Pinching Antenna Systems versus Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces in mmWave

Flexible and intelligent antenna designs, such as pinching antenna systems and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS), have gained extensive research attention due to their potential to enhance the wireless channels. This letter, for the first time, presents a comparative study between the emerging pinching antenna systems and RIS in millimeter wave (mmWave) bands. Our results reveal that RIS requires an extremely large number of elements (in the order of $10^4$) to outperform pinching antenna systems in terms of spectral efficiency, which severely impact the energy efficiency performance of RIS. Moreover, pinching antenna systems demonstrate greater robustness against hardware impairments and severe path loss typically encountered in high-frequency mmWave bands.

Swarm Intelligence Optimization of Multi-RIS Aided MmWave Beamspace MIMO

We investigate the performance of a multiple reconfigurable intelligence surface (RIS)-aided millimeter wave (mmWave) beamspace multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system with multiple users (UEs). We focus on a challenging scenario in which the direct links between the base station (BS) and all UEs are blocked, and communication is facilitated only via RISs. The maximum ratio transmission (MRT) is utilized for data precoding, while a low-complexity algorithm based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) is designed to jointly perform beam selection, power allocation, and RIS profile configuration. The proposed optimization approach demonstrates positive trade-offs between the complexity (in terms of running time) and the achievable sum rate. In addition, our results demonstrate that due to the sparsity of beamspace channels, increasing the number of unit cells (UCs) at RISs can lead to higher achievable rates than activating a larger number of beams at the MIMO BS.

SmartUT: Receive Beamforming for Spectral Coexistence of NGSO Satellite Systems

In this paper, we investigate downlink co-frequency interference (CFI) mitigation in non-geostationary satellites orbits (NGSOs) co-existing systems. Traditional mitigation techniques, such as Zero-forcing (ZF), produce a null towards the direction of arrivals (DOAs) of the interfering signals, but they suffer from high computational complexity due to matrix inversions and required knowledge of the channel state information (CSI). Furthermore, adaptive beamformers, such as sample matrix inversion (SMI)-based minimum variance, provide poor performance when the available snapshots are limited. We propose a Mamba-based beamformer (MambaBF) that leverages an unsupervised deep learning (DL) approach and can be deployed on the user terminal (UT) antenna array, for assisting downlink beamforming and CFI mitigation using only a limited number of available array snapshots as input, and without CSI knowledge. Simulation results demonstrate that MambaBF consistently outperforms conventional beamforming techniques in mitigating interference and maximizing the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), particularly under challenging conditions characterized by low SINR, limited snapshots, and imperfect CSI.

Low-Complexity Channel Estimation Protocol for Non-Diagonal RIS-Assisted Communications

Non-diagonal reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) offer enhanced wireless signal manipulation over conventional RIS by enabling the incident signal on any of its $M$ elements to be reflected from another element via an $M \times M$ switch array. To fully exploit this flexible configuration, the acquisition of individual channel state information (CSI) is essential. However, due to the passive nature of the RIS, cascaded channel estimation is performed, as the RIS itself lacks signal processing capabilities. This entails estimating the CSI for all $M \times M$ switch array permutations, resulting in a total of $M!$ possible configurations, to identify the optimal one that maximizes the channel gain. This process leads to long uplink training intervals, which degrade spectral efficiency and increase uplink energy consumption. In this paper, we propose a low-complexity channel estimation protocol that substantially reduces the need for exhaustive $M!$ permutations by utilizing only three configurations to optimize the non-diagonal RIS switch array and beamforming for single-input single-output (SISO) and multiple-input single-output (MISO) systems. Specifically, our three-stage pilot-based protocol estimates scaled versions of the user-RIS and RIS-base-station (BS) channels in the first two stages using the least square (LS) estimator and the commonly used ON/OFF protocol from conventional RIS. In the third stage, the cascaded user-RIS-BS channels are estimated to enable efficient beamforming optimization. Complexity analysis shows that our proposed protocol significantly reduces the BS computational load from $\mathcal{O}(NM\times M!)$ to $\mathcal{O}(NM)$, where $N$ is the number of BS antennas. This complexity is similar to the conventional ON/OFF-based LS estimation for conventional diagonal RIS.

Adaptive Soft Actor-Critic Framework for RIS-Assisted and UAV-Aided Communication

In this work, we explore UAV-assisted reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) technology to enhance downlink communications in wireless networks. By integrating RIS on both UAVs and ground infrastructure, we aim to boost network coverage, fairness, and resilience against challenges such as UAV jitter. To maximize the minimum achievable user rate, we formulate a joint optimization problem involving beamforming, phase shifts, and UAV trajectory. To address this problem, we propose an adaptive soft actor-critic (ASAC) framework. In this approach, agents are built using adaptive sparse transformers with attentive feature refinement (ASTAFER), enabling dynamic feature processing that adapts to real-time network conditions. The ASAC model learns optimal solutions to the coupled subproblems in real time, delivering an end-to-end solution without relying on iterative or relaxation-based methods. Simulation results demonstrate that our ASAC-based approach achieves better performance compared to the conventional SAC. This makes it a robust, adaptable solution for real-time, fair, and efficient downlink communication in UAV-RIS networks.

Beyond Diagonal RIS-Aided Networks: Performance Analysis and Sectorization Tradeoff

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have emerged as a spectrum- and energy-efficient technology to enhance the coverage of wireless communications within the upcoming 6G networks. Recently, novel extensions of this technology, referred to as multi-sector beyond diagonal RIS (BD-RIS), have been proposed, where the configurable elements are divided into $L$ sectors $(L \geq 2)$ and arranged as a polygon prism, with each sector covering $1/L$ space. This paper presents a performance analysis of a multi-user communication system assisted by a multi-sector BD-RIS operating in time-switching (TS) mode. Specifically, we derive closed-form expressions for the moment-generating function (MGF), probability density function (PDF), and cumulative density function (CDF) of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) per user. Furthermore, closed-form expressions for the outage probability, achievable spectral and energy efficiency, symbol error probability, and diversity order for the proposed system model are derived. Moreover, a comparison is performed with the simultaneously transmitting and reflecting (STAR)-RISs, a special case of multi-sector BD-RIS with two sectors. Our analysis shows that for a fixed number of elements, increasing the sectors improves outage performance at the expense of reduced diversity order compared to STAR-RIS. This trade-off is influenced by the Rician factors of the cascaded channel and the number of configurable elements per sector. However, this superiority in slope is observed at outage probability values below $10^{-5}$, which remains below practical operating ranges of communication systems. Additionally, simulations are provided to validate the accuracy of our theoretical analyses showing a notable $182\%$ increase in spectral efficiency and a $238\%$ increase in energy efficiency when transitioning from a 2-sector to a 6-sector configuration.

Real-Time and Security-Aware Precoding in RIS-Empowered Multi-User Wireless Networks

In this letter, we propose a deep-unfolding-based framework (DUNet) to maximize the secrecy rate in reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) empowered multi-user wireless networks. To tailor DUNet, first we relax the problem, decouple it into beamforming and phase shift subproblems, and propose an alternative optimization (AO) based solution for the relaxed problem. Second, we apply Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions to obtain a closed-form solutions for the beamforming and the phase shift. Using deep-unfolding mechanism, we transform the closed-form solutions into a deep learning model (i.e., DUNet) that achieves a comparable performance to that of AO in terms of accuracy and about 25.6 times faster.

P2AT: Pyramid Pooling Axial Transformer for Real-time Semantic Segmentation

Recently, Transformer-based models have achieved promising results in various vision tasks, due to their ability to model long-range dependencies. However, transformers are computationally expensive, which limits their applications in real-time tasks such as autonomous driving. In addition, an efficient local and global feature selection and fusion are vital for accurate dense prediction, especially driving scene understanding tasks. In this paper, we propose a real-time semantic segmentation architecture named Pyramid Pooling Axial Transformer (P2AT). The proposed P2AT takes a coarse feature from the CNN encoder to produce scale-aware contextual features, which are then combined with the multi-level feature aggregation scheme to produce enhanced contextual features. Specifically, we introduce a pyramid pooling axial transformer to capture intricate spatial and channel dependencies, leading to improved performance on semantic segmentation. Then, we design a Bidirectional Fusion module (BiF) to combine semantic information at different levels. Meanwhile, a Global Context Enhancer is introduced to compensate for the inadequacy of concatenating different semantic levels. Finally, a decoder block is proposed to help maintain a larger receptive field. We evaluate P2AT variants on three challenging scene-understanding datasets. In particular, our P2AT variants achieve state-of-art results on the Camvid dataset 80.5%, 81.0%, 81.1% for P2AT-S, P2ATM, and P2AT-L, respectively. Furthermore, our experiment on Cityscapes and Pascal VOC 2012 have demonstrated the efficiency of the proposed architecture, with results showing that P2AT-M, achieves 78.7% on Cityscapes. The source code will be available at

Enhancing Secrecy in UAV RSMA Networks: Deep Unfolding Meets Deep Reinforcement Learning

In this paper, we consider the maximization of the secrecy rate in multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) network. A joint beamforming, rate allocation, and UAV trajectory optimization problem is formulated which is nonconvex. Hence, the problem is transformed into a Markov decision problem and a novel multiagent deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework is designed. The proposed framework (named DUN-DRL) combines deep unfolding to design beamforming and rate allocation, data-driven to design the UAV trajectory, and deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) for the learning procedure. The proposed DUN-DRL have shown great performance and outperformed other DRL-based methods in the literature.