An Artificial Magnetic Conductor (AMC) frame capable of improving the impedance matching of a 2×2 array for 6G applications without degrading isolation performance is presented. The proposed frame is integrated into the array without modifying the single radiating element design. By relying on accurate full-wave simulations, it results that the addition of the frame restores the impedance matching performance, achieving a bandwidth of 1.5 GHz at 28 GHz. The isolation between each port remains under -15 dB within the operating band, thanks to the vias in the rectangular patch metasurface. Moreover, the overall structure exhibits a gain of 11.81 dBi with an aperture efficiency of 69%, satisfactorily for broadband communication purposes. The proposed AMC frame represents an effective method for improving array performance without the need to alter the shape or dimensions of the single radiating element.

This letter focuses on the analysis and optimization of the bit mapping for low-density parity-check (LDPC) coded faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) systems with high-order modulation. We propose the extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart analysis for LDPC-coded FTN systems based on the Ungerboeck observation model, where the vector-input and vector-output mutual information of the FTN detector is approximated using a suitably trained neural network (NN). Leveraging the EXIT chart, we optimize the bit mapping, i.e., the assignment of coded bits to the binary labeled constellation points, specifically for FTN systems. Through threshold analysis and simulations, it is shown that for an FTN system using a variant of the LDPC codes specified in the 5G standard, coded bits with highly reliable positions (information bits) in the Tanner graph preferentially to be transmitted over bit-wise sub-channels with higher capacity, while low-degree bits preferentially to be transmitted over bit-wise sub-channels with lower capacity. Numerical results show that: 1) the LDPC-coded FTN system with the optimized mapping outperforms those with random mappings, consistent with the proposed EXIT chart analysis; 2) under the same spectral efficiency, the LDPC-coded FTN system with optimized mapping also outperforms its 5G LDPC-coded Nyquist counterpart.

Finite-length design is essential for making coded caching practical, as the optimal communication gains of existing schemes often require prohibitively large subpacketization. This paper studies rate-optimal device-to-device (D2D) coded caching with reduced subpacketization. We propose a packet type-based (PT) framework that exploits the geometric structure induced by user grouping. Under this structure, subfiles, packets, and multicast groups are classified into types, allowing the originally symmetric Ji-Caire-Molisch (JCM) design to be systematically relaxed without sacrificing the optimal D2D communication rate. The key feature of the PT framework is that subpacketization reduction is achieved through two complementary mechanisms: subfile saving, by excluding redundant subfile types, and further-splitting saving, by assigning type-dependent further-splitting factors to subfiles through transmitter selection. The type-dependent splitting factors are then coordinated across multicast group types to produce a globally consistent file-splitting structure. Based on this framework, we construct several classes of rate-optimal D2D coded caching schemes that strictly improve upon the JCM subpacketization. The proposed schemes achieve either order-wise reductions in the number of users or constant-factor reductions over broad memory regimes, while preserving the optimal rate. These results reveal a structural distinction between D2D and shared-link coded caching: unlike in the shared-link setting, full symmetric subpacketization is not necessary for rate-optimal D2D caching.

High-Resolution three-dimensional (3D) radio maps (RMs) provide rich information about the radio landscape that is essential to a myriad of wireless applications in the future wireless networks. Although deep learning (DL) methods have shown their effectiveness in RM construction, existing approaches require massive high-resolution 3D RM samples in the training dataset, the acquisition of which is labor-intensive and time-consuming in practice. In this paper, our goal is to devise a data-friendly high-resolution 3D RM construction solution via training over a hybrid dataset, wherein the RMs associated with a small fraction of environment maps (EMs) are of high-resolution, while those corresponding to the majority of EMs are of low-resolution. To this end, we propose a Data-Friendly 3D Radio Map Estimator (DF-3DRME), which comprises two processing stages. Specifically, in the first stage, we leverage the abundant low-resolution 3D RM samples to train a neural network, termed the LR-Net, for predicting the low-resolution 3D RM from the input EM, which provides a coarse characterization of the spatial radio propagation. In the second stage, we employ an advanced super-resolution network, termed the SR-Net, to upscale the predicted low-resolution 3D RM to its high-resolution counterpart. Unlike the LR-Net, the SR-Net can be effectively trained with only the limited high-resolution 3D RM samples available in the hybrid dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves compelling reconstruction performance with only 4

The space-air-ground integrated network (SAGIN) has garnered significant attention in recent years due to its capability to extend communication networks from terrestrial environments to near-ground and space contexts. The application of SAGIN enables to achieve a high-quality, multi-functional, and complex communication requirements, which are essential for sixth-generation communication systems. This paper presents a topology aware (TA) framework to leverage the topological structure in SAGIN to address the multi-functional communication challenge, particularly the integrated sensing, communication, and power transfer (ISCPT) problem. To take advantage of the topological structure, we initially establish the topology according to the criteria of visibility and channel strength. The ISCPT problem can be reformulated into a topological structure as a mixed integer linear program, providing valuable insights from the objectives and constraints. Results demonstrate the superior performance of our solution compared to the benchmarks.

We demonstrate that separating beamforming (i.e., downlink precoding and uplink combining) and channel estimation in multi-user MIMO wireless systems incurs no loss of optimality under general conditions that apply to a wide variety of models in the literature, including canonical reciprocity-based cellular and cell-free massive MIMO system models. Specifically, we provide conditions under which optimal processing in terms of ergodic achievable rates can be decomposed into minimum mean-square error (MMSE) channel estimation followed by MMSE beamforming, for both centralized and distributed architectures. Applications of our results are illustrated in terms of concrete examples and numerical simulations.

This paper considers a new secure gradient coding problem with uncoded groupwise keys, formalized as a (K, N, N_r, M, S) secure gradient coding model, where a user aims to compute the sum of the gradients from K datasets with the assistance of N distributed servers. We consider arbitrary heterogeneous data assignment, where each dataset is assigned to at least M servers. The user should recover the sum of gradients from the transmissions of any N_r servers. The security constraint guarantees that even if the user receives the transmitted messages from all servers, it cannot obtain any other information about the datasets except the sum of gradients. Compared to existing secure gradient coding works, we introduce a practical constraint on secret keys, namely uncoded groupwise keys, where the keys are mutually independent and each key is shared by precisely S servers. An achievable secure gradient coding scheme with uncoded groupwise keys is proposed, which is then proven to be optimal if S > M and to be order optimal within a factor of 2 otherwise.

We study joint communication and sensing in an OFDM system, involving a transmitter sending a message to a receiver while enabling radar sensing by generating back-scattered signals. The sensing task is ranging, modeled by on-grid recovery of target delays that remain fixed over the transmission block, and formulated as a multiple hypothesis testing problem. We establish the exact tradeoff between the achievable communication rate and the ranging error exponent, and show that the tradeoff relies only on the power allocation across subcarriers. We further identify scenarios where uniform power allocation is optimal and sub-optimal for the ranging task.

In this paper, we consider a new simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) scheme based on faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) signaling and demonstrate that FTN is beneficial for both wireless information transmission (WIT) and wireless power transfer (WPT) over additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels. For WIT, we derive the achievable rate for FTN signaling under practical SWIPT scenarios, showing superior performance with optimized codes compared to the Nyquist counterpart. For WPT, we demonstrate that the advantage of FTN signaling arises from the compactness of the signal, which is primarily captured by the fourth-order statistics of the transmitted waveform. We also demonstrate that, with practical constellations having kurtosis smaller than Gaussian input, the fourth-order statistics improve as the symbol rate increases. This advantage diminishes with higher kurtosis, and we prove that the harvested power is maximized when Gaussian input is used. Numerical results show that the proposed coded FTN-based SWIPT scheme achieves more than 0.7 dB gain in WIT performance and up to approximately 65% improvement in energy-harvesting compared with Nyquist system.

In sixth-generation and beyond, space-air-ground integrated networks (SAGINs) extend network connectivity to space, thereby enabling broader service coverage. This paper proposes a topology-aware SAGIN framework to address the integrated sensing, communication, and wireless power transfer (ISCPT) problem, leveraging the distinctive visibility of satellite-terrestrial and satellite-satellite users as well as their constructing in-between channel strengths. By modeling the topology of the SAGIN as a bipartite graph, we formulate the ISCPT problem as a multi-objective joint optimization problem with specified topological structures to reflect connection relationships of satellite-terrestrial and satellite-satellite users. The ISCPT problem is then reformulated and carefully decomposed as several mixed-integer linear programs (MILPs) by leveraging the network topology to individually optimize sensing, communication, and power transfer. To reduce the computational complexity of the proposed method, a greedy algorithm deal with generalized multi-assignment problem (GMAP) is developed. Simulation results demonstrate superior performance in communication and sensing, with a tolerable trade-off in wireless power transfer.

This paper investigates the fundamental limits of information-theoretic decentralized secure aggregation (DSA) with user dropouts. We consider a fully decentralized network where K users communicate over broadcast channels without a trusted aggregation server. Each user holds a private input and aims to recover the sum of the surviving users' inputs (users may drop) while ensuring that no additional information about individual inputs is revealed to that user, even if it can collude with other users. A two-round communication protocol is considered, where we assume at least U users survive and each user can collude with at most T other users. For this setting, the optimal communication rate region is fully characterized: we show that DSA is infeasible if U≤ T+1; otherwise, the optimal rate region is given by R_1≥ 1 and R_2≥1/U-T-1, where R_1 and R_2 denote the first- and second-round communication rates, respectively. The proposed aggregation scheme is based on correlated secret keys constructed from (T+1)-private maximum distance separable (MDS) matrices, which simultaneously provide robustness against user dropouts and security against collusion. We also derive tight converse bounds that establish the optimality of the proposed scheme. Our result shows that the optimal second-round communication rate depends only on the effective redundancy level U-T-1 regardless the total number of users.

This paper studies the multi-access coded caching (MACC) problem with arbitrary user-cache access topology, which extends existing MACC models that rely on highly structured and combinatorially designed topologies. We consider a MACC system consisting of a single server, Λ cache-nodes, and K user-nodes. The server stores N equal-size files, each cache-node has a storage capacity of M files, and each user-node k∈[K] can access an arbitrary subset of cache-nodes 𝒜_k⊆[Λ] and retrieve the cached content stored in cache-nodes 𝒜_k. The objective is to design a universal framework for the MACC delivery problem. Decoding conflicts among the requested packets are captured by a conflict graph, and the design of the delivery is reduced to a graph coloring problem, where achieving a lower transmission load corresponds to coloring the graph using fewer colors. Under this formulation, the classical DSatur algorithm achieves a transmission load close to the index-coding (IC) converse bound, thereby providing a practical benchmark. However, its computational complexity becomes prohibitive for large-scale graphs. To overcome this limitation, we develop a learning-driven approach using graph neural networks (GNNs) that efficiently constructs coded multicast transmissions with performance close to the theoretical bounds and generalizes across different user-cache access topologies and numbers of users. In addition, we extend the IC converse bound to MACC systems with arbitrary access topology and propose a low-complexity greedy approximation that closely matches the IC converse bound. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves performance close to the DSatur algorithm and the IC converse bound, while significantly reducing computational complexity, making it well-suited for large-scale MACC systems.

Secure aggregation is a fundamental primitive in privacy-preserving distributed learning systems, where an aggregator aims to compute the sum of users' inputs without revealing individual data. In this paper, we study a multi-server secure aggregation problem in a two-hop network consisting of multiple aggregation servers and multiple users per server, under the presence of user collusion. Each user communicates only with its associated server, while the servers exchange messages to jointly recover the global sum. We adopt an information-theoretic security framework, allowing up to $T$ users to collude with any server. We characterize the complete optimal rate region in terms of user-to-server communication rate, server-to-server communication rate, individual key rate, and source key rate. Our main result shows that the minimum communication and individual key rates are all one symbol per input symbol, while the optimal source key rate is given by $\min\{U+V+T-2,\, UV-1\}$, where $U$ denotes the number of servers and $V$ the number of users per server. The achievability is established via a linear key construction that ensures correctness and security against colluding users, while the converse proof relies on tight entropy bounds derived from correctness and security constraints. The results reveal a fundamental tradeoff between security and key efficiency and demonstrate that the multi-server architecture can significantly reduce the required key randomness compared to single-server secure aggregation. Our findings provide a complete information-theoretic characterization of secure aggregation in multi-server systems with user collusion.

Metamaterial antennas are appealing for next-generation wireless networks due to their simplified hardware and much-reduced size, power, and cost. This paper investigates the holographic multiple-input multiple-output (HMIMO)-aided multi-cell systems with practical per-radio frequency (RF) chain power constraints. With multiple antennas at both base stations (BSs) and users, we design the baseband digital precoder and the tuning response of HMIMO metamaterial elements to maximize the weighted sum user rate. Specifically, under the framework of block coordinate descent (BCD) and weighted minimum mean square error (WMMSE) techniques, we derive the low-complexity closed-form solution for baseband precoder without requiring bisection search and matrix inversion. Then, for the design of HMIMO metamaterial elements under binary tuning constraints, we first propose a low-complexity suboptimal algorithm with closed-form solutions by exploiting the hidden convexity (HC) in the quadratic problem and then further propose an accelerated sphere decoding (SD)-based algorithm which yields global optimal solution in the iteration. For HMIMO metamaterial element design under the Lorentzian-constrained phase model, we propose a maximization-minorization (MM) algorithm with closed-form solutions at each iteration step. Furthermore, in a simplified multiple-input single-output (MISO) scenario, we derive the scaling law of downlink single-to-noise (SNR) for HMIMO with binary and Lorentzian tuning constraints and theoretically compare it with conventional fully digital/hybrid arrays. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms compared to benchmarks and the benefits of HMIMO compared to conventional arrays.

In this paper, we propose the random faster-than-Nyquist (RFTN) signaling as an effective method to approach the capacity of the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel under assigned power spectral density (PSD). By establishing a concise input-output representation of RFTN signaling, we analyze its asymptotic mutual information using the replica method. Particularly, leveraging asymptotic state evolution, we provide the performance analysis of RFTN signaling with finite-alphabet constellations. This analysis reveals that RFTN signaling can achieve a superior shaping gain compared to conventional FTN signaling, especially under higher symbol rates. In addition, an efficient RFTN detector based on orthogonal approximate message passing (OAMP) is also presented. Our numerical results confirm our theoretical analysis and demonstrate significant performance gains in both spectral efficiency and bit error rate (BER).

Coded caching is a promising technique to effectively reduce peak traffic by using local caches and the multicast gains generated by these local caches. We prefer to design a coded caching scheme with the subpacketization F and transmission load R as small as possible since these are the key metrics for evaluating the implementation complexity and transmission efficiency of the scheme, respectively. However, most of the existing coded caching schemes have large subpacketizations which grow exponentially with the number of users K, and there are a few schemes with linear subpacketizations which have large transmission loads. In this paper, we focus on studying the linear subpacketization, i.e., K=F, coded caching scheme with low transmission load. Specifically, we first introduce a new combinatorial structure called non-half-sum disjoint packing (NHSDP) which can be used to generate a coded caching scheme with K=F. Then a class of new schemes is obtained by constructing NHSDP. Theoretical and numerical comparisons show that (i) compared to the existing schemes with linear subpacketization (to the number of users), the proposed scheme achieves a lower load; (ii) compared to some existing schemes with polynomial subpacketization, the proposed scheme can also achieve a lower load in some cases; (iii) compared to some existing schemes with exponential subpacketization, the proposed scheme has loads close to those of these schemes in some cases. Moreover, the new concept of NHSDP is closely related to the classical combinatorial structures such as cyclic difference packing (CDP), non-three-term arithmetic progressions (NTAP), and perfect hash family (PHF). These connections indicate that NHSDP is an important combinatorial structure in the field of combinatorial design.

Channel knowledge maps (CKMs) learn the relation between transmitter (Tx) and receiver (Rx) positions and channel knowledge to support environment-aware wireless communications. Implicit neural methods can model continuous channel variation but often incur high training and inference cost, while existing Gaussian-splatting-based CKM methods improve efficiency yet still compress wireless multipath interactions into aggregated scattering representations. Consequently, explicit modeling of multi-bounce wireless propagation remains absent from CKM construction. We propose OctCGS, an octree-contextual Gaussian splatting framework that explicitly models the order of bounce jointly over Tx/Rx positions and carrier frequencies. OctCGS partitions the environment into a multi-resolution octree and anchors one Gaussian primitive to each leaf node. Rather than having each Gaussian independently encode all multi-path propagations, it models complex electromagnetic interactions among scatterers through tree attention over the octree hierarchy with controlled complexity. Experiments on simulated benchmarks show that OctCGS achieves a 2.99 dB channel-gain mean absolute error (MAE) and 0.065 channel gain normalized mean absolute error (NMAE), outperforming the strongest baseline by 0.88 dB MAE and 0.021 NMAE.

This paper focuses on the design and performance analysis of faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) signaling employing enhanced 5G low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, oriented toward the requirements of future 6G systems. We propose the extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart analysis for the LDPC-coded FTN system based on the Ungerboeck observation model, where the input-output mutual information function of the detector is approximated using least squares fitting. With the proposed EXIT chart analysis, we explore the thresholds and decoding performance of different LDPC codes (regular codes, irregular codes and protograph codes) in both Nyquist and FTN systems, revealing two important observational findings for FTN signaling: 1) unlike Nyquist systems, where certain 5G New Radio (NR)-like information puncturing can enhance the decoding threshold and performance, we observe that in the FTN setting considered in this paper such puncturing leads to performance degradation; 2) unlike Nyquist systems, the parity-check matrix of LDPC codes optimized for FTN signaling tends to be relatively sparser within comparable ensembles, due to the intentionally introduced inter-symbol interference (ISI). Based on these findings, we develop tailored LDPC codes for FTN signaling by applying the masking operation to the base matrix of the standard 5G LDPC codes, aiming to achieve a lower decoding threshold and thereby better decoding performance. Moreover, the raptor-like structure and rate compatibility are preserved in the proposed LDPC codes, and the encoder and decoder are reused with only minor modifications. Numerical results show that: 1) all simulation results align with the decoding thresholds obtained by the proposed EXIT chart analysis, confirming the effectiveness of the analysis; 2) for the FTN system, the tailored LDPC codes outperform standard 5G LDPC codes, achieving over 0.4 dB coding gain and approaching (slightly exceeding) the constrained Nyquist capacity; 3) under the same spectral efficiency, FTN with tailored LDPC codes performs better than standard 5G LDPC codes with Nyquist signaling, demonstrating a coding gain of up to 0.6 dB; 4) proposed LDPC codes with the FTN signaling achieve better performance compared to existing high-performance codes specifically designed for FTN signaling.