This Special Issue originates from the international conference EuCNC 2020 (European Conference on Networks and Communications), which was planned to be held in June 2020 in Dubrovnik (Croatia), but due to the COVID-19 pandemic was changed to an Online Conference. The Technical Programme Chairs of the conference have selected the best papers and invited authors to submit an extended version of their paper, by at least one third of their length. Only the top ranked papers were invited to this Special Issue, in order to fulfil its purpose. The main target was to collect and present quality research contributions in the most recent activities related to systems and networks beyond 5G, already presenting ideas for 6G. Through this Special Issue, the state-of-the-art is presented and the new challenges are highlighted, regarding the latest advances on systems and network perspectives that are already being positioned beyond 5G, bridging as well with the evolution of 5G, including applications and trials. Therefore, the motivation for this Special Issue is to present the latest and finest results on the evolution of research of mobile and wireless communications, coming, but not exclusively (since EuCNC is a conference open to the whole research community), from projects co-financed by the European Commission within its R&D programmes.

Cooperative, connected and automated mobility (CCAM) across Europe requires harmonized solutions to support cross-border seamless operation. The possibility of providing CCAM services across European countries has an enormous innovative business potential. However, the seamless provision of connectivity and the uninterrupted delivery of real-time services pose technical challenges which 5G technologies aim to solve. The situation is particularly challenging given the multi-country, multi-operator, multi-telco-vendor, multi-car-manufacturer and cross-network-generation scenario of any cross-border scenario. Motivated by this, the 5GCroCo project, with a total budget of 17 million Euro and partially funded by the European Commission, aims at validating 5G technologies in the Metz-Merzig-Luxembourg cross-border 5G corridor considering the borders between France, Germany and Luxembourg. The activities of 5GCroCo are organized around three use cases: (1) Tele-operated Driving, (2) high-definition map generation and distribution for automated vehicles and (3) Anticipated Cooperative Collision Avoidance (ACCA). The results of the project help contribute to a true European transnational CCAM. This paper describes the overall objectives of the project, motivated by the discussed challenges of cross-border operation, the use cases along with their requirements, the technical 5G features that will be validated and provides a description of the planned trials within 5GCroCo together with some initial results.

With the acceleration of informatization and the coverage of wireless networks, homes, conferences, schools and other places have a higher pursuit of the wireless transmission capabilities of electronic devices. Wireless screen transmission technology is used more frequently in life, work and study. This article mainly discusses the practical application of network multimedia courseware in college basketball teaching. This article first elaborates the teaching plan of multimedia courseware, including teaching content, teacher guidance, student learning and multimedia courseware. Secondly, the multimedia courseware of basketball tactics basic teaching is completed by using Flash mx2004 plug-in. After that, it specifically introduces the process of how to transmit basketball teaching content through multimedia equipment to the video network for students to learn under the wireless network environment. It emphasizes that the "wireless multimedia communication" course is an important course in the electronic information subject. Finally, through the teaching experiment, the accuracy of the multimedia teaching method was tested, and the validity of the courseware content was tested by the empirical validity evaluation method. At the same time, after the teaching experiment, in order to test the two groups of students' mastery of the basic coordination theory of basketball tactics, the basic coordination theory of basketball tactics was tested. The experimental group had 22 students with a score of 90 or more, accounting for 27.5%, and the control group had 13 students with a score of 90 or more, accounting for 16.5%. The results show that wireless network multimedia computer-assisted teaching has a positive effect on improving students' interest in learning.

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SEMs) are the important part of economic society whose innovation activities are of great significance for building innovative country. In order to investigate how technological innovation (TI) and business model design (BMD) affect the business performance of SMEs, samples of 268 SMEs in the artificial intelligence industry and hierarchical regression models are used in the analysis. The results indicate that TI, BMD, and the matching of them have different effects on the innovation of SMEs of different sizes. These findings are helpful for enriching the theory of the fit between TI and BMD and providing theoretical guidance for the innovation activities in SEMs.

In cellular networks, each mobile station adjusts its power level under control of its base station, i.e., through uplink transmit power control, which is essential to reach desired signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) at the base station and to limit inter-cell interference. The optimal levels of transmit power in a network depend on path loss, shadowing, and multipath fading, as well as the network configuration. However, since path loss is distance dependent and the cell association distances are correlated due to the cell association policies, the performance analysis of the uplink transmit power control is very complicated. Consequently, the impact of a specific power control algorithm on network performance is hard to quantify. In this paper, we analyze three uplink transmit power control schemes. We assume the standard power-law path loss and composite Rayleigh-lognormal fading. Using stochastic geometry tools, we derive the cumulative distribution function and the probability density function of the uplink transmit power and the resulting network coverage probability. It is shown that the coverage is highly dependent on the severity of shadowing, the power control scheme, and its parameters, but invariant of the density of deployment of base stations when the shadowing is mild and power control is fractional. At low SINRs, compensation of both path loss and shadowing improves the coverage. However, at high SINRs, compensating for path loss only improves coverage. Increase in the severity of shadowing significantly reduces the coverage.

We propose an early-detection scheme to reduce communications latency based on sequential tests under finite blocklength regime for a fixed-rate transmission without any feedback channel. The proposed scheme processes observations sequentially to decide in favor of one of the candidate symbols. Such a process stops as soon as a decision rule is satisfied or waits for more samples under a given accuracy. We first provide the optimal achievable latency in additive white Gaussian noise channels for every channel code given a probability of block error. For example, for a rate and a blocklength of 500 symbols, we show that only of the symbol time is needed to reach an error rate equal to . Then, we prove that if short messages can be transmitted in parallel Gaussian channels via a multi-carrier modulation, there exists an optimal low-latency strategy for every code. Next, we show how early detection can be effective with band-limited orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing signals while maintaining a given spectral efficiency by random coding or pre-coding random matrices. Finally, we show how the proposed early-detection scheme is effective in multi-hop systems.

With the assistance of emerging techniques, such as cloud computing, fog computing and Internet of Things (IoT), smart city is developing rapidly into a novel and well-accepted service pattern these days. The trend also facilitates numerous relevant applications, e.g., smart health care, smart office, smart campus, etc., and drives the urgent demand for data sharing. However, this brings many concerns on data security as there is more private and sensitive information contained in the data of smart city applications. It may incur disastrous consequences if the shared data are illegally accessed, which necessitates an efficient data access control scheme for data sharing in smart city applications with resource-poor user terminals. To this end, we proposes an efficient traceable and revocable time-based CP-ABE (TR-TABE) scheme which can achieve time-based and fine-grained data access control over large attribute universe for data sharing in large-scale smart city applications. To trace and punish the malicious users that intentionally leak their keys to pursue illicit profits, we design an efficient user tracing and revocation mechanism with forward and backward security. For efficiency improvement, we integrate outsourced decryption and verify the correctness of its result. The proposed scheme is proved secure with formal security proof and is demonstrated to be practical for data sharing in smart city applications with extensive performance evaluation.

This work presents an extension of the high-resolution RiMAX multipath estimation algorithm, enabling the analysis of frequency-dependent propagation parameters for ultra-wideband (UWB) channel modeling. Since RiMAX is a narrowband algorithm, it does not account for the frequency-dependency of the radio channel or the environment. As such, the impact of certain materials in which these systems operate can no longer be considered constant with respect to frequency, preventing an accurate estimation of multipath parameters for UWB communication. In order to track both the specular and dense multipath components (SMC and DMC) over frequency, an extension to the RiMAX algorithm was developed that can process UWB measurement data. The advantage of our approach is that geometrical propagation parameters do not appear or disappear from one sub-band onto the next. The UWB-RiMAX algorithm makes it possible to re-evaluate common radio channel parameters for DMC in the wideband scenario, and to extend the well-known deterministic propagation model comprising of SMC alone, towards a more hybrid model containing the stochastic contributions from the DMC's distributed diffuse scattering as well. Our algorithm was tested with synthetic radio channel models in an indoor environment, which show that our algorithm can match up to 99% of the SMC parameters according to the multipath component distance (MCD) metric and that the DMC reverberation time known from the theory of room electromagnetics can be estimated on average with an error margin of less than 2 ns throughout the UWB frequency band. We also present some preliminary results in an indoor environment, which indicate a strong presence of DMC and thus diffuse scattering. The DMC power represents up to 50% of the total measured power for the lower UWB frequencies and reduces to around 30% for the higher UWB frequencies.

Location spoof detection is a major component of location proofing mechanisms in internet of things (IoT), and it is significant for the system to assess the trustworthiness of the location data associated with the user. Unlike the work that employs physical layer features, we interest in building the infrastructure for a solution to establish location spoofing detection capabilities in blockchain-based IoT systems. In detail, at the node and the mobile trajectory level, we create an IoT system for evaluating the trustworthiness of location proofs with blockchain location system features. A blockchain-based multilayer fuzzy hierarchical analysis process (AHP) evaluation method is contemplated to detect location spoofing in the IoT system. Simulation results indicate the proposed method has a superior performance and provides a basis for the trustworthiness assessment of location proofs.

Link adaptation (LA) is the ability to adapt the modulation scheme (MS) and the coding rate of the error correction in accordance with the quality of the radio link. The MS plays an important role in enhancing the performance of LTE/LTE-A, which is typically dependent on the received signal to noise ratio (SNR). However, using the SNR to select the proper MSs is not enough given that adaptive MSs are sensitive to error. Meanwhile, non-optimal MS selection may seriously impair the system performance and hence degrades LA. In LTE/ LTE-A, the LA system must be designed and optimized in accordance with the characteristics of the physical (e.g., MSs) and MAC layers (e.g., Packet loss) to enhance the channel efficiency and throughput. Accordingly, this study proposes using two LA models to overcome the problem. The first model, named the cross-layer link adaptation (CLLA) model, is based on the downward cross-layer approach. This model is designed to overcome the accuracy issue of adaptive modulation in existing systems and improve the channel efficiency and throughput. The second model, named the Markov decision process over the CLLA (MDP-CLLA) model, is designed to improve on the selection of modulation levels. Besides that, our previous contribution, namely the modified alpha-Shannon capacity formula, is adopted as part of the MDP-CLLA model to enhance the link adaptation of LTE/LTE-A. The effectiveness of the proposed models is evaluated in terms of throughput and packet loss for different packet sizes using the MATLAB and Simulink environments for the single input single output (SISO) mode for transmissions over Rayleigh fading channels. In addition, phase productivity, which is defined as the multiplication of the total throughput for a specific modulation with the difference between adjacent modulation SNR threshold values, is used to determine the best model for specific packet sizes in addition to determine the optimal packet size for specific packet sizes among models. Results generally showed that the throughput improved from 87.5 to 89.6% for (QPSK 16-QAM) and from 0 to 43.3% for (16-QAM 64-QAM) modulation transitions, respectively, using the CLLA model when compared with the existing system. Moreover, the throughput using the MDP-CLLA model was improved by 87.5-88.6% and by 0-43.2% for the (QPSK 16-QAM)and (16-QAM 64-QAM) modulation transitions, respectively, when compared with the CLLA model and the existing system. Results were also validated for each model via the summation of the phase productivity for every modulation at specific packet sizes, followed by the application one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) statistical analysis with a post hoc test, to prove that the MDP-CLLA model improves with best high efficiency than the CLLA model and the existing system.

Cellular network technologies and radar sensing technologies have been developing in parallel for decades. Instead of developing two individual technologies, the 6G cellular network is expected to naturally support both communication and radar functionalities with shared hardware and carrier frequencies. In this regard, radio access technology (RAT)-based scatterer localization system is one of the important aspects of joint communication and sensing system that uses communication signals between transceivers to determine the location of scatterers in and around the propagation paths. In this article, we first identify the challenges of the RAT-based scatterer localization system and then present single- and multiple-bounce reflection loss simulation results for three common building materials in indoor environments. We also propose two novel methods to jointly localize and identify the type of the scatterers in a rich scattering environment.

To assist sixth-generation wireless systems in the management of a wide variety of services, ranging from mission-critical services to safety-critical tasks, key physical layer technologies such as reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) are proposed. Even though RISs are already used in various scenarios to enable the implementation of smart radio environments, they still face challenges with regard to real-time operation. Specifically, high dimensional fully passive RISs typically need costly system overhead for channel estimation. This paper, however, investigates a semi-passive RIS that requires a very low number of active elements, wherein only two pilots are required per channel coherence time. While in its infant stage, the application of deep learning (DL) tools shows promise in enabling feasible solutions. We propose two low-training overhead and energy-efficient adversarial bandit-based schemes with outstanding performance gains when compared to DL-based reflection beamforming reference methods. The resulting deep learning models are discussed using state-of-the-art model quality prediction trends.

When it comes to running and managing modern supply chains, 6G Internet of things (IoT) is of utmost importance. To provide IoT with security and automation, blockchain and machine learning are two upper-layer technology that can help. First, we propose to utilize blockchain in modern supply chains to ensure efficient collaboration between all parties. Second, we adopt multi-head attention (MHA)-based gated recurrent unit (GRU) to do inbound logistics task prediction. Finally, numerical results justify that multi-head attention-based GRU model has better fitting efficiency and prediction accuracy than its counterparts.

The body area network is now the most challenging and most popular network for study and research. Communication about the body has undoubtedly taken its place due to a wide variety of applications in industry, health care, and everyday life in wireless network technologies. The body area network requires such smart antennas that can provide the best benefits and reduce interference with the same channel. The discovery of this type of antenna design is at the initiative of this research. In this work, to get a good variety, the emphasis is on examining different techniques. The ultra-wide band is designed, simulated, and manufactured because the ultra-wide band offers better performance compared to narrowband antennas. To analyze the specific absorption rate, we designed a multilayer model of human head and hand in the high-frequency structure simulator. In the final stage, we simulated our antennas designed with the head and hand model to calculate the results of the specific absorption rate. The analysis of the specific absorption rate for the head and hand was calculated by placing the antennas on the designed model.

Private networks will play a key role in 5G and beyond to enable smart factories with the required better deployment, operation and flexible usage of available resource and infrastructure. 5G private networks will offer a lean and agile solution to effectively deploy and operate services with stringent and heterogeneous constraints in terms of reliability, latency, re-configurability and re-deployment of resources as well as issues related to governance and ownership of 5G components, and elements. In this paper, we present a novel approach to operator models, specifically targeting 5G and beyond private networks. We apply the proposed operator models to different network architecture options and to a selection of relevant use cases offering mixed private-public network operator governance and ownership. Moreover, several key enabling technologies have been identified for 5G private networks. Before the deployment, stakeholders should consider spectrum allocation and on-site channel measurements in order to fully understand the propagation characteristic of a given environment and to set up end-to-end system parameters. During the deployment, a monitoring tools will support to validate the deployment and to make sure that the end-to-end system meet the target KPI. Finally, some optimization can be made individually for service placement, network slicing and orchestration or jointly at radio access, multi-access edge computing or core network level.

This paper focuses on energy-efficient coordinated multi-point (CoMP) downlink in multi-antenna multi-cell wireless communications systems. We provide an overview of transmit beamforming designs for various energy efficiency (EE) metrics including maximizing the overall network EE, sum weighted EE, and fairness EE. Generally, an EE optimization problem is a nonconvex program for which finding the globally optimal solutions requires high computational effort. Consequently, several low-complexity suboptimal approaches have been proposed. Here, we sum up the main concepts of the recently proposed algorithms based on the state-of-the-art successive convex approximation (SCA) framework. Moreover, we discuss the application to the newly posted EE problems including new EE metrics and power consumption models. Furthermore, distributed implementation developed based on alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for the provided solutions is also discussed. For the sake of completeness, we provide numerical comparison of the SCA based approaches and the conventional solutions developed based on parametric transformations (PTs). We also demonstrate the differences and roles of different EE objectives and power consumption models.

Physical layer security (PLS) has been proposed to afford an extra layer of security on top of the conventional cryptographic techniques. Unlike the conventional complexity-based cryptographic techniques at the upper layers, physical layer security exploits the characteristics of wireless channels, e.g., fading, noise, interference, etc., to enhance wireless security. It is proved that secure transmission can benefit from fading channels. Accordingly, numerous researchers have explored what fading can offer for physical layer security, especially the investigation of physical layer security over wiretap fading channels. Therefore, this paper aims at reviewing the existing and ongoing research works on this topic. More specifically, we present a classification of research works in terms of the four categories of fading models: (i) small-scale, (ii) large-scale, (iii) composite, and (iv) cascaded. To elaborate these fading models with a generic and flexible tool, three promising candidates, including the mixture gamma (MG), mixture of Gaussian (MoG), and Fox's -function distributions, are comprehensively examined and compared. Their advantages and limitations are further demonstrated via security performance metrics, which are designed as vivid indicators to measure how perfect secrecy is ensured. Two clusters of secrecy metrics, namely (i) secrecy outage probability (SOP), and the lower bound of SOP; and (ii) the probability of nonzero secrecy capacity (PNZ), the intercept probability, average secrecy capacity (ASC), and ergodic secrecy capacity, are displayed and, respectively, deployed in passive and active eavesdropping scenarios. Apart from those, revisiting the secrecy enhancement techniques based on Wyner's wiretap model, the on-off transmission scheme, jamming approach, antenna selection, and security region are discussed.

To increase the average achievable rates per user for cluster-edge users, a rotating clustering scheme for the downlink of a coordinated multicell multiuser multiple-input multiple-output system is proposed in this paper and analyzed in two network layouts. In the multicell heterogeneous cellular network, base stations of a cluster cooperate to transmit data signals to the users within the cluster; rotating cluster patterns enable all users to be nearer the cluster center in at least one of the patterns. Considering cellular layouts with three or six macrocells per site, different rotating patterns of clusters are proposed and the system performance with the proposed sets of clustering patterns is investigated using a simulated annealing algorithm for user scheduling and successive zero-forcing dirty paper coding as the precoding method. The rotating clustering scheme is less complex than fully dynamic clustering, and it is primarily designed to improve the throughput of cluster-edge users. As an extra secondary benefit, it is also capable of slightly improving the average achievable sum rate of the network overall. The effectiveness of the proposed methods with two different scheduling metrics, namely throughput maximization and proportionally fair scheduling, is of interest in this work. Moreover, the speed of rotation affects the performance of the system; the higher the speed of rotation, the more frequently any specific users will be nearer the cluster center. Our simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed rotational approach and determine the speed of rotation beyond which any additional performance gains become negligible.

In unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted networks, UAV acts as an aerial base station which acquires the requested data via backhaul link and then serves ground users (GUs) through an access network. In this paper, we investigate an energy minimization problem with a limited power supply for both backhaul and access links. The difficulties for solving such a non-convex and combinatorial problem lie at the high computational complexity/time. In solution development, we consider the approaches from both actor-critic deep reinforcement learning (AC-DRL) and optimization perspectives. First, two offline non-learning algorithms, i.e., an optimal and a heuristic algorithms, based on piecewise linear approximation and relaxation are developed as benchmarks. Second, toward real-time decision-making, we improve the conventional AC-DRL and propose two learning schemes: AC-based user group scheduling and backhaul power allocation (ACGP), and joint AC-based user group scheduling and optimization-based backhaul power allocation (ACGOP). Numerical results show that the computation time of both ACGP and ACGOP is reduced tenfold to hundredfold compared to the offline approaches, and ACGOP is better than ACGP in energy savings. The results also verify the superiority of proposed learning solutions in terms of guaranteeing the feasibility and minimizing the system energy compared to the conventional AC-DRL.

Space-division multiple access (SDMA) utilizes linear precoding to separate users in the spatial domain and relies on treating any residual multi-user interference as noise. Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) uses linearly precoded superposition coding with successive interference cancellation (SIC) to superpose users in the power domain and relies on user grouping and ordering to enforce some users to fully decode and cancel interference created by other users. In this paper, we argue that to efficiently cope with the high throughput, heterogeneity of quality of service (QoS), and massive connectivity requirements of future multi-antenna wireless networks, multiple access design needs to depart from those two extreme interference management strategies, namely fully treat interference as noise (as in SDMA) and fully decode interference (as in NOMA). Considering a multiple-input single-output broadcast channel, we develop a novel multiple access framework, called rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA). RSMA is a more general and more powerful multiple access for downlink multi-antenna systems that contains SDMA and NOMA as special cases. RSMA relies on linearly precoded rate-splitting with SIC to decode part of the interference and treat the remaining part of the interference as noise. This capability of RSMA to decode interference and partially treat interference as noise enables to softly bridge the two extremes of fully decoding interference and treating interference as noise and provides room for rate and QoS enhancements and complexity reduction. The three multiple access schemes are compared, and extensive numerical results show that RSMA provides a smooth transition between SDMA and NOMA and outperforms them both in a wide range of network loads (underloaded and overloaded regimes) and user deployments (with a diversity of channel directions, channel strengths, and qualities of channel state information at the transmitter). Moreover, RSMA provides rate and QoS enhancements over NOMA at a lower computational complexity for the transmit scheduler and the receivers (number of SIC layers).

Cognitive satellite communication (SatCom) is rapidly emerging as a promising technology to overcome the scarcity of the exclusive licensed band model in order to fulfill the increasing demand for high data rate services. The paper addresses power allocation methods for multi-operator multi-beam uplink satellite communication systems co-existing with a Ka-band terrestrial network, using cognitive radio paradigm. Such a scenario is especially challenging because of (i) the coexisting multiple SatCom operators over the cognitive band need to coordinate the use of their resources under limited inter-operator information exchange, and (ii) nonlinear onboard high power amplifier (HPA) which leads to nonlinear interference between users and beams. In order to tackle the first challenge, we propose distributed power allocation algorithms including the standard Alternate Direction Multiplier Method (ADMM); Regarding the HPA nonlinear impairment, we propose nonlinear-aware power allocation based on Signomial Programming. The proposed solutions outperform state-of-the-art in both cases.