Machine Learning for Large-Scale Optimization in 6G Wireless Networks
China Telecom Research Institute（中国电信研究院）；ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院上海微系统与信息技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Xiamen University（厦门大学）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；The University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）
Yandong Shi, Lixiang Lian, Yuanming Shi, Zixin Wang, Yong Zhou, Liqun Fu, Lin Bai, Jun Zhang, Wei Zhang
The sixth generation (6G) wireless systems are envisioned to enable the paradigm shift from "connected things" to "connected intelligence", featured by ultra high density, large-scale, dynamic heterogeneity, diversified functional requirements and machine learning capabilities, which leads to a growing need for highly efficient intelligent algorithms. The classic optimization-based algorithms usually require highly precise mathematical model of data links and suffer from poor performance with high computational cost in realistic 6G applications. Based on domain knowledge (e.g., optimization models and theoretical tools), machine learning (ML) stands out as a promising and viable methodology for many complex large-scale optimization problems in 6G, due to its superior performance, generalizability, computational efficiency and robustness. In this paper, we systematically review the most representative "learning to optimize" techniques in diverse domains of 6G wireless networks by identifying the inherent feature of the underlying optimization problem and investigating the specifically designed ML frameworks from the perspective of optimization. In particular, we will cover algorithm unrolling, learning to branch-and-bound, graph neural network for structured optimization, deep reinforcement learning for stochastic optimization, end-to-end learning for semantic optimization, as well as federated learning for distributed optimization, for solving challenging large-scale optimization problems arising from various important wireless applications. Through the in-depth discussion, we shed light on the excellent performance of ML-based optimization algorithms with respect to the classical methods, and provide insightful guidance to develop advanced ML techniques in 6G networks.
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学）；University of South Florida（南佛罗里达大学）；University of Southampton（南安普顿大学）
Future wireless networks have a substantial potential in terms of supporting a broad range of complex compelling applications both in military and civilian fields, where the users are able to enjoy high-rate, low-latency, low-cost and reliable information services. Achieving this ambitious goal requires new radio techniques for adaptive learning and intelligent decision making because of the complex heterogeneous nature of the network structures and wireless services. Machine learning (ML) algorithms have great success in supporting big data analytics, efficient parameter estimation and intera…
As cellular networks become denser, a scalable and dynamic tuning of wireless base station parameters can only be achieved through automated optimization. Although the contextual bandit framework arises as a natural candidate for such a task, its extension to a parallel setting is not straightforward: one needs to carefully adapt existing methods to fully leverage the multi-agent structure of this problem. We propose two approaches: one derived from a deterministic UCB-like method and the other relying on Thompson sampling. Thanks to its bayesian nature, the latter is intuited to better preser…
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Western Ontario, London, ON N6A 5B9, Canada（加拿大安大略省伦敦市西安大略大学电气与计算机工程系）
The fifth generation (5G) and beyond wireless networks are critical to support diverse vertical applications by connecting heterogeneous devices and machines, which directly increase vulnerability for various spoofing attacks. Conventional cryptographic and physical layer authentication techniques are facing some challenges in complex dynamic wireless environments, including significant security overhead, low reliability, as well as difficulty in pre-designing authentication model, providing continuous protections, and learning time-varying attributes. In this article, we envision new authenti…
Large Language Model (LLM)-enabled Reinforcement Learning for Wireless Network Optimization
State-Province Joint Engineering and Research Center of Advanced Networking and Intelligent Information Services, College of Computer Science, Northwest University（高级网络与智能信息服务省-市联合工程与研究中心，计算机科学学院，西北大学）；College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University（计算与数据科学学院，南洋理工大学）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence, University of Science and Technology Beijing（人工智能研究院，北京科技大学）；Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, the University of Hong Kong（电子与电气工程系，香港大学）；Automation of School, Guangdong University of Technology（自动化学院，广东工业大学）；Queen’s University Belfast（贝尔法斯特女王大学）
Fudan University（复旦大学）；Shanghai University（上海大学）；Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO)（联邦科学与工业研究组织（CSIRO））；University of Manitoba（曼尼托巴大学）
Distributed machine learning (DML) techniques, such as federated learning, partitioned learning, and distributed reinforcement learning, have been increasingly applied to wireless communications. This is due to improved capabilities of terminal devices, explosively growing data volume, congestion in the radio interfaces, and increasing concern of data privacy. The unique features of wireless systems, such as large scale, geographically dispersed deployment, user mobility, and massive amount of data, give rise to new challenges in the design of DML techniques. There is a clear gap in the existi…
This paper looks at various aspects of Machine Learning (ML) applications in wireless communication technologies, focusing mainly on fifth-generation (5G) and millimeter wave (mmWave) technologies. This paper includes the summaries of 3 papers on machine learning applications in wireless communication technology. The paper deals with the need for integration of machine learning in wireless communication, types of machine learning techniques used in wireless communication, advantages and potential of ML in wireless communication, and implementation parameters of ML in wireless communication, as…
Ghent University（根特大学）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）
This paper provides a systematic and comprehensive survey that reviews the latest research efforts focused on machine learning (ML) based performance improvement of wireless networks, while considering all layers of the protocol stack (PHY, MAC and network). First, the related work and paper contributions are discussed, followed by providing the necessary background on data-driven approaches and machine learning for non-machine learning experts to understand all discussed techniques. Then, a comprehensive review is presented on works employing ML-based approaches to optimize the wireless commu…
KTH - Royal Institute of Technology（KTH皇家理工学院）；MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）
As data generation increasingly takes place on devices without a wired connection, machine learning (ML) related traffic will be ubiquitous in wireless networks. Many studies have shown that traditional wireless protocols are highly inefficient or unsustainable to support ML, which creates the need for new wireless communication methods. In this survey, we give an exhaustive review of the state-of-the-art wireless methods that are specifically designed to support ML services over distributed datasets. Currently, there are two clear themes within the literature, analog over-the-air computation …
Wireless-Friendly Window Position Optimization for RIS-Aided Outdoor-to-Indoor Networks based on Multi-Modal Large Language Model
Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, the University of Sheffield（电子与电气工程系，谢菲尔德大学）；Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge（计算机科学与技术系，剑桥大学）；Brunel University London（伦敦布鲁内尔大学）；School of Information and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang Gongshang University（信息与电子工程学院，浙江工商大学）；Design & Health Lab, Department of Architecture, Built Environment and Construction Engineering, Politecnico di Milano（设计与健康实验室，建筑、环境与土木工程系，米兰理工学院）；Department of Computer Science, Brunel University London（计算机科学系，伦敦布鲁内尔大学）；The State Key Laboratory of Synthetical Automation for Process Industries and The College of Information Science and Engineering, Northeastern University（过程工业综合自动化国家重点实验室和信息科学与工程学院，东北大学）；Centre for Wireless Innovation, Queen’s University of Belfast（无线创新中心，贝尔法斯特女王大学）
Toshiba Corporation（东芝公司）；University of Cyprus（塞浦路斯大学）；University of Nottingham（诺丁汉大学）
Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs) promise improved, secure and more efficient wireless communications. We propose and demonstrate how to exploit the diversity offered by RISs to generate and select easily differentiable radio maps for use in wireless fingerprinting localization applications. Further, we apply machine learning feature selection methods to prune the large state space of the RIS, thus reducing complexity and enhancing localization accuracy and position acquisition time. We evaluate our proposed approach by generation of radio maps with a novel radio propagation modelling…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Sungkyunkwan University（成均馆大学）；University of Idaho（爱达荷大学）
Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has been recently employed to reshape the wireless channels by controlling individual scattering elements' phase shifts, namely, passive beamforming. Due to the large size of scattering elements, the passive beamforming is typically challenged by the high computational complexity and inexact channel information. In this article, we focus on machine learning (ML) approaches for performance maximization in IRS-assisted wireless networks. In general, ML approaches provide enhanced flexibility and robustness against uncertain information and imprecise modeling.…
The classic wireless communication channel modeling is performed using Deterministic and Stochastic channel methodologies. Machine learning (ML) emerges to revolutionize system design for 5G and beyond. ML techniques such as supervise leaning methods will be used to predict the wireless channel path loss of a variate of environments base on a certain dataset. The propagation signal of communication systems fundamentals is focusing on channel modeling particularly for new frequency bands such as MmWave. Machine learning can facilitate rapid channel modeling for 5G and beyond wireless communicat…
Hierarchical Wireless Foundation Model for Multi-Task Optimization
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Imperial College London（电气与电子工程系，工程学院，伦敦帝国理工学院）；School of Mathematics and Statistics, Beijing Jiaotong University（数学与统计学学院，北京交通大学）
Machine learning (ML) provides effective means to learn from spectrum data and solve complex tasks involved in wireless communications. Supported by recent advances in computational resources and algorithmic designs, deep learning (DL) has found success in performing various wireless communication tasks such as signal recognition, spectrum sensing and waveform design. However, ML in general and DL in particular have been found vulnerable to manipulations thus giving rise to a field of study called adversarial machine learning (AML). Although AML has been extensively studied in other data domai…
The application of machine learning (ML) techniques in wireless communication domain has seen a tremendous growth over the years especially in the wireless sensing domain. However, the questions surrounding the ML model's inference reliability, and uncertainty associated with its predictions are never answered or communicated properly. This itself raises a lot of questions on the transparency of these ML systems. Developing ML systems with probabilistic modeling can solve this problem easily, where one can quantify uncertainty whether it is arising from the data (irreducible error or aleotoric…
King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）；Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology（南京信息工程大学）
This letter investigates a channel assignment problem in uplink wireless communication systems. Our goal is to maximize the sum rate of all users subject to integer channel assignment constraints. A convex optimization based algorithm is provided to obtain the optimal channel assignment, where the closed-form solution is obtained in each step. Due to high computational complexity in the convex optimization based algorithm, machine learning approaches are employed to obtain computational efficient solutions. More specifically, the data are generated by using convex optimization based algorithm …
Intel Labs（英特尔实验室）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
We consider the problem of downlink power control in wireless networks, consisting of multiple transmitter-receiver pairs communicating with each other over a single shared wireless medium. To mitigate the interference among concurrent transmissions, we leverage the network topology to create a graph neural network architecture, and we then use an unsupervised primal-dual counterfactual optimization approach to learn optimal power allocation decisions. We show how the counterfactual optimization technique allows us to guarantee a minimum rate constraint, which adapts to the network size, hence…
In this paper, we study the distributed computational capabilities of device-to-device (D2D) networks. A key characteristic of D2D networks is that their topologies are reconfigurable to cope with network demands. For distributed computing, resource management is challenging due to limited network and communication resources, leading to inter-channel interference. To overcome this, recent research has addressed the problems of wireless scheduling, subchannel allocation, power allocation, and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) signal design, but has not considered them jointly. In this paper…
University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
The recent revival of artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing almost every branch of science and technology. Given the ubiquitous smart mobile gadgets and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, it is expected that a majority of intelligent applications will be deployed at the edge of wireless networks. This trend has generated strong interests in realizing an "intelligent edge" to support AI-enabled applications at various edge devices. Accordingly, a new research area, called edge learning, emerges, which crosses and revolutionizes two disciplines: wireless communication and machine learni…
The rich mobile data and edge computing enabled wireless networks motivate to deploy artificial intelligence (AI) at network edge, known as \emph{edge AI}, which integrates wireless communication and machine learning. In communication, data bits are equally important, while in machine learning some data bits are more important. Therefore we can allocate more radio resources to the more important data and allocate less radio resources to the less important data, so as to efficiently utilize the limited radio resources. To this end, how to define "more or less important" of data is the key probl…
In-region location verification (IRLV) aims at verifying whether a user is inside a region of interest (ROI). In wireless networks, IRLV can exploit the features of the channel between the user and a set of trusted access points. In practice, the channel feature statistics is not available and we resort to machine learning (ML) solutions for IRLV. We first show that solutions based on either neural networks (NNs) or support vector machines (SVMs) and typical loss functions are Neyman-Pearson (N-P)-optimal at learning convergence for sufficiently complex learning machines and large training dat…
In recent years, a brand-new technology, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) has been widely studied for reconfiguring the wireless propagation environment. RIS is an artificial surface of electromagnetic material that is capable of customizing the propagation of the wave impinging upon it. Utilizing RIS for communication service like signal enhancement usually lead to non-convex optimization problems. Existing optimization methods either suffers from scalability issues for $N$ number of RIS elements large, or may lead to suboptimal solutions in some scenario. In this paper, we propose a …
The roll-out of various emerging wireless services has triggered the need for the sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks to provide functions of target sensing, intelligent computing and information communication over the same radio spectrum. In this paper, we provide a unified framework integrating sensing, computing, and communication to optimize limited system resource for 6G wireless networks. In particular, two typical joint beamforming design algorithms are derived based on multi-objective optimization problems (MOOP) with the goals of the weighted overall performance maximization and t…
Duzce University（杜兹切大学）；University of Luxembourg（卢森堡大学）；Carleton University（卡尔顿大学）；United States Army Research Laboratory（美国陆军研究实验室）；University of Hertfordshire（赫特福德大学）
With the deployment of the fifth generation (5G) wireless systems gathering momentum across the world, possible technologies for 6G are under active research discussions. In particular, the role of machine learning (ML) in 6G is expected to enhance and aid emerging applications such as virtual and augmented reality, vehicular autonomy, and computer vision. This will result in large segments of wireless data traffic comprising image, video and speech. The ML algorithms process these for classification/recognition/estimation through the learning models located on cloud servers. This requires wir…
In this paper, we consider a wireless network consisting of a base station (BS) that is serving multiple real-time traffic streams forwarding information updates to their destinations in order to sustain the freshness of information for time-critical applications. Since the wireless channels may be unreliable due to the impurities of the propagation environments, such as deep fading, blockages, etc., we integrate a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) to the wireless system in order to mitigate the propagation-induced impairments, enhance the quality of the wireless links, and ensure that …
The focus of this white paper is on machine learning (ML) in wireless communications. 6G wireless communication networks will be the backbone of the digital transformation of societies by providing ubiquitous, reliable, and near-instant wireless connectivity for humans and machines. Recent advances in ML research has led enable a wide range of novel technologies such as self-driving vehicles and voice assistants. Such innovation is possible as a result of the availability of advanced ML models, large datasets, and high computational power. On the other hand, the ever-increasing demand for conn…
Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has emerged as a promising technique for wireless communication networks. By dynamically tuning the reflection amplitudes/phase shifts of a large number of passive elements, IRS enables flexible wireless channel control and configuration, and thereby enhances the wireless signal transmission rate and reliability significantly. Despite the vast literature on designing and optimizing assorted IRS-aided wireless systems, prior works have mainly focused on enhancing wireless links with single signal reflection only by one or multiple IRSs, which may be insuffic…
Wireless Human-Machine Collaboration in Industry 5.0
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Sydney（悉尼大学电气与计算机工程学院）；College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算与数据科学学院）
This paper develops an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) deployment scheme in the context of the directional modulation-based secure precise wireless transmissions (SPWTs), where the optimal UAV position for the SPWT is derived to maximum the secrecy rate (SR) without injecting any artificial noise (AN) signaling. To be specific, the proposed scheme reveals that the optimal position of UAV for maximizing the SR performance has to be placed at the null space of Eves channel, which impels the received energy of the confidential message at the unintended receiver deteriorating to zero whilst benefits…
The growing role that artificial intelligence and specifically machine learning is playing in shaping the future of wireless communications has opened up many new and intriguing research directions. This paper motivates the research in the novel direction of \textit{vision-aided wireless communications}, which aims at leveraging visual sensory information in tackling wireless communication problems. Like any new research direction driven by machine learning, obtaining a development dataset poses the first and most important challenge to vision-aided wireless communications. This paper addresse…
Waveform optimization has recently been shown to be a key technique to boost the efficiency and range of far-field wireless power transfer (WPT). Current research has optimized transmit waveform adaptive to channel state information (CSI) and accounting for energy harvester (EH)'s non-linearity but under the assumption of linear high power amplifiers (HPA) at the transmitter. This paper proposes a channel-adaptive waveform design strategy that optimizes the transmitter's input waveform considering both HPA and EH non-linearities. Simulations demonstrate that HPA's non-linearity degrades the en…
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are the foundation of the Internet of Things (IoT), and in the era of the fifth generation of wireless communication networks, they are envisioned to be truly ubiquitous, reliable, scalable, and energy efficient. To this end, topology control is an important mechanism to realize self-organized WSNs that are capable of adapting to the dynamics of the environment. Topology optimization is combinatorial in nature, and generally is NP-hard to solve. Most existing algorithms leverage heuristic rules to reduce the number of search candidates so as to obtain a suboptim…
Wireless power transfer (WPT) is an emerging paradigm that will enable using wireless to its full potential in future networks, not only to convey information but also to deliver energy. Such networks will enable trillions of future low-power devices to sense, compute, connect, and energize anywhere, anytime, and on the move. The design of such future networks brings new challenges and opportunities for signal processing, machine learning, sensing, and computing so as to make the best use of the RF radiations, spectrum, and network infrastructure in providing cost-effective and real-time power…
Intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) have received much attention recently and are envisioned to promote 6G communication networks. In this paper, for wireless communications aided by IRS units, we formulate optimization problems for power control under quality of service (QoS) and max-min fair QoS under three kinds of traffic patterns from a base station (BS) to mobile users (MUs): unicast, broadcast, and multicast. The optimizations are achieved by jointly designing the transmit beamforming of the BS and the phase shift matrix of the IRS. For power control under QoS, existing IRS studies i…
Pukyong National University（釜庆国立大学）；Korea University（高丽大学）；Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）；Kyung Hee University（庆熙大学）
This paper studies a deep learning (DL) framework to solve distributed non-convex constrained optimizations in wireless networks where multiple computing nodes, interconnected via backhaul links, desire to determine an efficient assignment of their states based on local observations. Two different configurations are considered: First, an infinite-capacity backhaul enables nodes to communicate in a lossless way, thereby obtaining the solution by centralized computations. Second, a practical finite-capacity backhaul leads to the deployment of distributed solvers equipped along with quantizers fo…
Federated learning becomes increasingly attractive in the areas of wireless communications and machine learning due to its powerful functions and potential applications. In contrast to other machine learning tools that require no communication resources, federated learning exploits communications between the central server and the distributed local clients to train and optimize a machine learning model. Therefore, how to efficiently assign limited communication resources to train a federated learning model becomes critical to performance optimization. On the other hand, federated learning, as …
Recently, deep neural network (DNN) has been widely adopted in the design of intelligent communication systems thanks to its strong learning ability and low testing complexity. However, most current offline DNN-based methods still suffer from unsatisfactory performance, limited generalization ability, and poor interpretability. In this article, we propose an online DNN-based approach to solve general optimization problems in wireless communications, where a dedicated DNN is trained for each data sample. By treating the optimization variables and the objective function as network parameters and…
Deep learning is driving a radical paradigm shift in wireless communications, all the way from the application layer down to the physical layer. Despite this, there is an ongoing debate as to what additional values artificial intelligence (or machine learning) could bring to us, particularly on the physical layer design; and what penalties there may have? These questions motivate a fundamental rethinking of the wireless modem design in the artificial intelligence era. Through several physical-layer case studies, we argue for a significant role that machine learning could play, for instance in …
Wireless-connected Virtual Reality (VR) provides immersive experience for VR users from any-where at anytime. However, providing wireless VR users with seamless connectivity and real-time VR video with high quality is challenging due to its requirements in high Quality of Experience (QoE) and low VR interaction latency under limited computation capability of VR device. To address these issues,we propose a MEC-enabled wireless VR network, where the field of view (FoV) of each VR user can be real-time predicted using Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), and the rendering of VR content is moved from V…
In this paper, we employ multiple wireless-powered relays to assist information transmission from a multi-antenna access point to a single-antenna receiver. The wireless relays can operate in either the passive mode via backscatter communications or the active mode via RF communications, depending on their channel conditions and energy states. We aim to maximize the overall throughput by jointly optimizing the access point's beamforming and the relays' radio modes and operating parameters. Due to the non-convex and combinatorial structure, we develop a novel optimization-driven hierarchical de…
WARA: A Closed-Loop Multi-Agent Framework for Wireless Optimization Autoresearch
The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)（香港中文大学（深圳））；Shenzhen Future Network of Intelligence Institute (FNii-Shenzhen)（深圳未来网络智能研究所）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学）
A spurt of progress in wireless power transfer (WPT) and mobile edge computing (MEC) provides a promising approach for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) to enhance the quality and productivity of manufacturing. Scheduling in such a scenario is challenging due to congested wireless channels, time-dependent energy constraints, complicated device heterogeneity, and prohibitive signaling overheads. In this paper, we first propose an online algorithm, called energy-aware resource scheduling (ERS), to maximize the system utility comprising throughput and fairness, with consideration on both syste…
This paper addresses the problem of optimizing sensor deployment locations to reconstruct and also predict a spatiotemporal field. A novel deep learning framework is developed to find a limited number of optimal sampling locations and based on that, improve the accuracy of spatiotemporal field reconstruction and prediction. The proposed approach first optimizes the sampling locations of a wireless sensor network to retrieve maximum information from a spatiotemporal field. A spatiotemporal reconstructor is then used to reconstruct and predict the spatiotemporal field, using collected in-situ me…
