Existing communication systems are mainly built based on Shannon's information theory which deliberately ignores the semantic aspects of communication. The recent iteration of wireless technology, the so-called 5G and beyond, promises to support a plethora of services enabled by carefully tailored network capabilities based on the contents, requirements, as well as semantics. This sparkled significant interest in the semantic communication, a novel paradigm that involves the meaning of message into the communication. In this article, we first review the classic semantic communication framework and then summarize key challenges that hinder its popularity. We observe that some semantic communication processes such as semantic detection, knowledge modeling, and coordination, can be resource-consuming and inefficient, especially for the communication between a single source and a destination. We therefore propose a novel architecture based on federated edge intelligence for supporting resource-efficient semantic-aware networking. Our architecture allows each user to offload the computationally intensive semantic encoding and decoding tasks to the edge servers and protect its proprietary model-related information by coordinating via intermediate results. Our simulation result shows that the proposed architecture can reduce the resource consumption and significantly improve the communication efficiency.
Distributed multi-controller deployment is a promising method to achieve a scalable and reliable control plane of Software-Defined Networking (SDN). However, it brings a new challenge for balancing loads on the distributed controllers as the network traffic dynamically changes. The unbalanced load distribution on the controllers will increase response delay for processing flows and reduce the controllers'throughput. Switch migration is an effective approach to solve the problem. However, existing schemes focus only on the load balancing performance but ignore migration efficiency, which may re…
Goal-Oriented Multi-Agent Semantic Networking: Unifying Intents, Semantics, and Intelligence
Department of Engineering, King’s College London（伦敦国王学院工程系）；Network Automation Department, NSSR Lab, Nokia Bell Labs（诺基亚贝尔实验室网络自动化部门）；Bristol Research and Innovation Laboratory, Toshiba Europe Ltd.（东芝欧洲有限公司布里斯托尔研究与创新实验室）
Socially-aware networking is an emerging paradigm for intermittently connected networks consisting of mobile users with social relationships and characteristics. In this setting, humans are the main carriers of mobile devices. Hence, their connections, social features, and behaviors can be exploited to improve the performance of data forwarding protocols. In this paper, we first explore the impact of three social features, namely physical proximity, user interests, and social relationship on users' daily routines. Then, we propose a multi-dimensional routing protocol called Proximity-Interest-…
The physical topology is emerging as the next frontier in an ongoing effort to render communication networks more flexible. While first empirical results indicate that these flexibilities can be exploited to reconfigure and optimize the network toward the workload it serves and, e.g., providing the same bandwidth at lower infrastructure cost, only little is known today about the fundamental algorithmic problems underlying the design of reconfigurable networks. This paper initiates the study of the theory of demand-aware, self-adjusting networks. Our main position is that self-adjusting network…
Socially aware networking (SAN) exploits social characteristics of mobile users to streamline data dissemination protocols in opportunistic environments. Existing protocols in this area utilized various social features such as user interests, social similarity, and community structure to improve the performance of data dissemination. However, the interrelationship between user interests and its impact on the efficiency of data dissemination has not been explored sufficiently. In this paper, we analyze various kinds of relationships between user interests and model them using a layer-based stru…
IEEE 802.11p is one of the key technologies that enable Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC) in intelligent transportation system (ITS) for safety on the road. The main challenge in vehicular communication is the large amount of data to be processed. As vehicle density and velocity increases, the data to be transmitted also increases. We proposed a protocol that reduces the number of messages transmitted at a vehicle according to the level of danger that the vehicle experiences. The proposed protocol measures inter-vehicle distance, as the representative of the danger of a vehicle, to d…
Path-aware networks (PANs) are emerging as an intriguing new paradigm with the potential to significantly improve the dependability and efficiency of networks. However, the benefits of PANs can only be realized if the adoption of such architectures is economically viable. This paper shows that PANs enable novel interconnection agreements among autonomous systems, which allow to considerably improve both economic profits and path diversity compared to today's Internet. Specifically, by supporting packet forwarding along a path selected by the packet source, PANs do not require the Gao-Rexford c…
As new networking paradigms emerge for different networking applications, e.g., cyber-physical systems, and different services are handled under a converged data link technology, e.g., Ethernet, certain applications with mission critical traffic cannot coexist on the same physical networking infrastructure using traditional Ethernet packet-switched networking protocols. The IEEE 802.1Q Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) task group is developing protocol standards to provide deterministic properties on Ethernet based packet-switched networks. In particular, the IEEE 802.1Qcc, centralized managemen…
Presence of a logically centralized controller in software-defined networks enables smart and fine-grained management of network traffic. Generally, traffic management includes measurement, analysis and control of traffic in order to improve resource utilization. This is done by inspecting corresponding performance requirements using metrics such as packet delay, jitter, loss rate and bandwidth utilization from global network view. There has been many works regarding traffic management of software-defined networks and how it could help to efficiently allocate resources. However, the vast major…
Due to spectrum scarcity and increasing wireless capacity demands, terahertz (THz) communications at 0.1-10THz and the corresponding spectrum characterization have emerged to meet diverse service requirements in future 5G and 6G wireless systems. However, conventional compressed sensing techniques to reconstruct the original wideband spectrum with under-sampled measurements become inefficient as local spectral correlation is deliberately omitted. Recent works extend communication methods with deep learning-based algorithms but lack strong ties to THz channel properties. This paper introduces n…
Intelligent Automation Inc.（智能自动化公司）；U.S. Army C5ISR（美国陆军C5ISR）；University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学）；The Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）
The problem of quality of service (QoS) and jamming-aware communications is considered in an adversarial wireless network subject to external eavesdropping and jamming attacks. To ensure robust communication against jamming, an interference-aware routing protocol is developed that allows nodes to avoid communication holes created by jamming attacks. Then, a distributed cooperation framework, based on deep reinforcement learning, is proposed that allows nodes to assess network conditions and make deep learning-driven, distributed, and real-time decisions on whether to participate in data commun…
SANEmerg: An Emergent Communication Framework for Semantic-aware Agentic AI Networking
1 School of Elect. Inform. \& Commun., Huazhong Univ. of Science \& Technology, China；2 Peng Cheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, China；3 Pazhou Laboratory (Huangpu), Guangzhou, China；4 Department of Electrical；Computer Engineering, the University of Arizona
Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) extends IEEE 802.1 Ethernet for safety-critical and real-time applications in several areas, e.g., automotive, aerospace or industrial automation. However, many of these systems also have stringent security requirements, and security attacks may impair safety. Given a TSN-based distributed architecture, a set of applications with tasks and messages, as well as a set of security and redundancy requirements, we are interested to synthesize a system configuration such that the real-time, safety and security requirements are upheld. We use the Timed Efficient Stream…
With the current host-based Internet architecture, networking faces limitations in dynamic scenarios, due mostly to host mobility. The ICN paradigm mitigates such problems by releasing the need to have an end-to-end transport session established during the life time of the data transfer. Moreover, the ICN concept solves the mismatch between the Internet architecture and the way users would like to use it: currently a user needs to know the topological location of the hosts involved in the communication when he/she just wants to get the data, independently of its location. Most of the research …
Foundation University（费登大学）；Ton Duc Thang University（同塔大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）；Wuhan University of Technology（武汉理工大学）；Palestine Technical University（巴勒斯坦技术大学）；Oxford Brookes University（牛津布鲁克斯大学）；Obuda University（欧布达大学）；Bauhaus University Weimar（魏玛包豪斯大学）
Cloud infrastructure provides computing services where computing resources can be adjusted on-demand. However, the adoption of cloud infrastructures brings concerns like reliance on the service provider network, reliability, compliance for service level agreements. Software-defined networking (SDN) is a networking concept that suggests the segregation of a network data plane from the control plane. This concept improves networking behavior. In this paper, we present an SDN-enabled resource-aware topology framework. The proposed framework employs SLA compliance, Path Computation Element (PCE) a…
The field of wireless networks has been rapidly developed during the past decade due to the increasing popularity of the mobile devices. The great demand for mobility and connectivity makes wireless networking a field whose continuous technological development is very important as new challenges and issues are arising. Many scientists and researchers are currently engaged in developing new approaches and optimization methods in several topics of wireless networking. This survey paper study works from the following topics: Cognitive Radio Networks, Interactive Broadcasting, Energy Efficient Net…
Being a state-of-the-art network, Software Defined Networking (SDN) decouples control and management planes from data plane of the forwarding devices by implementing both the control and management planes at logically centralized entity, called controller. This helps to make simple and easy both the network control and management. Failure of links occurs frequently in a computer network. To deal with the link failures, the existing approaches computes and installs multiple paths for a flow at the switches in SDN without considering the reliability value of the primary path. This incurs extra c…
The ICT industry today is placed as one of the major consumers of energy, where recent reports have also shown that the industry is a major contributor to global carbon emissions. While renewable energy-aware data centers have been proposed, these solutions have certain limitations. The primary limitation is due to the design of data centers which focus on large-size facilities located in selected locations. This paper addresses this problem, by utilizing in-network caching with each router having storage and being powered by renewable energy sources (wind and solar). Besides placing contents …
This paper debates on notions of context-awareness as a relevant asset of networking and computing architectures for an Internet of Things (IoT), in particular in regards to a smoother support of the the networking operation between Cloud and Edge. Specifically, the paper debates on notions of context-awareness and goes over different types of context-awareness indicators that are being applied to Edge selection algorithms, covering the approaches currently used, the role of the algorithms applied, their scope, and contemplated performance metrics. Lastly, the paper provides guidelines for fut…
SANet: A Semantic-aware Agentic AI Networking Framework for Cross-layer Optimization in 6G
the School of Electronic Information and Communications, the Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China（电子信息学院，华中科技大学，武汉，中国）；the Peng Cheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, China（鹏城实验室，深圳，中国）；the School of Mechanical Engineering and Electronic Information, China University of Geosciences (Wuhan), China（机械工程与电子信息学院，中国地质大学（武汉），中国）；the State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching（网络与交换技术国家重点实验室）
The architectural semantics of \emph{Information-Centric Networking} bring in interesting features in regards to mobility management: Information-Centric Networking is content-oriented, connection-less, and receiver-driven. Despite such intrinsic advantages, the support for node movement is being based on the principles of IP solutions. IP-based solutions are, however, host-oriented, and Information-Centric Networking paradigms are information-oriented. By following IP mobility management principles, some of the natural mobility support advantages of Information-Centric Networking are not bein…
Toward Agentic AI: Generative Information Retrieval Inspired Intelligent Communications and Networking
College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算与数据科学学院）；University of Technology and Design, Singapore（新加坡科技设计大学）；Institute for Infocomm Research, Agency for Science, Technology and Research（新加坡科技研究局信息通信研究院）；Auburn University（奥本大学）；University of Houston（休斯顿大学）；Kyung Hee University（庆熙大学）
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Pazhou Laboratory (Huangpu)（琶洲实验室（黄埔））；Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
Semantic communication has recently attracted significant interest from both industry and academia due to its potential to transform the existing data-focused communication architecture towards a more generally intelligent and goal-oriented semantic-aware networking system. Despite its promising potential, semantic communications and semantic-aware networking are still at their infancy. Most existing works focus on transporting and delivering the explicit semantic information, e.g., labels or features of objects, that can be directly identified from the source signal. The original definition o…
The 5G Phase-2 and beyond wireless systems will focus more on vertical applications such as autonomous driving and industrial Internet-of-things, many of which are categorized as ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications (uRLLC). In this article, an alternative view on uRLLC is presented, that information latency, which measures the distortion of information resulted from time lag of its acquisition process, is more relevant than conventional communication latency of uRLLC in wireless networked control systems. An AI-assisted Situationally-aware Multi-Agent Reinforcement learning framework for…
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm provides many features including hardware abstraction, programmable networking and centralized policy control. One of the main benefits used along with these features is core/backhaul network virtualization which ensures sharing of mobile core and backhaul networks among Mobile Operators (MOs). In this paper, we propose a virtualized SDN-based Evolved Packet System (EPS) cellular network architecture including design of network virtualization controller. After virtualization of core/backhaul network elements, eNodeBs associated with MOs become a part …
In 5G networks, the number of connected devices, data rate and data volume per area, as well as the variety of QoS requirements, will attain unprecedented scales. The achievement of these goals will rely on new technologies and disruptive changes in network architecture and node design. Energy efficiency is believed to play a key role in complementing the 5G technologies and optimizing their deployment, dynamic configuration and management [1]. Within the framework of green communications and networks, especially for next-generation green cellular radio access networks, the GREAT (Green Cognit…
Information-centric networking (ICN) facilitates content identification in networks and offers parametric representation of content semantics. This work, proposes an ICN/WDM network architecture that uses these features to offer superior network utilization, in terms of performance and power consumption. The architecture introduces an ICN publish/subscribe communication approach to the wavelength layer, whereby, content is aggregated according to its popularity rank into wavelength-size groups that can be published and "subscribed to" by multiple nodes. Consequently, routing and wavelength ass…
By integrating Software-Defined Networking and cloud computing, virtualized networking and computing resources can be dynamically reallocated through live migration of Virtual Machines (VMs). Dynamic resource management such as load balancing and energy-saving policies can request multiple migrations when the algorithms are triggered periodically. There exist notable research efforts in dynamic resource management that alleviate single migration overheads, such as single migration time and co-location interference while selecting the potential VMs and migration destinations. However, by neglec…
Real-time video surveillance has become a crucial technology for smart cities, made possible through the large-scale deployment of mobile and fixed video cameras. In this paper, we propose situation-aware streaming, for real-time identification of important events from live-feeds at the source rather than a cloud based analysis. For this, we first identify the frames containing a specific situation and assign them a high scale-of-importance (SI). The identification is made at the source using a tiny neural network (having a small number of hidden layers), which incurs a small computational res…
