Plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) have recently attracted much attention due to their potential to reduce CO₂ emissions and transportation costs and can be grouped into entities (aggregators) to provide ancillary services such as frequency regulation. In this paper, the application of aggregators to frequency regulation by making fair use of their energy storage capacity is addressed. When the power grid requires frequency regulation service to the aggregator to adjust the grid frequency, the PEVs participating in providing the service can either draw energy (as it is usually done to charge the vehicle) or deliver energy to the grid by means of the vehicle-to-grid (V2G) interface. Under the general framework of optimizing the aggregator profit, different methods, such as state-dependent allocation and the water-filling approach, are proposed to achieve a final state of charge (SOC) of the PEVs that satisfy the desired fairness criteria once the regulation service has been carried out.

One of the main problems faced by communication systems is the presence of skip-zones in the targeted areas. With the deployment of the fifth-generation mobile network, solutions are proposed to solve the signal loss due to obstruction by buildings, mountains, and atmospheric or weather conditions. Among these solutions, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS), which are newly proposed modules, may be exploited to reflect the incident signal in the direction of dead zones, increase communication coverage, and make the channel smarter and controllable. This paper tackles the skip-zone problem in terrestrial free-space optical (T-FSO) systems using a single-element RIS. Considering link distances and jitter ratios at the RIS position, we carry out a performance analysis of RIS-aided T-FSO links affected by turbulence and pointing errors, for both heterodyne detection and intensity modulation-direct detection techniques. Turbulence is modeled using the Gamma-Gamma distribution. We analyze the model and provide exact closed-form expressions of the probability density function, cumulative distribution function, and moment generating function of the end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio. Capitalizing on these statistics, we evaluate the system performance through the outage probability, ergodic channel capacity, and average bit error rate for selected binary modulation schemes. Numerical results, validated through simulations, obtained for different RIS positions and link distances ratio values, reveal that RIS-based T-FSO performs better when the RIS module is located near the transmitter.

Adaptive OFDM has the potential of providing bandwidth-efficient communications in hostile propagation environments. Currently, bit loading algorithms use M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation of the OFDM sub-carriers, where the number of bits per symbol modulating each of them is obtained in order to maximize the performance. SNR gap approximation for M-QAM signaling makes the algorithms simpler to implement. However, in some circumstances it may be preferable to use. M-ary phase shift keying. In this letter an approximation is derived for M-PSK similar to the SNR gap of M-QAM so that bit loading algorithms can be extended to this type of modulation. In addition, the performance obtained when using M-PSK is compared to that of M-QAM in a practical situation.

The irruption of the cell-free (CF) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) network topology has meant taking one step further the concept of massive MIMO as a means to provide uniform service in large coverage areas. A key property of massive MIMO networks is channel hardening, by which the channel becomes deterministic when the number of antennas grows large enough relative to the number of serviced users, easing the signal processing and boosting the performance of simple precoders. However, in CF massive MIMO, the fulfillment of this condition depends on several aspects that are not considered in classical massive MIMO systems. In this work, we address the presence of channel hardening in both CF massive MIMO and the recently appeared user-centric (UC) approach, under a spatially correlated Ricean fading channel using distributed and cooperative precoding and combining schemes and different power control strategies for both the downlink (DL) and uplink (UL) segments. We show that the line-of-sight (LOS) component, spatially correlated antennas and UC schemes have an impact on how the channel hardens. In addition, we examine the existent gap between the estimated achievable rate and the true network performance when channel hardening is compromised. Exact closed-form expressions for both the hardening metric and achievable DL/UL rates are given as well.

The activities of the current European RACE and ACTS projects have led to an increasing interest in OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) as a means of combating impulsive noise and multipath effects and making fuller use of the available bandwidth of the system. This paper analyses the performance of OFDM signals in amplifier nonlinearity. In particular, bit error rate (BER) degradation as a result of amplitude limiting or clipping are analysed. In the presence of both nonlinear distortion and additive Gaussian noise, optimized output power back off is provided to balance the requirements of minimum BER and power amplifier efficiency. For this purpose, an OFDM system has been built using the SPW (Signal Processing Worksystem) simulator.Publicad

A new constellation is designed for the multi-user non-coherent Large-Scale single input multiple output (LS-SIMO) uplink system based on M-DPSK, which is combined with a Bit Interleaved Coded Modulation-Iterative Decoding (BICM-ID) scheme for attaining improved performance. We conceive a new approach for constructing EXIT charts parameterized by the number of antennas used for optimizing the design. Finally, the system performance is analyzed and compared to previous work. This evaluation shows an overall improvement of two orders of magnitude demonstrating a dramatic reduction in the required number of antennas.