Information Theory (cs.IT)

Abstract: The complex transmission mechanism of cross-packet hybrid automatic repeat request (XP-HARQ) hinders its optimal system design. To overcome this difficulty, this letter attempts to use the deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to solve the rate selection problem of XP-HARQ over correlated fading channels. In particular, the long term average throughput (LTAT) is maximized by properly choosing the incremental information rate for each HARQ round on the basis of the outdated channel state information (CSI) available at the transmitter. The rate selection problem is first converted into a Markov decision process (MDP), which is then solved by capitalizing on the algorithm of deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) with prioritized experience replay. The simulation results finally corroborate the superiority of the proposed XP-HARQ scheme over the conventional HARQ with incremental redundancy (HARQ-IR) and the XP-HARQ with only statistical CSI.

Abstract: Wireless short-packet communications pose challenges to the security and reliability of the transmission. Besides, the proactive warder compounds these challenges, who detects and interferes with the potential transmission. An extra jamming channel is introduced by the proactive warder compared with the passive one, resulting in the inapplicability of analytical methods and results in exsiting works. Thus, effective system design schemes are required for short-packet communications against the proactive warder. To address this issue, we consider the analysis and design of covert and reliable transmissions for above systems. Specifically, to investigate the reliable and covert performance of the system, detection error probability at the warder and decoding error probability at the receiver are derived, which is affected by both the transmit power and the jamming power. Furthermore, to maximize the effective throughput, an optimization framework is proposed under reliability and covertness constraints. Numerical results verify the accuracy of analytical results and the feasibility of the optimization framework. It is shown that the tradeoff between transmission reliability and covertness is changed by the proactive warder compared with the passive one. Besides, it is shown that longer blocklength is always beneficial to improve the throughput for systems with optimized transmission rates. But when transmission rates are fixed, the blocklength should be carefully designed since the maximum one is not optimal in this case.

Abstract: Partial-information multiple access (PIMA) is an orthogonal multiple access (OMA) uplink scheme where time is divided into frames, each composed of two parts. The first part is used to count the number of users with packets to transmit, while the second has a variable number of allocated slots, each assigned to multiple users to uplink data transmission. We investigate the case of correlated user activations, wherein the correlation is due to the retransmissions of the collided packets, modeling PIMA as a partially observable-Markov decision process. The assignment of users to slots is optimized based on the knowledge of both the number of active users and past successful transmissions and collisions. The scheduling turns out to be a mixed integer nonlinear programming problem, with a complexity exponentially growing with the number of users. Thus, sub-optimal greedy solutions are proposed and evaluated. Our solutions show substantial performance improvements with respect to both traditional OMA schemes and conventional PIMA.

Abstract: Short-packet communications are applied to various scenarios where transmission covertness and reliability are crucial due to the open wireless medium and finite blocklength. Although intelligent reflection surface (IRS) has been widely utilized to enhance transmission covertness and reliability, the question of how many reflection elements at IRS are required remains unanswered, which is vital to system design and practical deployment. The inherent strong coupling exists between the transmission covertness and reliability by IRS, leading to the question of intractability. To address this issue, the detection error probability at the warder and its approximation are derived first to reveal the relation between covertness performance and the number of reflection elements. Besides, to evaluate the reliability performance of the system, the decoding error probability at the receiver is also derived. Subsequently, the asymptotic reliability performance in high covertness regimes is investigated, which provides theoretical predictions about the number of reflection elements at IRS required to achieve a decoding error probability close to 0 with given covertness requirements. Furthermore, Monte-Carlo simulations verify the accuracy of the derived results for detection (decoding) error probabilities and the validity of the theoretical predictions for reflection elements. Moreover, results show that more reflection elements are required to achieve high reliability with tighter covertness requirements, longer blocklength and higher transmission rates.

Abstract: This paper investigates the problem of joint subcarrier and power allocation in the coexistence of radar and multi-user communication systems. Specifically, in our research scenario, the base station (BS) provides information transmission services for multiple users while ensuring that its interference to a separate radar system will not affect the radar's normal function. To this end, we propose a subcarrier and power allocation scheme based on orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDM). The original problem consisting involving multivariate fractional programming and binary variables is highly non-convex. Due to its complexity, we relax the binary constraint by introducing a penalty term, provided that the optimal solution is not affected. Then, by integrating multiple power variables into one matrix, the original problem is reformulated as a multi-ratio fractional programming (FP) problem, and finally a quadratic transform is employed to make the non-convex problem a sequence of convex problems. The numerical results indicate the performance trade-off between the multi-user communication system and the radar system, and notably that the performance of the communication system is not improved with power increase in the presence of radar interference beyond a certain threshold. This provides a useful insight for the energy-efficient design of the system.

Abstract: Movable antennas (MAs) are a promising paradigm to enhance the spatial degrees of freedom of conventional multi-antenna systems by flexibly adapting the positions of the antenna elements within a given transmit area. In this paper, we model the motion of the MA elements as discrete movements and study the corresponding resource allocation problem for MA-enabled multiuser multiple-input single-output (MISO) communication systems. Specifically, we jointly optimize the beamforming and the MA positions at the base station (BS) for the minimization of the total transmit power while guaranteeing the minimum required signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of each individual user. To obtain the globally optimal solution to the formulated resource allocation problem, we develop an iterative algorithm capitalizing on the generalized Bender's decomposition with guaranteed convergence. Our numerical results demonstrate that the proposed MA-enabled communication system can significantly reduce the BS transmit power and the number of antenna elements needed to achieve a desired performance compared to state-of-the-art techniques, such as antenna selection. Furthermore, we observe that refining the step size of the MA motion driver improves performance at the expense of a higher computational complexity.

Abstract: This study investigates simpler alternatives to coherent joint transmission for supporting robust connectivity against signal blockage in mmWave/sub-THz access networks. By taking an information-theoretic viewpoint, we demonstrate analytically that with a careful design, full macrodiversity gains and significant SNR gains can be achieved through canonical receivers and minimal coordination and synchronization requirements at the infrastructure side. Our proposed scheme extends non-coherent joint transmission by employing a special form of diversity to counteract artificially induced deep fades that would otherwise make this technique often compare unfavorably against standard transmitter selection schemes. Additionally, the inclusion of an Alamouti-like space-time coding layer is shown to recover a significant fraction of the optimal performance. Our conclusions are based on an insightful multi-point intermittent block fading channel model that enables rigorous ergodic and outage rate analysis, while also considering timing offsets due to imperfect delay compensation. Although simplified, our approach captures the essential features of modern mmWave/sub-THz communications, thereby providing practical design guidelines for realistic systems.

Abstract: Unrolling a decoding algorithm allows to achieve extremely high throughput at the cost of increased area. Look-up tables (LUTs) can be used to replace functions otherwise implemented as circuits. In this work, we show the impact of replacing blocks of logic by carefully crafted LUTs in unrolled decoders for polar codes. We show that using LUTs to improve key performance metrics (e.g., area, throughput, latency) may turn out more challenging than expected. We present three variants of LUT-based decoders and describe their inner workings as well as circuits in detail. The LUT-based decoders are compared against a regular unrolled decoder, employing fixed-point representations for numbers, with a comparable error-correction performance. A short systematic polar code is used as an illustration. All resulting unrolled decoders are shown to be capable of an information throughput of little under 10 Gbps in a 28 nm FD-SOI technology clocked in the vicinity of 1.4 GHz to 1.5 GHz. The best variant of our LUT-based decoders is shown to reduce the area requirements by 23% compared to the regular unrolled decoder while retaining a comparable error-correction performance.