In this paper, a backscatter cooperation (BC) scheme is proposed for non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) downlink transmission. The key idea is to backscatter the surplus power of the received downlink signals at one user to enhance the reception of the user who cannot recover its information. To evaluate the performance of the proposed BC-NOMA scheme, three benchmark schemes are introduced, which include the non-cooperation (NC)-NOMA scheme, the conventional relaying (CR)-NOMA scheme, and the incremental relaying (IR)-NOMA scheme. For all these schemes, the outage performance, the expected rate, and the diversity-multiplexing trade-off (DMT) performance are analyzed. Additionally, the optimal power allocation to maximize the expected rate of the BC-NOMA scheme in the high signal-to-noise ratio region is derived. The theoretical results show that the proposed BC-NOMA can enhance both transmission reliability (outage performance) and transmission effectiveness (expected rate) compared with NC-NOMA. Furthermore, representative numerical results are presented to validate the theoretical results. It is shown that unlike the two relaying-based cooperative schemes (CR/IR-NOMA), which improve the outage performance at the cost of transmission rate, the proposed BC-NOMA scheme can enhance the transmission reliability without impairing the spectrum efficiency, which makes backscattering an appealing solution to cooperative NOMA downlinks.

The artificial noise (AN) aided multi-beam directional modulation (DM) technology is capable of wireless physical layer secure (PLS) transmissions for multiple desired receivers in free space. The application of AN, however, makes it less powerefficient for such a DM system. To address this problem, the weighted fractional Fourier transform (WFRFT) technology is employed in this paper to achieve power-efficient multi-beam DM transmissions. Specifically, a power-efficient multi-beam WFRFTDM scheme with cooperative receivers and a power-efficient multi-beam WFRFT-DM scheme with independent receivers are proposed based on frequency diverse array (FDA), respectively. The bit error rate (BER), secrecy rate, and robustness of the proposed multi-beam WFRFT-DM schemes are analyzed. Simulations demonstrate that 1) the proposed multi-beam WFRFT-DM schemes are more power-efficient than the conventional multibeam AN-DM scheme; 2) the transmission security can also be guaranteed even if the eavesdroppers are located close to or the same as the desired receivers; and 3) the proposed multi-beam WFRFT-DM schemes are capable of independent transmissions for different desired receivers with different modulations.

The reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is envisioned to create ultra-secure wireless networks. Previous works on the RIS-assisted security provisioning techniques assumed wiretap channel information at the transmitter, which is practically unavailable in a passive eavesdropping scenario. In this article, we consider a point-to-point anti-eavesdropping system in which a RIS is used to enable the secure transmission from a multi-antenna transmitter to a multi-antenna legitimate receiver. A passive eavesdropper, whose channel state information is completely unknown, attempts to decode the secret messages. We propose a security approach by using the reflection at the RIS as multiplicative randomness against the wiretapper. Specifically, the reflection coefficients in terms of amplitude and phase are updated in each transmission and kept private at the RIS. Through the reflection designs, the effective channel matrix is diagonalized at the legitimate receiver. In contrast, the eavesdropper receives coupled signals with the weights of the randomness at RIS. The main contributions of this article are three reflection designs and correspondingly three secure transmission schemes, which fulfills diverse requirements of the balance amongst performance metrics including the degrees of randomness, spectral efficiency, and reliability. The main benefits of the proposed secure transmission schemes are four-fold. First, the transmitter does not need to know the eavesdropper's channel states. Second, closed-form solutions for the reflection coefficients are provided. Third, the legitimate receiver has a linear decoding complexity. Fourth, the unauthorized wiretapper is unable to cancel out the multiplicative randomness and thus cannot extract much useful information. Numerical results show that exploiting the RIS as a source of multiplicative randomness provides a new perspective to improve the security of the wireless networks.

The frequency diverse array (FDA)-based directional modulation (DM) technology plays an important role in the physical-layer security (PLS) transmission of 5G and beyond communications. In order to meet the tremendous increase in mobile data traffic, a new memory-efficient design for the FDA-DM-based PLS transmission is urgently demanded. In this article, an analytical symmetrical multi-carrier FDA model is proposed in three dimensions, namely, range, azimuth angle, and elevation angle, differing from the conventional analytical approach with only range and azimuth angle considered. Then, a single-point (SP) artificial noise (AN) aided FDA-DM scheme is proposed, which reduces the memory consumption significantly compared with the conventional zero-forcing (ZF) and singular value decomposition (SVD) approaches. Moreover, the PLS performance of the proposed FDA-DM scheme is analyzed in fluctuating two-ray (FTR) fading channels for the first time, including the average secrecy capacity (ASC) and the secrecy outage probability (SOP). More importantly, the closed-form expressions for the lower bound on ASC and the upper bound on SOP are derived, respectively. The effectiveness of the analytical expressions is verified by numerical simulations. This work opens a way to lower the memory requirements for DM-based PLS transmission of 5G and beyond communications.

Energy limitation is an adverse problem in designing routing protocols for underwater sensor networks (UWSNs). To prolong the network lifetime with limited battery power, an energy balanced and efficient routing protocol, called energy balanced and lifetime extended routing protocol (EBLE), is proposed in this paper. The proposed EBLE not only balances traffic loads according to the residual energy, but also optimizes data transmissions by selecting low-cost paths. Two phases are operated in the EBLE data transmission process: (1) candidate forwarding set selection phase and (2) data transmission phase. In candidate forwarding set selection phase, nodes update candidate forwarding nodes by broadcasting the position and residual energy level information. The cost value of available nodes is calculated and stored in each sensor node. Then in data transmission phase, high residual energy and relatively low-cost paths are selected based on the cost function and residual energy level information. We also introduce detailed analysis of optimal energy consumption in UWSNs. Numerical simulation results on a variety of node distributions and data load distributions prove that EBLE outperforms other routing protocols (BTM, BEAR and direct transmission) in terms of network lifetime and energy efficiency.