XR refers to creating a virtual manmachine interaction environment by combining the real and the virtual through a computer. XR is a general term for VR (Virtual Reality), AR (Augmented Reality), MR (Mixed Reality) and other technologies. At present, VR devices account for nearly half of the market share, AR for about a third, and MR for the rest. As the development of 5G technology and network empowers more application scenarios, combined with the integration of AI technology with computational vision and the innovative functions of hardware, VR and AR technologies and applications will become more integrated and interoperable. It is here that the MR and XR concepts emerge. XR will create a world where the virtual and the real are completely intertwined.

Beamforming-capable antenna arrays overcome the high free-space path loss at higher carrier frequencies. However, the beams must be properly aligned to ensure that the highest power is radiated towards (and received by) the user equipment (UE). While there are methods that improve upon an exhaustive search for optimal beams by some form of hierarchical search, they can be prone to return only locally optimal solutions with small beam gains. Other approaches address this problem by exploiting contextual information, e.g., the position of the UE or information from neighboring base stations (BS), but the burden of computing and communicating this additional information can be high. Methods based on machine learning so far suffer from the accompanying training, performance monitoring and deployment complexity that hinders their application at scale. This paper proposes a novel method for solving the initial beam-discovery problem. It is scalable, and easy to tune and to implement. Our algorithm is based on a recommender system that associates groups (i.e., UEs) and preferences (i.e., beams from a codebook) based on a training data set. Whenever a new UE needs to be served our algorithm returns the best beams in this user cluster. Our simulation results demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of our approach, not only in single BS setups but also in setups that require a coordination among several BSs. Our method consistently outperforms standard baseline algorithms in the given task.

Complexity is driven in part by 5G itself, which uses a much broader set of frequency bands, can prioritize services based on latency, and supports huge increases in the number of network elements and end-user devices. But there is a plethora of other changes which further increase complexity. These include the evolution from physical hardware to virtual and cloud native networks, end-to-end network slicing, the adoption of Open Radio Access Network (RAN) technologies and the addition of new enterprise business services. There are also multi-technology networks with some communications service providers (CSPs) running 2G, 3G, 4G/LTE and 5G networks in parallel, as well as multi-vendor networks with typically two to four different RAN vendors deployed in the network. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are becoming commonplace in the telecoms industry and are often the only way to manage the complexity we see in today's multi-vendor, multi-technology networks.

Today's telecommunication sectors face enormous demands from customers to offer a far better user experience and high-quality telecom services. Businesses got to overcome the challenge and competition with the help of customized AI in telecom for their users, focusing on long-term business relationships. AI is continuously revolutionizing the face of the Telecom Industry. The telecom sector is leveraging the potential of AI to analyze and work out the large volume of Big Data. It helps gain competitive and valuable insight to improve business process operations.

The vision of 5G lies in providing high data rates, low latency (for the aim of near-real-time applications), significantly increased base station capacity, and near-perfect quality of service (QoS) for users, compared to LTE networks. In order to provide such services, 5G systems will support various combinations of access technologies such as LTE, NR, NR-U and Wi-Fi. Each radio access technology (RAT) provides different types of access, and these should be allocated and managed optimally among the users. Besides resource management, 5G systems will also support a dual connectivity service. The orchestration of the network therefore becomes a more difficult problem for system managers with respect to legacy access technologies. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for RAT allocation based on federated meta-learning (FML), which enables RAN intelligent controllers (RICs) to adapt more quickly to dynamically changing environments. We have designed a simulation environment which contains LTE and 5G NR service technologies. In the simulation, our objective is to fulfil UE demands within the deadline of transmission to provide higher QoS values. We compared our proposed algorithm with a single RL agent, the Reptile algorithm and a rule-based heuristic method. Simulation results show that the proposed FML method achieves higher caching rates at first deployment round 21% and 12% respectively. Moreover, proposed approach adapts to new tasks and environments most quickly amongst the compared methods.

The growing complexity and capacity demands for mobile networks necessitate innovative techniques for optimizing resource usage. Meanwhile, recent breakthroughs have brought Reinforcement Learning (RL) into the domain of continuous control of real-world systems. As a step towards RL-based network control, this paper introduces a new framework for benchmarking the performance of an RL agent in network environments simulated with ns-3. Within this framework, we demonstrate that an RL agent without domain-specific knowledge can learn how to efficiently adjust Radio Access Network (RAN) parameters to match offline optimization in static scenarios, while also adapting on the fly in dynamic scenarios, in order to improve the overall user experience. Our proposed framework may serve as a foundation for further work in developing workflows for designing RL-based RAN control algorithms.

Looked at a certain way, Qualcomm's growth strategy is defining the direction of the entire wireless industry. They've been riding the wireless growth wave for decades, and more recently have expanded their focus to 5G, AI, IoT, the cloud and, perhaps most compellingly, the metaverse. Under new chief executive Cristiano Amon, the company's metaverse strategy, if played right, could translate to an even stronger growth opportunity moving forward for Qualcomm (QCOM) and its investors. It's another chance for Qualcomm to work with companies in other industries -- including healthcare, automotive, retail and more -- that are looking to transform their business models to remain competitive. The big news in this regard is the company's signing of an extended partnership with Facebook parent Meta (META).

Connectivity is all about faster, better and increased data transfer between endpoints. The race for wireless connections, beginning in 1979 with the first 1G technology in Tokyo deployed by the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), has led the world to 5G and 6G four decades later. McKinsey Technology Trends Outlook 2022 reveals that advanced connectivity, which includes 5G, 6G, low-Earth-orbit satellites and other technologies, is driving growth and productivity across industries with an investment of $166 billion in 2021. Unlike other new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) or mobility, the technology has a high adoption rate. In a report shared by Market Research and Future to TechRepublic, the organization explains that the COVID-19 pandemic was a significant catalyst for implementing 5G globally.

Softwarization, programmable network control and the use of all-encompassing controllers acting at different timescales are heralded as the key drivers for the evolution to next-generation cellular networks. These technologies have fostered newly designed intelligent data-driven solutions for managing large sets of diverse cellular functionalities, basically impossible to implement in traditionally closed cellular architectures. Despite the evident interest of industry on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) solutions for closed-loop control of the Radio Access Network (RAN), and several research works in the field, their design is far from mainstream, and it is still a sophisticated and often overlooked operation. In this paper, we discuss how to design AI/ML solutions for the intelligent closed-loop control of the Open RAN, providing guidelines and insights based on exemplary solutions with high-performance record. We then show how to embed these solutions into xApps instantiated on the O-RAN near-real-time RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) through OpenRAN Gym, the first publicly available toolbox for data-driven O-RAN experimentation at scale. We showcase a use case of an xApp developed with OpenRAN Gym and tested on a cellular network with 7 base stations and 42 users deployed on the Colosseum wireless network emulator. Our demonstration shows the high degree of flexibility of the OpenRAN Gym-based xApp development environment, which is independent of deployment scenarios and traffic demand.

Multi-user delay constrained scheduling is important in many real-world applications including wireless communication, live streaming, and cloud computing. Yet, it poses a critical challenge since the scheduler needs to make real-time decisions to guarantee the delay and resource constraints simultaneously without prior information of system dynamics, which can be time-varying and hard to estimate. Moreover, many practical scenarios suffer from partial observability issues, e.g., due to sensing noise or hidden correlation. To tackle these challenges, we propose a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm, named Recurrent Softmax Delayed Deep Double Deterministic Policy Gradient ($\mathtt{RSD4}$), which is a data-driven method based on a Partially Observed Markov Decision Process (POMDP) formulation. $\mathtt{RSD4}$ guarantees resource and delay constraints by Lagrangian dual and delay-sensitive queues, respectively. It also efficiently tackles partial observability with a memory mechanism enabled by the recurrent neural network (RNN) and introduces user-level decomposition and node-level merging to ensure scalability. Extensive experiments on simulated/real-world datasets demonstrate that $\mathtt{RSD4}$ is robust to system dynamics and partially observable environments, and achieves superior performances over existing DRL and non-DRL-based methods.