This paper presents a joint linear processing scheme for two-hop and half-duplex distributed amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying networks with one source, one destination and multiple relays, each having multiple antennas. By using the minimum mean-square error (MMSE) criterion and the Wiener filter principle, the joint relay and destination design with perfect channel state information (CSI) is first formulated as an optimization problem with respect to the relay precoding matrix under the constraint of a total relay transmit power. The constrained optimization with an objective to design the relay block-diagonal matrix is then simplified to an equivalent problem with scalar optimization variables. Next, it is revealed that the scalar-version optimization is convex when the total relay power or the second-hop SNR (signal to noise ratio) is above a certain threshold. The underlying optimization problem, which is non-convex in general, is solved by complementary geometric programming (CGP). The proposed joint relay and destination design with perfect CSI is also extended for practical systems where only the channel mean and covariance matrix are available, leading to a robust processing scheme. Finally, Monte Carlo simulations are undertaken to demonstrate the superior MSE (mean-square error) and SER (symbol error rate) performances of the proposed scheme over the existing relaying method in the case of relatively large second-hop SNR.

Direction of arrival (DOA) estimation as a fundamental issue in array signal processing has been extensively studied for many applications in military and civilian fields. Many DOA estimation algorithms have been developed for different application scenarios such as low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), limited snapshots, etc. However, there are still some practical problems that make DOA estimation very difficult. One of them is the correlation between sources. In this paper, we develop a sparsity-based method to estimate the DOA of coherent signals with sparse linear array (SLA). We adopt the off-grid signal model and solve the DOA estimation problem in the sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) framework. By considering the SLA as a ‘missing sensor’ ULA, our proposed method treats the output of the SLA as a partial output of the corresponding virtual uniform linear array (ULA) to make full use of the expanded aperture character of the SLA. Then we employ the expectation-maximization (EM) method to update the hyper-parameters and the output of the virtual ULA in an iterative manner. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed method has a better performance in correlated signal scenarios than the reference methods in comparison, confirming the advantage of exploiting the extended aperture feature of the SLA.

The energy efficiency of intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) enabled internet of things (IoT) networks is studied in this letter. The energy efficiency is mathematically expressed, respectively, as the number of reflecting elements and the spectral efficiency of the network and is shown to scale in the logarithm of the reflecting elements number in the high regime of transmit power from source node. Furthermore, it is revealed that the energy efficiency scales linearly over the spectral efficiency in the high regime of transmit power, in contrast to conventional studies on energy and spectral efficiency trade-offs in the non-IRS wireless IoT networks. Numerical simulations are carried out to verify the derived results for the IRS enabled IoT networks.

We propose a variant of OMP algorithm named BROMP for sparse solution. In our algorithm, the update rule of MP algorithm is employed to reduce the number of least square calculations and the refining strategy is introduced to further improve its performance. Simulations show that the proposed algorithm performs better than the OMP algorithm with significantly lower complexity.