Cooperative 3D Beamforming for Small-Cell and Cell-Free 6G Systems

Three dimensional (3D) resource reuse is an important design requirement for the prospective 6G wireless communication systems. Hence, we propose a cooperative 3D beamformer for use in 3D space. Explicitly, we harness multiple base station antennas for joint zero forcing transmit pre-coding for beaming the transmit signals in specific 3D directions. The technique advocated is judiciously configured for use in both cell-based and cell-free wireless architectures. We evaluated the performance of the proposed scheme using the novel metric of Volumetric Spectral Efficiency (VSE). We also characterized the performance of the scheme in terms of its spectral efficiency (SE) and Bit Error Rate (BER) through extensive simulation studies.

Airplane-Aided Integrated Next-Generation Networking

A high-rate yet low-cost air-to-ground (A2G) communication backbone is conceived for integrating the space and terrestrial network by harnessing the opportunistic assistance of the passenger planes or high altitude platforms (HAPs) as mobile base stations (BSs) and millimetre wave communication. The airliners act as the network-provider for the terrestrial users while relying on satellite backhaul. A null-steered beamforming technique relying on a large-scale planar array is used for transmission by the airliner/HAP for achieving a high directional gain, hence minimizing the interference between the users. Furthermore, approximate spectral efficiency (SE) and area spectral efficiency (ASE) expressions are derived and quantified for diverse system parameters.