Handovers (HOs) are the cornerstone of modern cellular networks for enabling seamless connectivity to a vast and diverse number of mobile users. However, as mobile networks become more complex with more diverse users and smaller cells, traditional HOs face significant challenges, such as prolonged delays and increased failures. To mitigate these issues, 3GPP introduced conditional handovers (CHOs), a new type of HO that enables the preparation (i.e., resource allocation) of multiple cells for a single user to increase the chance of HO success and decrease the delays in the procedure. Despite its advantages, CHO introduces new challenges that must be addressed, including efficient resource allocation and managing signaling/communication overhead from frequent cell preparations and releases. This paper presents a novel framework aligned with the O-RAN paradigm that leverages meta-learning for CHO optimization, providing robust dynamic regret guarantees and demonstrating at least 180% superior performance than other 3GPP benchmarks in volatile signal conditions.

Machine Learning jobs, carried out on large number of distributed high performance systems, involve periodic communication using operations like AllReduce, AllGather, and Broadcast. These operations may create high bandwidth and bursty traffic patterns, leading to network congestion and packet loss, thus impacting the performance of these jobs. Hence it is imperative to analyze these patterns, which can be helpful in provisioning network resources depending on the type of machine learning workloads. In this poster we carry out extensive analysis of the collective communication behavior seen in a wide variety of models (ex. DeepSeek, GPT, Llama, etc.) To achieve this we instrument Nvidia Collective Communication Library logging functionality for richer context about the collectives and workloads. We adjust configuration parameters that influence collective communication behavior, such as parallelism, number of nodes, and model type. This overview presents and discusses some of the results on the collective communication behavior for the open source DeepSeek V3 inferencing model, which includes operation type and count, transfer sizes per operation, and request size distribution. Our analysis shows that it makes sense to rethink current collective communication frameworks and network topologies so as to accommodate the effect of network anomalies on the mentioned workloads.

This paper explores the application of a federated learning-based multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) strategy to enhance physical-layer security (PLS) in a multi-cellular network within the context of beyond 5G networks. At each cell, a base station (BS) operates as a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agent that interacts with the surrounding environment to maximize the secrecy rate of legitimate users in the presence of an eavesdropper. This eavesdropper attempts to intercept the confidential information shared between the BS and its authorized users. The DRL agents are deemed to be federated since they only share their network parameters with a central server and not the private data of their legitimate users. Two DRL approaches, deep Q-network (DQN) and Reinforce deep policy gradient (RDPG), are explored and compared. The results demonstrate that RDPG converges more rapidly than DQN. In addition, we demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the distributed DRL approach. Furthermore, the outcomes illustrate the trade-off between security and complexity.

As robots (edge-devices, agents) find uses in an increasing number of settings and edge-cloud resources become pervasive, wireless networks will often be shared by flows of data traffic that result from communication between agents and corresponding edge-cloud. In such settings, agent communicating with the edge-cloud is unaware of state of network resource, which evolves in response to not just agent's own communication at any given time but also to communication by other agents, which stays unknown to the agent. We address challenge of an agent learning a policy that allows it to decide whether or not to communicate with its cloud node, using limited feedback it obtains from its own attempts to communicate, to optimize its utility. The policy generalizes well to any number of other agents sharing the network and must not be trained for any particular network configuration. Our proposed policy is a DRL model Query Net (QNet) that we train using a proposed simulation-to-real framework. Our simulation model has just one parameter and is agnostic to specific configurations of any wireless network. It allows training an agent's policy over a wide range of outcomes that an agent's communication with its edge-cloud node may face when using a shared network, by suitably randomizing the simulation parameter. We propose a learning algorithm that addresses challenges observed in training QNet. We validate our simulation-to-real driven approach through experiments conducted on real wireless networks including WiFi and cellular. We compare QNet with other policies to demonstrate its efficacy. WiFi experiments involved as few as five agents, resulting in barely any contention for the network, to as many as fifty agents, resulting in severe contention. The cellular experiments spanned a broad range of network conditions, with baseline RTT ranging from a low of 0.07 second to a high of 0.83 second.

This monograph, spanning three chapters, explores Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL). The first two chapters view inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) through the lens of revealed preferences from microeconomics while the third chapter studies adaptive IRL via Langevin dynamics stochastic gradient algorithms. Chapter uses classical revealed preference theory (Afriat's theorem and extensions) to identify constrained utility maximizers based on observed agent actions. This allows for the reconstruction of set-valued estimates of an agent's utility. We illustrate this procedure by identifying the presence of a cognitive radar and reconstructing its utility function. The chapter also addresses the construction of a statistical detector for utility maximization behavior when agent actions are corrupted by noise. Chapter 2 studies Bayesian IRL. It investigates how an analyst can determine if an observed agent is a rationally inattentive Bayesian utility maximizer (i.e., simultaneously optimizing its utility and observation likelihood). The chapter discusses inverse stopping-time problems, focusing on reconstructing the continuation and stopping costs of a Bayesian agent operating over a random horizon. We then apply this IRL methodology to identify the presence of a Bayes-optimal sequential detector. Additionally, Chapter 2 provides a concise overview of discrete choice models, inverse Bayesian filtering, and inverse stochastic gradient algorithms for adaptive IRL. Finally, Chapter 3 introduces an adaptive IRL approach utilizing passive Langevin dynamics. This method aims to track time-varying utility functions given noisy and misspecified gradients. In essence, the adaptive IRL algorithms presented in Chapter 3 can be conceptualized as inverse stochastic gradient algorithms, as they learn the utility function in real-time while a stochastic gradient algorithm is in operation.

Recent research has demonstrated the effectiveness of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and more specifically, Large Language Models (LLMs), in supporting network configuration synthesis and automating network diagnosis tasks, among others. In this preliminary work, we restrict our focus to the application of AI agents to network troubleshooting and elaborate on the need for a standardized, reproducible, and open benchmarking platform, where to build and evaluate AI agents with low operational effort.

Accurate channel state information (CSI) is critical to the performance of wireless communication systems, especially with the increasing scale and complexity introduced by 5G and future 6G technologies. While artificial intelligence (AI) offers a promising approach to CSI acquisition and utilization, existing methods largely depend on task-specific neural networks (NNs) that require expert-driven design and large training datasets, limiting their generalizability and practicality. To address these challenges, we propose LVM4CSI, a general and efficient framework that leverages the structural similarity between CSI and computer vision (CV) data to directly apply large vision models (LVMs) pre-trained on extensive CV datasets to wireless tasks without any fine-tuning, in contrast to large language model-based methods that generally necessitate fine-tuning. LVM4CSI maps CSI tasks to analogous CV tasks, transforms complex-valued CSI into visual formats compatible with LVMs, and integrates lightweight trainable layers to adapt extracted features to specific communication objectives. We validate LVM4CSI through three representative case studies, including channel estimation, human activity recognition, and user localization. Results demonstrate that LVM4CSI achieves comparable or superior performance to task-specific NNs, including an improvement exceeding 9.61 dB in channel estimation and approximately 40% reduction in localization error. Furthermore, it significantly reduces the number of trainable parameters and eliminates the need for task-specific NN design.

Despite advancements, Radio Access Networks (RAN) still account for over 50\% of the total power consumption in 5G networks. Existing RAN split options do not fully harness data potential, presenting an opportunity to reduce operational expenditures. This paper addresses this opportunity through a twofold approach. First, highly accurate network traffic and user predictions are achieved using the proposed Curated Collaborative Learning (CCL) framework, which selectively collaborates with relevant correlated data for traffic forecasting. CCL optimally determines whom, when, and what to collaborate with, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art approaches, including global, federated, personalized federated, and cyclic institutional incremental learnings by 43.9%, 39.1%, 40.8%, and 31.35%, respectively. Second, the Distributed Unit Pooling Scheme (DUPS) is proposed, leveraging deep reinforcement learning and prediction inferences from CCL to reduce the number of active DU servers efficiently. DUPS dynamically redirects traffic from underutilized DU servers to optimize resource use, improving energy efficiency by up to 89% over conventional strategies, translating into substantial monetary benefits for operators. By integrating CCL-driven predictions with DUPS, this paper demonstrates a transformative approach for minimizing energy consumption and operational costs in 5G RANs, significantly enhancing efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

The limitations of the Poisson process were more evident when modeling high-speed network traffic, particularly real-time data traffic modeling for next-generation networks. For example, Liji et al. [85] demonstrated that the Stationary Poison Increment Process can only model Short Range Dependence (SRD) but not LRD. To address this limitation, the authors proposed using second-order self-similarity models, such as fractional Gaussian noise and fractional ARIMA processes, as a more appropriate approach. In the meantime, researchers also explored modeling data center network traffic using poisson processes. To better simulate realistic traffic in data center environments, the generation of flow-level network traffic matrices based on the poisson shot-noise model is proposed in [172]. By incorporating factors such as flow arrival rates, intra-rack traffic ratios, flow sizes and durations, the poisson shot-noise process offers a more accurate representation of traffic patterns in data centers. B. Weibull distribution As discussed earlier, the limitations of Poisson processes for modeling network traffic led to exploring other distributions. One such promising model was the Weibull distribution, mainly due to its flexibility to model both heavy and non-heavy tailed distributions [11].

Accurate traffic demand forecasting enables transportation management departments to allocate resources more effectively, thereby improving their utilization efficiency. However, complex spatiotemporal relationships in traffic systems continue to limit the performance of demand forecasting models. To improve the accuracy of spatiotemporal traffic demand prediction, we propose a new graph convolutional network structure called DKGCM. Specifically, we first consider the spatial flow distribution of different traffic nodes and propose a novel temporal similarity-based clustering graph convolution method, DK-GCN. This method utilizes Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and K-means clustering to group traffic nodes and more effectively capture spatial dependencies. On the temporal scale, we integrate the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) within the bidirectional Mamba deep learning framework to capture temporal dependencies in traffic demand. To further optimize model training, we incorporate the GRPO reinforcement learning strategy to enhance the loss function feedback mechanism. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms several advanced methods and achieves strong results on three public datasets.