Intent-Aware DRL-Based Uplink Dynamic Scheduler for 5G-NR

We investigate the problem of supporting Industrial Internet of Things user equipment (IIoT UEs) with intent (i.e., requested quality of service (QoS)) and random traffic arrival. A deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based centralized dynamic scheduler for time-frequency resources is proposed to learn how to schedule the available communication resources among the IIoT UEs. The proposed scheduler leverages an RL framework to adapt to the dynamic changes in the wireless communication system and traffic arrivals. Moreover, a graph-based reduction scheme is proposed to reduce the state and action space of the RL framework to allow fast convergence and a better learning strategy. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed intelligent scheduler in guaranteeing the expressed intent of IIoT UEs compared to several traditional scheduling schemes, such as round-robin, semi-static, and heuristic approaches. The proposed scheduler also outperforms the contention-free and contention-based schemes in maximizing the number of successfully computed tasks.

Latency-Aware Generative Semantic Communications with Pre-Trained Diffusion Models

Generative foundation AI models have recently shown great success in synthesizing natural signals with high perceptual quality using only textual prompts and conditioning signals to guide the generation process. This enables semantic communications at extremely low data rates in future wireless networks. In this paper, we develop a latency-aware semantic communications framework with pre-trained generative models. The transmitter performs multi-modal semantic decomposition on the input signal and transmits each semantic stream with the appropriate coding and communication schemes based on the intent. For the prompt, we adopt a re-transmission-based scheme to ensure reliable transmission, and for the other semantic modalities we use an adaptive modulation/coding scheme to achieve robustness to the changing wireless channel. Furthermore, we design a semantic and latency-aware scheme to allocate transmission power to different semantic modalities based on their importance subjected to semantic quality constraints. At the receiver, a pre-trained generative model synthesizes a high fidelity signal using the received multi-stream semantics. Simulation results demonstrate ultra-low-rate, low-latency, and channel-adaptive semantic communications.

Meta Reinforcement Learning for Resource Allocation in Aerial Active-RIS-assisted Networks with Rate-Splitting Multiple Access

Mounting a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) holds promise for improving traditional terrestrial network performance. Unlike conventional methods deploying passive RIS on UAVs, this study delves into the efficacy of an aerial active RIS (AARIS). Specifically, the downlink transmission of an AARIS network is investigated, where the base station (BS) leverages rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) for effective interference management and benefits from the support of an AARIS for jointly amplifying and reflecting the BS's transmit signals. Considering both the non-trivial energy consumption of the active RIS and the limited energy storage of the UAV, we propose an innovative element selection strategy for optimizing the on/off status of RIS elements, which adaptively and remarkably manages the system's power consumption. To this end, a resource management problem is formulated, aiming to maximize the system energy efficiency (EE) by jointly optimizing the transmit beamforming at the BS, the element activation, the phase shift and the amplification factor at the RIS, the RSMA common data rate at users, as well as the UAV's trajectory. Due to the dynamicity nature of UAV and user mobility, a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm is designed for resource allocation, utilizing meta-learning to adaptively handle fast time-varying system dynamics. Simulations indicate that incorporating an active RIS at the UAV leads to substantial EE gain, compared to passive RIS-aided UAV. We observe the superiority of the RSMA-based AARIS system in terms of EE, compared to existing approaches adopting non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA).

GenAINet: Enabling Wireless Collective Intelligence via Knowledge Transfer and Reasoning

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and communication networks are expected to have groundbreaking synergies in 6G. Connecting GenAI agents over a wireless network can potentially unleash the power of collective intelligence and pave the way for artificial general intelligence (AGI). However, current wireless networks are designed as a "data pipe" and are not suited to accommodate and leverage the power of GenAI. In this paper, we propose the GenAINet framework in which distributed GenAI agents communicate knowledge (high-level concepts or abstracts) to accomplish arbitrary tasks. We first provide a network architecture integrating GenAI capabilities to manage both network protocols and applications. Building on this, we investigate effective communication and reasoning problems by proposing a semantic-native GenAINet. Specifically, GenAI agents extract semantic concepts from multi-modal raw data, build a knowledgebase representing their semantic relations, which is retrieved by GenAI models for planning and reasoning. Under this paradigm, an agent can learn fast from other agents' experience for making better decisions with efficient communications. Furthermore, we conduct two case studies where in wireless device query, we show that extracting and transferring knowledge can improve query accuracy with reduced communication; and in wireless power control, we show that distributed agents can improve decisions via collaborative reasoning. Finally, we address that developing a hierarchical semantic level Telecom world model is a key path towards network of collective intelligence.

Digital versus Analog Transmissions for Federated Learning over Wireless Networks

In this paper, we quantitatively compare these two effective communication schemes, i.e., digital and analog ones, for wireless federated learning (FL) over resource-constrained networks, highlighting their essential differences as well as their respective application scenarios. We first examine both digital and analog transmission methods, together with a unified and fair comparison scheme under practical constraints. A universal convergence analysis under various imperfections is established for FL performance evaluation in wireless networks. These analytical results reveal that the fundamental difference between the two paradigms lies in whether communication and computation are jointly designed or not. The digital schemes decouple the communication design from specific FL tasks, making it difficult to support simultaneous uplink transmission of massive devices with limited bandwidth. In contrast, the analog communication allows over-the-air computation (AirComp), thus achieving efficient spectrum utilization. However, computation-oriented analog transmission reduces power efficiency, and its performance is sensitive to computational errors. Finally, numerical simulations are conducted to verify these theoretical observations.

Intent Profiling and Translation Through Emergent Communication

To effectively express and satisfy network application requirements, intent-based network management has emerged as a promising solution. In intent-based methods, users and applications express their intent in a high-level abstract language to the network. Although this abstraction simplifies network operation, it induces many challenges to efficiently express applications' intents and map them to different network capabilities. Therefore, in this work, we propose an AI-based framework for intent profiling and translation. We consider a scenario where applications interacting with the network express their needs for network services in their domain language. The machine-to-machine communication (i.e., between applications and the network) is complex since it requires networks to learn how to understand the domain languages of each application, which is neither practical nor scalable. Instead, a framework based on emergent communication is proposed for intent profiling, in which applications express their abstract quality-of-experience (QoE) intents to the network through emergent communication messages. Subsequently, the network learns how to interpret these communication messages and map them to network capabilities (i.e., slices) to guarantee the requested Quality-of-Service (QoS). Simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms self-learning slicing and other baselines, and achieves a performance close to the perfect knowledge baseline.

URLLC-Aware Proactive UAV Placement in Internet of Vehicles

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are envisioned to provide diverse services from the air. The service quality may rely on the wireless performance which is affected by the UAV's position. In this paper, we focus on the UAV placement problem in the Internet of Vehicles, where the UAV is deployed to monitor the road traffic and sends the monitored videos to vehicles. The studied problem is formulated as video resolution maximization by optimizing over the UAV's position. Moreover, we take into account the maximal transmission delay and impose a probabilistic constraint. To solve the formulated problem, we first leverage the techniques in extreme value theory (EVT) and Gaussian process regression (GPR) to characterize the influence of the UAV's position on the delay performance. Based on this characterization, we subsequently propose a proactive resolution selection and UAV placement approach, which adaptively places the UAV according to the geographic distribution of vehicles. Numerical results justify the joint usage of EVT and GPR for maximal delay characterization. Through investigating the maximal transmission delay, the proposed approach nearly achieves the optimal performance when vehicles are evenly distributed, and reduces 10% and 19% of the 999-th 1000-quantile over two baselines when vehicles are biased distributed.

Emergent Communication Protocol Learning for Task Offloading in Industrial Internet of Things

In this paper, we leverage a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework to jointly learn a computation offloading decision and multichannel access policy with corresponding signaling. Specifically, the base station and industrial Internet of Things mobile devices are reinforcement learning agents that need to cooperate to execute their computation tasks within a deadline constraint. We adopt an emergent communication protocol learning framework to solve this problem. The numerical results illustrate the effectiveness of emergent communication in improving the channel access success rate and the number of successfully computed tasks compared to contention-based, contention-free, and no-communication approaches. Moreover, the proposed task offloading policy outperforms remote and local computation baselines.

Knowledge Distillation from Language-Oriented to Emergent Communication for Multi-Agent Remote Control

In this work, we compare emergent communication (EC) built upon multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) and language-oriented semantic communication (LSC) empowered by a pre-trained large language model (LLM) using human language. In a multi-agent remote navigation task, with multimodal input data comprising location and channel maps, it is shown that EC incurs high training cost and struggles when using multimodal data, whereas LSC yields high inference computing cost due to the LLM's large size. To address their respective bottlenecks, we propose a novel framework of language-guided EC (LEC) by guiding the EC training using LSC via knowledge distillation (KD). Simulations corroborate that LEC achieves faster travel time while avoiding areas with poor channel conditions, as well as speeding up the MADRL training convergence by up to 61.8% compared to EC.

Multi-Objective Optimization in STAR-RIS-Aided SWIPT with RSMA via Meta-Learning

Simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) is a cutting-edge concept for the sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks. In this letter, we propose a novel system that incorporates STAR-RIS with simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) using rate splitting multiple access (RSMA). The proposed system facilitates communication from a multi-antenna base station (BS) to single-antenna users in a downlink transmission. The BS concurrently sends energy and information signals to multiple energy harvesting receivers (EHRs) and information data receivers (IDRs) with the support of a deployed STAR-RIS. Furthermore, a multi-objective optimization is introduced to strike a balance between users' sum rate and the total harvested energy. To achieve this, an optimization problem is formulated to optimize the energy/information beamforming vectors at the BS, the phase shifts at the STAR-RIS, and the common message rate. Subsequently, we employ a meta deep deterministic policy gradient (Meta-DDPG) approach to solve the complex problem. Simulation results validate that the proposed algorithm significantly enhances both data rate and harvested energy in comparison to conventional DDPG.