Xiaolong Yang's research while affiliated with Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications and other places

Both reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) are treated as promising technologies for future wireless communications. However, the performance gain achieved traditional passive RIS-aided NOMA system is limited due to the double-fading effect for the base station (BS)-RIS-user channel. In this letter, a sum rate maximization problem for active RIS-aided uplink multi-antenna NOMA system is studied, in which the reflecting elements (REs) of active RIS can manipulate the phase shifts and amplify the amplitudes of incident signals. To tackle the formulated sum rate maximization problem, the original optimization problem is decomposed into three subproblems, i.e., the equalizer optimization, the power allocation, and the active RIS beamforming design. Simulation results show that the proposed active RIS-aided NOMA system can effectively improve sum rate compared with several benchmark schemes.

With the emergence of several new services such as driverless vehicles and virtual reality, mobile communication networks face problems such as heavy load and insufficient computing resources. The development of cloud, edge, and mobile edge network computing provides a good solution to this problem. This paper proposes the development of a user energy efficiency fairness task unloading algorithm for cloud-side networks. First, a cloud-side network cooperation model is constructed. The model ensures the efficient use of user energy and addresses the task offloading decision and resource allocation optimization problem jointly. Using the generalized fraction theory, the optimization problem is transformed into an equivalent convex problem by introducing relaxation as well as auxiliary variables. Next, the centralized energy efficiency fairness (CEEF) and alternating direction method of multiplier (ADMM)-based energy efficiency fairness algorithms are implemented to obtain an optimal solution for the optimization problem. Finally, through experimental simulation, the convergence of the CEEF- and ADMM-based energy efficiency fairness algorithms is verified. Compared with noncooperative algorithms, the performance of our proposed method increased by 30.76%. The proposed algorithm has been verified to ensure the fairness of user energy efficiency.

Caching popular contents at edge networks (such as small-cell base stations) has been proposed to deal with the ever-growing mobile traffic. At the meantime, recommendation system is able to shape user demands for further prompting caching gain. In this paper, we study a multi-antenna multi-cell edge network employing transmit beamforming with caching-aware recommendation and user association. We first establish a framework for the joint problem of beamforming, user association, content caching and recommendation to minimize the content transmission delay of mobile users, by specifying a set of necessary conditions for all four component functions of the network. The resulting optimization problem corresponds to a non-convex, multi-timescale, and mixed-integer programming problem, which is hard to handle. To deal with the difficulty in solving the joint optimization problem by the direct formulation, we equivalently decompose it into three sub-problems. Then, we develop a computationally-efficient iterative algorithm to obtain the sub-optimal solution, where the three subproblems are tackled iteratively. Simulation results are conducted to demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can obtain lower transmission delay than baseline schemes.

Edge side caching assisted device-to-device (D2D) communication has been acknowledged as a promising technique to alleviate the heavy burden of backhaul transmission link and to reduce the network latency. However, the effectiveness of caching strategies at the network edge is highly dependent on the distribution of individual user's content preference. To fully attain the benefits of edge caching, some proactive mechanisms shall be considered. Among which, recommendation performs noticeably well due to its capability of reshaping the content request probabilities of different users, which in turn affects the cache decision significantly. In this work, we quantitatively investigate how recommendation can be applied to enhance the caching efficiency of D2D enabled wireless content caching networks. And for that, the cache hit ratio maximization problem for a generic network model is formulated taking into account the requirements of each user's personalized recommendation quality, recommendation quantity and cache capacity. Then, we show that the optimal recommendation and caching policies which jointly maximize the cache efficiency is NP-hard to compute. Further, a time-efficient sub-optimal algorithm is designed, which works in an iterative manner and has provable convergence guarantee as well as polynomial time complexity. Monte-Carlo simulation results demonstrate the convergence performance of our proposed joint decision algorithm and its cache efficiency improvements compared to extensive benchmarks.

The energy cost minimization for mission-critical internet-of-things (IoT) in mobile edge computing (MEC) system is investigated in this work. Therein, short data packets are transmitted between the IoT devices and the access points (APs) to reduce transmission latency and prolong the battery life of the IoT devices. The effects of short-packet transmission on the radio resource allocation is explicitly revealed. We mathematically formulate the energy cost minimization problem as a mixed-integer non-linear programming (MINLP) problem, which is difficult to solve in an optimal way. More specifically, the difficulty is essentially derived from the coupling of the binary offloading variables and the resource management among all the IoT devices. For analytical tractability, we decouple the mixed-integer and non-convex optimization problem into two sub-problems, namely, the task offloading decision-making and the resource optimization problems, respectively. It is proved that the resource allocation problem for IoT devices under the fixed offloading strategy is convex. On this basis, an iterative algorithm is designed, whose performance is comparable to the best solution for exhaustive search, and aims to jointly optimize the offloading strategy and resource allocation. Simulation results verify the convergence performance and energy-saving function of the designed joint optimization algorithm. Compared with the extensive baselines under comprehensive parameter settings, the algorithm has better energy-saving effects.

Content caching is recognized as a promising solution to release the heavy burden of backhaul links and decrease the content transmission latency in Fog radio access networks (Fog-RANs). However, the content caching design is still a challenging problem with considering the user request patterns, the content delivery strategies, and the limited caching capacity. Recommendation has the capability of reshaping users' content requests for further prompting caching gain. The joint recommendation , caching, beamforming holds the potential to improve the system performance of Fog-RANs. In this paper, a joint recommendation , caching, and beamforming scheme is proposed for multi-cell multi-antenna recommendation aware Fog-RANs. Aiming at minimizing the content transmission latency, we formulate a joint recommendation, caching, and beamforming optimization problem. The minimization problem is a very challenging two-timescale mixed integer nonlinear programming problem, which is hard to solve in general. By exploring structural properties of the problem, we propose an alternative optimization algorithm with low complexity through decomposing the original problem into three sub-problems. Extensive simulations show that our proposed method can significantly reduce the content transmission delay.

To appear in IEEE Transactions on Communications

The energy cost minimization for mission-critical internet-of-things (IoT) in mobile edge computing (MEC) system is investigated in this work. Therein, short data packets are transmitted between the IoT devices and the access points (APs) to reduce transmission latency and prolong the battery life of the IoT devices. The effects of short-packet transmission on the radio resource allocation is explicitly revealed. We mathematically formulate the energy cost minimization problem as a mixed-integer non-linear programming (MINLP) problem, which is difficult to solve in an optimal way. More specifically, the difficulty is essentially derived from the coupling of the binary offloading variables and the resource management among all the IoT devices. For analytical tractability, we decouple the mixed-integer and non-convex optimization problem into two sub-problems, namely, the task offloading decision-making and the resource optimization problems, respectively. It is proved that the resource allocation problem for IoT devices under the fixed offloading strategy is convex. On this basis, an iterative algorithm is designed, whose performance is comparable to the best solution for exhaustive search, and aims to jointly optimize the offloading strategy and resource allocation. Simulation results verify the convergence performance and energy-saving function of the designed joint optimization algorithm. Compared with the extensive baselines under comprehensive parameter settings, the algorithm has better energy-saving effects.