IEEE Transactions on Communications最新文献

{"title":"Efficient Encoding/Decoding Algorithms for Irreducible Polynomial Remainder Codes via Additive FFT","authors":"Wenhao Liu;Zhengyi Jiang;Zhongyi Huang;Weitao Xu;Linqi Song;Hanxu Hou","doi":"10.1109/TCOMM.2026.3663509","DOIUrl":"10.1109/TCOMM.2026.3663509","url":null,"abstract":"Polynomial remainder codes form a class of linear codes constructed based on the Chinese Remainder Theorem over polynomial rings, with Reed-Solomon codes as a special case. In particular, irreducible polynomial remainder codes are those where the moduli are pairwise coprime irreducible polynomials. This paper presents an efficient encoding and decoding method for irreducible polynomial remainder codes over <inline-formula> <tex-math>$mathbb {F}_{2^{m}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, leveraging the additive Fast Fourier Transform (additive FFT). The proposed approach achieves a computational complexity of <inline-formula> <tex-math>$mathcal {O}(Nlog ^{2}(N-K))$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, where <inline-formula> <tex-math>$N$ </tex-math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula> <tex-math>$K$ </tex-math></inline-formula> denote the code length and dimension, with the additional requirement that <inline-formula> <tex-math>$N-K lt 2^{m-1}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula> <tex-math>$N-K$ </tex-math></inline-formula> is a power of 2. This substantially outperforms the best known algorithm for such codes, which has a complexity of <inline-formula> <tex-math>$mathcal {O}(N^{2})$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. Furthermore, we conduct a non-asymptotic complexity comparison under specific parameters, with numerical results demonstrating that the proposed algorithms effectively reduces computational complexity. For example, with code length <inline-formula> <tex-math>$N=256$ </tex-math></inline-formula> and dimension <inline-formula> <tex-math>$K=224$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, our method achieves an approximately 83% reduction in multiplicative complexity for encoding and a 50% reduction for decoding compared to the state-of-the-art approach for polynomial remainder codes.","PeriodicalId":13041,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Transactions on Communications","volume":"74 ","pages":"5574-5589"},"PeriodicalIF":8.3,"publicationDate":"2026-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146161379","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An Analytical Framework for HAPS Downlink Coverage Based on Stochastic Geometry","authors":"Geewon Jang;Dong-eui Kim;Jihwan P. Choi","doi":"10.1109/TCOMM.2026.3663511","DOIUrl":"10.1109/TCOMM.2026.3663511","url":null,"abstract":"The high-altitude platform station (HAPS), which is anticipated to play a key role in future networks, has drawn increasing attention in both industry and academia. In this paper, a realistic downlink communication scenario is introduced in which an aerodynamic HAPS flies along a circular trajectory and serves handheld users in an urban environment. Stochastic geometry-based analysis is conducted, along with the assimilation of approximations using simulation data to incorporate the circular aperture antenna model of the HAPS. Analytical expressions are derived for the coverage probability and the ergodic capacity, and the validity of these expressions is demonstrated through extensive Monte Carlo simulations. Although there are slight gaps in the performance analysis, the general tendencies between the analysis and simulation results show a close match. The impact of aerodynamic parameters such as flight radius and altitude on the coverage probability is demonstrated to be relatively marginal to that of communication system parameters such as the number of simultaneous service users and the total transmission power. In terms of ergodic capacity, both aerodynamic parameters show improved performance as their values decrease, with the altitude being more dominant. Although smaller flight radii are favorable for improving network performance, such configurations impose additional constraints on aircraft design, highlighting the need to carefully consider the limitations of size, weight, and power (SWaP). A discussion on real-world HAPS design is supplemented in order to offer practical guidelines for balancing communication performances with the SWaP constraints of the HAPS.","PeriodicalId":13041,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Transactions on Communications","volume":"74 ","pages":"5122-5137"},"PeriodicalIF":8.3,"publicationDate":"2026-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146161375","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cascaded Optical Reconfigurable Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces for Multi-Hop Optical Wireless Communications","authors":"Haibo Wang;Hao Jiang;Bingcheng Zhu;Han Zeng;Zaichen Zhang","doi":"10.1109/TCOMM.2026.3663533","DOIUrl":"10.1109/TCOMM.2026.3663533","url":null,"abstract":"Optical reconfigurable intelligent reflecting surface (ORIS), as a new type of programmable optical communication equipment, can reconstruct the optical channel environment and expand the application scenarios of optical wireless communications (OWC), which have attracted widespread attention. However, with the increasing demand for OWC scale in B5G and even 6G scenarios, the coverage range of a single ORIS (below 300 m) can no longer meet communication needs. Cascaded ORISs’ technology has become an inevitable trend in the development of ORIS, which has not been deeply studied in existing work. To address the above challenges, in this paper we set up cascaded ORISs in a typical long-distance free space optcis (FSO) scenario and conduct a detailed analysis of their channels and performance. This system employs cascaded ORISs to extend ORIS coverage and expand the overall scale of the FSO system, thereby enabling the FSO link to evolve from a traditional point-to-point configuration to a broader, spatially distributed communication layout. The physical model of multiple ORISs’ cascades and the effect on their communication performance are analyzed in detail. Meanwhile, the closed-form expressions of the bit error rate (BER) and outage probability of the multi-hop cascaded ORISs-assisted FSO system are derived and verified by simulations. Based on the theoretical results and simulation results, the influence of each parameter on the system performance is carefully analyzed, which provides guidance for the design of the actual system.","PeriodicalId":13041,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Transactions on Communications","volume":"74 ","pages":"5105-5121"},"PeriodicalIF":8.3,"publicationDate":"2026-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146161401","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Network-Assisted Full-Duplex RIS-Aided Cell-Free Massive MIMO for Integrated Sensing and Communication","authors":"Debajit Choudhury;Abhay Kumar Sah","doi":"10.1109/TCOMM.2026.3663215","DOIUrl":"10.1109/TCOMM.2026.3663215","url":null,"abstract":"Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) has emerged as a highly promising technology for future sixth-generation networks owing to its potential to optimize spectrum resources at minimal hardware costs. One promising realization of ISAC is the multi-static design, where several distributed nodes jointly enhance sensing and communication performance. However, the current multi-static designs fall short of maintaining accurate sensing performance while fulfilling the simultaneous uplink/downlink communication requirements. To solve this efficiently, we consider a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) aided cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (CF-mMIMO) operating in network-assisted full-duplex (NAFD) mode and enhance the weighted sensing and communication rates of the network by efficiently designing transmit/receive beamformers at the APs and optimizing the RIS phase-shifts. Since the formulated problem is highly non-convex, we leverage tools such as quadratic-transform and succesive-convex approximation to convert the objective into a tractable form and then utilize Lagrange multipliers method to derive inter-AP-interference suppression enabled closed-form expressions for transmit and receive beamformers at the APs. Then, we propose a variance-reduced projected-gradient method, that relies on closed-form gradient updates to update the reflect beamformers at the RIS based on statistical-CSI. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design in achieving excellent ISAC performance at low computational complexity.","PeriodicalId":13041,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Transactions on Communications","volume":"74 ","pages":"5443-5454"},"PeriodicalIF":8.3,"publicationDate":"2026-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146161397","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Improved Successive Cancellation Decoding of Long Polar Codes Through Perturbing a Posteriori LLRs and Its Theoretical Insights","authors":"Zhongjun Yang;Li Chen;Xianbin Wang;Huazi Zhang","doi":"10.1109/TCOMM.2026.3663532","DOIUrl":"10.1109/TCOMM.2026.3663532","url":null,"abstract":"For polar codes, perturbing received information can enhance the successive cancellation (SC) decoding performance. This is an effective approach for realizing low-latency yet high performance for long polar codes, since all the perturbation-enhanced SC (PSC) decoding can be performed in parallel. This paper provides theoretical insights into soft information perturbation. It first reveals that the PSC decoding can be equivalently interpreted as perturbing the a posteriori log-likelihood ratios (LLRs) of information bits. Such a revelation leads to the design of an improved PSC (IPSC) decoding that yields a lower perturbation complexity. By better utilizing the decoding a posteriori LLRs, a set of possibly erroneous estimations can be formed and further perturbed, resulting in the proposed hybrid PSC (HPSC) decoding. During each new SC decoding attempt, it takes turns to flip the first erroneous bit within the SC decoding estimations by introducing a biased perturbation, while the subsequent erroneous estimations are corrected through random perturbations. Our simulation results validate that, for various codeword lengths and rates, the proposed IPSC decoding can achieve a similar performance as the conventional PSC decoding, but yield a significantly reduced perturbation complexity. With the same number of decoding attempts, the proposed HPSC decoding outperforms the thresholded SC-flip (TSCF) decoding and the dynamic SC-flip (DSCF) decoding.","PeriodicalId":13041,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Transactions on Communications","volume":"74 ","pages":"5489-5503"},"PeriodicalIF":8.3,"publicationDate":"2026-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146161378","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A General Congestion Control Framework for Deterministic Service Delay Guarantee","authors":"Xinglin Yang;Wei Wang;Jiangping Han;Bing Hu;Kaiping Xue;Zhaoyang Zhang","doi":"10.1109/TCOMM.2026.3663538","DOIUrl":"10.1109/TCOMM.2026.3663538","url":null,"abstract":"Current congestion control algorithms ignore the application-layer delay, where the untransmitted data waiting at source nodes degrades the delay performance of services. Moreover, differentiated priorities are necessary for the application services with various delay requirements, especially for mission-critical services. Different from the existing works only considering the network delay, in this paper, by adding the flow queueing delay at source nodes, we formulate the network utility maximization (NUM) problem with additional deterministic service delay constraints. We propose a general TCP-based two-timescale congestion window control (TCWC) framework with delay-aware priority to enhance traditional algorithms. Specifically, to handle the obstacle of new delay constraints, we transform them to the time-average stability of virtual queues. By solving the new NUM problem via Lyapunov optimization, we design a short-term congestion window adjustment strategy in each time slot. To further guarantee the service delay, we apply extreme value theory (EVT) to evaluate the priorities of different flows, and determine the long-term control of window update rates. We deploy the proposed framework in three classic algorithms including NewReno, Vegas and DCTCP. In addition, simulation results show that our TCWC framework can significantly reduce the average service delay and provide deterministic guarantees compared with time-aware TCP congestion control algorithms such as TIMELY and BBRv2.","PeriodicalId":13041,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Transactions on Communications","volume":"74 ","pages":"5138-5152"},"PeriodicalIF":8.3,"publicationDate":"2026-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146161382","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Rate-Splitting Multiple Access for Coexistence of Semantic and Bit Communications","authors":"Yuanwen Liu;Bruno Clerckx","doi":"10.1109/TCOMM.2026.3657401","DOIUrl":"10.1109/TCOMM.2026.3657401","url":null,"abstract":"In the sixth generation (6G) of cellular networks, the demands for capacity and connectivity will increase dramatically to meet the requirements of emerging services for both humans and machines. Semantic communication has shown great potential because of its efficiency, and suitability for users who only care about the semantic meaning. But bit communication is still needed for users requiring original messages. Therefore, there will be a coexistence of semantic and bit communications in future networks. This motivates us to explore how to allocate resources in such a coexistence scenario. We investigate different uplink multiple access (MA) schemes for the coexistence of semantic users and a bit user, namely orthogonal multiple access (OMA), non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA). We characterize the rate regions achieved by those MA schemes. The simulation results show that RSMA always outperforms NOMA and has better performance in high semantic rate regimes compared to OMA. Unlike bit-only communications where RSMA is capacity achieving without any need for time sharing, time sharing helps enlarging RSMA rate region in the coexistence scenario. We also summarize the particularities of RSMA scheme design between the coexistence scenario and bit-only communication scenario.","PeriodicalId":13041,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Transactions on Communications","volume":"74 ","pages":"4367-4383"},"PeriodicalIF":8.3,"publicationDate":"2026-02-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146161154","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"SFTRAP: Satisfying Fidelity Threshold Routing and Adaptive Purification for Throughput Maximum in Quantum Network","authors":"Zhi Wang;Tao Gong;Yingpu Nian;Bo Yi;Xingwei Wang;Xinhao Zhou;Jianhui Lv;Geyong Min;Keqin Li","doi":"10.1109/TCOMM.2026.3658364","DOIUrl":"10.1109/TCOMM.2026.3658364","url":null,"abstract":"The core function of quantum networks is to establish high-fidelity quantum entanglement for long-distance communication. However, the main challenge is to efficiently allocate resources under limited conditions, maximize throughput, satisfy end-to-end (E2E) fidelity requirements, and prevent quantum decoherence caused by inefficient routing algorithms. Current research focuses on optimizing either throughput or fidelity, with a lack of approaches that optimize both simultaneously; furthermore, existing algorithms suffer from high computational complexity. To tackle these challenges, this study proposes a Satisfying Fidelity Threshold Routing and Adaptive Purification Strategy (SFTRAP). SFTRAP maximizes throughput for each request by selecting multiple paths and dynamically choosing links for entanglement purification based on the current state of link resources, thus minimizing throughput loss while satisfying fidelity threshold. The strategy also adaptively adjusts the number of purification rounds according to the fidelity threshold, thereby optimizing the time required for deep purification and enhancing algorithmic efficiency. For multi-request scenarios, SFTRAP employs a priority sorting mechanism that takes into account both path cost and path freedom, which refines request scheduling and path selection to create more efficient request combinations, thus further boosting the overall network throughput. Simulation results indicate that SFTRAP surpasses state-of-the-art methods in terms of both throughput and algorithmic efficiency, highlighting its potential for optimizing resources in quantum networks.","PeriodicalId":13041,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Transactions on Communications","volume":"74 ","pages":"3952-3967"},"PeriodicalIF":8.3,"publicationDate":"2026-02-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146161152","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Dynamic Multi-Layer Aerial System for Latent Diffusion-Based Generative AI Inference at the Edge","authors":"Dao Quang Hiep;Nguyen Cong Luong;Shimin Gong;Xingwang Li;Ngoc Hung Nguyen;Dusit Niyato;Dong In Kim","doi":"10.1109/TCOMM.2026.3662093","DOIUrl":"10.1109/TCOMM.2026.3662093","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, we investigate a <underline>M</u>ulti-layer <underline>A</u>erial system for <underline>G</u>enAI inference at the <underline>E</u>dge (MAGE). Therein, ground user equipments (UEs) request image synthesis services from a remote base station (BS) that leverages the Latent Diffusion Model (LDM) for image generation. Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are deployed to serve the UEs for relaying their images and prompts to the BS. To reduce the communication cost and the computation burden at the BS, the UAVs can partially execute the LDM inference, i.e., an image autoencoder and prompt encoder, and offload the diffusion process task to the BS. In this work, we aim to minimize the BRISQUE scores across all the UEs by jointly optimizing the UAVs’ positions, UE–UAV associations, the number of denoising steps at the BS, and offloading strategies of the UAVs. The optimization problem is non-convex, in which the objective function based on BRISQUE scores has no closed-form expression. Due to the fixed exploration strategy of Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), which limits the policy’s adaptability in dynamic environments, this leads to sub-optimal solutions. To address these potential drawbacks, we propose an adaptive exploration strategy that dynamically adjusts the exploration rate based on observed improvements in rewards. Specifically, the exploration capability is controlled by modulating the influence of the entropy bonus according to recent reward gains. Simulations based on the COCO-Stuff datasets show that the proposed scheme outperforms baseline schemes in different terms of BRISQUE score, UAVs’ energy consumption, and inference latency. In particular, the proposed scheme reduces the BRISQUE score by up to 20–28.57%, inference energy consumption up to 15.98–30.17%, transmission energy consumption by 15.4–18.5%, and the latency by up to 33.33–43.28% compared to the baseline methods, resulting in higher image quality with a noticeably improved level of perceptual naturalness, improved energy efficiency, as well as substantially faster performance.","PeriodicalId":13041,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Transactions on Communications","volume":"74 ","pages":"4461-4476"},"PeriodicalIF":8.3,"publicationDate":"2026-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146134910","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Policy-Aware Deep Reinforcement Learning for NOMA-Enabled RIS-Aided Cell-Free Systems","authors":"Malay Chakraborty;Ekant Sharma;Prem Singh;Hien Quoc Ngo","doi":"10.1109/TCOMM.2026.3662279","DOIUrl":"10.1109/TCOMM.2026.3662279","url":null,"abstract":"This work investigates a non-orthogonal multiple access enabled reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) aided cell-free massive MIMO system by designing optimal RIS beamforming under quality-of-service constraints to maximize the achievable throughput, considering imperfect channel state information (CSI) and spatial correlation. To improve robustness and reduce complexity, we develop a large-scale fading-based optimization framework for RIS phase design, which avoids frequent CSI updates and ensures stable performance over multiple coherence intervals. To address the resulting non-convex optimization problem, we propose two policy-aware deep reinforcement learning algorithms within the Markov decision process framework: (a) an off-policy adaptive-exploration deep deterministic policy gradient (AE-DDPG) and (b) an on-policy enhanced advantage actor-critic (E-A2C). The proposed AE-DDPG algorithm improves sample efficiency through experience replay, exploration noise, and a whitening process. In contrast, the E-A2C algorithm offers improved exploration efficiency through its advantage function and multi-worker agent learning structure. Numerical results demonstrate the stability, convergence, and optimality of the proposed algorithms and their superiority over the benchmarking schemes. Moreover, the comparative analysis highlights the complementary strengths of the proposed algorithms, where AE-DDPG achieves faster convergence with improved learning stability and E-A2C provides better optimality through robust exploration.","PeriodicalId":13041,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Transactions on Communications","volume":"74 ","pages":"5590-5604"},"PeriodicalIF":8.3,"publicationDate":"2026-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146134909","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}