A tool that could suggest new personalized research directions and ideas by taking insights from the scientific literature could significantly accelerate the progress of science. A field that might benefit from such an approach is artificial intelligence (AI) research, where the number of scientific publications has been growing exponentially over the last years, making it challenging for human researchers to keep track of the progress. Here, we use AI techniques to predict the future research directions of AI itself. We develop a new graph-based benchmark based on real-world data -- the Science4Cast benchmark, which aims to predict the future state of an evolving semantic network of AI. For that, we use more than 100,000 research papers and build up a knowledge network with more than 64,000 concept nodes. We then present ten diverse methods to tackle this task, ranging from pure statistical to pure learning methods. Surprisingly, the most powerful methods use a carefully curated set of network features, rather than an end-to-end AI approach. It indicates a great potential that can be unleashed for purely ML approaches without human knowledge. Ultimately, better predictions of new future research directions will be a crucial component of more advanced research suggestion tools.

The energy consumption of the fifth generation(5G) of mobile networks is one of the major concerns of the telecom industry. However, there is not currently an accurate and tractable approach to evaluate 5G base stations (BSs) power consumption. In this article, we propose a novel model for a realistic characterisation of the power consumption of 5G multi-carrier BSs, which builds on a large data collection campaign. At first, we define a machine learning architecture that allows modelling multiple 5G BS products. Then, we exploit the knowledge gathered by this framework to derive a realistic and analytically tractable power consumption model, which can help driving both theoretical analyses as well as feature standardisation, development and optimisation frameworks. Notably, we demonstrate that such model has high precision, and it is able of capturing the benefits of energy saving mechanisms. We believe this analytical model represents a fundamental tool for understanding 5G BSs power consumption, and accurately optimising the network energy efficiency.

Traffic classification is essential in network management for a wide range of operations. Recently, it has become increasingly challenging with the widespread adoption of encryption in the Internet, for example, as a de facto in HTTP/2 and QUIC protocols. In the current state of encrypted traffic classification using deep learning (DL), we identify fundamental issues in the way it is typically approached. For instance, although complex DL models with millions of parameters are being used, these models implement a relatively simple logic based on certain header fields of the TLS handshake, limiting model robustness to future versions of encrypted protocols. Furthermore, encrypted traffic is often treated as any other raw input for DL, while crucial domain-specific considerations are commonly ignored. In this paper, we design a novel feature engineering approach used for encrypted Web protocols, and develop a neural network architecture based on stacked long short-term memory layers and convolutional neural networks. We evaluate our approach on a real-world Web traffic dataset from a major Internet service provider and mobile network operator. We achieve an accuracy of 95% in service classification with less raw traffic and a smaller number of parameters, outperforming a state-of-the-art method by nearly 50% fewer false classifications. We show that our DL model generalizes for different classification objectives and encrypted Web protocols. We also evaluate our approach on a public QUIC dataset with finer application-level granularity in labeling, achieving an overall accuracy of 99%. Traffic classification is quintessential for network operators to perform a wide range of network operation and management activities. This includes capacity planning, security and intrusion detection, quality of service (QoS) assurance, performance monitoring, volumetry, and resource provisioning, to name a few. For example, an enterprise network administrator or Internet service provider (ISP) may want to prioritize traffic for business critical services, identify unknown traffic for anomaly detection, or perform workload characterization for designing efficient resource management schemes to satisfy performance and resource requirements of diverse applications. Depending on the context, misclassification on a large scale may result in failure to deliver QoS guarantees, high operational expenses, security breaches, or even disruption in services.

There's a new use for 5G networks: spotting wildfires before they get out of control, an increasing worry as climate change makes fires spread faster and burn longer than before. The startup Pano AI uses a series of cameras that survey the wilderness and AI algorithms that watch for telltale smoke -- an indicator of small blazes that could grow into raging wildfires. That footage is sent to the startup's headquarters for human confirmation, and if a fire is burning, evidence is sent to clients who could be affected. While Pano AI had been sending evidence photos over 4G LTE networks at slow rates of around 20 to 30 6-megapixel images per minute, its new partnership with T-Mobile has it using the carrier's 5G network to send video at 30 frames per second, which is around 90 times more data. Ultimately, getting evidence to Pano AI's clients, which include utility companies, much quicker on 5G means a faster response from firefighters and potentially squashing big fires before they get dangerous.

Network traffic classification is a fundamental problem in networking. Given observations of network traffic, the goal is to infer properties of interest, such as what application generated the traffic. This enables network operators to monitor and optimize performance, detect anomalies or malware, block unwanted traffic, inform capacity planning, and so on. The problem has been extensively studied for more than 20 years, using a combination of heuristics, based on domain expertise, and automated methodologies. Some techniques rely on hard-coded rules, such as the use of well-known ports or servers. For example, a DNS request, the HTTP Host field, or the SNI field in TLS, may all reveal the name of the server contacted (for example, server.netflix.com),

As computing power is becoming the core productivity of the digital economy era, the concept of Computing and Network Convergence (CNC), under which network and computing resources can be dynamically scheduled and allocated according to users' needs, has been proposed and attracted wide attention. Based on the tasks' properties, the network orchestration plane needs to flexibly deploy tasks to appropriate computing nodes and arrange paths to the computing nodes. This is a orchestration problem that involves resource scheduling and path arrangement. Since CNC is relatively new, in this paper, we review some researches and applications on CNC. Then, we design a CNC orchestration method using reinforcement learning (RL), which is the first attempt, that can flexibly allocate and schedule computing resources and network resources. Which aims at high profit and low latency. Meanwhile, we use multi-factors to determine the optimization objective so that the orchestration strategy is optimized in terms of total performance from different aspects, such as cost, profit, latency and system overload in our experiment. The experiments shows that the proposed RL-based method can achieve higher profit and lower latency than the greedy method, random selection and balanced-resource method. We demonstrate RL is suitable for CNC orchestration. This paper enlightens the RL application on CNC orchestration.

In conventional multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems with frequency division duplexing (FDD), channel acquisition and precoder optimization processes have been designed separately although they are highly coupled. This paper studies an end-to-end design of downlink MU-MIMO systems which include pilot sequences, limited feedback, and precoding. To address this problem, we propose a novel deep learning (DL) framework which jointly optimizes the feedback information generation at users and the precoder design at a base station (BS). Each procedure in the MU-MIMO systems is replaced by intelligently designed multiple deep neural networks (DNN) units. At the BS, a neural network generates pilot sequences and helps the users obtain accurate channel state information. At each user, the channel feedback operation is carried out in a distributed manner by an individual user DNN. Then, another BS DNN collects feedback information from the users and determines the MIMO precoding matrices. A joint training algorithm is proposed to optimize all DNN units in an end-to-end manner. In addition, a training strategy which can avoid retraining for different network sizes for a scalable design is proposed. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DL framework compared to classical optimization techniques and other conventional DNN schemes.

Access plan recommendation is a query optimization approach that executes new queries using prior created query execution plans (QEPs). The query optimizer divides the query space into clusters in the mentioned method. However, traditional clustering algorithms take a significant amount of execution time for clustering such large datasets. The MapReduce distributed computing model provides efficient solutions for storing and processing vast quantities of data. Apache Spark and Apache Hadoop frameworks are used in the present investigation to cluster different sizes of query datasets in the MapReduce-based access plan recommendation method. The performance evaluation is performed based on execution time. The results of the experiments demonstrated the effectiveness of parallel query clustering in achieving high scalability. Furthermore, Apache Spark achieved better performance than Apache Hadoop, reaching an average speedup of 2x.

The 3rd Generation Partnership Project started the study of Release 18 in 2021. Artificial intelligence (AI)-native air interface is one of the key features of Release 18, where AI for channel state information (CSI) feedback enhancement is selected as the representative use case. This article provides an overview of AI for CSI feedback enhancement in 5G-Advanced. Several representative non-AI and AI-enabled CSI feedback frameworks are first introduced and compared. Then, the standardization of AI for CSI feedback enhancement in 5G-advanced is presented in detail. First, the scope of the AI for CSI feedback enhancement in 5G-Advanced is presented and discussed. Then, the main challenges and open problems in the standardization of AI for CSI feedback enhancement, especially focusing on performance evaluation and the design of new protocols for AI-enabled CSI feedback, are identified and discussed. This article provides a guideline for the standardization study of AI-based CSI feedback enhancement.

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms have recently gained wide attention in the wireless networks domain. They are considered promising approaches for solving dynamic radio resource management (RRM) problems in next-generation networks. Given their capabilities to build an approximate and continuously updated model of the wireless network environments, DRL algorithms can deal with the multifaceted complexity of such environments. Nevertheless, several challenges hinder the practical adoption of DRL in commercial networks. In this article, we first discuss two key practical challenges that are faced but rarely tackled when developing DRL-based RRM solutions. We argue that it is inevitable to address these DRL-related challenges for DRL to find its way to RRM commercial solutions. In particular, we discuss the need to have safe and accelerated DRL-based RRM solutions that mitigate the slow convergence and performance instability exhibited by DRL algorithms. We then review and categorize the main approaches used in the RRM domain to develop safe and accelerated DRL-based solutions. Finally, a case study is conducted to demonstrate the importance of having safe and accelerated DRL-based RRM solutions. We employ multiple variants of transfer learning (TL) techniques to accelerate the convergence of intelligent radio access network (RAN) slicing DRL-based controllers. We also propose a hybrid TL-based approach and sigmoid function-based rewards as examples of safe exploration in DRL-based RAN slicing.