Due to their distinctive features, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been recently exploited to support a wide range of applications. The features include low maintenance cost, compact size, and excellent capability of maneuvering. In particular, UAVs have the potential capabilities to support different technologies such as Internet-of-things (IoT) devices, sensors, cameras, and systems, thus, performing civilian, target tracking, industrial, and military applications. Specifically, target tracking has been recently configured as one of the most attractive applications of UAVs. With this, UAVs estimate and detect the behavior or locate a moving or a stationary item. Accordingly, several research efforts have been conducted to investigate the promising capabilities of UAVs in target-tracking missions, including indoor and outdoor tracking missions. This paper surveys UAV-based target tracking and monitoring for indoor and outdoor environments, where the deployment scenarios of such UAV-based systems are characterized and investigated. Furthermore, we discuss a set of practical design challenges of UAV-based target tracking systems, and thus, we provide a set of potential solutions to deal with these challenges. Specifically, we present a set of recent enabling technologies that might be integrated into UAV target tracking systems, including machine learning (ML), cloud computing, and emerging fifth-generation (5G) technologies. We also demonstrate a use-case scenario in which ML is used to facilitate indoor target tracking and monitoring. Finally, future research directions are outlined that can help in improving the efficiency of the UAV-based target-tracking systems.

When considering the future generation wireless networks, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) represents a viable multiple access technique for improving the spectral efficiency. The basic performance of the NOMA is often enhanced using downlink beamforming and power allocation techniques. Although downlink beamforming has been previously studied with different performance criteria, such as sum-rate and max-min rate, it has not been studied in the multiuser, multiple-input single-output (MISO) case, particularly with the energy efficiency criteria. In this paper, we investigate the design of an energy efficient beamforming technique for downlink transmission in the context of a multiuser MISO-NOMA system. In particular, this beamforming design is formulated as a global energy efficiency (GEE) maximization problem with minimum user rate requirements and transmit power constraints. By using the sequential convex approximation technique and the Dinkelbach's algorithm to handle the non-convex nature of the GEE-Max problem, we propose two novel algorithms for solving the downlink beamforming problem for the MISO-NOMA system. Our evaluation of the proposed algorithms shows that they offer similar optimal designs and are effective in offering substantial energy efficiencies compared with the designs based on conventional methods.

The integration of cognitive radio (CR) technology and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) techniques, referred to as CR-based NOMA system, has been recently configured as a promising solution to meet the requirements of beyond fifth generation (B5G) networks, especially those related to Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. With such integration, power domain NOMA allows multiple users to share the same orthogonal resource blocks, while CR technology enables opportunistic bandwidth utilization by permitting secondary users (SUs) to access the licensed spectrum frequency without interrupting the primary users’ (PUs) activities. To support the massive connectivity requirements of IoT-based networks, several multiple-access techniques have been recently combined with CR-based NOMA systems, including orthogonal multiple access (OMA) and multiple-antenna techniques. For example, in CR-based OMA-NOMA systems, the licensed frequency band is split into several channels, and a set of SUs is served on each channel using the NOMA technique. This paper provides an overview and analysis of the state-of-the-art CR-based NOMA network architecture. It summarizes the main design challenges related to the practical implementation of such systems. Furthermore, this paper presents the advances of combining CR-based NOMA with recent multiple-access techniques, where the potential capabilities and the design challenges of such integrated systems are also investigated and discussed. On the other hand, this paper demonstrates the potential capabilities of deploying recent technologies in CR-based NOMA networks. The technologies include intelligent reflecting surfaces, terahertz communications, machine learning, unmanned aerial vehicles, and hybrid NOMA systems. Finally, future research directions and open issues are provided and discussed.

In this paper, we consider an energy efficient resource allocation technique for a hybrid time division multiple access (TDMA) - non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system. In such a hybrid system, the available time for transmission is divided into several sub-time slots, and a sub-time slot is allocated to serve a group of users (i.e., cluster). Furthermore, signals for the users in each cluster are transmitted based on the NOMA approach. With NOMA, multiple users can be served simultaneously through utilizing power domain multiplexing at transmitter and successive interference cancellation (SIC) at receiver. In this paper, to maximize the energy efficiency (EE), we jointly allocate both the available time slots and the available transmit power in the hybrid TDMA-NOMA system. In particular, we formulate an EE maximization (EE-Max) problem aiming to maximize the overall EE of the system with a per-user minimum rate and transmit power constraints. However, this joint optimization problem is non-convex in nature, and thus, cannot be solved directly. Therefore, we develop an iterative algorithm by approximating the original problem into a convex one with sequential convex approximation (SCA) and a novel second-order cone (SOC) approach. Simulation results demonstrate that the performance of the proposed hybrid TDMA-NOMA system with joint resource allocation outperforms the system with equal time allocation in terms of the overall EE. Simulation results further confirm that the proposed iterative approaches with SCA and SOC techniques converge within a few number of iterations while yielding the solution to the original non-convex problem.

Energy efficiency (EE) and spectral efficiency (SE) are two of the key performance metrics in future wireless networks, covering both design and operational requirements. For previous conventional resource allocation techniques, these two performance metrics have been considered in isolation, resulting in severe performance degradation in either of these metrics. Motivated by this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel beamforming design that jointly considers the trade-off between the two performance metrics in a multiple-input singleoutput non-orthogonal multiple access system. In particular, we formulate a joint SE-EE based design as a multi-objective optimization (MOO) problem to achieve a good trade-off between the two performance metrics. However, this MOO problem is not mathematically tractable and, thus, it is difficult to determine a feasible solution due to the conflicting objectives, where both need to be simultaneously optimized. To overcome this issue, we exploit a priori articulation scheme combined with the weighted sum approach. Using this, we reformulate the original MOO problem as a conventional single objective optimization (SOO) problem. In doing so, we develop an iterative algorithm to solve this non-convex SOO problem using the sequential convex approximation technique. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the advantages and effectiveness of the proposed approach over the available beamforming designs.

The combination of time division multiple access (TDMA) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), referred to as hybrid TDMA-NOMA system, is considered as a potential solution to meet the unprecedented requirements for future wireless networks. While recent resource allocation techniques aiming to individually maximize either spectral efficiency (SE) or energy efficiency (EE), this paper considers an SE-EE trade-off based technique for a hybrid TDMA-NOMA system. This design offers an additional degree of freedom in resource allocation. The proposed design is formulated as a non-convex multi-objective optimization (MOO) problem. The MOO framework is reformulated as a single-objective optimization (SOO) problem by combining the multi-objectives through a weighted-sum objective function. With this, each of the original objectives is assigned with a weight factor to reflect its importance in the design. Then, the sequential convex approximation (SCA) and a second-order cone (SOC) approach are jointly utilized to deal with the non-convexity issues of the SOO problem. Simulation results reveal that the proposed trade-off based design strikes a good balance between the objective functions, while meeting the instantaneous requirements of the system.