Xidong MuQueen's University Belfast | QUB · Institute of Electronics, Communications and Information Technology (ECIT)
Xidong Mu
Doctor of Philosophy
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191
Publications
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Publications (191)
A simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) aided integrated sensing, computing, and communication (ISCC) Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) framework is proposed. Specifically, the full-duplex (FD) base station (BS) simultaneously receives the offloading signals from decision robots (DRs) and carries o...
This article targets at unlocking the potentials of a class of prominent generative artificial intelligence (GAI) method, namely diffusion model (DM), for mobile communications. First, a DM-driven communication architecture is proposed, which introduces two key paradigms, i.e., conditional DM and DMdriven deep reinforcement learning (DRL), for wire...
A simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) assisted wireless powered communication network (WPCN) is proposed, where two energy-limited devices first harvest energy from a hybrid access point (HAP) and then use that energy to transmit information back. To fully eliminate the doubly-near-far effect in...
A multi-user heterogeneous semantic communication (SemCom) and bit communication (BitCom) system is investigated. Each user can be served via either SemCom or BitCom for demanding semantic or bit data. Orthogonal/non-orthogonal multiple access (OMA/NOMA) techniques are employed to provide access for multiple users. Channel-based and user demand-bas...
A novel hybrid active-passive reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) transmitter enabled downlink multi-user communication system is investigated. Specifically, RISs are exploited to serve as transmitter antennas, where each element can flexibly switch between active and passive modes to deliver information to multiple users. The system energy ef...
A non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-based spatial modulation system operating over multiple subchannels is investigated. For scheduled users of each subchannel, a mixed multicast and unicast transmission is delivered. The multicast content is transmitted via the transmit antenna domain, while unicast contents are transmitted through the amplitu...
A conception of mobile edge generation (MEG) is proposed, where generative artificial intelligence (GAI) models are distributed at edge servers (ESs) and user equipment (UE), enabling joint execution of generation tasks. The overall object of MEG is to alleviate the immense network load caused by GAI service and to reduce user queuing times for acc...
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 transce...
The rapid development of next-generation Internet of Things (IoT) applications, including integrated-sensing-and-communication (ISAC), smart grids, smart cities, intelligent transport networks, etc., enables at least tens of billions of bandwidth-thirsty IoT devices, which consume a deluge of data in the sixth-generation (6G) communication systems....
This article revisits integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems that operate in the near-field region of large antenna arrays while utilizing large bandwidths. The article first describes the basic characteristics of a wideband sensing and communication (S&C) channel, highlighting the key changes that occur during the transition from the...
This article targets at unlocking the potentials of a class of prominent generative artificial intelligence (GAI) method, namely diffusion model (DM), for mobile communications. First, a DM-driven communication architecture is proposed, which introduces two key paradigms, i.e., conditional DM and DM-driven deep reinforcement learning (DRL), for wir...
Mobile edge generation (MEG) is an emerging technology that allows the network to meet the challenging traffic load expectations posed by the rise of generative artificial intelligence~(GAI). A novel MEG model is proposed for deploying GAI models on edge servers (ES) and user equipment~(UE) to jointly complete text-to-image generation tasks. In the...
A near-field simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) network is investigated, where the hybrid beamforming architecture is employed at the base station (BS) for information transmission while charging energy harvesting users. A transmit power minimization problem is formulated by jointly optimizing the analog beamformer, the ba...
A novel non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) assisted full space integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) framework is proposed to elevate the radio sensing performance. Exploiting the simultaneously transmitting and reflecting RIS (STAR-RIS) to extend the half-space into full-space ISAC coverage intensifies the competition for wireless resourc...
Multiple-antenna technologies are advancing toward the development of extremely large aperture arrays and the utilization of extremely high frequencies, driving the progress of next-generation multiple access (NGMA). This evolution is accompanied by the emergence of near-field communications (NFC), characterized by spherical-wave propagation, which...
A novel accelerated mobile edge generation (MEG) framework is proposed for generating high-resolution images on mobile devices. Exploiting a large-scale latent diffusion model (LDM) distributed across edge server (ES) and user equipment (UE), cost-efficient artificial intelligence generated content (AIGC) is achieved by transmitting low-dimensional...
A novel paradigm of mobile edge generation (MEG)-enabled digital twin (DT) is proposed, which enables distributed on-device generation at mobile edge networks for real-time DT applications. First, an MEG-DT architecture is put forward to decentralize generative artificial intelligence (GAI) models onto edge servers (ESs) and user equipments (UEs),...
In the multiple unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) mobile edge computing (MEC) systems, the cooperative computation among multiple UAVs can improve the overall computation service capability. Multi-UAV MEC systems can meet the quality of service requirements for computation intensive applications of ground terminals (GTs) in complex field environments,...
A near-field secure transmission framework is proposed. Employing the hybrid beamforming architecture, a multi-antenna base station (BS) transmits confidential information to a multi-antenna legitimate user (U) against a multi-antenna internal eavesdropper (E) in the near field. Based on the spherical-wave channel state information of U and E, a tw...
The ultimate goal of next generation multiple access (NGMA) is to support massive terminals and facilitate multiple functionalities over the limited radio resources of wireless networks in the most efficient manner possible. However, the random and uncontrollable wireless radio environment is a major obstacle to realizing this NGMA vision. Given th...
True-time delayers (TTDs) are popular components for hybrid beamforming architectures to combat the spatial-wideband effect in wideband near-field communications. In this paper, a
serial
and a
hybrid serial-parallel
TTD configuration are investigated for hybrid beamforming architectures. Compared to the conventional parallel configuration, the...
Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided near-field communications are investigated. First, the necessity of investigating RIS-aided near-field communications and the advantages brought about by the unique spherical wave-based near-field propagation are discussed. Then, the family of patch array-based RISs and metasurface-based RISs is introd...
Simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (STAR-RISs) have been attracting significant attention in both academia and industry for their advantages of achieving 360° coverage and enhanced degrees-of-freedom. This article first identifies the fundamentals of STAR-RIS, by discussing the hardware models, channel mo...
The ultimate goal of next generation multiple access (NGMA) is to support massive terminals and facilitate multiple functionalities over the limited radio resources of wireless networks in the most efficient manner possible. However, the random and uncontrollable wireless radio environment is a major obstacle to realizing this NGMA vision. Given th...
A near-field wideband communication system is investigated in which a base station (BS) employs an extra-large scale antenna array (ELAA) to serve multiple users in its near-field region. To facilitate near-field multi-user beamforming and mitigate the spatial wideband effect, the BS employs a hybrid beamforming architecture based on true-time dela...
A reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) assisted semi-grant-free (SGF) non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system is investigated. Unlike existing works that only focus on short-term resource allocation, we study a long-term power-saving optimization problem under queue stability constraints and utilize Lyapunov stability theory to deal with d...
The novel concept of near-field velocity sensing is proposed. In contrast to far-field velocity sensing, near-field velocity sensing enables the simultaneous estimation of both radial and transverse velocities of a moving target in the mono-static setup. A maximum-likelihood-based method is proposed for jointly estimating the radial and transverse...
A simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) assisted wireless powered communication network (WPCN) is proposed, where two energy-limited devices first harvest energy from a hybrid access point (HAP) and then use that energy to transmit information back. To fully eliminate the doubly-near-far effect in...
Multiple-antenna technologies are evolving towards larger aperture sizes, extremely high frequencies, and innovative antenna types. This evolution is fostering the emergence of near-field communications (NFC) in future wireless systems. Considerable attention has been directed towards this cutting-edge technology due to its potential to enhance the...
Simultaneously transmitting and reflecting surface (STARS) empowered multi-functional 6G wireless networks are investigated. Starting with the communication functionality, various types of STARS are introduced in terms of power amplification capabilities, reciprocity features, and spatial density of elements. Then, three STARS-empowered wireless se...
The development of sixth-generation (6G) communication technologies is confronted with the significant challenge of spectrum resource shortage. To alleviate this issue, we propose a novel simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) aided multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) cognitive radio (CR) system....
The novel concept of near-field velocity sensing is proposed. In contrast to far-field velocity sensing, near-field velocity sensing enables the simultaneous estimation of both radial and transverse velocities of a moving target. A maximum-likelihood-based method is proposed for jointly estimating the radial and transverse velocities from the echo...
A reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted downlink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) Internet-of-Things (IoT) network is proposed, where a quality-of-service (QoS)-based NOMA clustering scheme is conceived to effectively utilize the limited wireless resources among IoT devices. A throughput maximization problem is formulated by jointl...
A novel reconfigurable intelligent surface-aided multi-robot network is proposed, where multiple mobile robots are served by an access point (AP) through non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA). The goal is to maximize the sum-rate of whole trajectories for the multi-robot system by jointly optimizing trajectories and NOMA decoding orders of robots,...
A simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) assisted downlink (DL) active and uplink (UL) backscatter communication (BackCom) framework is proposed. More particularly, a full-duplex (FD) base station (BS) communicates with the DL users via the STAR-RIS's transmission link, while exciting and receiving...
A simultaneously transmitting and reflecting surface (STARS) enabled integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) framework is proposed, where the entire space is partitioned by STARS into a sensing space and a communication space. A novel sensing-at-STARS structure is proposed, where dedicated sensors are mounted at STARS to address the significan...
A near-field integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) framework is proposed, which introduces an additional
distance
dimension for both sensing and communications compared to the conventional far-field system. In particular, the Cramér-Rao bound for the near-field
joint distance and angle
sensing is derived, which is minimized subject to th...
A novel semantics-empowered two-user uplink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) framework is proposed for resource efficiency enhancement. More particularly, a secondary far user (F-user) employs the semantic communication (SemCom) while a primary near user (N-user) employs the conventional bit-based communication (BitCom). The fundamental perfor...
This paper proposes a novel simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) assisted unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) emergency communication network. Multiple STAR-RISs are deployed to provide additional and intelligent transmission links between trapped users and UAV-moun...
A simultaneously transmitting and reflecting surface (STARS) aided terahertz (THz) communication system is proposed. A novel power consumption model is proposed that depends on the type and resolution of the STARS elements. The spectral efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE) are maximized in both narrowband and wideband THz systems by jointly o...
A near-field wideband communication system is studied, wherein a base station (BS) employs an extremely large-scale antenna array (ELAA) to serve multiple users situated within its near-field region. To facilitate the near-field beamfocusing and mitigate the wideband beam split, true-time delayer (TTD)-based hybrid beamforming architectures are emp...
Recently, simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (STAR-RISs) have received significant research interest. The employment of large STAR-RIS and high-frequency signaling inevitably make the near-field propagation dominant in wireless communications. In this work, a STAR-RIS aided near-field multiple-input multi...
This article focuses on the near-field effect in terahertz (THz) communications and sensing systems. By equipping with extremely large-scale antenna arrays (ELAAs), the near-field region in THz systems can be possibly extended to hundreds of meters in proximity to THz transceivers, which necessitates the consideration of near-field effect in the TH...
Extremely large-scale antenna arrays, tremendously high frequencies, and new types of antennas are three clear trends in multi-antenna technology for supporting the sixth-generation (6G) networks. To properly account for the new characteristics introduced by these three trends in communication system design, the near-field spherical-wave propagatio...
A near-field simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) network is investigated, where the hybrid beamforming architecture is employed at the base station (BS) for information transmission while charging energy harvesting users. A transmit power minimization problem is formulated by jointly optimizing of the analog beamformer, the...
Simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (STAR-RISs) have been attracting significant attention in both academia and industry for their advantages of achieving 360{\deg} coverage and enhanced degrees of freedom. This article first identifies the fundamentals of STAR-RIS, by discussing the hardware models, chann...
The novel concept of near-field non-orthogonal multiple access (NF-NOMA) communications is proposed. The near-filed beamfocusing enables NOMA to be carried out in both angular and distance domains. Two novel frameworks are proposed, namely, single-location-beamfocusing NF-NOMA (SLB-NF-NOMA) and multiple-location-beamfocusing NF-NOMA (MLB-NF-NOMA)....
A multi-cell cluster-free NOMA framework is proposed, where both intra-cell and inter-cell interference are jointly mitigated via flexible cluster-free successive interference cancellation (SIC) and coordinated beamforming design. The joint design problem is formulated to maximize the system sum rate while satisfying the SIC decoding requirements a...
A generalized downlink multi-antenna non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) transmission framework is proposed with the novel concept of cluster-free successive interference cancellation (SIC). In contrast to conventional NOMA approaches, where SIC is successively carried out within the same cluster, the key idea is that the SIC can be flexibly impl...
Simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) assisted non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) communication systems are investigated in its vicinity, where a STAR-RIS is deployed within a predefined region for establishing communication links for users. Both beamformer-based NOMA and cluster-based NOMA sche...
The design dilemma of "What will be different between near-field communications (NFC) and far-field communications (FFC)?" is addressed from four perspectives. 1) From the channel modelling perspective, the differences between near-field and far-field channel models are discussed. A novel Green's function-based channel model is proposed for continu...
A near-field secure transmission framework is proposed. Employing the hybrid beamforming architecture, a base station (BS) transmits the confidential information to a legitimate user (U) against an eavesdropper (E) in the near field. A two-stage algorithm is proposed to maximize the near-field secrecy capacity. Based on the fully-digital beamformer...
A near-field integrated sensing and communications (NF-ISAC) framework is proposed, where both a sensing target and multiple communication users are located within the near-field region. An extended multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm is proposed for the joint distance and angle estimation. The performance tradeoff between communicatio...
This article focuses on the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), which aims to achieve automated, adaptive, and high-efficiency multi-user communications toward next generation multiple access (NGMA). First, the limitations of current scenario-specific multiple-antenna NOMA schemes are discussed, and...
This article focuses on the development of integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) from a multiple access (MA) perspective, where the idea of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is exploited for harmoniously accommodating the sensing and communication functionalities. We first reveal that the developing trend of ISAC is from orthogonality to...
A novel simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (STAR-RISs) aided downlink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) communication framework is proposed. Two STAR-RIS protocols are investigated, namely the energy splitting (ES) and the mode switching (MS). However, since the STAR-RIS has a massive number of reconf...
The reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is a promising technology to provide smart radio environment. In contrast to the well-studied patch-array-based RISs, this work focuses on the metasurface-based RISs and simultaneously transmitting and reflecting (STAR)-RISs where the elements have millimeter or even molecular sizes. For these meticulous...
Simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (STAR-RISs) are gaining great attention for their ability to achieve full-space coverage. In this paper, the queue-aware STAR-RIS assisted non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) communication system is investigated to ensure system stability. To tackle the challenge of in...
A simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) assisted simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) system is proposed. More particularly, an STAR-RIS is deployed to assist in the information/power transfer from a multi-antenna access point (AP) to multiple single-antenna information user...
This paper proposes a novel simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) assisted unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) emergency communication network. Multiple STAR-RISs are deployed to provide additional and intelligent transmission links between trapped users and UAV-moun...
A bidirectional integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system is proposed, in which a pair of transceivers carry out two-way communication and mutual sensing. Both full-duplex and half-duplex operations in narrowband and wideband systems are conceived for the bidirectional ISAC. 1) For the narrowband system, the conventional full-duplex and ha...
A simultaneously transmitting and reflecting surface (STARS) aided terahertz (THz) communication system is proposed. A novel power consumption model depending on the type and the resolution of individual elements is proposed for the STARS. Then, the system energy efficiency (EE) and spectral efficiency (SE) are maximized in both narrowband and wide...
The reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is a promising technology to provide smart radio environment. In contrast to the well-studied patch-array-based RISs, this work focuses on the metasurface-based RISs and simultaneously transmitting and reflecting (STAR)-RISs where the elements have millimeter or even molecular sizes. For these meticulous...
This article investigates the exploitation of semantic communications in multi-user networks. We propose a novel heterogeneous semantic and bit multi-user framework for providing flawless, customized, and intelligent information transmission. We discuss both orthogonal multiple access (OMA) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) for the proposed...
A bidirectional integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system is proposed, in which a pair of transceivers carry out two-way communication and mutual sensing. Both full-duplex and half-duplex operations in narrowband and wideband systems are conceived for the bidirectional ISAC. 1) For the narrowband system, the conventional full-duplex and ha...
A novel air-to-ground communication paradigm is conceived, where an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-mounted base station (BS) equipped with multiple antennas sends information to multiple ground users (GUs) with the aid of a simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS). In contrast to the conventional RIS w...
A novel semantics-empowered two-user uplink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) framework is proposed for resource efficiency enhancement. More particularly, a secondary far user (F-user) employs the semantic communication (SemCom) while a primary near user (N-user) employs the conventional bit-based communication (BitCom). The fundamental perfor...
A hardware model and a signal model are proposed for dual-sided simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (STAR-RISs), where the signal simultaneously incident on both sides of the surface. Based on the proposed hardware model, signal models for dual-sided STAR-RISs are developed. For elements with scalar surfac...
Simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) is a promising technology that aids in achieving full-space coverage on both sides of the surface, by splitting the incident signal into transmitted and reflected signals. This paper investigates the resource allocation problem in a STAR-RIS-assisted multi-carr...