Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) exhibits superiority in spectrum efficiency and device connections in comparison with the traditional orthogonal multiple access technologies. However, the non-orthogonality of NOMA also introduces intra-cell interference that has become the bottleneck limiting the performance to be further improved. To coordinate the intra-cell interference, we investigate the dynamic user scheduling and power allocation problem in this paper. Specifically, we formulate this problem as a stochastic optimization problem with the objective to minimize the total power consumption of the whole network under the constraint of all users’ long-term rate requirements. To tackle this challenging problem, we first transform it into a series of static optimization problems based on the stochastic optimization theory. Afterward, we exploit the special structure of the reformulated problem and adopt the branch-and-bound technique to devise an efficient algorithm, which can obtain the optimal control policies with a low complexity. As a good feature, the proposed algorithm can make decisions only according to the instantaneous system state and can guarantee the long-term network performance. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has good performance in convergence and outperforms other schemes in terms of power consumption and user satisfaction.

This correspondence reveals the potential of reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) in anti-jamming communications. In particular, we consider an aerial RIS (ARIS) that can be flexibly deployed in the air so as to mitigate jamming attacks and enhance the legitimate transmissions. We formulate the joint optimization of ARIS deployment and passive beamforming and solve the problem through an alternating optimization framework, where the location of ARIS is obtained by successive convex approximation and the reflection beamformer is tackled with manifold optimization. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that an ARIS with our proposal can effectively mitigate the jamming attacks and thus safeguard the legitimate transmissions.

In this paper, we investigate the application of the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique into the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) aided relay networks. Specifically, we first incorporate the NOMA protocol with the decode-and-forward (DF) relay protocol to enhance the performance of the cell edge users in a macrocell network. Theoretical analysis indicates that the NOMA-DF-relay protocol outperforms the conventional orthogonal multiple access (OMA) based DF-relay protocol in terms of data rate. To fully exploit the advantages of the proposed protocol, we formulate a joint UAV height optimization, channel allocation, and power allocation problem with the objective to maximize the total data rate of the cell edge users under the coverage of the UAV. For solving the formulated problem effectively, we first analyze its property and employ the golden section method to propose a general framework to obtain the optimal height of the UAV. Then, we design a low-complexity iterative algorithm to solve the joint channel-and-power allocation problem based on the matching theory and the Lagrangian dual decomposition technique. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that the NOMA-DF-relay protocol is superior to the OMA-DF-relay protocol even when the system parameters are not optimized, and the proposed algorithms can further significantly improve the network performance in comparison with the other schemes.

In this paper, we propose a mobile edge computing (MEC)-enabled unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) architecture, based on which a number of vehicles are served by UAVs equipped with computation resource. Each vehicle has to offload its computing tasks to the proper MEC server on the UAV due to the limited computation ability. To counter the problems above, we first model and analyze the transmission model and the security assurance model from the vehicle to the MEC server on UAV, and the task computation model of the local vehicle and the edge UAV. Then, the vehicle offloading problem is formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem by jointly considering the task offloading, the resource allocation, and the security assurance. For tackling this hard problem, we decouple the multi-objective optimization problem as two subproblems and propose an efficient iterative algorithm to jointly make the MEC selection decision based on the criteria of load balancing and optimize the offloading ratio and the computation resource according to the Lagrangian dual decomposition. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate that our proposed scheme achieves significant performance superiority compared with other schemes in terms of the successful task processing ratio and the task processing delay.

Providing reliable and flexible emergency communications for the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is challenging in post-disaster scenarios, especially when communications infrastructures are unavailable or seriously damaged. Under such circumstances, it is highly demanded to deploy the air base station (ABS) to restore connectivity in disaster areas. Although the ABS can offer improved performance, the massive access of communications devices and the rising demand for many emergency-related services will bring new challenges to the ABS-aided IoV. In this paper, we propose a vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) collaboration framework to support emergency communications. Specifically, we incorporate non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) into the ABS-aided IoV. By using the successive interference cancellation (SIC) technique, V2I and V2V links can operate in four spectrum reuse modes, which are the extension of the conventional underlaying reuse mode. To fully exploit the advantages of the NOMA enhanced collaboration framework, we formulate a total power consumption minimization problem by jointly considering the mode selection, power control, and the channel state information (CSI) latency. The formulated problem is constrained by the reliability and rate requirements, and the decoding threshold of the SIC technique. Due to the NP-hard characteristics of the formulated problem, we decouple it first, and then adopt the graphical method to derive the analytical solution of optimal power control policies. Afterwards, we can get every feasible spectrum reuse mode. Among the feasible modes, we select the mode with minimum power consumption as the optimal mode. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm outperforms the current works in term of the total power consumption, e.g., by adopting the ABS and the NOMA technology, the total power consumption can be reduced by 22.3% and 40.9%, respectively.