Licensed-assisted access (LAA), which conveys data information via both licensed and unlicensed bands through spectrum aggregation, becomes a promising solution to enhance the capacity of wireless systems. In view of the potential impact on the incumbent system operating in unlicensed bands, the medium access control (MAC) protocol design for LAA system to harmonically coexist with its neighboring incumbent users is one of the most critical and challenging issues. In this paper, we consider a long-term evolution-based LAA (LAA-LTE) system operating in the WiFi unlicensed spectrum, for which the listen-before-talk-based MAC protocol is carefully designed. By quantifying the WiFi throughput and packet delay in the coexisting system, we formulate the constraints of LAA-LTE transmission time to fairly maintain WiFi services. The conditions of known and unknown network size of incumbent WiFi system are each considered separately. Then, the feasible region of LAA-LTE transmission time is determined, and the LAA-LTE protocol is optimized for maximizing the LAA-LTE throughput or the overall throughput contributed by both LAA-LTE and WiFi system. The theoretical analysis is validated via simulation, which also illustrates important observations when LAA-LTE and WiFi systems coexist. This paper offers guidelines to design the LAA-LTE system, paving the way to a controllable, not only harmonious, coexistence of LAA-LTE and WiFi systems in the unlicensed spectrum.

Symbiotic radio (SR) is a new paradigm of spectrum sharing that allows passive Internet-of-Things (IoT) device to transmit messages over the ambient RF signal. Considering that the reader needs to collect information from multiple IoT devices in practice, and the traditional multiple access schemes that require coordination among users are unaffordable for the passive devices, we propose a random code assisted multiple access scheme, in which each backscatter device (BD) independently chooses a random code to spread its signal and the incident signal is backscattered. To avoid the need of the instantaneous information, including the specific codes and the instantaneous channel state information of the backscatter links, and to optimize the transmit power and the BD reflection coefficients, we derive the asymptotic BD signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) by employing the large-dimension random matrix theory. We formulate the joint optimization problem to maximize the minimum asymptotic SINR among BDs with guaranteeing the primary target rate. By investigating the property of the problem, the original problem is transformed and solved by the proposed iterative-based algorithm. Extensive simulations are executed to verify our theoretical analysis and demonstrate the outperformance of the proposed algorithm.

In this paper, we investigate the physical layer security (PLS) for a multiple-input single-output (MISO) non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) visible light communication (VLC) system, whose information is intercepted by collusive eavesdroppers. For the case of known eavesdroppers' locations, a precoding scheme is proposed to maximize the secrecy capacity of the system by suppressing the rate of collusive eavesdroppers. Then we extend the scheme to the case of unknown eavesdroppers' locations. Specifically, the artificial noise is introduced in the precoding scheme to further suppress the average rate of eavesdroppers. To solve the non-convex optimization problem, we propose an iterative algorithm based on concave-convex procedure. Simulation results illustrate the outperformance of the proposed schemes in guaranteeing the PLS for the MISO NOMA VLC system under the interception of collusive eavesdroppers.

Ambient backscatter communication (AmBC) has great potential to provide Internet of Things (IoT) services with low energy and spectrum cost. In this letter, we study an AmBC system where multiple full-duplex mobile users (MUs) attempt to send packets to the access point (AP) according to the CSMA/CA protocol while receiving the information from their respective associated backscatter devices (BDs). We notice that the transmission of the BD not only decreases the PHY-layer SINR of the CSMA/CA system, but also increases its failure probability of the packet transmission in the MAC-layer. In return, the BD transmission probability is affected by the MAC-layer activity of the CSMA/CA system. To this end, we analyze the cross-layer performance of the AmBC system and quantify the cross-layer outage capacities of the BD and the CSMA/CA systems. Simulation results are provided to verify our theoretical analysis, and demonstrate the interaction between the BD and the ambient CSMA/CA systems.

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has proved its great potential for supporting the delay-stringent services in wireless networks. We notice that offloading performance of the MEC system is not only determined by the PHY-layer transmission rate, but also closely related to the performance of channel access and computation at the server. To this end, in this correspondence, we investigate a multiuser MEC system, where each user offloads packet to a single AP equipped with an MEC server by preempting the channel according to carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) protocol. We derive the effective offloading rate and delay by considering transmission outage caused by the poor channel condition, the MAC-layer channel competition, and the packet overflow due to the limited service capability of the server, where the service process is modelled as an $M/M/1/B$ queue. The theoretical analysis is verified by extensive simulations, which has shown that the competition intensity indicated by the number of users and the packet length, as well as the processing capability of the MEC server including the buffer size and the computation speed, has profound impact on the offloading performance.

The internet of things (IoT) paradigm holds the promise to revolutionize the way we live and work through connecting various machine-type communication terminals. In this work, we investigate a symbiotic network from a cross-layer perspective, where passive IoT devices coexist in symbiosis with an ambient network that uses carrier sense multiple access with collision notifications (CSMA/CN) MAC protocol. In the ambient network, each full-duplex mobile user (MU) aims to transmit its own packets to the common access point (AP) while receiving the signal backscattered from its associated backscatter device (BD). Considering the imperfectness of carrier sensing of the MU, two key parameters, i.e., the probability of detection and the probability of false alarm, are quantified. Then we derive the PHY-layer outage probabilities and analyze the corresponding diversity orders for both the CSMA/CN and the BD system. By incorporating the outage probabilities and the carrier sensing metrics into the MAC-layer analysis, the cross-layer outage capacities of the CSMA/CN and the BD system are derived. Simulation results demonstrate that the system performance can be improved by appropriately setting the PHY-layer parameters, such as the BD reflection coefficient α and the number of samples for carrier sensing K, as well as the MAC-layer parameters, such as the sensing duration and the initial contention window. With the BD reflection coefficient being 0.05, the outage capacity of the overall system has improved by 41.85% compared with CSMA/CA protocol.