Beam Aware Stochastic Multihop Routing for Flying Ad-hoc Networks

Routing is a crucial component in the design of Flying Ad-Hoc Networks (FANETs). State of the art routing solutions exploit the position of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and their mobility information to determine the existence of links between them, but this information is often unreliable, as the topology of FANETs can change quickly and unpredictably. In order to improve the tracking performance, the uncertainty introduced by imperfect measurements and tracking algorithms needs to be accounted for in the routing. Another important element to consider is beamforming, which can reduce interference, but requires accurate channel and position information to work. In this work, we present the Beam Aware Stochastic Multihop Routing for FANETs (BA-SMURF), a Software-Defined Networking (SDN) routing scheme that takes into account the positioning uncertainty and beamforming design to find the most reliable routes in a FANET. Our simulation results show that joint consideration of the beamforming and routing can provide a 5% throughput improvement with respect to the state of the art.

User Clustering for Rate Splitting using Machine Learning

Hierarchical Rate Splitting (HRS) schemes proposed in recent years have shown to provide significant improvements in exploiting spatial diversity in wireless networks and provide high throughput for all users while minimising interference among them. Hence, one of the major challenges for such HRS schemes is the necessity to know the optimal clustering of these users based only on their Channel State Information (CSI). This clustering problem is known to be NP hard and, to deal with the unmanageable complexity of finding an optimal solution, in this work a scalable and much lighter clustering mechanism based on Neural Network (NN) is proposed. The accuracy and performance metrics show that the NN is able to learn and cluster the users based on the noisy channel response and is able to achieve a rate comparable to other more complex clustering schemes from the literature.

Energy-Efficient Design for RIS-assisted UAVcommunications in beyond-5G Networks

The usage of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) in conjunction with Unmanned Ariel Vehicles (UAVs) is being investigated as a way to provide energy-efficient communication to ground users in dense urban areas. In this paper, we devise an optimization scenario to reduce overall energy consumption in the network while guaranteeing certain Quality of Service (QoS) to the ground users in the area. Due to the complex nature of the optimization problem, we provide a joint UAV trajectory and RIS phase decision to minimize transmission power of the UAV and Base Station (BS) that yields good performance with lower complexity. So, the proposed method uses a Successive Convex Approximation (SCA) to iteratively determine a joint optimal solution for UAV Trajectory, RIS phase and BS and UAV Transmission Power. The approach has, therefore, been analytically evaluated under different sets of criterion.