Satellite communications (SatComs) have recently entered a period of renewed interest motivated by technological advances and nurtured through private investment and ventures. The present survey aims at capturing the state of the art in SatComs, while highlighting the most promising open research topics. Firstly, the main innovation drivers are motivated, such as new constellation types, on-board processing capabilities, nonterrestrial networks and space-based data collection/processing. Secondly, the most promising applications are described i.e. 5G integration, space communications, Earth observation, aeronautical and maritime tracking and communication. Subsequently, an in-depth literature review is provided across five axes: i) system aspects, ii) air interface, iii) medium access, iv) networking, v) testbeds & prototyping. Finally, a number of future challenges and the respective open research topics are described.

Social distancing plays a pivotal role in preventing the spread of viral diseases illnesses such as COVID-19. By minimizing the close physical contact among people, we can reduce the chances of catching the virus and spreading it across the community. This two-part paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey on how emerging technologies, e.g., wireless and networking, artificial intelligence (AI) can enable, encourage, and even enforce social distancing practice. In this Part I, we provide a comprehensive background of social distancing including basic concepts, measurements, models, and propose various practical social distancing scenarios. We then discuss enabling wireless technologies which are especially effective and can be widely adopted in practice to keep distance, encourage, and enforce social distancing in general. These technologies open many new solutions and directions to deal with problems in social distancing, e.g., symptom prediction, detection and monitoring quarantined people, and contact tracing. The companion paper Part II [1] surveys other emerging and related technologies, such as machine learning, computer vision, thermal, ultrasound, etc., and discusses open issues and challenges (e.g., privacypreserving, scheduling, and incentive mechanisms) in implementing social distancing in practice.

Abstract-This paper addresses the problem of channel estimation in time-division duplex (TDD) multicell cellular systems, where the performance of such systems is usually bounded by a bottleneck due to pilot contamination. We propose two channel estimation schemes that completely remove pilot contamination. The exact closed-form expression for average mean square error (MSE) of the proposed estimators is derived. More importantly, our proposed estimators do not need to know the second-order statistics of either desired user channels or interfering user channels. Finally, simulated results confirm gains over existing channel estimation schemes.

This two-part paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey on how emerging technologies, e.g., wireless and networking, artificial intelligence (AI) can enable, encourage, and even enforce social distancing practice. In Part I [1], an extensive background of social distancing is provided, and enabling wireless technologies are thoroughly surveyed. In this Part II, emerging technologies such as machine learning, computer vision, thermal, ultrasound, etc., are introduced. These technologies open many new solutions and directions to deal with problems in social distancing, e.g., symptom prediction, detection and monitoring quarantined people, and contact tracing. Finally, we discuss open issues and challenges (e.g., privacy-preserving, scheduling, and incentive mechanisms) in implementing social distancing in practice. As an example, instead of reacting with ad-hoc responses to COVID-19-like pandemics in the future, smart infrastructures (e.g., next-generation wireless systems like 6G, smart home/building, smart city, intelligent transportation systems) should incorporate a pandemic mode in their standard architectures/designs.

Abstract-In ultra-dense heterogeneous networks, caching popular contents at small base stations is considered as an effective way to reduce latency and redundant data transmission. Optimization of caching placement/replacement and content delivering can be computationally heavy, especially for largescale networks. The provision of both time-efficient and highquality solutions is challenging. Conventional iterative optimization methods, either optimal or heuristic, typically require a large number of iterations to achieve satisfactory performance, and result in considerable computational delay. This may limit their applications in practical network operations where online decisions have to be made. In this paper, we provide a viable alternative to the conventional methods for caching optimization, from a deep learning perspective. The idea is to train the optimization algorithms through a deep neural network (DNN) in advance, instead of directly applying them in real-time caching or scheduling. This allows significant complexity reduction in the delay-sensitive operation phase since the computational burden is shifted to the DDN training phase. Numerical results demonstrate that the DNN is of high computational efficiency. By training the designed DNN over a massive number of instances, the solution quality of the energy-efficient content delivering can be progressively approximated to around 90% of the optimum.

In this paper, we design the UAV trajectory to minimize the total energy consumption while satisfying the requested timeout (RT) requirement and energy budget, which is accomplished via jointly optimizing the path and UAV's velocities along subsequent hops. The corresponding optimization problem is difficult to solve due to its non-convexity and combinatorial nature. To overcome this difficulty, we solve the original problem via two consecutive steps. Firstly, we propose two algorithms, namely heuristic search, and dynamic programming (DP) to obtain a feasible set of paths without violating the GU's RT requirements based on the traveling salesman problem with time window (TSPTW). Then, they are compared with exhaustive search and traveling salesman problem (TSP) used as reference methods. While the exhaustive algorithm achieves the best performance at a high computation cost, the heuristic algorithm exhibits poorer performance with low complexity. As a result, the DP is proposed as a practical trade-off between the exhaustive and heuristic algorithms. Specifically, the DP algorithm results in near-optimal performance at a much lower complexity. Secondly, for given feasible paths, we propose an energy minimization problem via a joint optimization of the UAV's velocities along subsequent hops. Finally, numerical results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms. The results show that the DP-based algorithm approaches the exhaustive search's performance with a significantly reduced complexity. It is also shown that the proposed solutions outperform the stateof-the-art benchmarks in terms of both energy consumption and outage performance.

Federated learning (FL) allows multiple edge computing nodes to jointly build a shared learning model without having to transfer their raw data to a centralized server, thus reducing communication overhead. However, FL still faces a number of challenges such as non-iid distributed data and heterogeneity of user equipments (UEs). Enabling a large number of UEs to join the training process in every round raises a potential issue of the heavy global communication burden. To address these issues, we generalize the current state-of-the-art Federated Averaging (FedAvg) by adding a weight-based proximal term to the local loss function. The proposed FL algorithm runs stochastic gradient descent in parallel on a sampled subset of the total UEs with replacement during each global round. We provide a convergence upper bound characterizing the trade-off between convergence rate and global rounds, showing that a small number of active UEs per round still guarantees convergence. Next, we employ the proposed FL algorithm in wireless Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks to minimize either total energy consumption or completion time of FL, where a simple yet efficient path-following algorithm is developed for its solutions. Finally, numerical results on unbalanced datasets are provided to demonstrate the performance improvement and robustness on the convergence rate of the proposed FL algorithm over FedAvg. They also reveal that the proposed algorithm requires much less training time and energy consumption than the FL algorithm with full user participation. These observations advocate the proposed FL algorithm for a paradigm shift in bandwidth-constrained learning wireless IoT networks.

Abstract-Fast growth of Internet content and availability of electronic devices such as smart phones and laptops has created an explosive content demand. As one of the 5G technology enablers, caching is a promising technique to off-load the network backhaul and reduce the content delivery delay. Satellite communications provides immense area coverage and high data rate, hence, it can be used for large-scale content placement in the caches. In this work, we propose using hybrid mono/multi-beam satellite-terrestrial backhaul network for off-line edge caching of cellular base stations in order to reduce the traffic of terrestrial network. The off-line caching approach is comprised of content placement and content delivery phases. The content placement phase is performed based on local and global content popularities assuming that the content popularity follows Zipf-like distribution. In addition, we propose an approach to generate local content popularities based on a reference Zipf-like distribution to keep the correlation of content popularity. Simulation results show that the hybrid satellite-terrestrial architecture considerably reduces the content placement time while sustaining the cache hit ratio quite close to the upper-bound compared to the satellite-only method.