A Tutorial on Chirp Spread Spectrum for LoRaWAN: Basics and Key Advances

Chirps spread spectrum (CSS) modulation is the heart of long-range (LoRa) modulation used in the context of long-range wide area network (LoRaWAN) in internet of things (IoT) scenarios. Despite being a proprietary technology owned by Semtech Corp., LoRa modulation has drawn much attention from the research and industry communities in recent years. However, to the best of our knowledge, a comprehensive tutorial, investigating the CSS modulation in the LoRaWAN application, is missing in the literature. Therefore, in the first part of this paper, we provide a thorough analysis and tutorial of CSS modulation modified by LoRa specifications, discussing various aspects such as signal generation, detection, error performance, and spectral characteristics. Moreover, a summary of key recent advances in the context of CSS modulation applications in IoT networks is presented in the second part of this paper under four main categories of transceiver configuration and design, data rate improvement, interference modeling, and synchronization algorithms.

Low-Complexity Design and Detection of Unitary Constellations in Non-Coherent SIMO Systems for URLLC

In this paper, we propose a novel multi-symbol unitary constellation structure for non-coherent single-input multiple-output (SIMO) communications over block Rayleigh fading channels. To facilitate the design and the detection of large unitary constellations at reduced complexity, the proposed constellations are constructed as the Cartesian product of independent amplitude and phase-shift-keying (PSK) vectors, and hence, can be iteratively detected. The amplitude vector can be detected by exhaustive search, whose complexity is still sufficiently low in short packet transmissions. For detection of the PSK vector, we adopt a maximum-A-posteriori (MAP) criterion to improve the reliability of the sorted decision-feedback differential detection (sort-DFDD), which results in near-optimal error performance in the case of the same modulation order of the transmit PSK symbols at different time slots. This detector is called MAP-based-reliability-sort-DFDD (MAP-R-sort-DFDD) and has polynomial complexity. For the case of different modulation orders at different time slots, we observe that undetected symbols with lower modulation orders have a significant impact on the detection of PSK symbols with higher modulation orders. We exploit this observation and propose an improved detector called improved-MAP-R-sort-DFDD, which approaches the optimal error performance with polynomial time complexity. Simulation results show the merits of our proposed multi-symbol unitary constellation when compared to competing low-complexity unitary constellations.

D2D-aided LoRaWAN LR-FHSS in Direct-to-Satellite IoT Networks

In this paper, we present a device-to-device (D2D) transmission scheme for aiding long-range frequency hopping spread spectrum (LR-FHSS) LoRaWAN protocol with application in direct-to-satellite IoT networks. We consider a practical ground-to-satellite fading model, i.e. shadowed-Rice channel, and derive the outage performance of the LR-FHSS network. With the help of network coding, D2D-aided LR-FHSS transmission scheme is proposed to improve the network capacity for which a closed-form outage probability expression is also derived. The obtained analytical expressions for both LR-FHSS and D2D-aided LR-FHSS outage probabilities are validated by computer simulations for different parts of the analysis capturing the effects of noise, fading, unslotted ALOHA-based time scheduling, the receiver's capture effect, IoT device distributions, and distance from node to satellite. The total outage probability for the D2D-aided LR-FHSS shows a considerable increase of 249.9% and 150.1% in network capacity at a typical outage of 10^-2 for DR6 and DR5, respectively, when compared to LR-FHSS. This is obtained at the cost of minimum of one and maximum of two additional transmissions per each IoT end device imposed by the D2D scheme in each time-slot.

Bit-Interleaved Coded Energy-Based Modulation with Iterative Decoding

This paper develops a low-complexity near-optimal non-coherent receiver for a multi-level energy-based coded modulation system. Inspired by the turbo processing principle, we incorporate the fundamentals of bit-interleaved coded modulation with iterative decoding (BICM-ID) into the proposed receiver design. The resulting system is called bit-interleaved coded energy-based modulation with iterative decoding (BICEM-ID) and its error performance is analytically studied. Specifically, we derive upper bounds on the average pairwise error probability (PEP) of the non-coherent BICEM-ID system in the feedback-free (FF) and error-free feedback (EFF) scenarios. It is revealed that the definition of the nearest neighbors, which is important in the performance analysis in the FF scenario, is very different from that in the coherent BICM-ID counterpart. The analysis also reveals how the mapping from coded bits to energy levels influences the diversity order and coding gain of the BICEM-ID systems. A design criterion for good mappings is then formulated and an algorithm is proposed to find a set of best mappings for BICEM-ID. Finally, simulation results corroborate the main analytical findings.

Multi-level Design for Multiple-Symbol Non-Coherent Unitary Constellations for Massive SIMO Systems

This paper investigates non-coherent detection of single-input multiple-output (SIMO) systems over block Rayleigh fading channels. Using the Kullback-Leibler divergence as the design criterion, we formulate a multiple-symbol constellation optimization problem, which turns out to have high computational complexity to construct and detect. We exploit the structure of the formulated problem and decouple it into a unitary constellation design and a multi-level design. The proposed multi-level design has low complexity in both construction and detection. Simulation results show that our multi-level design has better performance than traditional pilot-based schemes and other existing low-complexity multi-level designs.

RIS-Aided Cell-Free Massive MIMO Systems: Joint Design of Transmit Beamforming and Phase Shifts

This paper studies RIS-aided cell-free massive MIMO systems, where multiple RISs are deployed to assist the communication between multiple access points (APs) and multiple users, with either continuous or discrete phase shifts at the RISs. We formulate the max-min fairness problem that maximizes the minimum achievable rate among all users by jointly optimizing the transmit beamforming at active APs and the phase shifts at passive RISs, subject to power constraints at the APs. To address such a challenging problem, we first study the special single-user scenario and propose an algorithm that can transform the optimization problem into semidefinite program (SDP) or integer linear program (ILP) for the cases of continuous and discrete phase shifts, respectively. By solving the resulting SDP and ILP, we first obtain the optimal phase shifts, and then design the optimal transmit beamforming accordingly. To solve the optimization problem for the multi-user scenario and continuous phase shifts at RISs, we extend the single-user algorithm and propose an alternating optimization algorithm, which can first decompose the max-min fairness problem into two subproblems related to transmit beamforming and phase shifts, and then transform the two subproblems into second-order-cone program and SDP, respectively. For the multi-user scenario and discrete phase shifts, the max-min fairness problem is shown to be a mixed-integer non-linear program (MINLP). To tackle it, we design a ZF-based successive refinement algorithm, which can find a suboptimal transmit beamforming and phase shifts by means of alternating optimization. Numerical results show that compared with benchmark schemes of random phase shifts and without using RISs, the proposed algorithms can significantly increase the minimum achievable rate among all users, especially when the number of reflecting elements at each RIS is large.

Joint Cluster Head Selection and Trajectory Planning in UAV-Aided IoT Networks by Reinforcement Learning with Sequential Model

Employing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has attracted growing interests and emerged as the state-of-the-art technology for data collection in Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks. In this paper, with the objective of minimizing the total energy consumption of the UAV-IoT system, we formulate the problem of jointly designing the UAV's trajectory and selecting cluster heads in the IoT network as a constrained combinatorial optimization problem which is classified as NP-hard and challenging to solve. We propose a novel deep reinforcement learning (DRL) with a sequential model strategy that can effectively learn the policy represented by a sequence-to-sequence neural network for the UAV's trajectory design in an unsupervised manner. Through extensive simulations, the obtained results show that the proposed DRL method can find the UAV's trajectory that requires much less energy consumption when compared to other baseline algorithms and achieves close-to-optimal performance. In addition, simulation results show that the trained model by our proposed DRL algorithm has an excellent generalization ability to larger problem sizes without the need to retrain the model.

Concurrent Transmission and Multiuser Detection of LoRa Signals

This paper investigates a new model to improve the scalability of low-power long-range (LoRa) networks by allowing multiple end devices (EDs) to simultaneously communicate with multiple multi-antenna gateways on the same frequency band and using the same spreading factor. The maximum likelihood (ML) decision rule is first derived for non-coherent detection of information bits transmitted by multiple devices. To overcome the high complexity of the ML detection, we propose a sub-optimal two-stage detection algorithm to balance the computational complexity and error performance. In the first stage, we identify transmit chirps (without knowing which EDs transmit them). In the second stage, we determine the EDs that transmit the specific chirps identified from the first stage. To improve the detection performance in the second stage, we also optimize the transmit powers of EDs to minimize the similarity, measured by the Jaccard coefficient, between the received powers of any pair of EDs. As the power control optimization problem is non-convex, we use concepts from successive convex approximation to transform it to an approximate convex optimization problem that can be solved iteratively and guaranteed to reach a sub-optimal solution. Simulation results demonstrate and justify the tradeoff between transmit power penalties and network scalability of the proposed LoRa network model. In particular, by allowing concurrent transmission of 2 or 3 EDs, the uplink capacity of the proposed network can be doubled or tripled over that of a conventional LoRa network, albeit at the expense of additional 3.0 or 4.7 dB transmit power.

Angle Estimation for Terahertz Ultra-Massive MIMO-Based Space-to-Air Communications

This paper investigates terahertz ultra-massive (UM)-MIMO-based angle estimation for space-to-air communications, which can solve the performance degradation problem caused by the dual delay-beam squint effects of terahertz UM-MIMO channels. Specifically, we first design a grouping true-time delay unit module that can significantly mitigate the impact of delay-beam squint effects to establish the space-to-air THz link. Based on the subarray selection scheme, the UM hybrid array can be equivalently considered as a low-dimensional fully-digital array, and then the fine estimates of azimuth/elevation angles at both UAVs and satellite can be separately acquired using the proposed prior-aided iterative angle estimation algorithm. The simulation results that close to Cram\'{e}r-Rao lower bounds verify the effectiveness of our solution.

UAV Trajectory Planning in Wireless Sensor Networks for Energy Consumption Minimization by Deep Reinforcement Learning

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as a promising candidate solution for data collection of large-scale wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this paper, we investigate a UAV-aided WSN, where cluster heads (CHs) receive data from their member nodes, and a UAV is dispatched to collect data from CHs along the planned trajectory. We aim to minimize the total energy consumption of the UAV-WSN system in a complete round of data collection. Toward this end, we formulate the energy consumption minimization problem as a constrained combinatorial optimization problem by jointly selecting CHs from nodes within clusters and planning the UAV's visiting order to the selected CHs. The formulated energy consumption minimization problem is NP-hard, and hence, hard to solve optimally. In order to tackle this challenge, we propose a novel deep reinforcement learning (DRL) technique, pointer network-A* (Ptr-A*), which can efficiently learn from experiences the UAV trajectory policy for minimizing the energy consumption. The UAV's start point and the WSN with a set of pre-determined clusters are fed into the Ptr-A*, and the Ptr-A* outputs a group of CHs and the visiting order to these CHs, i.e., the UAV's trajectory. The parameters of the Ptr-A* are trained on small-scale clusters problem instances for faster training by using the actor-critic algorithm in an unsupervised manner. At inference, three search strategies are also proposed to improve the quality of solutions. Simulation results show that the trained models based on 20-clusters and 40-clusters have a good generalization ability to solve the UAV's trajectory planning problem in WSNs with different numbers of clusters, without the need to retrain the models. Furthermore, the results show that our proposed DRL algorithm outperforms two baseline techniques.