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A Survey of Recent Advances in Optimization Methods for Wireless Communications | IEEE Journals & Magazine | IEEE Xplore

A Survey of Recent Advances in Optimization Methods for Wireless Communications


Abstract:

Mathematical optimization is now widely regarded as an indispensable modeling and solution tool for the design of wireless communications systems. While optimization has ...Show More

Abstract:

Mathematical optimization is now widely regarded as an indispensable modeling and solution tool for the design of wireless communications systems. While optimization has played a significant role in the revolutionary progress in wireless communication and networking technologies from 1G to 5G and onto the future 6G, the innovations in wireless technologies have also substantially transformed the nature of the underlying mathematical optimization problems upon which the system designs are based and have sparked significant innovations in the development of methodologies to understand, to analyze, and to solve those problems. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of recent advances in mathematical optimization theory and algorithms for wireless communication system design. We begin by illustrating common features of mathematical optimization problems arising in wireless communication system design. We discuss various scenarios and use cases and their associated mathematical structures from an optimization perspective. We then provide an overview of recently developed optimization techniques in areas ranging from nonconvex optimization, global optimization, and integer programming, to distributed optimization and learning-based optimization. The key to successful solution of mathematical optimization problems is in carefully choosing or developing suitable algorithms (or neural network architectures) that can exploit the underlying problem structure. We conclude the paper by identifying several open research challenges and outlining future research directions.
Published in: IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications ( Volume: 42, Issue: 11, November 2024)
Page(s): 2992 - 3031
Date of Publication: 14 August 2024

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I. Introduction

Wireless communication technology has progressed dramatically in the last several decades. Wireless communication systems have impacted our society in profound ways and have become an integral part of our daily lives. The development of wireless communication technology is continuously driven by the requirements imposed by newly emerging use cases—such as aggregate/peak data rate, latency, cost and energy consumption, spectrum and energy efficiency, connectivity density, and many others. These ever more stringent key performance indicators (KPIs) have propelled innovations in both the physical and networking layer technologies from 1G to current 5G [1] in the past several decades, and will continue to do so into the era of future 6G wireless systems [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]. These innovations include but are not limited to: advanced massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technologies [7], [8], [9] such as coordinated/cooperative beamforming [10], [11], hybrid beamforming [12] and symbol-level precoding [13], new waveforms [14] ranging from time-division multiple access, code-division multiple access, orthogonal frequency-division multiple access to nonorthogonal multiple access, novel access protocols and paradigms [15], [16] such as grant-free multiple access, new networking architectures [17], [18] such as cloud radio access network (C-RAN) and cell-free (massive) MIMO, as well as advanced signal processing algorithms such as efficient compressed sensing techniques.

References

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