Onel Luis Alcaraz López - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Onel Luis Alcaraz López

arXiv (Cornell University), Dec 11, 2019

Recent advances on wireless energy transfer (WET) make it a promising solution for powering futur... more 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.

arXiv (Cornell University), May 29, 2020

Wireless Energy Transfer (WET) is a promising solution for powering massive Internet of Things de... more Wireless Energy Transfer (WET) is a promising solution for powering massive Internet of Things deployments. An important question is whether the costly Channel State Information (CSI) acquisition procedure is necessary for optimum performance. In this paper, we shed some light into this matter by evaluating CSI-based and CSI-free multi-antenna WET schemes in a setup with WET in the downlink, and periodic or Poisson-traffic Wireless Information Transfer (WIT) in the uplink. When CSI is available, we show that a maximum ratio transmission beamformer is close to optimum whenever the farthest node experiences at least 3 dB of power attenuation more than the remaining devices. On the other hand, although the adopted CSI-free mechanism is not capable of providing average harvesting gains, it does provide greater WET/WIT diversity with lower energy requirements when compared with the CSIbased scheme. Our numerical results evidence that the CSI-free scheme performs favorably under periodic traffic conditions, but it may be deficient in case of Poisson traffic, specially if the setup is not optimally configured. Finally, we show the prominent performance results when the uplink transmissions are periodic, while highlighting the need of a minimum mean square error equalizer rather than zero-forcing for information decoding.

arXiv (Cornell University), Sep 21, 2020

Interference mitigation is a major design challenge in wireless systems,especially in the context... more Interference mitigation is a major design challenge in wireless systems,especially in the context of ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) services. Conventional averagebased interference management schemes are not suitable for URLLC as they do not accurately capture the tail information of the interference distribution. This letter proposes a novel interference prediction algorithm that considers the entire interference distribution instead of only the mean. The key idea is to model the interference variation as a discrete state space discrete-time Markov chain. The state transition probability matrix is then used to estimate the state evolution in time, and allocate radio resources accordingly. The proposed scheme is found to meet the target reliability requirements in a low-latency single-shot transmission system considering realistic system assumptions, while requiring only ∼ 25% more resources than the optimum case with perfect interference knowledge.

arXiv (Cornell University), Jul 21, 2021

Ambient radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting (EH) technology is key to realize self-sustainable... more Ambient radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting (EH) technology is key to realize self-sustainable, always-on, low-power, massive Internet of Things networks. Typically, rigid (non-adaptable to channel fluctuations) multi-antenna receive architectures are proposed to support reliable EH operation. Herein, we introduce a dynamic RF combining architecture for ambient RF EH use cases, and exemplify the attainable performance gains via three simple phase shifts' exploration mechanisms, namely, brute force (BF), sequential testing (ST) and codebook based (CB). Among the proposed mechanisms, BF demands the highest power consumption, while CB requires the highest-resolution phase shifters, thus tipping the scales in favor of ST. Finally, we show that the performance gains of ST over a rigid RF combining scheme increase with the number of receive antennas and energy transmitters' deployment density.

arXiv (Cornell University), Aug 15, 2019

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been identified as a promising technology for future wi... more Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been identified as a promising technology for future wireless systems due to its performance gains in spectral efficiency when compared to conventional orthogonal schemes (OMA). This gain can be easily translated to an increasing number of served users, but imposes a challenge in the system reliability which is of vital importance for new services and applications of coming cellular systems. To cope with these issues we propose a NOMA rate control strategy that makes use only of topological characteristics of the scenario and the reliability constraint. We attain the necessary conditions so that NOMA overcomes the OMA alternative, while we discuss the optimum allocation strategies for the 2-user NOMA setup when operating with equal rate or maximum sumrate goals. In such scenario we show that the user with the largest target error probability times the ratio between the average receive signal power and the average interference power, should be scheduled to be decoded first for optimum performance. We compare numerically the performance of our allocation scheme with its ideal counterpart requiring full CSI at the BSs and infinitely long blocklength, and show how the gap increases as the reliability constraint becomes more stringent. Results also evidence the benefits of NOMA when the co-interference can be efficiently canceled, specially when the goal is to maximize the sum-rate.

arXiv (Cornell University), May 1, 2022

Grant-free protocols exploiting compressed sensing (CS) multiuser detection (MUD) are appealing f... more Grant-free protocols exploiting compressed sensing (CS) multiuser detection (MUD) are appealing for solving the random access problem in massive machine-type communications (mMTC) with sporadic device activity. Such protocols would greatly benefit from a prior deterministic knowledge of the sparsity level, i.e., instantaneous number of simultaneously active devices K. Aiming at this, herein we introduce a framework relying on coordinated pilot transmissions (CPT) over a short phase at the beginning of the transmission block for detecting K in mMTC scenarios under Rayleigh fading. CPT can be implemented either as: i) U-CPT, which exploits only uplink transmissions, or A-CPT, which includes also downlink transmissions for channel state information (CSI) acquisition that resolve fading uncertainty. We discuss two specific implementations of A-CPT: ii) A-CPT-F, which implements CSI-based phase corrections while leveraging the same statistical inverse power control used by U-CPT, and iii) A-CPT-D, which implements a dynamic CSI-based inverse power control, although it requires some active devices to remain in silence if their corresponding channels are too faded. We derive a signal sparsity level detector for each CPT mechanism by relaxing the original integer detection/classification problem to an estimation problem in the continuous real domain followed by a rounding operation. We show that the variance of the relaxed estimator increases with K 2 and K when operating with U-CPT and A-CPT mechanisms, respectively. The distribution of the estimators under U-CPT, A-CPT-F and A-CPT-D is found to follow an exponential, Gaussian, and Student's t−like distribution, respectively. Analyses evince the superiority of A-CPT-D, which is also corroborated via numerical results. We reveal several interesting trade-offs and highlight potential research directions.

Security and Communication Networks, Oct 29, 2021

Internet of ings (IoT) facilitates physical things to detect, interact, and execute activities on... more Internet of ings (IoT) facilitates physical things to detect, interact, and execute activities on-demand, enabling a variety of applications such as smart homes and smart cities. However, it also creates many potential risks related to data security and privacy vulnerabilities on the physical layer of cloud-based Internet of ings (IoT) networks. ese can include different types of physical attacks such as interference, eavesdropping, and jamming. As a result, quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning gets difficult for cloud-based IoT. is paper investigates the statistical QoS provisioning of a four-node cloud-based IoT network under security, reliability, and latency constraints by relying on the effective capacity model to offer enhanced QoS for IoT networks. Alice and Bob are legitimate nodes trying to communicate with secrecy in the considered scenario, while an eavesdropper Eve overhears their communication. Meanwhile, a friendly jammer, which emits artificial noise, is used to degrade the wiretap channel. By taking advantage of their multiple antennas, Alice implements transmit antenna selection, while Bob and Eve perform maximum-ratio combining. We further assume that Bob decodes the artificial noise perfectly and thus removes its contribution by implementing perfect successive interference cancellation. A closed-form expression for an alternative formulation of the outage probability, conditioned upon the successful transmission of a message, is obtained by considering adaptive rate allocation in an ON-OFF transmission. e data arriving at Alice's buffer are modeled by considering four different Markov sources to describe different IoT traffic patterns. en, the problem of secure throughput maximization is addressed through particle swarm optimization by considering the security, latency, and reliability constraints. Our results evidence the considerable improvements on the delay violation probability by increasing the number of antennas at Bob under strict buffer constraints.

The Fifth Generation (5G) of wireless networks introduced native support for Machine-Type Communi... more The Fifth Generation (5G) of wireless networks introduced native support for Machine-Type Communication (MTC), which is a key enabler for the Internet of Things (IoT) revolution. Current 5G standards are not yet capable of fully satisfying the requirements of critical MTC (cMTC) and massive MTC (mMTC) use cases. This is the main reason why industry and academia have already started working on technical solutions for beyond-5G and Sixth Generation (6G) networks. One technological solution that has been extensively studied is the combination of network densification, massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (mMIMO) systems and user-centric design, which is known as distributed mMIMO or Cell-Free (CF) mMIMO. Under this new paradigm, there are no longer cell boundaries: all the Access Points (APs) on the network cooperate to jointly serve all the devices. In this paper, we compare the performance of traditional mMIMO and different distributed mMIMO setups, and quantify the macro diversity and signal spatial diversity performance they provide. Aiming at the uplink in industrial indoor scenarios, we adopt a path loss model based on real measurement campaigns. Monte Carlo simulation results show that the grid deployment of APs provide higher average channel gains, but radio stripes deployments provide lower variability of the received signal strength.

IEEE Access, 2022

Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC) is a newly introduced service class targeting em... more Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC) is a newly introduced service class targeting emerging Internet-of-Things (IoT) application scenarios. This paper assumes an interferencelimited Fog Radio Access Network (F-RAN) setup composed of multiple Remote Radio Heads (RRHs) equipped with multiple antennas serving single-antenna users. F-RAN facilitates collaborative solutions while reducing delay by pushing the network capabilities beyond the edge. By leveraging diversity, RRHs may cooperate through silencing, reducing interference, or joint transmission strategies such as maximal ratio transmission. We derive closed-form outage probability expressions and attain their diversity gain. We validate the derived analytical results through extensive numerical simulations. Furthermore, we propose a mini-slots-based scheduling framework to serve URLLC users within their fixed latency budget. In an interference-limited regime with the proposed scheduling framework, we show that a performance gain is superior when RRHs cooperate compared to when they do not. We briefly discuss the cost of reliability, i.e., the impact on the system's average sum throughput under cooperation. Moreover, numerical results verify that cooperating transmission schemes boost transmission reliability with a significantly improved latency performance at the cost of reduced system's average sum throughput.

IEEE Internet of Things Journal, Sep 1, 2022

The Internet of Things (IoT) brings connectivity to a massive number of devices that demand energ... more The Internet of Things (IoT) brings connectivity to a massive number of devices that demand energy-efficient solutions to deal with limited battery capacities, uplink-dominant traffic, and channel impairments. In this work, we explore the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with configurable antennas as a flexible solution for serving lowpower IoT networks. We formulate an optimization problem to set the position and antenna beamwidth of the UAV, and the transmit power of the IoT devices subject to average-signal-toaverage-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) Quality-of-Service (QoS) constraints. We minimize the worst case average energy consumption of the latter, thus targeting the fairest allocation of the energy resources. The problem is nonconvex and highly nonlinear; therefore, we reformulate it as a series of three geometric programs that can be solved iteratively. Results reveal the benefits of planning the network compared to a random deployment in terms of reducing the worst case average energy consumption. Furthermore, we show that the targetSINR is limited by the number of IoT devices, and highlight the dominant impact of the UAV hovering height when serving wider areas. Our proposed algorithm outperforms other optimization benchmarks in terms of minimizing the average energy consumption at the most energy-demanding IoT device, and convergence time. Index Terms-Energy efficiency, geometric programming (GP), Internet of Things (IoT), reconfigurable antennas, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), worst case average energy consumption. I. INTRODUCTION T HE FIFTH generation of cellular networks (5G) is introducing for the first time, in addition to the traditional human-centric broadband communication services, new service classes related to the Internet of Things (IoT) [1]. IoT use cases are usually characterized by the deployment of numerous low-cost low-power devices, for which novel energy-efficient strategies are increasingly needed as the network densifies [2]-[4]. Furthermore, the information and communication technology industry currently contributes to 6% of global CO 2 emissions [5]. As a consequence, energy-efficient technologies and solutions are relentlessly pursued by industry and academy. We need to consider myriad of different approaches

IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, Sep 1, 2022

Radio frequency wireless energy transfer (WET) is a promising solution for powering autonomous In... more Radio frequency wireless energy transfer (WET) is a promising solution for powering autonomous Internet of Things (IoT) deployments. In this work, we leverage energy beamforming for powering multiple user equipments (UEs) with stringent energy harvesting (EH) demands in an indoor distributed massive multiple-input multiple-output system. Based on semi-definite programming, successive convex approximation (SCA), and maximum ratio transmission (MRT) techniques, we derive optimal and sub-optimal precoders aimed at minimizing the radio stripes' transmit power while exploiting information of the power transfer efficiency of the EH circuits at the UEs. Moreover, we propose an analytical framework to assess and control the electromagnetic field (EMF) radiation exposure in the considered indoor scenario. Numerical results show that i) the EMF radiation exposure can be more easily controlled at higher frequencies at the cost of a higher transmit power consumption, ii) training is not a very critical factor for the considered indoor system, iii) MRT/SCA-based precoders are particularly appealing when serving a small number of UEs, thus, especially suitable for implementation in a time domain multiple access (TDMA) scheduling framework, and iv) TDMA is more efficient than spatial domain multiple access (SDMA) when serving a relatively small number of UEs. Results suggest that additional boosting performance strategies are needed to increase the overall system efficiency, thus making the technology viable in practice.

IEEE Access, 2022

The Fifth Generation (5G) of wireless networks introduced support to Machine-Type Communications ... more The Fifth Generation (5G) of wireless networks introduced support to Machine-Type Communications (MTC), which is the wireless connectivity solution for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. MTC is split into two different categories: massive MTC (mMTC) and critical MTC (cMTC). Current 5G standards and technologies are not capable of fully satisfying the requirements of both mMTC and cMTC use cases, thus industry and academia have already started developing solutions for MTC in beyond-5G and 6G networks. In some mMTC use cases, receivers might not be equipped with a large number of antennas owing to cost, size or power limitations, thus the number of active devices in a time slot may surpass the number of antennas. Due to the limited spatial multiplexing capabilities, only multi-antenna techniques are not enough to provide connectivity to a massive number of devices in such scenarios. In this paper, we propose and evaluate the performance of iterative linear receivers that can address this issue. By combining Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) techniques with Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) exploiting Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) or Parallel Interference Cancellation (PIC) decoding, the proposed novel receivers are capable of performing dynamic ordering SIC/PIC decoding of multiple overlapping signals even when the number of active devices surpasses that of receive antennas. The performance of the receivers is studied in terms of outage probability and computational complexity. Simulation results show that, among all the receivers studied in this paper, the PIC-based Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) receiver presents the best performance while at the same time reducing the number of complex signal operations such as matrix inversions. INDEX TERMS 5G, 6G, mMTC, MIMO, NOMA.

IEEE Wireless Communications Letters, Jul 1, 2023

Prolonging the lifetime of massive machine-type communication (MTC) networks is key to realizing ... more Prolonging the lifetime of massive machine-type communication (MTC) networks is key to realizing a sustainable digitized society. Great energy savings can be achieved by accurately predicting MTC traffic followed by properly designed resource allocation mechanisms. However, selecting the proper MTC traffic predictor is not straightforward and depends on accuracy/complexity trade-offs and the specific MTC applications and network characteristics. Remarkably, the related state-ofthe-art literature still lacks such debates. Herein, we assess the performance of several machine learning (ML) methods to predict Poisson and quasi-periodic MTC traffic in terms of accuracy and computational cost. Results show that the temporal convolutional network (TCN) outperforms the long-short term memory (LSTM), the gated recurrent units (GRU), and the recurrent neural network (RNN), in that order. For Poisson traffic, the accuracy gap between the predictors is larger than under quasiperiodic traffic. Finally, we show that running a TCN predictor is around three times more costly than other methods, while the training/inference time is the greatest/least.

arXiv (Cornell University), Jan 13, 2021

Data aggregation is an efficient approach to handle the congestion introduced by a massive number... more 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.

This paper studies a power splitting (PS)-based simultaneous wireless information and power trans... more This paper studies a power splitting (PS)-based simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) multiuser system. Specifically, an optimization problem is formulated to minimize the average transmit power of the base station (BS) by jointly optimizing the transmit beamformer and receive PS ratios, while meeting user-specific latency and energy harvesting (EH) requirements. We employ the Lyapunov optimization framework and provide a dynamic control algorithm for the time-average problem. The coupled and non-convex constraints are handled via the Successive Convex Approximation (SCA) technique, and a low-complexity iterative algorithm, where each step is computed in closed-form, is proposed by solving a system of Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) optimality conditions. The numerical results provide insights on the robustness of the proposed design to realize a power-efficient SWIPT system while ensuring latency and EH requirements in a dynamic network.

This paper considers a multiuser multiple-inputsingle-output (MU-MISO) broadcast scenario with po... more This paper considers a multiuser multiple-inputsingle-output (MU-MISO) broadcast scenario with power splitting (PS) based simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT). Specifically, we propose a novel joint transmit beamforming and receive PS strategy aiming to minimize the total transmit power of the base station (BS) under user-specific latency constraints. We use the Lyapunov optimization framework and derive a dynamic control algorithm to transform the long-term time-average sum-power minimization problem into a sequence of deterministic and independent subproblems. Furthermore, the combinations of coupled and non-convex constraints are handled using semidefinite relaxation (SDR) and fractional programming (FP) techniques. The numerical examples illustrate the trade-offs between average transmit power and harvested power while ensuring the user-specific latency requirements.

arXiv (Cornell University), Mar 23, 2023

In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine learning (ML) have gained significant i... more In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine learning (ML) have gained significant interest from both, industry and academia. Notably, conventional ML techniques require enormous amounts of power to meet the desired accuracy, which has limited their use mainly to high-capability devices such as network nodes. However, with many advancements in technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing, it is desirable to incorporate ML techniques into resource-constrained embedded devices for distributed and ubiquitous intelligence. This has motivated the emergence of the TinyML paradigm which is an embedded ML technique that enables ML applications on multiple cheap, resource-and power-constrained devices. However, during this transition towards appropriate implementation of the TinyML technology, multiple challenges such as processing capacity optimisation, improved reliability, and maintenance of learning models' accuracy require timely solutions. In this article, various avenues available for TinyML implementation are reviewed. Firstly, a background of TinyML is provided, followed by detailed discussions on various tools supporting TinyML. Then, state-of-art applications of TinyML using advanced technologies are detailed. Lastly, various research challenges and future directions are identified.

arXiv (Cornell University), Nov 16, 2022

The increasing popularity of the Internet of Everything and small-cell devices has enormously acc... more The increasing popularity of the Internet of Everything and small-cell devices has enormously accelerated traffic loads. Consequently, increased bandwidth and high data rate requirements stimulate the operation at the millimeter wave and the Tera-Hertz spectrum bands in the fifth generation (5G) and beyond 5G (B5G) wireless networks. Furthermore, efficient spectrum allocation, maximizing the spectrum utilization, achieving efficient spectrum sharing (SS), and managing the spectrum to enhance the system performance remain challenging. To this end, recent studies have implemented artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques, enabling intelligent and efficient spectrum leveraging. However, despite many recent research advances focused on maximizing utilization of the spectrum bands, achieving efficient sharing, allocation, and management of the enormous available spectrum remains challenging. Therefore, the current article acquaints a comprehensive survey on intelligent SS methodologies for 5G and B5G wireless networks, considering the applications of artificial intelligence for efficient SS. Specifically, a thorough overview of SS methodologies is conferred, following which the various spectrum utilization opportunities arising from the existing SS methodologies in intelligent wireless networks are discussed. Subsequently, to highlight critical limitations of the existing methodologies, recent literature on existing SS methodologies is reviewed in detail, classifying them based on the implemented technology, i.e., cognitive radio, machine learning, blockchain, and multiple other techniques. Moreover, the related SS techniques are reviewed to highlight significant challenges in the B5G intelligent wireless network. Finally, to provide an insight into the prospective research avenues, the article is concluded by presenting several potential research directions and proposed solutions.

arXiv (Cornell University), Dec 11, 2019

Recent advances on wireless energy transfer (WET) make it a promising solution for powering futur... more 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.

arXiv (Cornell University), May 29, 2020

Wireless Energy Transfer (WET) is a promising solution for powering massive Internet of Things de... more Wireless Energy Transfer (WET) is a promising solution for powering massive Internet of Things deployments. An important question is whether the costly Channel State Information (CSI) acquisition procedure is necessary for optimum performance. In this paper, we shed some light into this matter by evaluating CSI-based and CSI-free multi-antenna WET schemes in a setup with WET in the downlink, and periodic or Poisson-traffic Wireless Information Transfer (WIT) in the uplink. When CSI is available, we show that a maximum ratio transmission beamformer is close to optimum whenever the farthest node experiences at least 3 dB of power attenuation more than the remaining devices. On the other hand, although the adopted CSI-free mechanism is not capable of providing average harvesting gains, it does provide greater WET/WIT diversity with lower energy requirements when compared with the CSIbased scheme. Our numerical results evidence that the CSI-free scheme performs favorably under periodic traffic conditions, but it may be deficient in case of Poisson traffic, specially if the setup is not optimally configured. Finally, we show the prominent performance results when the uplink transmissions are periodic, while highlighting the need of a minimum mean square error equalizer rather than zero-forcing for information decoding.

arXiv (Cornell University), Sep 21, 2020

Interference mitigation is a major design challenge in wireless systems,especially in the context... more Interference mitigation is a major design challenge in wireless systems,especially in the context of ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) services. Conventional averagebased interference management schemes are not suitable for URLLC as they do not accurately capture the tail information of the interference distribution. This letter proposes a novel interference prediction algorithm that considers the entire interference distribution instead of only the mean. The key idea is to model the interference variation as a discrete state space discrete-time Markov chain. The state transition probability matrix is then used to estimate the state evolution in time, and allocate radio resources accordingly. The proposed scheme is found to meet the target reliability requirements in a low-latency single-shot transmission system considering realistic system assumptions, while requiring only ∼ 25% more resources than the optimum case with perfect interference knowledge.

arXiv (Cornell University), Jul 21, 2021

Ambient radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting (EH) technology is key to realize self-sustainable... more Ambient radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting (EH) technology is key to realize self-sustainable, always-on, low-power, massive Internet of Things networks. Typically, rigid (non-adaptable to channel fluctuations) multi-antenna receive architectures are proposed to support reliable EH operation. Herein, we introduce a dynamic RF combining architecture for ambient RF EH use cases, and exemplify the attainable performance gains via three simple phase shifts' exploration mechanisms, namely, brute force (BF), sequential testing (ST) and codebook based (CB). Among the proposed mechanisms, BF demands the highest power consumption, while CB requires the highest-resolution phase shifters, thus tipping the scales in favor of ST. Finally, we show that the performance gains of ST over a rigid RF combining scheme increase with the number of receive antennas and energy transmitters' deployment density.

arXiv (Cornell University), Aug 15, 2019

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been identified as a promising technology for future wi... more Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been identified as a promising technology for future wireless systems due to its performance gains in spectral efficiency when compared to conventional orthogonal schemes (OMA). This gain can be easily translated to an increasing number of served users, but imposes a challenge in the system reliability which is of vital importance for new services and applications of coming cellular systems. To cope with these issues we propose a NOMA rate control strategy that makes use only of topological characteristics of the scenario and the reliability constraint. We attain the necessary conditions so that NOMA overcomes the OMA alternative, while we discuss the optimum allocation strategies for the 2-user NOMA setup when operating with equal rate or maximum sumrate goals. In such scenario we show that the user with the largest target error probability times the ratio between the average receive signal power and the average interference power, should be scheduled to be decoded first for optimum performance. We compare numerically the performance of our allocation scheme with its ideal counterpart requiring full CSI at the BSs and infinitely long blocklength, and show how the gap increases as the reliability constraint becomes more stringent. Results also evidence the benefits of NOMA when the co-interference can be efficiently canceled, specially when the goal is to maximize the sum-rate.

arXiv (Cornell University), May 1, 2022

Grant-free protocols exploiting compressed sensing (CS) multiuser detection (MUD) are appealing f... more Grant-free protocols exploiting compressed sensing (CS) multiuser detection (MUD) are appealing for solving the random access problem in massive machine-type communications (mMTC) with sporadic device activity. Such protocols would greatly benefit from a prior deterministic knowledge of the sparsity level, i.e., instantaneous number of simultaneously active devices K. Aiming at this, herein we introduce a framework relying on coordinated pilot transmissions (CPT) over a short phase at the beginning of the transmission block for detecting K in mMTC scenarios under Rayleigh fading. CPT can be implemented either as: i) U-CPT, which exploits only uplink transmissions, or A-CPT, which includes also downlink transmissions for channel state information (CSI) acquisition that resolve fading uncertainty. We discuss two specific implementations of A-CPT: ii) A-CPT-F, which implements CSI-based phase corrections while leveraging the same statistical inverse power control used by U-CPT, and iii) A-CPT-D, which implements a dynamic CSI-based inverse power control, although it requires some active devices to remain in silence if their corresponding channels are too faded. We derive a signal sparsity level detector for each CPT mechanism by relaxing the original integer detection/classification problem to an estimation problem in the continuous real domain followed by a rounding operation. We show that the variance of the relaxed estimator increases with K 2 and K when operating with U-CPT and A-CPT mechanisms, respectively. The distribution of the estimators under U-CPT, A-CPT-F and A-CPT-D is found to follow an exponential, Gaussian, and Student's t−like distribution, respectively. Analyses evince the superiority of A-CPT-D, which is also corroborated via numerical results. We reveal several interesting trade-offs and highlight potential research directions.

Security and Communication Networks, Oct 29, 2021

Internet of ings (IoT) facilitates physical things to detect, interact, and execute activities on... more Internet of ings (IoT) facilitates physical things to detect, interact, and execute activities on-demand, enabling a variety of applications such as smart homes and smart cities. However, it also creates many potential risks related to data security and privacy vulnerabilities on the physical layer of cloud-based Internet of ings (IoT) networks. ese can include different types of physical attacks such as interference, eavesdropping, and jamming. As a result, quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning gets difficult for cloud-based IoT. is paper investigates the statistical QoS provisioning of a four-node cloud-based IoT network under security, reliability, and latency constraints by relying on the effective capacity model to offer enhanced QoS for IoT networks. Alice and Bob are legitimate nodes trying to communicate with secrecy in the considered scenario, while an eavesdropper Eve overhears their communication. Meanwhile, a friendly jammer, which emits artificial noise, is used to degrade the wiretap channel. By taking advantage of their multiple antennas, Alice implements transmit antenna selection, while Bob and Eve perform maximum-ratio combining. We further assume that Bob decodes the artificial noise perfectly and thus removes its contribution by implementing perfect successive interference cancellation. A closed-form expression for an alternative formulation of the outage probability, conditioned upon the successful transmission of a message, is obtained by considering adaptive rate allocation in an ON-OFF transmission. e data arriving at Alice's buffer are modeled by considering four different Markov sources to describe different IoT traffic patterns. en, the problem of secure throughput maximization is addressed through particle swarm optimization by considering the security, latency, and reliability constraints. Our results evidence the considerable improvements on the delay violation probability by increasing the number of antennas at Bob under strict buffer constraints.

The Fifth Generation (5G) of wireless networks introduced native support for Machine-Type Communi... more The Fifth Generation (5G) of wireless networks introduced native support for Machine-Type Communication (MTC), which is a key enabler for the Internet of Things (IoT) revolution. Current 5G standards are not yet capable of fully satisfying the requirements of critical MTC (cMTC) and massive MTC (mMTC) use cases. This is the main reason why industry and academia have already started working on technical solutions for beyond-5G and Sixth Generation (6G) networks. One technological solution that has been extensively studied is the combination of network densification, massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (mMIMO) systems and user-centric design, which is known as distributed mMIMO or Cell-Free (CF) mMIMO. Under this new paradigm, there are no longer cell boundaries: all the Access Points (APs) on the network cooperate to jointly serve all the devices. In this paper, we compare the performance of traditional mMIMO and different distributed mMIMO setups, and quantify the macro diversity and signal spatial diversity performance they provide. Aiming at the uplink in industrial indoor scenarios, we adopt a path loss model based on real measurement campaigns. Monte Carlo simulation results show that the grid deployment of APs provide higher average channel gains, but radio stripes deployments provide lower variability of the received signal strength.

IEEE Access, 2022

Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC) is a newly introduced service class targeting em... more Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC) is a newly introduced service class targeting emerging Internet-of-Things (IoT) application scenarios. This paper assumes an interferencelimited Fog Radio Access Network (F-RAN) setup composed of multiple Remote Radio Heads (RRHs) equipped with multiple antennas serving single-antenna users. F-RAN facilitates collaborative solutions while reducing delay by pushing the network capabilities beyond the edge. By leveraging diversity, RRHs may cooperate through silencing, reducing interference, or joint transmission strategies such as maximal ratio transmission. We derive closed-form outage probability expressions and attain their diversity gain. We validate the derived analytical results through extensive numerical simulations. Furthermore, we propose a mini-slots-based scheduling framework to serve URLLC users within their fixed latency budget. In an interference-limited regime with the proposed scheduling framework, we show that a performance gain is superior when RRHs cooperate compared to when they do not. We briefly discuss the cost of reliability, i.e., the impact on the system's average sum throughput under cooperation. Moreover, numerical results verify that cooperating transmission schemes boost transmission reliability with a significantly improved latency performance at the cost of reduced system's average sum throughput.

IEEE Internet of Things Journal, Sep 1, 2022

The Internet of Things (IoT) brings connectivity to a massive number of devices that demand energ... more The Internet of Things (IoT) brings connectivity to a massive number of devices that demand energy-efficient solutions to deal with limited battery capacities, uplink-dominant traffic, and channel impairments. In this work, we explore the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with configurable antennas as a flexible solution for serving lowpower IoT networks. We formulate an optimization problem to set the position and antenna beamwidth of the UAV, and the transmit power of the IoT devices subject to average-signal-toaverage-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) Quality-of-Service (QoS) constraints. We minimize the worst case average energy consumption of the latter, thus targeting the fairest allocation of the energy resources. The problem is nonconvex and highly nonlinear; therefore, we reformulate it as a series of three geometric programs that can be solved iteratively. Results reveal the benefits of planning the network compared to a random deployment in terms of reducing the worst case average energy consumption. Furthermore, we show that the targetSINR is limited by the number of IoT devices, and highlight the dominant impact of the UAV hovering height when serving wider areas. Our proposed algorithm outperforms other optimization benchmarks in terms of minimizing the average energy consumption at the most energy-demanding IoT device, and convergence time. Index Terms-Energy efficiency, geometric programming (GP), Internet of Things (IoT), reconfigurable antennas, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), worst case average energy consumption. I. INTRODUCTION T HE FIFTH generation of cellular networks (5G) is introducing for the first time, in addition to the traditional human-centric broadband communication services, new service classes related to the Internet of Things (IoT) [1]. IoT use cases are usually characterized by the deployment of numerous low-cost low-power devices, for which novel energy-efficient strategies are increasingly needed as the network densifies [2]-[4]. Furthermore, the information and communication technology industry currently contributes to 6% of global CO 2 emissions [5]. As a consequence, energy-efficient technologies and solutions are relentlessly pursued by industry and academy. We need to consider myriad of different approaches

IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, Sep 1, 2022

Radio frequency wireless energy transfer (WET) is a promising solution for powering autonomous In... more Radio frequency wireless energy transfer (WET) is a promising solution for powering autonomous Internet of Things (IoT) deployments. In this work, we leverage energy beamforming for powering multiple user equipments (UEs) with stringent energy harvesting (EH) demands in an indoor distributed massive multiple-input multiple-output system. Based on semi-definite programming, successive convex approximation (SCA), and maximum ratio transmission (MRT) techniques, we derive optimal and sub-optimal precoders aimed at minimizing the radio stripes' transmit power while exploiting information of the power transfer efficiency of the EH circuits at the UEs. Moreover, we propose an analytical framework to assess and control the electromagnetic field (EMF) radiation exposure in the considered indoor scenario. Numerical results show that i) the EMF radiation exposure can be more easily controlled at higher frequencies at the cost of a higher transmit power consumption, ii) training is not a very critical factor for the considered indoor system, iii) MRT/SCA-based precoders are particularly appealing when serving a small number of UEs, thus, especially suitable for implementation in a time domain multiple access (TDMA) scheduling framework, and iv) TDMA is more efficient than spatial domain multiple access (SDMA) when serving a relatively small number of UEs. Results suggest that additional boosting performance strategies are needed to increase the overall system efficiency, thus making the technology viable in practice.

IEEE Access, 2022

The Fifth Generation (5G) of wireless networks introduced support to Machine-Type Communications ... more The Fifth Generation (5G) of wireless networks introduced support to Machine-Type Communications (MTC), which is the wireless connectivity solution for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. MTC is split into two different categories: massive MTC (mMTC) and critical MTC (cMTC). Current 5G standards and technologies are not capable of fully satisfying the requirements of both mMTC and cMTC use cases, thus industry and academia have already started developing solutions for MTC in beyond-5G and 6G networks. In some mMTC use cases, receivers might not be equipped with a large number of antennas owing to cost, size or power limitations, thus the number of active devices in a time slot may surpass the number of antennas. Due to the limited spatial multiplexing capabilities, only multi-antenna techniques are not enough to provide connectivity to a massive number of devices in such scenarios. In this paper, we propose and evaluate the performance of iterative linear receivers that can address this issue. By combining Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) techniques with Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) exploiting Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) or Parallel Interference Cancellation (PIC) decoding, the proposed novel receivers are capable of performing dynamic ordering SIC/PIC decoding of multiple overlapping signals even when the number of active devices surpasses that of receive antennas. The performance of the receivers is studied in terms of outage probability and computational complexity. Simulation results show that, among all the receivers studied in this paper, the PIC-based Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) receiver presents the best performance while at the same time reducing the number of complex signal operations such as matrix inversions. INDEX TERMS 5G, 6G, mMTC, MIMO, NOMA.

IEEE Wireless Communications Letters, Jul 1, 2023

Prolonging the lifetime of massive machine-type communication (MTC) networks is key to realizing ... more Prolonging the lifetime of massive machine-type communication (MTC) networks is key to realizing a sustainable digitized society. Great energy savings can be achieved by accurately predicting MTC traffic followed by properly designed resource allocation mechanisms. However, selecting the proper MTC traffic predictor is not straightforward and depends on accuracy/complexity trade-offs and the specific MTC applications and network characteristics. Remarkably, the related state-ofthe-art literature still lacks such debates. Herein, we assess the performance of several machine learning (ML) methods to predict Poisson and quasi-periodic MTC traffic in terms of accuracy and computational cost. Results show that the temporal convolutional network (TCN) outperforms the long-short term memory (LSTM), the gated recurrent units (GRU), and the recurrent neural network (RNN), in that order. For Poisson traffic, the accuracy gap between the predictors is larger than under quasiperiodic traffic. Finally, we show that running a TCN predictor is around three times more costly than other methods, while the training/inference time is the greatest/least.

arXiv (Cornell University), Jan 13, 2021

Data aggregation is an efficient approach to handle the congestion introduced by a massive number... more 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.

This paper studies a power splitting (PS)-based simultaneous wireless information and power trans... more This paper studies a power splitting (PS)-based simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) multiuser system. Specifically, an optimization problem is formulated to minimize the average transmit power of the base station (BS) by jointly optimizing the transmit beamformer and receive PS ratios, while meeting user-specific latency and energy harvesting (EH) requirements. We employ the Lyapunov optimization framework and provide a dynamic control algorithm for the time-average problem. The coupled and non-convex constraints are handled via the Successive Convex Approximation (SCA) technique, and a low-complexity iterative algorithm, where each step is computed in closed-form, is proposed by solving a system of Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) optimality conditions. The numerical results provide insights on the robustness of the proposed design to realize a power-efficient SWIPT system while ensuring latency and EH requirements in a dynamic network.

This paper considers a multiuser multiple-inputsingle-output (MU-MISO) broadcast scenario with po... more This paper considers a multiuser multiple-inputsingle-output (MU-MISO) broadcast scenario with power splitting (PS) based simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT). Specifically, we propose a novel joint transmit beamforming and receive PS strategy aiming to minimize the total transmit power of the base station (BS) under user-specific latency constraints. We use the Lyapunov optimization framework and derive a dynamic control algorithm to transform the long-term time-average sum-power minimization problem into a sequence of deterministic and independent subproblems. Furthermore, the combinations of coupled and non-convex constraints are handled using semidefinite relaxation (SDR) and fractional programming (FP) techniques. The numerical examples illustrate the trade-offs between average transmit power and harvested power while ensuring the user-specific latency requirements.

arXiv (Cornell University), Mar 23, 2023

In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine learning (ML) have gained significant i... more In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine learning (ML) have gained significant interest from both, industry and academia. Notably, conventional ML techniques require enormous amounts of power to meet the desired accuracy, which has limited their use mainly to high-capability devices such as network nodes. However, with many advancements in technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing, it is desirable to incorporate ML techniques into resource-constrained embedded devices for distributed and ubiquitous intelligence. This has motivated the emergence of the TinyML paradigm which is an embedded ML technique that enables ML applications on multiple cheap, resource-and power-constrained devices. However, during this transition towards appropriate implementation of the TinyML technology, multiple challenges such as processing capacity optimisation, improved reliability, and maintenance of learning models' accuracy require timely solutions. In this article, various avenues available for TinyML implementation are reviewed. Firstly, a background of TinyML is provided, followed by detailed discussions on various tools supporting TinyML. Then, state-of-art applications of TinyML using advanced technologies are detailed. Lastly, various research challenges and future directions are identified.

arXiv (Cornell University), Nov 16, 2022

The increasing popularity of the Internet of Everything and small-cell devices has enormously acc... more The increasing popularity of the Internet of Everything and small-cell devices has enormously accelerated traffic loads. Consequently, increased bandwidth and high data rate requirements stimulate the operation at the millimeter wave and the Tera-Hertz spectrum bands in the fifth generation (5G) and beyond 5G (B5G) wireless networks. Furthermore, efficient spectrum allocation, maximizing the spectrum utilization, achieving efficient spectrum sharing (SS), and managing the spectrum to enhance the system performance remain challenging. To this end, recent studies have implemented artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques, enabling intelligent and efficient spectrum leveraging. However, despite many recent research advances focused on maximizing utilization of the spectrum bands, achieving efficient sharing, allocation, and management of the enormous available spectrum remains challenging. Therefore, the current article acquaints a comprehensive survey on intelligent SS methodologies for 5G and B5G wireless networks, considering the applications of artificial intelligence for efficient SS. Specifically, a thorough overview of SS methodologies is conferred, following which the various spectrum utilization opportunities arising from the existing SS methodologies in intelligent wireless networks are discussed. Subsequently, to highlight critical limitations of the existing methodologies, recent literature on existing SS methodologies is reviewed in detail, classifying them based on the implemented technology, i.e., cognitive radio, machine learning, blockchain, and multiple other techniques. Moreover, the related SS techniques are reviewed to highlight significant challenges in the B5G intelligent wireless network. Finally, to provide an insight into the prospective research avenues, the article is concluded by presenting several potential research directions and proposed solutions.