The recent development of metasurfaces, which may enable several use cases by modifying the propagation environment, is anticipated to substantially affect the performance of sixth-generation (6G) wireless communications. Metasurface elements can produce passive subwavelength scattering to enable a smart radio environment. Simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS), which refers to reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) that can transmit and reflect concurrently (STAR), is gaining popularity. In contrast to the widely studied RIS, which can only reflect the wireless signal and serve users on the same side as the transmitter, the STAR-RIS can reflect and refract (transmit), enabling 360° wireless coverage, thus serving users on both sides of the transmitter. This article presents a comprehensive review of the STAR-RIS, focusing on the most recent schemes for diverse use cases in 6G networks, resource allocation, and performance evaluation. We begin by laying the foundation for RIS (passive, active, and STAR-RIS), and then discuss the STAR-RIS protocols, advantages, and applications. In addition, we categorize the approaches within the domain of use scenarios, which include increasing coverage, enhancing physical-layer security (PLS), maximizing sum rate, improving energy efficiency (EE), and reducing interference. Next, we will discuss the various strategies for resource allocation and measures for performance evaluation. We aimed to elaborate, compare, and evaluate the literature regarding setup, channel characteristics, methodology, and objectives. In conclusion, we examine this field’s open research problems and potential future prospects.

Fifth-generation (5G) cellular networks have led to the implementation of beyond 5G (B5G) networks, which are capable of incorporating autonomous services to swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). They provide capacity expansion strategies to address massive connectivity issues and guarantee ultra-high throughput and low latency, especially in extreme or emergency situations where network density, bandwidth, and traffic patterns fluctuate. On the one hand, 6G technology integrates AI/ML, IoT, and blockchain to establish ultra-reliable, intelligent, secure, and ubiquitous UAV networks. 6G networks, on the other hand, rely on new enabling technologies such as air interface and transmission technologies, as well as a unique network design, posing new challenges for the swarm of UAVs.Keeping these challenges in mind, this article focuses on the security and privacy, intelligence, and energy-efficiency issues faced by swarms of UAVs operating in 6G mobile network. In this state-of-the-art review, we integrated blockchain and AI/ML with UAV networks utilizing the 6G ecosystem. The key findings are then presented, and potential research challenges are identified. We conclude the review by shedding light on future research in this emerging field of research.

The last two decades have seen a clear trend toward crafting intelligent vehicles based on the significant advances in communication and computing paradigms, which provide a safer, stress-free, and more enjoyable driving experience. Moreover, emerging applications and services necessitate massive volumes of data, real-time data processing, and ultrareliable and low-latency communication (URLLC). However, the computing capability of current intelligent vehicles is minimal, making it challenging to meet the delay-sensitive and computation-intensive demand of such applications. In this situation, vehicular task/computation offloading toward the edge cloud (EC) and vehicular cloudlet (VC) seems to be a promising solution to improve the network’s performance and applications’ Quality of Service (QoS). At the same time, artificial intelligence (AI) has dramatically changed people’s lives. Especially for vehicular task offloading applications, AI achieves state-of-the-art performance in various vehicular environments. Motivated by the outstanding performance of integrating reinforcement learning (RL)/deep RL (DRL) to the vehicular task offloading systems, we present a survey on various RL/DRL techniques applied to vehicular task offloading. Precisely, we classify the vehicular task offloading works into two main categories: 1) RL/ DRL solutions leveraging EC and 2) RL/DRL solutions using VC computing. Moreover, the EC section-based RL/DRL solutions are further subcategorized into multiaccess edge computing (MEC) server, nearby vehicles, and hybrid MEC (HMEC). To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to cover RL/DRL-based vehicular task offloading. Also, we provide lessons learned and open research challenges in this field and discuss the possible trend for future research.

Vehicular edge computing (VEC) is an innovative computing paradigm with an exceptional ability to improve the vehicles’ capacity to manage computation-intensive applications with both low latency and energy consumption. Vehicles require to make task offloading decisions in dynamic network conditions to obtain maximum computation efficiency. In this article, we analyze computation efficiency in a VEC scenario, where a vehicle offloads its tasks to maximize computation efficiency as a tradeoff between computation time and energy consumption. Although, it is quite a challenge to ensure the quality of experience of the vehicle due to diverse task requirements and the dynamic wireless conditions caused by vehicle mobility. To tackle this problem, a computation efficiency problem is formulated by jointly optimizing task offloading decision and computation resource allocation. We propose a mobility-aware computational efficiency-based task offloading and resource allocation (MACTER) scheme and develop a distributed MACTER algorithm that provides the near-optimal solution. We further consider the fifth-generation new-radio vehicle-to-everything communication model, i.e., cellular link and millimeter wave, to enhance the system performance. The simulation outcomes demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can efficiently enhance computation efficiency while satisfying computing time and energy consumption constraints.

The swift progress of metasurface technology, enabling meticulous manipulation of the propagation environment, is anticipated to bring a transformative impact on sixth-generation (6G) wireless communications efficiency. Utilizing metasurface elements presents a promising opportunity for achieving passive scattering at sub-wavelength scales, facilitating intelligent radio settings’ advancement. Active Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (ARIS) have gained significant interest in emergent metasurface technology. In contrast to passive RIS, which exhibits a certain degree of performance enhancement but encounters restrictions arising from the “double fading" phenomenon in the phase response, ARIS emerges as a highly promising alternative to counter such restrictions. This study provides a complete examination of ARIS, particularly emphasizing current improvements and its various uses within the context of 6G wireless networks. The review commences by laying a robust foundation in RIS technology, covering the various types and modes of RIS. Following this, we will explore the benefits and practical implementations of ARIS. Through a systematic examination, we categorize different approaches within ARIS-enabled use cases. These scenarios include optimizing the sum rate and signal-to-noise ratio, attaining maximum secrecy rate, energy minimization, and ensuring channel estimation. Additionally, we provide a summary and lessons learned along with a summary table for each category to describe, contrast, and evaluate the existing literature regarding setup, channel characteristics, methodologies, and objectives. We highlight the crucial role of ARIS in defining the landscape of wireless communications in the 6G era by outlining the open research problems in this emerging area and exploring the attractive future prospects.

The future sixth generation (6G) wireless communication networks will face the challenges of large-scale connections green communication. To meet these requirements, cognitive ambient backscatter communication (C-AmBC) has been proposed as a new spectrum paradigm for the green Internet-of-Things (IoT) with stringent energy and spectrum constraints, in which the backscatter device (BD) can achieve communications by simultaneously sharing both spectrum and radio-frequency (RF) sources. However, due to the broadcasting nature of wireless communication channels, BD is vulnerable to eavesdropping from unlicensed eavesdroppers. To address this, this paper proposes a framework of C-AmBC networks in the presence of an unlicensed eavesdropper. Specifically, we investigate the reliability and security of the proposed framework by invoking the outage probability (OP) and intercept probability (IP) with analytical derivations. In addition, the asymptotic behaviors are conducted for the OP in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime and IP in the high main-to-eavesdropper ratio (MER) regime. Extensive analytical and computer simulated performance evaluation results show that: 1) when the considered system is under high SNR, the OP of the legitimate user and BD tends to be a non-zero fixed constant, indicating that the existence of error floors for the diversity orders; 2) the performance trade-off of reliability and security can be optimized by adjusting various parameters of the considered system; 3) with the increase of MER, the security of the legitimate user increases, while that of BD decreases.