Low power wide area network (LPWAN) technologies are increasingly catching the attention of the Internet-of-Things market and have brought the need for reliable knowledge about the performance of such networks. This paper is concerned with the performance and scalability of LoRa networks, a leading LPWAN technology. Several recently published articles have analyzed the ability of LoRa networks to scale, i.e., their ability to support increased traffic and number of nodes. This paper proposes to employ message replication and gateways with multiple receive antennas to achieve, respectively, time and spatial diversity. The paper presents the proposed schemes and evaluates them through theoretical analysis and computer simulations. Results show that LoRa networks are highly sensitive to the increase in user and traffic density, but both message replication and multiple antennas can enhance performance. Message replication has an optimum number of message copies for each network configuration, and its utilization is more beneficial in low-density networks, while the use of multiple receive antennas at the gateway is always beneficial.

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have been proposed as a key enabler to improve the coverage of the signals and mitigate the frequent blockages in millimeter wave (mmWave) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communications. However, the channel state information (CSI) acquisition is one of the major challenges for the practical deployment of the RIS. The passive RIS without any baseband processing capabilities brings difficulty on the channel estimation (CE), since the individual channels or the cascaded one can be estimated only at base station (BS) via uplink training or mobile station (MS) via downlink training. In order to facilitate the CSI acquisition, we focus on the hybrid RIS architecture, where a small number of elements are active and able to receive and process the pilot signals at the RIS. The CE is performed in two stages by following the atomic norm minimization to recover the channel parameters, i.e., angles of departure (AoDs), angles of arrival (AoAs), and propagation path gains. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can outperform the passive RIS CE under the same training overhead. Furthermore, we also study the theoretical performance limits in terms of mean square error (MSE) via Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) analyses.

We compare the energy efficiency of some transmission schemes in wireless sensor networks. By constraining the system to end-to-end throughput requirements, we assume that the nodes in multi-hop and cooperative schemes operate at a spectral efficiency which is twice that of the single-hop transmission. By taking into account the energy consumption of the RF circuitry, we show that cooperation may be considerably more energy efficient than non-cooperative schemes even in small transmission ranges, specially if a feedback channel is available.

The recent extra-large scale massive multiple-input multiple-output (XL-MIMO) systems are seen as a promising technology for providing very high data rates in high user-density scenarios. Spatial non-stationarities and visibility regions (VRs) appear across the XL-MIMO array, since its large dimension is of the same order of the distances to the user-equipments (UEs). Due to the increased density of UEs in typical applications of XL-MIMO systems and the scarcity of pilots, the design of random access (RA) protocols and scheduling algorithms become challenging. In this paper, we propose a joint RA and scheduling protocol, namely non-overlapping VR XL-MIMO (NOVR-XL) RA protocol, which takes advantage of the different VRs of the UEs for improving RA performance, besides of seeking UEs with non-overlapping VRs to be scheduled in the same payload data pilot (PDP) resource. Our results reveal that the proposed scheme achieves significant gains in terms of sum-rate compared with traditional RA schemes, as well as reducing access latency and improving connectivity performance as a whole.

In this work, we consider a scenario where two multiple-aperture legitimate nodes (Alice and Bob) communicate by means of Free-Space Optical (FSO) communication in the presence of a multiple-aperture eavesdropper (Eve), which is subject to pointing errors. Two different schemes are considered depending on the availability of channel state information (CSI) at Alice: i) the adaptive scheme, where Alice possesses the instantaneous CSI with respect to Bob; ii) the fixed-rate scheme, where such information is not available at Alice. The performance of the aforementioned schemes is evaluated in terms of a recently proposed metric named effective secrecy throughput (EST), which encompasses both the reliability and secrecy constraints. By constraining the system to operate below a given maximum allowed secrecy outage probability, we evaluate the EST analytically and through numerical results, showing that the use of multiple apertures at Alice is very important towards achieving the optimal EST.

This paper compares the energy efficiency of some cooperative MIMO schemes in wireless networks. By energy efficiency we denote the spectral efficiency seen at the receiver normalized by the total energy consumption, which includes the circuitry, the efficiency of the power amplifier, and the transmission rate. We focus on transmit antenna selection (TAS) and switch and stay combining (SSC) at the receiver. The performance of TAS+SSC is compared to that of TAS and maximal ratio combining (MRC), and to that of transmit/receive beamforming using a singular value decomposition (SVD) technique. We derive closed-form outage probability expressions, and analyze the effect of selecting the antenna from the source to optimize the communication with the relay or with the destination. Our results show that selecting the antennas with respect to the destination is in general a better option when the energy consumption is accounted. Moreover, some power allocation strategies are described and the comparison of the schemes in terms of energy efficiency reveals a considerable improvement with the use of TAS+SSC for low to moderate spectral efficiency, while beamforming outperforms the other schemes for high spectral efficiency when the number of antennas at each node is small.