As the complexity and scale of modern computer networks continue to increase, there has emerged an urgent need for precise traffic analysis, which plays a pivotal role in cutting-edge wireless connectivity technologies. This study focuses on leveraging Machine Learning methodologies to create an advanced network traffic classification system. We introduce a novel data-driven approach that excels in identifying various network service types in real-time, by analyzing patterns within the network traffic. Our method organizes similar kinds of network traffic into distinct categories, referred to as network services, based on latency requirement. Furthermore, it decomposes the network traffic stream into multiple, smaller traffic flows, with each flow uniquely carrying a specific service. Our ML models are trained on a dataset comprised of labeled examples representing different network service types collected on various Wi-Fi network conditions. Upon evaluation, our system demonstrates a remarkable accuracy in distinguishing the network services. These results emphasize the substantial promise of integrating Artificial Intelligence in wireless technologies. Such an approach encourages more efficient energy consumption, enhances Quality of Service assurance, and optimizes the allocation of network resources, thus laying a solid groundwork for the development of advanced intelligent networks.

Graph Neural Networks (GNN) are reshaping our understanding of biomedicine and diseases by revealing the deep connections among genes and cells. As both algorithmic and biomedical technologies have advanced significantly, we're entering a transformative phase of personalized medicine. While pioneering tools like Graph Attention Networks (GAT) and Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (Graph CNN) are advancing graph-based learning, the rise of single-cell sequencing techniques is reshaping our insights on cellular diversity and function. Numerous studies have combined GNNs with single-cell data, showing promising results. In this work, we highlight the GNN methodologies tailored for single-cell data over the recent years. We outline the diverse range of graph deep learning architectures that center on GAT methodologies. Furthermore, we underscore the several objectives of GNN strategies in single-cell data contexts, ranging from cell-type annotation, data integration and imputation, gene regulatory network reconstruction, clustering and many others. This review anticipates a future where GNNs become central to single-cell analysis efforts, particularly as vast omics datasets are continuously generated and the interconnectedness of cells and genes enhances our depth of knowledge in biomedicine.

Over the last years we witnessed a renewed interest toward Traffic Classification (TC) captivated by the rise of Deep Learning (DL). Yet, the vast majority of TC literature lacks code artifacts, performance assessments across datasets and reference comparisons against Machine Learning (ML) methods. Among those works, a recent study from IMC22 [16] is worth of attention since it adopts recent DL methodologies (namely, few-shot learning, self-supervision via contrastive learning and data augmentation) appealing for networking as they enable to learn from a few samples and transfer across datasets. The main result of [16] on the UCDAVIS19, ISCX-VPN and ISCX-Tor datasets is that, with such DL methodologies, 100 input samples are enough to achieve very high accuracy using an input representation called "flowpic" (i.e., a per-flow 2d histograms of the packets size evolution over time). In this paper (i) we reproduce [16] on the same datasets and (ii) we replicate its most salient aspect (the importance of data augmentation) on three additional public datasets (MIRAGE19, MIRAGE22 and UTMOBILENET21). While we confirm most of the original results, we also found a 20% accuracy drop on some of the investigated scenarios due to a data shift in the original dataset that we uncovered. Additionally, our study validates that the data augmentation strategies studied in [16] perform well on other datasets too. In the spirit of reproducibility and replicability we make all artifacts (code and data) available to the research community at https://tcbenchstack.github.io/tcbench/

Although Maxwell discovered the physical laws of electromagnetic waves 160 years ago, how to precisely model the propagation of an RF signal in an electrically large and complex environment remains a long-standing problem. The difficulty is in the complex interactions between the RF signal and the obstacles (e.g., reflection, diffraction, etc.). Inspired by the great success of using a neural network to describe the optical field in computer vision, we propose a neural radio-frequency radiance field, NeRF$^\textbf{2}$, which represents a continuous volumetric scene function that makes sense of an RF signal's propagation. Particularly, after training with a few signal measurements, NeRF$^\textbf{2}$ can tell how/what signal is received at any position when it knows the position of a transmitter. As a physical-layer neural network, NeRF$^\textbf{2}$ can take advantage of the learned statistic model plus the physical model of ray tracing to generate a synthetic dataset that meets the training demands of application-layer artificial neural networks (ANNs). Thus, we can boost the performance of ANNs by the proposed turbo-learning, which mixes the true and synthetic datasets to intensify the training. Our experiment results show that turbo-learning can enhance performance with an approximate 50% increase. We also demonstrate the power of NeRF$^\textbf{2}$ in the field of indoor localization and 5G MIMO.

In modern communication systems, efficient and reliable information dissemination is crucial for supporting critical operations across domains like disaster response, autonomous vehicles, and sensor networks. This paper introduces a Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) approach as a significant step forward in achieving more decentralized, efficient, and collaborative solutions. We propose a Partially Observable Stochastic Game (POSG) formulation for information dissemination empowering each agent to decide on message forwarding independently, based on their one-hop neighborhood. This constitutes a significant paradigm shift from traditional heuristics based on Multi-Point Relay (MPR) selection. Our approach harnesses Graph Convolutional Reinforcement Learning, employing Graph Attention Networks (GAT) with dynamic attention to capture essential network features. We propose two approaches, L-DGN and HL-DGN, which differ in the information that is exchanged among agents. We evaluate the performance of our decentralized approaches, by comparing them with a widely-used MPR heuristic, and we show that our trained policies are able to efficiently cover the network while bypassing the MPR set selection process. Our approach is a first step toward supporting the resilience of real-world broadcast communication infrastructures via learned, collaborative information dissemination.

Modern IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi) networks extensively rely on multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) to significantly improve throughput. To correctly beamform MIMO transmissions, the access point needs to frequently acquire a beamforming matrix (BM) from each connected station. However, the size of the matrix grows with the number of antennas and subcarriers, resulting in an increasing amount of airtime overhead and computational load at the station. Conventional approaches come with either excessive computational load or loss of beamforming precision. For this reason, we propose SplitBeam, a new framework where we train a split deep neural network (DNN) to directly output the BM given the channel state information (CSI) matrix as input. We formulate and solve a bottleneck optimization problem (BOP) to keep computation, airtime overhead, and bit error rate (BER) below application requirements. We perform extensive experimental CSI collection with off-the-shelf Wi-Fi devices in two distinct environments and compare the performance of SplitBeam with the standard IEEE 802.11 algorithm for BM feedback and the state-of-the-art DNN-based approach LB-SciFi. Our experimental results show that SplitBeam reduces the beamforming feedback size and computational complexity by respectively up to 81% and 84% while maintaining BER within about 10^-3 of existing approaches. We also implement the SplitBeam DNNs on FPGA hardware to estimate the end-to-end BM reporting delay, and show that the latter is less than 10 milliseconds in the most complex scenario, which is the target channel sounding frequency in realistic multi-user MIMO scenarios.

In this paper, we present Hermes, an end-to-end framework to automatically generate formal representations from natural language cellular specifications. We first develop a neural constituency parser, NEUTREX, to process transition-relevant texts and extract transition components (i.e., states, conditions, and actions). We also design a domain-specific language to translate these transition components to logical formulas by leveraging dependency parse trees. Finally, we compile these logical formulas to generate transitions and create the formal model as finite state machines. To demonstrate the effectiveness of Hermes, we evaluate it on 4G NAS, 5G NAS, and 5G RRC specifications and obtain an overall accuracy of 81-87%, which is a substantial improvement over the state-of-the-art. Our security analysis of the extracted models uncovers 3 new vulnerabilities and identifies 19 previous attacks in 4G and 5G specifications, and 7 deviations in commercial 4G basebands.

One-quarter of respondents expect generative AI's primary effect to be a reduction in their workforce. The figure was higher in industrial sectors like energy and utilities (43%), manufacturing (34%), and transport and logistics (31%). It was lowest in IT and telecommunications (7%). Overall, this is a modest figure compared to the more dystopian job replacement scenarios in circulation. Demand for skills is increasing in technical fields that focus on operationalizing AI models and in organizational and management positions tackling thorny topics including ethics and risk. AI is democratizing technical skills across the workforce in ways that could lead to new job opportunities and increased employee satisfaction.

The paper introduces Supervised Embedding and Clustering Anomaly Detection (SEMC-AD), a method designed to efficiently identify faulty alarm logs in a mobile network and alleviate the challenges of manual monitoring caused by the growing volume of alarm logs. SEMC-AD employs a supervised embedding approach based on deep neural networks, utilizing historical alarm logs and their labels to extract numerical representations for each log, effectively addressing the issue of imbalanced classification due to a small proportion of anomalies in the dataset without employing one-hot encoding. The robustness of the embedding is evaluated by plotting the two most significant principle components of the embedded alarm logs, revealing that anomalies form distinct clusters with similar embeddings. Multivariate normal Gaussian clustering is then applied to these components, identifying clusters with a high ratio of anomalies to normal alarms (above 90%) and labeling them as the anomaly group. To classify new alarm logs, we check if their embedded vectors' two most significant principle components fall within the anomaly-labeled clusters. If so, the log is classified as an anomaly. Performance evaluation demonstrates that SEMC-AD outperforms conventional random forest and gradient boosting methods without embedding. SEMC-AD achieves 99% anomaly detection, whereas random forest and XGBoost only detect 86% and 81% of anomalies, respectively. While supervised classification methods may excel in labeled datasets, the results demonstrate that SEMC-AD is more efficient in classifying anomalies in datasets with numerous categorical features, significantly enhancing anomaly detection, reducing operator burden, and improving network maintenance.

Multi-robot patrolling is the potential application for robotic systems to survey wide areas efficiently without human burdens and mistakes. However, such systems have few examples of real-world applications due to their lack of human predictability. This paper proposes an algorithm: Local Reactive (LR) for multi-robot patrolling to satisfy both needs: (i)patrol efficiently and (ii)provide humans with better situation awareness to enhance system predictability. Each robot operating according to the proposed algorithm selects its patrol target from the local areas around the robot's current location by two requirements: (i)patrol location with greater need, (ii)report its achievements to the base station. The algorithm is distributed and coordinates the robots without centralized control by sharing their patrol achievements and degree of need to report to the base station. The proposed algorithm performed better than existing algorithms in both patrolling and the base station's situation awareness.