Directivity-Aware Degrees of Freedom Analysis for Extremely Large-Scale MIMO

Extremely large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (XL-MIMO) communications, enabled by numerous antenna elements integrated into large antenna surfaces, can provide increased effective degree of freedom (EDoF) to achieve high diversity gain. However, it remains an open problem that how the EDoF is influenced by the directional radiation pattern of antenna elements. In this work, empowered by the wavenumber-domain channel representation, we analyze the EDoF in a general case where the directivity of antennas, determined by the antenna structure and element spacing, is considered. Specifically, we first reveal the uneven distribution of directivity-aware wavenumber-domain coupling coefficients, i.e., channel gain towards different directions, in the isotropic Rayleigh fading channel. EDoF is then calculated based on such distribution of coupling coefficients. A numerical method is also provided to obtain coupling coefficients via electromagnetic full-wave simulations. Due to the influence of antenna directivity, how EDoF and ergodic channel capacity vary with the element spacing are explored via simulations for different antenna types.

Disco Intelligent Omni-Surfaces: 360-degree Fully-Passive Jamming Attacks

Intelligent omni-surfaces (IOSs) with 360-degree electromagnetic radiation significantly improves the performance of wireless systems, while an adversarial IOS also poses a significant potential risk for physical layer security. In this paper, we propose a "DISCO" IOS (DIOS) based fully-passive jammer (FPJ) that can launch omnidirectional fully-passive jamming attacks. In the proposed DIOS-based FPJ, the interrelated refractive and reflective (R&R) coefficients of the adversarial IOS are randomly generated, acting like a "DISCO" that distributes wireless energy radiated by the base station. By introducing active channel aging (ACA) during channel coherence time, the DIOS-based FPJ can perform omnidirectional fully-passive jamming without neither jamming power nor channel knowledge of legitimate users (LUs). To characterize the impact of the DIOS-based PFJ, we derive the statistical characteristics of DIOS-jammed channels based on two widely-used IOS models, i.e., the constant-amplitude model and the variable-amplitude model. Consequently, the asymptotic analysis of the ergodic achievable sum rates under the DIOS-based omnidirectional fully-passive jamming is given based on the derived stochastic characteristics for both the two IOS models. Based on the derived analysis, the omnidirectional jamming impact of the proposed DIOS-based FPJ implemented by a constant-amplitude IOS does not depend on either the quantization number or the stochastic distribution of the DIOS coefficients, while the conclusion does not hold on when a variable-amplitude IOS is used. Numerical results based on one-bit quantization of the IOS phase shifts are provided to verify the effectiveness of the derived theoretical analysis. The proposed DIOS-based FPJ can not only launch omnidirectional fully-passive jamming, but also improve the jamming impact by about 55% at 10 dBm transmit power per LU.

Holographic-Pattern Based Multi-User Beam Training in RHS-Aided Hybrid Near-Field and Far-Field Communications

Reconfigurable holographic surfaces (RHSs) have been suggested as an energy-efficient solution for extremely large-scale arrays. By controlling the amplitude of RHS elements, high-gain directional holographic patterns can be achieved. However, the complexity of acquiring real-time channel state information (CSI) for beamforming is exceedingly high, particularly in large-scale RHS-assisted communications, where users may distribute in the near-field region of RHS. This paper proposes a one-shot multi-user beam training scheme in large-scale RHS-assisted systems applicable to both near and far fields. The proposed beam training scheme comprises two phases: angle search and distance search, both conducted simultaneously for all users. For the angle search, an RHS angular codebook is designed based on holographic principles so that each codeword covers multiple angles in both near-field and far-field regions, enabling simultaneous angular search for all users. For the distance search, we construct the distance-adaptive codewords covering all candidate angles of users in a real-time way by leveraging the additivity of holographic patterns, which is different from the traditional phase array case. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves higher system throughput compared to traditional beam training schemes. The beam training accuracy approaches the upper bound of exhaustive search at a significantly reduced overhead.

Large Models for Aerial Edges: An Edge-Cloud Model Evolution and Communication Paradigm

The future sixth-generation (6G) of wireless networks is expected to surpass its predecessors by offering ubiquitous coverage through integrated air-ground facility deployments in both communication and computing domains. In this network, aerial facilities, such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), conduct artificial intelligence (AI) computations based on multi-modal data to support diverse applications including surveillance and environment construction. However, these multi-domain inference and content generation tasks require large AI models, demanding powerful computing capabilities, thus posing significant challenges for UAVs. To tackle this problem, we propose an integrated edge-cloud model evolution framework, where UAVs serve as edge nodes for data collection and edge model computation. Through wireless channels, UAVs collaborate with ground cloud servers, providing cloud model computation and model updating for edge UAVs. With limited wireless communication bandwidth, the proposed framework faces the challenge of information exchange scheduling between the edge UAVs and the cloud server. To tackle this, we present joint task allocation, transmission resource allocation, transmission data quantization design, and edge model update design to enhance the inference accuracy of the integrated air-ground edge-cloud model evolution framework by mean average precision (mAP) maximization. A closed-form lower bound on the mAP of the proposed framework is derived, and the solution to the mAP maximization problem is optimized accordingly. Simulations, based on results from vision-based classification experiments, consistently demonstrate that the mAP of the proposed framework outperforms both a centralized cloud model framework and a distributed edge model framework across various communication bandwidths and data sizes.

Hybrid Near-Far Field Channel Estimation for Holographic MIMO Communications

Holographic MIMO communications, enabled by large-scale antenna arrays with quasi-continuous apertures, is a potential technology for spectrum efficiency improvement. However, the increased antenna aperture size extends the range of the Fresnel region, leading to a hybrid near-far field communication mode. The users and scatterers randomly lie in near-field and far-field zones, and thus, conventional far-field-only and near-field-only channel estimation methods may not work. To tackle this challenge, we demonstrate the existence of the power diffusion (PD) effect, which leads to a mismatch between the hybrid-field channel and existing channel estimation methods. Specifically, in far-field and near-field transform domains, the power gain of one channel path may diffuse to other positions, thus generating fake paths. This renders the conventional techniques unable to detect those real paths. We propose a PD-aware orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm to eliminate the influence of the PD effect by identifying the PD range within which paths diffuse to other positions. PD-OMP fits a general case without prior knowledge of near-field and far-field path numbers and the user's location. The computational complexity of PD-OMP and the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound for the sparse-signal-recovery-based channel estimation are also derived. Simulation results show that PD-OMP outperforms state-of-the-art hybrid-field channel estimation methods.

Multi-target Detection for Reconfigurable Holographic Surfaces Enabled Radar

Multi-target detection is one of the primary tasks in radar-based localization and sensing, typically built on phased array antennas. However, the bulky hardware in the phased array restricts its potential for enhancing detection accuracy, since the cost and power of the phased array can become unaffordable as its physical aperture scales up to pursue higher beam shaping capabilities. To resolve this issue, we propose a radar system enabled by reconfigurable holographic surfaces (RHSs), a novel meta-surface antenna composed of meta-material elements with cost-effective and power-efficient hardware, which performs multi-target detection in an adaptive manner. Different from the phase-control structure in the phased array, the RHS is able to apply beamforming by controlling the radiation amplitudes of its elements. Consequently, traditional beamforming schemes designed for phased arrays cannot be directly applied to RHSs due to this structural difference. To tackle this challenge, a waveform and amplitude optimization algorithm (WAOA) is designed to jointly optimize the radar waveform and RHS amplitudes in order to improve the detection accuracy. Simulation results reveal that the proposed RHS-enabled radar increases the probability of detection by 0.13 compared to phased array radars when six iterations of adaptive detection are performed given the same hardware cost.

Reconfigurable Holographic Surface Aided Wireless Simultaneous Localization and Mapping

As a crucial facilitator of future autonomous driving applications, wireless simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) has drawn growing attention recently. However, the accuracy of existing wireless SLAM schemes is limited because the antenna gain is constrained given the cost budget due to the expensive hardware components such as phase arrays. To address this issue, we propose a reconfigurable holographic surface (RHS)-aided SLAM system in this paper. The RHS is a novel type of low-cost antenna that can cut down the hardware cost by replacing phased arrays in conventional SLAM systems. However, compared with a phased array where the phase shifts of parallelfed signals are adjusted, the RHS exhibits a different radiation model because its amplitude-controlled radiation elements are series-fed by surface waves, implying that traditional schemes cannot be applied directly. To address this challenge, we propose an RHS-aided beam steering method for sensing the surrounding environment and design the corresponding SLAM algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can achieve more than there times the localization accuracy that traditional wireless SLAM with the same cost achieves.

Channel Estimation for Holographic Communications in Hybrid Near-Far Field

To realize holographic communications, a potential technology for spectrum efficiency improvement in the future sixth-generation (6G) network, antenna arrays inlaid with numerous antenna elements will be deployed. However, the increase in antenna aperture size makes some users lie in the Fresnel region, leading to the hybrid near-field and far-field communication mode, where the conventional far-field channel estimation methods no longer work well. To tackle the above challenge, this paper considers channel estimation in a hybrid-field multipath environment, where each user and each scatterer can be in either the far-field or the near-field region. First, a joint angular-polar domain channel transform is designed to capture the hybrid-field channel's near-field and far-field features. We then analyze the power diffusion effect in the hybrid-field channel, which indicates that the power corresponding to one near-field (far-field) path component of the multipath channel may spread to far-field (near-field) paths and causes estimation error. We design a novel power-diffusion-based orthogonal matching pursuit channel estimation algorithm (PD-OMP). It can eliminate the prior knowledge requirement of path numbers in the far field and near field, which is a must in other OMP-based channel estimation algorithms. Simulation results show that PD-OMP outperforms current hybrid-field channel estimation methods.

Near-Far Field Codebook Design for IOS-Aided Multi-User Communications

Recently, the rapid development of metasurface facilitates the growth of extremely large-scale antenna arrays, making the ultra-massive MIMO possible. In this paper, we study the codebook design and beam training for an intelligent omni-surface (IOS) aided multi-user system, where the IOS is a novel metasurface enabling simultaneous signal reflection and refraction. To deal with the near field expansion caused by the large-dimension of IOS, we design a near-far field codebook to serve users both in the near and far fields without prior knowledge of user distribution. Moreover, to fully exploit the dual functionality of the IOS, the coupling between the reflective and refractive signals is analyzed theoretically and utilized in the codebook design, thereby reducing the training overhead. On this basis, the multi-user beam training is adopted where each codeword covers multiple areas to enable all users to be trained simultaneously. Simulation results verify our theoretical analysis on the reflective-refractive coupling. Compared to the state-of-the-art schemes, the proposed scheme can improve the sum rate and throughput.

Intelligent Surfaces Empowered Wireless Network: Recent Advances and The Road to 6G

Intelligent surfaces (ISs) have emerged as a key technology to empower a wide range of appealing applications for wireless networks, due to their low cost, high energy efficiency, flexibility of deployment and capability of constructing favorable wireless channels/radio environments. Moreover, the recent advent of several new IS architectures further expanded their electromagnetic functionalities from passive reflection to active amplification, simultaneous reflection and refraction, as well as holographic beamforming. However, the research on ISs is still in rapid progress and there have been recent technological advances in ISs and their emerging applications that are worthy of a timely review. Thus, we provide in this paper a comprehensive survey on the recent development and advances of ISs aided wireless networks. Specifically, we start with an overview on the anticipated use cases of ISs in future wireless networks such as 6G, followed by a summary of the recent standardization activities related to ISs. Then, the main design issues of the commonly adopted reflection-based IS and their state-of-theart solutions are presented in detail, including reflection optimization, deployment, signal modulation, wireless sensing, and integrated sensing and communications. Finally, recent progress and new challenges in advanced IS architectures are discussed to inspire futrue research.