Semantic Communication Meets Edge Intelligence

The development of emerging applications, such as autonomous transportation systems, are expected to result in an explosive growth in mobile data traffic. As the available spectrum resource becomes more and more scarce, there is a growing need for a paradigm shift from Shannon's Classical Information Theory (CIT) to semantic communication (SemCom). Specifically, the former adopts a "transmit-before-understanding" approach while the latter leverages artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to "understand-before-transmit", thereby alleviating bandwidth pressure by reducing the amount of data to be exchanged without negating the semantic effectiveness of the transmitted symbols. However, the semantic extraction (SE) procedure incurs costly computation and storage overheads. In this article, we introduce an edge-driven training, maintenance, and execution of SE. We further investigate how edge intelligence can be enhanced with SemCom through improving the generalization capabilities of intelligent agents at lower computation overheads and reducing the communication overhead of information exchange. Finally, we present a case study involving semantic-aware resource optimization for the wireless powered Internet of Things (IoT).

Perceptive Mobile Network with Distributed Target Monitoring Terminals: Leaking Communication Energy for Sensing

Integrated sensing and communication enables sensing capability for wireless networks. However, the interference management and resource allocation between sensing and communication have not been fully studied. In this paper, we consider the design of perceptive mobile networks (PMNs) by adding sensing capability to current cellular networks. To avoid the full-duplex operation and reduce interference, we propose the PMN with distributed target monitoring terminals (TMTs) where passive TMTs are deployed over wireless networks to locate the sensing target (ST). We then jointly optimize the transmit and receive beamformers towards the communication user terminals (UEs) and the ST by alternating-optimization (AO) and prove its convergence. To reduce computation complexity and obtain physical insights, we further investigate the use of linear transceivers, including zero forcing and beam synthesis (B-syn), and show that B-syn can achieve comparable sensing performance as AO especially when the communication requirement is high. Some interesting physical insights are also revealed. For example, instead of forming a dedicated sensing signal, it is more efficient to jointly design the communication signals for different UEs such that they ``collaboratively leak" energy to the ST. Furthermore, the amount of energy leakage from one UE to the ST depends on their relative locations.

Task-Oriented Multi-User Semantic Communications

While semantic communications have shown the potential in the case of single-modal single-users, its applications to the multi-user scenario remain limited. In this paper, we investigate deep learning (DL) based multi-user semantic communication systems for transmitting single-modal data and multimodal data, respectively. We will adopt three intelligent tasks, including, image retrieval, machine translation, and visual question answering (VQA) as the transmission goal of semantic communication systems. We will then propose a Transformer based unique framework to unify the structure of transmitters for different tasks. For the single-modal multi-user system, we will propose two Transformer based models, named, DeepSC-IR and DeepSC-MT, to perform image retrieval and machine translation, respectively. In this case, DeepSC-IR is trained to optimize the distance in embedding space between images and DeepSC-MT is trained to minimize the semantic errors by recovering the semantic meaning of sentences. For the multimodal multi-user system, we develop a Transformer enabled model, named, DeepSC-VQA, for the VQA task by extracting text-image information at the transmitters and fusing it at the receiver. In particular, a novel layer-wise Transformer is designed to help fuse multimodal data by adding connection between each of the encoder and decoder layers. Numerical results will show that the proposed models are superior to traditional communications in terms of the robustness to channels, computational complexity, transmission delay, and the task-execution performance at various task-specific metrics.

How global observation works in Federated Learning: Integrating vertical training into Horizontal Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) has recently emerged as a transformative paradigm that jointly train a model with distributed data sets in IoT while avoiding the need for central data collection. Due to the limited observation range, such data sets can only reflect local information, which limits the quality of trained models. In practice, the global information and local observations would require a joint consideration for learning to make a reasonable policy. However, in horizontal FL, the central agency only acts as a model aggregator without utilizing its global observation to further improve the model. This could significantly degrade the performance in some missions such as traffic flow prediction in network systems, where the global information may enhance the accuracy. Meanwhile, the global feature may not be directly transmitted to agents for data security. How to utilize the global observation residing in the central agency while protecting its safety thus rises up as an important problem in FL. In this paper, we develop a vertical-horizontal federated learning (VHFL) process, where the global feature is shared with the agents in a procedure similar to that of vertical FL without any extra communication rounds. By considering the delay and packet loss, we will analyze VHFL convergence and validate its performance by experiments. It is shown that the proposed VHFL could enhance the accuracy compared with horizontal FL while still protecting the security of global data.

A Communication-efficient Federated learning assisted by Central data: Implementation of vertical training into Horizontal Federated learning

Federated learning (FL) has emerged to jointly train a model with distributed data sets in IoT while avoiding the need for central data collection. Due to limited observation range, such data sets can only reflect local information, which limits the quality of trained models. In practical network, the global information and local observations always coexist, which requires joint consideration for learning to make reasonable policy. However, in horizontal FL among distributed clients, the central agency only acts as a model aggregator without utilizing its global features to further improve the model. This could largely degrade the performance in some missions such as flow prediction, where the global information could obviously enhance the accuracy. Meanwhile, such global feature may not be directly transmitted to agents for data security. Then how to utilize the global observation residing in the central agency while protecting its safety rises up as an important problem in FL. In this paper, we developed the vertical-horizontal federated learning (VHFL) process, where the global feature is shared with the agents in a procedure similar to vertical FL without extra communication rounds. Considering the delay and packet loss, we analyzed its convergence in the network system and validated its performance by experiments. The proposed VHFL could enhance the accuracy compared with the horizontal FL while protecting the security of global data.

Cell-Free Massive MIMO Detection: A Distributed Expectation Propagation Approach

Cell-free massive MIMO is one of the core technologies for future wireless networks. It is expected to bring enormous benefits, including ultra-high reliability, data throughput, energy efficiency, and uniform coverage. As a radically distributed system, the performance of cell-free massive MIMO critically relies on efficient distributed processing algorithms. In this paper, we propose a distributed expectation propagation (EP) detector for cell-free massive MIMO, which consists of two modules: a nonlinear module at the central processing unit (CPU) and a linear module at each access point (AP). The turbo principle in iterative channel decoding is utilized to compute and pass the extrinsic information between the two modules. An analytical framework is provided to characterize the asymptotic performance of the proposed EP detector with a large number of antennas. Furthermore, a distributed joint channel estimation and data detection (JCD) algorithm is developed to handle the practical setting with imperfect channel state information (CSI). Simulation results will show that the proposed method outperforms existing detectors for cell-free massive MIMO systems in terms of the bit-error rate and demonstrate that the developed theoretical analysis accurately predicts system performance. Finally, it is shown that with imperfect CSI, the proposed JCD algorithm improves the system performance significantly and enables non-orthogonal pilots to reduce the pilot overhead.

Edge Artificial Intelligence for 6G: Vision, Enabling Technologies, and Applications

The thriving of artificial intelligence (AI) applications is driving the further evolution of wireless networks. It has been envisioned that 6G will be transformative and will revolutionize the evolution of wireless from "connected things" to "connected intelligence". However, state-of-the-art deep learning and big data analytics based AI systems require tremendous computation and communication resources, causing significant latency, energy consumption, network congestion, and privacy leakage in both of the training and inference processes. By embedding model training and inference capabilities into the network edge, edge AI stands out as a disruptive technology for 6G to seamlessly integrate sensing, communication, computation, and intelligence, thereby improving the efficiency, effectiveness, privacy, and security of 6G networks. In this paper, we shall provide our vision for scalable and trustworthy edge AI systems with integrated design of wireless communication strategies and decentralized machine learning models. New design principles of wireless networks, service-driven resource allocation optimization methods, as well as a holistic end-to-end system architecture to support edge AI will be described. Standardization, software and hardware platforms, and application scenarios are also discussed to facilitate the industrialization and commercialization of edge AI systems.

Bounding Queue Length Violation Probability of Joint Channel and Buffer Aware Transmission

Queue length violation probability, i.e., the tail distribution of the queue length, is a widely used statistical quality-of-service (QoS) metric in wireless communications. Characterizing and optimizing the queue length violation probability have great significance in time sensitive networking (TSN) and ultra reliable and low-latency communications (URLLC). However, it still remains an open problem. In this paper, we put our focus on the analysis of the tail distribution of the queue length from the perspective of cross-layer design in wireless link transmission. We find that, under the finite average power consumption constraint, the queue length violation probability can achieve zero with diversity gains, while it can have a linear-decay-rate exponent according to large deviation theory (LDT) with limited receiver sensitivity. Besides, we find that the arbitrary-decay-rate queue length tail distribution with the finite average power consumption exists in the Rayleigh fading channel. Then, we generalize the sufficient conditions for the communication system belonging to these three scenarios, respectively. Moreover, we apply the above results to analyze the wireless link transmission in the Nakagami-m fading channel. Numerical results with approximation validate our analysis.

Queue Length Violation Probability of Joint Channel and Buffer Aware Transmission

Queue length violation probability, i.e., the tail distribution of the queue length, is a widely used statistical quality-of-service (QoS) metric in wireless communications. Many previous works conducted tail distribution analysis on the control policies with the assumption that the condition of the large deviations theory (LDT) is satisfied. LDT indicates that the tail distribution of the queue length has a linear-decay-rate exponent. However, there are many control policies which do not meet that assumption, while the optimal control policy may be included in these policies. In this paper, we put our focus on the analysis of the tail distribution of the queue length from the perspective of cross-layer design in wireless link transmission. Specifically, we divide the wireless link transmission systems into three scenarios according to the decay rate of the queue-length tail distribution with the finite average power consumption. A heuristic policy is conceived to prove that the arbitrary-decay-rate tail distribution with the finite average power consumption exists in Rayleigh fading channels. Based on this heuristic policy, we generalize the analysis to Nakagami-m fading channels. Numerical results with approximation validate our analysis.