In this letter, deep learning is applied to estimate the uplink channels for mixed analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, where a portion of antennas are equipped with high-resolution ADCs while others employ low-resolution ones at the base station. A direct-input deep neural network (DI-DNN) is first proposed to estimate channels by using the received signals of all antennas. To eliminate the adverse impact of the coarsely quantized signals, a selective-input prediction DNN (SIP-DNN) is developed, where only the signals received by the high-resolution ADC antennas are exploited to predict the channels of other antennas as well as to estimate their own channels. Numerical results show the superiority of the proposed DNN based approaches over the existing methods, especially with mixed one-bit ADCs, and the effectiveness of the proposed approaches on different ADC resolution patterns.

A near-field integrated sensing, positioning, and communication (ISPAC) framework is proposed, where a base station (BS) simultaneously serves multiple communication users and carries out target sensing and positioning. A novel double-array structure is proposed to enable the near-field ISPAC at the BS. Specifically, a small-scale assisting transceiver (AT) is attached to the large-scale main transceiver (MT) to empower the communication system with the ability of sensing and positioning. Based on the proposed framework, the joint angle and distance Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) is first derived. Then, the CRB is minimized subject to the minimum communication rate requirement in both downlink and uplink ISPAC scenarios: 1) For downlink ISPAC, a downlink target positioning algorithm is proposed and a penalty dual decomposition (PDD)-based double-loop algorithm is developed to tackle the non-convex optimization problem. 2) For uplink ISPAC, an uplink target positioning algorithm is proposed and an efficient alternating optimization algorithm is conceived to solve the non-convex CRB minimization problem with coupled user communication and target probing design. Both proposed optimization algorithms can converge to a stationary point of the CRB minimization problem. Numerical results show that: 1) The proposed ISPAC system can locate the target in both angle and distance domains merely relying on single BS and limited bandwidths; and 2) the positioning performance achieved by the hybrid-analog-and-digital ISPAC approaches that achieved by fully digital ISPAC when the communication rate requirement is not stringent.

This letter aims to reduce huge pilot overhead when estimating the reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) relayed wireless channel. Motivated by the compelling grasp of deep learning in tackling nonlinear mapping problems, the proposed approach only activates a part of RIS elements and utilizes the corresponding cascaded channel estimate to predict another part. Through a synthetic deep neural network (DNN), the direct channel and active cascaded channel are first estimated sequentially, followed by the channel prediction for the inactive RIS elements. A three-stage training strategy is developed for this synthetic DNN. From simulation results, the proposed deep learning based approach is effective in reducing the pilot overhead and guaranteeing the reliable estimation accuracy.

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is considered to be a promising technology for improving bandwidth utilization efficiency and reducing power consumption. In this paper, we consider the optimization of user clustering in the NOMA scenario, where the goal is to maximize the system total throughput under minimum rate constraints. Different from most existing literatures, there is no limit on the number of users in each cluster. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can significantly reduce computational complexity and have a better performance compared with schemes based on the other heuristic algorithms and random user clustering with greedy strategy.

For ultra-dense networks with wireless backhaul, caching strategy at small base stations (SBSs), usually with limited storage, is critical to meet massive high data rate requests. Since the content popularity profile varies with time in an unknown way, we exploit reinforcement learning (RL) to design a cooperative caching strategy with maximum-distance separable (MDS) coding. We model the MDS coding based cooperative caching as a Markov decision process to capture the popularity dynamics and maximize the long-term expected cumulative traffic load served directly by the SBSs without accessing the macro base station. For the formulated problem, we first find the optimal solution for a small-scale system by embedding the cooperative MDS coding into Q-learning. To cope with the large-scale case, we approximate the state-action value function heuristically. The approximated function includes only a small number of learnable parameters and enables us to propose a fast and efficient action-selection approach, which dramatically reduces the complexity. Numerical results verify the optimality/near-optimality of the proposed RL based algorithms and show the superiority compared with the baseline schemes. They also exhibit good robustness to different environments.