Integrating the reconfigurable intelligent surface in a cell-free (RIS-CF) network is an effective solution to improve the capacity and coverage of future wireless systems with low cost and power consumption. The reflecting coefficients of RISs can be programmed to enhance signals received at users. This letter addresses a joint design of transmit beamformers at access points and reflecting coefficients at RISs to maximize the energy efficiency (EE) of RIS-CF networks, taking into account the limited backhaul capacity constraints. Due to a very computationally challenging nonconvex problem, we develop a simple yet efficient alternating algorithm for its solution. Numerical results verify that the EE of RIS-CF networks is greatly improved, showing the benefit of using RISs.

With the extensive application of underwater acoustic sensor networks (UANs) in various fields such as commerce, marine environmental research, and national defense, the need for an autonomous and well-organized underwater acoustic network has been increasing. Topology discovery is a crucial step in constructing an underwater acoustic network, and node discovery and topology establishment are the essential components of the topology discovery process in UANs. This paper introduces the characteristics of underwater acoustic channels and networks and highlights their influences on topology discovery. We discuss the topology discovery protocol development in terrestrial networks (i.e., duty-cycle ad hoc network, Internet of things). The main focus of this paper is to study the topology discovery protocols of UANs. This paper also classifies and introduces the existing topology discovery protocols and compared their advantages and disadvantages to understand the current topology discovery methods. Furthermore, we also discuss the topology discovery protocol’s influence on different layers’ functions in the UAN protocol stack. Analyze the current research challenges in this field, followed by important open issues in UAN protocol development, which provide new opportunities for further research.

The superior spectral efficiency (SE) and user fairness feature of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems are achieved by exploiting user clustering (UC) more efficiently. However, a random UC certainly results in a suboptimal solution while an exhaustive search method comes at the cost of high complexity, especially for systems of medium-to-large size. To address this problem, we develop two efficient unsupervised machine learning based UC algorithms, namely k-means++ and improved k-means++, to effectively cluster users into disjoint clusters in cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (CFmMIMO) system. Adopting full-pilot zero-forcing at access points (APs) to comprehensively assess the system performance, we formulate the sum SE optimization problem taking into account power constraints at APs, necessary conditions for implementing successive interference cancellation, and required SE constraints at user equipments. The formulated optimization problem is highly non-convex, and thus, it is difficult to obtain the global optimal solution. Therefore, we develop a simple yet efficient iterative algorithm for its solution. In addition, the performance of collocated massive MIMO-NOMA (COmMIMO-NOMA) system is also characterized. Numerical results are provided to show the superior performance of the proposed UC algorithms compared to baseline schemes. The effectiveness of applying NOMA in CFmMIMO and COmMIMO systems is also validated.

Underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) have played a vital role in many security-sensitive applications like offshore oil exploration, tsunami forecast, and tactical surveillance. Due to the complex marine environment and harsh acoustic channel, UASNs face severe security challenges and attacks. Exploiting the multi-path energy from the richly scattering underwater environment, the time-reversal (TR) process can form the resonating strength based on the channel impulse response (CIR). Inspired by the natural link signature resulting from the spatial dependency of acoustic links, an authentication scheme using the maximum TR resonating strength is proposed, with the aim of effectively detecting the spoofing attacks in UASNs. To accommodate the time-varying nature of the underwater acoustic link, a database correlation method is exploited to capture the link CIR pattern over time for each link, which efficiently improves the accuracy of the authentication scheme using the TR process. Hence, the proposed algorithm enables each node to make the authentication decision based on maximum time-reversal resonating strength (MTRRS) locally with little overhead. It was evaluated by the probabilities of authentication, attack detection, and false alarm through extensive simulations. Finally, this MTRRS-based authentication was verified using the sea trial CIR data.

Constrained-energy underwater acoustic nodes are typically connected via a multi-hop underwater acoustic network (MHUAN) to cover a broad marine region. Recently, protocols for efficiently connecting such nodes have received considerable attention. In this paper, we show that the time reversal (TR) process plays an important role in the medium access control (MAC) because of its physical capability to exploit the multi-path energy from the richly scattering underwater environment, as well as to focus the signal energy in both spatial and temporal domains. In MHUANs, with severe multi-path propagation at the physical layer, the active TR process spatially focuses the signals to the location of the intended receiver; this significantly diminishes the interference among parallel links. We propose an active TR-based MAC (TRMAC) protocol for MHUANs, with the aim of minimizing collision and maximizing channel utilization simultaneously. Furthermore, by considering the impact of the cross correlation between different links on the TR-based medium access, we derive the threshold of the link cross correlation to resolve collision caused by the high cross correlation between realistic links. We perform simulations using the OPNET and BELLHOP environments, and show that the proposed TRMAC results in significantly improved throughput, decreased delay, and reduced data drop ratio in MHUANs.