Dr Jinfei Wang

In vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) networks, a cluster of multi-antenna access points (APs) can collaboratively conduct transmitter beamforming to provide data services (e.g., eMBB or URLLC). The collaboration between APs effectively forms a networked linear antenna-array with extra-large aperture (i.e., network-ELAA), where the wireless channel exhibits spatial non-stationarity. Major contribution of this work lies in the analysis of beamforming gain and radio coverage for network-ELAA non-stationary Rician channels considering the AP clustering. Assuming that: 1) the total transmit-power is fixed and evenly distributed over APs, 2) the beam is formed only based on the line-of-sight (LoS) path, it is found that the beamforming gain is concave to the cluster size. The optimum size of the AP cluster varies with respect to the user's location, channel uncertainty as well as data services. A user located farther from the ELAA requires a larger cluster size. URLLC is more sensitive to the channel uncertainty when comparing to eMBB, thus requiring a larger cluster size to mitigate the channel fading effect and extend the coverage. Finally, it is shown that the network-ELAA can offer significant coverage extension (50% or more in most of cases) when comparing with the single-AP scenario.

In this paper, a novel nonlinear precoding (NLP) technique, namely constellation-oriented perturbation (COP), is proposed to tackle the scalability problem inherent in conventional NLP techniques. The basic concept of COP is to apply vector perturbation (VP) in the constellation domain instead of symbol domain; as often used in conventional techniques. By this means, the computational complexity of COP is made independent to the size of multi-antenna (i.e., MIMO) networks. Instead, it is related to the size of symbol constellation. Through widely linear transform, it is shown that COP has its complexity flexibly scalable in the constellation domain to achieve a good complexityperformance tradeoff. Our computer simulations show that COP can offer very comparable performance with the optimum VP in small MIMO systems. Moreover, it significantly outperforms current sub-optimum VP approaches (such as degree-2 VP) in large MIMO whilst maintaining much lower computational complexity.

This paper presents a parallel computing approach that is employed to reconstruct original information bits from a non-recursive convolutional codeword in noise, with the goal of reducing the decoding latency without compromising the performance. This goal is achieved by means of cutting a received codeword into a number of sub-codewords (SCWs) and feeding them into a two-stage decoder. At the first stage, SCWs are decoded in parallel using the Viterbi algorithm or equivalently the brute force algorithm. Major challenge arises when determining the initial state of the trellis diagram for each SCW, which is uncertain except for the first one; and such results in multiple decoding outcomes for every SCW. To eliminate or more precisely exploit the uncertainty, an Euclidean-distance minimization algorithm is employed to merge neighboring SCWs; and this is called the merging stage, which can also run in parallel. Our work reveals that the proposed two-stage decoder is optimal and has its latency growing logarithmically, instead of linearly as for the Viterbi algorithm, with respect to the codeword length. Moreover, it is shown that the decoding latency can be further reduced by employing artificial neural networks for the SCW decoding. Computer simulations are conducted for two typical convolutional codes, and the results confirm our theoretical analysis.

—The cumulative distribution function (CDF) of a non-central χ 2-distributed random variable (RV) is often used when measuring the outage probability of communication systems. For ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC), it is important but mathematically challenging to determine the outage threshold for an extremely small outage target. This motivates us to investigate lower bounds of the outage threshold, and it is found that the one derived from the Chernoff inequality (named Cher-LB) is the most effective lower bound. This finding is associated with three rigorously established properties of the Cher-LB with respect to the mean, variance, reliability requirement , and degrees of freedom of the non-central χ 2-distributed RV. The Cher-LB is then employed to predict the beamforming gain in URLLC for both conventional multi-antenna systems (i.e., MIMO) under first-order Markov time-varying channel and reconfigurable intellgent surface (RIS) systems. It is exhibited that, with the proposed Cher-LB, the pessimistic prediction of the beamforming gain is made sufficiently accurate for guaranteed reliability as well as the transmit-energy efficiency.

The cumulative distribution function (CDF) of a non-central χ2 -distributed random variable (RV) is often used when measuring the outage probability of communication systems. For adaptive transmitters, it is important but mathematically challenging to determine the outage threshold for an extreme target outage probability (e.g., 10−5 or less). This motivates us to investigate lower bounds of the outage threshold, and it is found that the one derived from the Chernoff inequality (named Cher-LB) is the most {effective} lower bound. The Cher-LB is then employed to predict the multi-antenna transmitter beamforming-gain in ultra-reliable and low-latency communication, concerning the first-order Markov time-varying channel. It is exhibited that, with the proposed Cher-LB, pessimistic prediction of the beamforming gain is made sufficiently accurate for guaranteed reliability as well as the transmit-energy efficiency.

Deep learning is driving a radical paradigm shift in wireless communications, all the way from the application layer down to the physical layer. Despite this, there is an ongoing debate as to what additional values artificial intelligence (or machine learning) could bring to us, particularly on the physical layer design; and what penalties there may have? These ques-tions motivate a fundamental rethinking of the wireless modem design in the artificial intelli-gence era. Through several physical-layer case studies, we argue for a significant role that ma-chine learning could play, for instance in parallel error-control coding and decoding, channel equalization, interference cancellation, as well as multiuser and multiantenna detection. In addition, we discuss the fundamental bottlenecks of machine learning as well as their poten-tial solutions in this paper.

In this paper, a novel spatially non-stationary channel model is proposed for link-level computer simulations of massive multiple-input multiple-output (mMIMO) with extremely large aperture array (ELAA). The proposed channel model allows a mix of non-line-of-sight (NLoS) and LoS links between a user and service antennas. The NLoS/LoS state of each link is characterized by a binary random variable, which obeys a correlated Bernoulli distribution. The correlation is described in the form of an exponentially decaying window. In addition, the proposed model incorporates shadowing effects which are non-identical for NLoS and LoS states. It is demonstrated, through computer emulation, that the proposed model can capture almost all spatially non-stationary fading behaviors of the ELAA-mMIMO channel. Moreover, it has a low implementational complexity. With the proposed channel model, Monte-Carlo simulations are carried out to evaluate the channel capacity of ELAA-mMIMO. It is shown that the ELAA-mMIMO channel capacity has considerably different stochastic characteristics from the conventional mMIMO due to the presence of channel spatial non-stationarity.

Current iterative multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) detectors suffer from slow convergence when the wireless channel is ill-conditioned. The ill-conditioning is mainly caused by spatial correlation between channel columns corresponding to the same user equipment, known as intra-user interference. In addition, in the emerging MIMO systems using an extremely large aperture array (ELAA), spatial non-stationarity can make the channel even more ill-conditioned. In this paper, user-wise singular value decomposition (UW-SVD) is proposed to accelerate the convergence of iterative MIMO detectors. Its basic principle is to perform SVD on each user's sub-channel matrix to eliminate intra-user interference. Then, the MIMO signal model is effectively transformed into an equivalent signal (e-signal) model, comprising an e-channel matrix and an e-signal vector. Existing iterative algorithms can be used to recover the e-signal vector, which undergoes post-processing to obtain the signal vector. It is proven that the e-channel matrix is better conditioned than the original MIMO channel for spatially correlated (ELAA-)MIMO channels. This implies that UW-SVD can accelerate current iterative algorithms, which is confirmed by our simulation results. Specifically, it can speed up convergence by up to 10 times in both uncoded and coded systems. Index Terms—Linear MIMO detectors, extremely large aperture array (ELAA), user-wise singular value decomposition (UW-SVD), channel ill-conditioning, fast convergence.

The cumulative distribution function (CDF) of a non-central χ2-distributed random variable (RV) is often used when measuring the outage probability of communication systems. For adaptive transmitters, it is important but mathematically challenging to determine the outage threshold for an extreme target outage probability (e.g., 10 −5 or less). This motivates us to investigate lower bounds of the outage threshold, and it is found that the one derived from the Chernoff inequality (named Cher-LB) is the most effective lower bound. The Cher-LB is then employed to predict the multi-antenna transmitter beamforming-gain in ultra-reliable and low-latency communication, concerning the first-order Markov time-varying channel. It is exhibited that, with the proposed Cher-LB, pessimistic prediction of the beamforming gain is made sufficiently accurate for guaranteed reliability as well as the transmit-energy efficiency. Index Terms—Chernoff bound, beamforming gain, non-central χ2-distribution, reliability, multi-input multi-output (MIMO).