamforming design for a novel RIS-assisted UAV com…
This paper studies an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled wireless sensor network, in which one UAV flies in the sky to collect the data transmitted from a set of ground nodes (GNs) via distributed beamforming. We consider two scenarios with delay-tolerant and delay-sensitive applications, in which the GNs send the common/shared messages to the UAV via adaptive- and fixed-rate transmissions, respectively. For the two scenarios, we aim to maximize the average data-rate throughput and minimize the transmission outage probability, respectively, by jointly optimizing the UAV's trajectory design …
Numerous communications and networking challenges prevent deploying unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in extreme environments where the existing wireless technologies are mainly ground-focused; and, as a consequence, the air-to-air channel for UAVs is not fully covered. In this paper, a novel spatial estimation for beamforming is proposed to address UAV-based joint sensing and communications (JSC). The proposed spatial estimation algorithm relies on using a delay tolerant observer-based predictor, which can accurately predict the positions of the target UAVs in the presence of uncertainties due …
This article investigates the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) assisted unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) networks. By utilizing a stochastic geometry model, a new 3-Dimension UAV framework for providing wireless service to randomly roaming NOMA users has been proposed. In an effort to evaluate the performance of the proposed framework, we derive analytical expressions for the outage probability and the ergodic rate of MIMO-NOMA enhanced UAV networks. We examine tractable upper bounds for the whole proposed framework, with deriving asymptotic results fo…
This article investigates the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) enhanced unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-to-Everything (U2X) frameworks. A novel 3-Dimension framework for providing wireless services to randomly roaming NOMA receivers (Rxs) in the sphere space is proposed by utilizing stochastic geometry tools. In an effort to evaluate the performance of the proposed framework, we first derive closed-form expressions for the outage probability and the ergodic rate of paired NOMA Rxs. For obtaining more insights, we investigate the diversity order and the high signal-to-noise (SNR) slope of NO…
Millimeter-wave (mmWave) hybrid analog-digital beamforming is a promising approach to satisfy the low-latency constraint in multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) systems, which serve as network infrastructure for flexible deployment. However, in highly dynamic multi-UAV environments, analog beam tracking becomes a critical challenge. The overhead of additional pilot transmission at the price of spectral efficiency is shown necessary to achieve high resilience in operation. An efficient method to deal with high dynamics of UAVs applies machine learning, particularly Q-learning, to analog bea…
Providing connectivity to aerial users such as cellular connected unmanned aerial vehicles is a key challenge for future cellular systems. In this paper, the use of conjugate beamforming for simultaneous content delivery to an AU coexisting with multiple ground users is investigated. In particular, a content delivery network of uniformly distributed massive MIMO enabled ground base stations serving both aerial and ground users through spatial multiplexing is considered. For this model, the successful content delivery probability is derived as a function of the system parameters. The effects of…
Cognitive radio is a promising technology to improve spectral efficiency. However, the secure performance of a secondary network achieved by using physical layer security techniques is limited by its transmit power and channel fading. In order to tackle this issue, a cognitive unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication network is studied by exploiting the high flexibility of a UAV and the possibility of establishing line-of-sight links. The average secrecy rate of the secondary network is maximized by robustly optimizing the UAV's trajectory and transmit power. Our problem formulation takes i…
This article investigates physical layer security (PLS) in reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted multiple-input multiple-output multiple-antenna-eavesdropper (MIMOME) channels. Existing researches ignore the problem that secrecy rate can not be calculated if the eavesdropper's instantaneous channel state information (CSI) is unknown. Furthermore, without the secrecy rate expression, beamforming and phase shifter optimization with the purpose of PLS enhancement is not available. To address these problems, we first give the expression of secrecy outage probability for any beamforming…
Underwater sensor networks (UWSNs) are of interest to gather data from underwater sensor nodes (SNs) and deliver information to a terrestrial access point (AP) in the uplink transmission, and transfer data from the AP to the SNs in the downlink transmission. In this paper, we investigate a triple-hop UWSN in which autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) relays enable end-to-end communications between the SNs and the AP. It is assumed that the SN--AUV, AUV--UAV, and UAV--AP links are deployed by underwater optical communication (UWOC), free-space optic (FSO), and r…
Relay-assisted free-space optical (FSO) communication systems are exploited as a means to mitigate the limiting effects of the turbulence induced atmospheric scintillation. However, conventional ground relays are stationary, and their optimal placement is not always feasible. Due to their mobility and flexibility, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) provide new opportunities for FSO relaying systems. In this paper, a hovering UAV-based serial FSO decode-and-forward relaying system is investigated. In the channel modelling for such a system, four types of impairments (i.e., atmospheric loss, atmosp…
In unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks, directional modulation (DM) is adopted to improve the secrecy rate (SR) performance. Alice, a ground base station, behaves as a control center, and Bob is a UAV of flying along a linear flight trajectory who optimizes its SR performance by dynamically adjusting its beamforming vectors and power allocation (PA) strategy. Per fixed time interval during the Bob's flight process, the transmit beamforming vectors for useful messages and AN projection are given by the rule of maximizing signal-to-leakage-and-noise ratio (Max-SLNR) and maximizing AN-and-leak…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have brought a lot of flexibility in the network deployment. However, UAVs suffer from the high mobility and instability. To improve the capacity and reliability of the UAV networks, millimeter-wave (mmWave) and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) can be used in the system. In this paper, we consider an RIS-assisted mmWave UAV wireless cellular network, where UAVs serve several users with the help of multiple RISs. We jointly optimize the deployment, user scheduling, beamforming vector, and RIS phases to maximize the sum-rate, with the constraints of the …
The design of a set of beamformers for the multiuser multiple-input single-output (MISO) downlink that provides the receivers with prespecified levels of quality-of-service (QoS) can be quite challenging when the channel state information is not perfectly known at the base station. The constraint of having the SINR meet or exceed a given threshold with high probability is intractable in general, which results in problems that are fundamentally hard to solve. In this paper, we will develop a high quality approximation of the SINR outage constraint that, along with a semidefinite relaxation, ena…
This paper considers unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-carried intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) for secure data collection in wireless sensor networks. An eavesdropper (Eve) lurks within the vicinity of the main receiver (Bob) while several randomly placed sensor nodes beamform collaboratively to the UAV-carried IRS that reflects the signal to the main receiver (Bob). The design objective is to maximise the achievable secrecy rate in the noisy communication channel by jointly optimizing the collaborative beamforming weights of the sensor nodes, the trajectory of the UAV and the reflection coef…
Terahertz (THz) systems are capable of supporting ultra-high data rates thanks to large bandwidth, and the potential to harness high-gain beamforming to combat high pathloss. In this paper, a novel quantum sensing (Ghost Imaging (GI)) based beam training is proposed for Simultaneously Transmitting and Reflecting Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (STAR RIS) aided THz multi-user massive MIMO systems. We first conduct GI by surrounding 5G downlink signals to obtain 3D images of the environment including users and obstacles. Based on the information, we calculate the optimal position of the UAV-m…
This paper considers grid formation of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm for maximizing the secrecy rate in the presence of an unknown eavesdropper. In particular, the UAV swarm performs coordinated beamforming onto the null space of the legitimate channel to jam the eavesdropper located at an unknown location. By nulling the channel between the legitimate receiver and the UAV swarm, we obtain an optimal trajectory and jamming power allocation for each UAV enabling wideband single ray beamforming to improve the secrecy rate. Results obtained demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed U…
In this paper, an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is introduced to assist an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication system based on non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) for serving multiple ground users. We aim to minimize the average total system energy consumption by jointly designing the resource allocation strategy, the three dimensional (3D) trajectory of the UAV, as well as the phase control at the IRS. The design is formulated as a non-convex optimization problem taking into account the maximum tolerable outage probability constraint and the individual minimum data rate requi…
