Abstract: Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is steadily growing as a promising technology for next-generation communication systems due to their appealing features such as wide coverage with high altitude, on-demand low-cost deployment, and fast responses. UAV communications are fundamentally different from the conventional terrestrial and satellite communications owing to the high mobility and the unique channel characteristics of air-ground links. However, obtaining effective channel state information (CSI) is challenging because of the dynamic propagation environment and variable transmission delay. In this paper, a deep learning (DL)-based CSI prediction framework is proposed to address channel aging problem by extracting the most discriminative features from the UAV wireless signals. Specifically, we develop a procedure of multiple Gaussian Bernoulli restricted Boltzmann machines (GBRBM) for dimension reduction and pre-training utilization incorporated with an autoencoder-based deep neural networks (DNNs).

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Telecom giant Vodafone is no stranger to the world of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), having used the technology for years, with hundreds of data scientists that have built thousands of models. While Vodafone was able to deploy and benefit from AI, over the last several years it increasingly faced a number of challenges. Among the challenges was the issue of scaling its AI workloads in a standardized and repeatable approach. Vodafone also faced issues with speed and security. In a session at the Google Cloud Next 2022 event this week, Sebastian Mathalikunnel, AI strategy lead at Vodafone, detailed the issues his organization faced and what it had to do to help overcome them.

We propose cooperative edge-assisted dynamic federated learning (CE-FL). CE-FL introduces a distributed machine learning (ML) architecture, where data collection is carried out at the end devices, while the model training is conducted cooperatively at the end devices and the edge servers, enabled via data offloading from the end devices to the edge servers through base stations. CE-FL also introduces floating aggregation point, where the local models generated at the devices and the servers are aggregated at an edge server, which varies from one model training round to another to cope with the network evolution in terms of data distribution and users' mobility. CE-FL considers the heterogeneity of network elements in terms of communication/computation models and the proximity to one another. CE-FL further presumes a dynamic environment with online variation of data at the network devices which causes a drift at the ML model performance. We model the processes taken during CE-FL, and conduct analytical convergence analysis of its ML model training. We then formulate network-aware CE-FL which aims to adaptively optimize all the network elements via tuning their contribution to the learning process, which turns out to be a non-convex mixed integer problem. Motivated by the large scale of the system, we propose a distributed optimization solver to break down the computation of the solution across the network elements. We finally demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework with the data collected from a real-world testbed.

Former employees said that leadership decision-making was diffuse. Some major decisions came from Arons, while others came from Roberts -- sometimes through Joe Marsh, an executive at Comcast Spectacor and close collaborator of Roberts. Marsh did not officially join G4 until summer 2022, but former employees said he was involved in the operation, especially on the esports side of the network, as far back as summer 2021. Roberts, meanwhile, continued to sporadically meet with talent after Arons took over, according to former G4 staff.

Among the many important reasons why telecommunication companies should be attracted to Microsoft Azure are our network and system management tools. Azure has invested many intellectual and engineering cycles in the development of a sophisticated, robust framework that manages millions of servers and several hundred thousand network elements distributed in over one hundred and forty countries around the world. We have built tools and expertise to maintain these systems, use AI to predict problem areas and solve them before they become issues, and provide transparency in the performance and efficiency of a very large and complicated system. At Microsoft, we believe these tools and expertise can be repurposed to manage and optimize telecommunication infrastructure as well. This is because the evolving infrastructure for telecommunication operators includes elements of edge and cloud computing that lend themselves well to global management.

The quantum machine learning (QML) paradigms and their synergies with network slicing can be envisioned to be a disruptive technology on the cusp of entering to era of sixth-generation (6G), where the mobile communication systems are underpinned in the form of advanced tenancy-based digital use-cases to meet different service requirements. To overcome the challenges of massive slices such as handling the increased dynamism, heterogeneity, amount of data, extended training time, and variety of security levels for slice instances, the power of quantum computing pursuing a distributed computation and learning can be deemed as a promising prerequisite. In this intent, we propose a cloud-native federated learning framework based on quantum deep reinforcement learning (QDRL) where distributed decision agents deployed as micro-services at the edge and cloud through Kubernetes infrastructure then are connected dynamically to the radio access network (RAN). Specifically, the decision agents leverage the remold of classical deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm into variational quantum circuits (VQCs) to obtain the optimal cooperative control on slice resources. The initial numerical results show that the proposed federated QDRL (FQDRL) scheme provides comparable performance than benchmark solutions and reveals the quantum advantage in parameter reduction. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first exploratory study considering an FQDRL approach for 6G communication network.

Data-driven approaches and paradigms have become promising solutions to efficient network performances through optimization. These approaches focus on state-of-the-art machine learning techniques that can address the needs of 5G networks and the networks of tomorrow, such as proactive load balancing. In contrast to model-based approaches, data-driven approaches do not need accurate models to tackle the target problem, and their associated architectures provide a flexibility of available system parameters that improve the feasibility of learning-based algorithms in mobile wireless networks. The work presented in this paper focuses on demonstrating a working system prototype of the 5G Core (5GC) network and the Network Data Analytics Function (NWDAF) used to bring the benefits of data-driven techniques to fruition. Analyses of the network-generated data explore core intra-network interactions through unsupervised learning, clustering, and evaluate these results as insights for future opportunities and works.

Generalizing machine learning (ML) models for network traffic dynamics tends to be considered a lost cause. Hence for every new task, we design new models and train them on model-specific datasets closely mimicking the deployment environments. Yet, an ML architecture called_Transformer_ has enabled previously unimaginable generalization in other domains. Nowadays, one can download a model pre-trained on massive datasets and only fine-tune it for a specific task and context with comparatively little time and data. These fine-tuned models are now state-of-the-art for many benchmarks. We believe this progress could translate to networking and propose a Network Traffic Transformer (NTT), a transformer adapted to learn network dynamics from packet traces. Our initial results are promising: NTT seems able to generalize to new prediction tasks and environments. This study suggests there is still hope for generalization, though it calls for a lot of future research.

We investigate training machine learning (ML) models across a set of geo-distributed, resource-constrained clusters of devices through unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) swarms. The presence of time-varying data heterogeneity and computational resource inadequacy among device clusters motivate four key parts of our methodology: (i) stratified UAV swarms of leader, worker, and coordinator UAVs, (ii) hierarchical nested personalized federated learning (HN-PFL), a distributed ML framework for personalized model training across the worker-leader-core network hierarchy, (iii) cooperative UAV resource pooling to address computational inadequacy of devices by conducting model training among the UAV swarms, and (iv) model/concept drift to model time-varying data distributions. In doing so, we consider both micro (i.e., UAV-level) and macro (i.e., swarm-level) system design. At the micro-level, we propose network-aware HN-PFL, where we distributively orchestrate UAVs inside swarms to optimize energy consumption and ML model performance with performance guarantees. At the macro-level, we focus on swarm trajectory and learning duration design, which we formulate as a sequential decision making problem tackled via deep reinforcement learning. Our simulations demonstrate the improvements achieved by our methodology in terms of ML performance, network resource savings, and swarm trajectory efficiency.