Telecommunications
To Trust or Not to Trust: On Calibration in ML-based Resource Allocation for Wireless Networks
Raina, Rashika, Simmons, Nidhi, Simmons, David E., Yacoub, Michel Daoud, Duong, Trung Q.
In next-generation communications and networks, machine learning (ML) models are expected to deliver not only accurate predictions but also well-calibrated confidence scores that reflect the true likelihood of correct decisions. This paper studies the calibration performance of an ML-based outage predictor within a single-user, multi-resource allocation framework. We first establish key theoretical properties of this system's outage probability (OP) under perfect calibration. Importantly, we show that as the number of resources grows, the OP of a perfectly calibrated predictor approaches the expected output conditioned on it being below the classification threshold. In contrast, when only one resource is available, the system's OP equals the model's overall expected output. We then derive the OP conditions for a perfectly calibrated predictor. These findings guide the choice of the classification threshold to achieve a desired OP, helping system designers meet specific reliability requirements. We also demonstrate that post-processing calibration cannot improve the system's minimum achievable OP, as it does not introduce new information about future channel states. Additionally, we show that well-calibrated models are part of a broader class of predictors that necessarily improve OP. In particular, we establish a monotonicity condition that the accuracy-confidence function must satisfy for such improvement to occur. To demonstrate these theoretical properties, we conduct a rigorous simulation-based analysis using post-processing calibration techniques: Platt scaling and isotonic regression. As part of this framework, the predictor is trained using an outage loss function specifically designed for this system. Furthermore, this analysis is performed on Rayleigh fading channels with temporal correlation captured by Clarke's 2D model, which accounts for receiver mobility.
Semi-Supervised Federated Learning via Dual Contrastive Learning and Soft Labeling for Intelligent Fault Diagnosis
Dai, Yajiao, Li, Jun, Mei, Zhen, Ni, Yiyang, Jin, Shi, Li, Zengxiang, Guo, Sheng, Xiang, Wei
--Intelligent fault diagnosis (IFD) plays a crucial role in ensuring the safe operation of industrial machinery and improving production efficiency. However, traditional supervised deep learning methods require a large amount of training data and labels, which are often located in different clients. Additionally, the cost of data labeling is high, making labels difficult to acquire. Meanwhile, differences in data distribution among clients may also hinder the model's performance. T o tackle these challenges, this paper proposes a semi-supervised federated learning framework, SSFL-DCSL, which integrates dual contrastive loss and soft labeling to address data and label scarcity for distributed clients with few labeled samples while safeguarding user privacy. It enables representation learning using unlabeled data on the client side and facilitates joint learning among clients through prototypes, thereby achieving mutual knowledge sharing and preventing local model divergence. Specifically, first, a sample weighting function based on the Laplace distribution is designed to alleviate bias caused by low confidence in pseudo labels during the semi-supervised training process. Second, a dual contrastive loss is introduced to mitigate model divergence caused by different data distributions, comprising local contrastive loss and global contrastive loss. Third, local prototypes are aggregated on the server with weighted averaging and updated with momentum to share knowledge among clients. T o evaluate the proposed SSFL-DCSL framework, experiments are conducted on two publicly available datasets and a dataset collected on motors from the factory. In the most challenging task, where only 10% of the data are labeled, the proposed SSFL-DCSL can improve accuracy by 1.15% to 7.85% over state-of-the-art methods. Dai and Z. Mei are with the School of Electronic and Optical Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing 210094, China (e-mail: { yajiao.dai, J. Li and S. Jin are with the School of Information Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210096, China (e-mail: jun.li, jinshi@seu.edu.cn).
On the Role of AI in Managing Satellite Constellations: Insights from the ConstellAI Project
Stock, Gregory F., Fraire, Juan A., Hermanns, Holger, Mosiฤลผny, Jฤdrzej, Al-Khazraji, Yusra, Molina, Julio Ramรญrez, Ntagiou, Evridiki V.
The rapid expansion of satellite constellations in near-Earth orbits presents significant challenges in satellite network management, requiring innovative approaches for efficient, scalable, and resilient operations. This paper explores the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in optimizing the operation of satellite mega-constellations, drawing from the ConstellAI project funded by the European Space Agency (ESA). A consortium comprising GMV GmbH, Saarland University, and Thales Alenia Space collaborates to develop AI-driven algorithms and demonstrates their effectiveness over traditional methods for two crucial operational challenges: data routing and resource allocation. In the routing use case, Reinforcement Learning (RL) is used to improve the end-to-end latency by learning from historical queuing latency, outperforming classical shortest path algorithms. For resource allocation, RL optimizes the scheduling of tasks across constellations, focussing on efficiently using limited resources such as battery and memory. Both use cases were tested for multiple satellite constellation configurations and operational scenarios, resembling the real-life spacecraft operations of communications and Earth observation satellites. This research demonstrates that RL not only competes with classical approaches but also offers enhanced flexibility, scalability, and generalizability in decision-making processes, which is crucial for the autonomous and intelligent management of satellite fleets. The findings of this activity suggest that AI can fundamentally alter the landscape of satellite constellation management by providing more adaptive, robust, and cost-effective solutions.
Learning to Gridize: Segment Physical World by Wireless Communication Channel
Wang, Juntao, Yin, Feng, Ding, Tian, Chang, Tsung-Hui, Luo, Zhi-Quan, Yan, Qi
Gridization, the process of partitioning space into grids where users share similar channel characteristics, serves as a fundamental prerequisite for efficient large-scale network optimization. However, existing methods like Geographical or Beam Space Gridization (GSG or BSG) are limited by reliance on unavailable location data or the flawed assumption that similar signal strengths imply similar channel properties. We propose Channel Space Gridization (CSG), a pioneering framework that unifies channel estimation and gridization for the first time. Formulated as a joint optimization problem, CSG uses only beam-level reference signal received power (RSRP) to estimate Channel Angle Power Spectra (CAPS) and partition samples into grids with homogeneous channel characteristics. To perform CSG, we develop the CSG Autoencoder (CSG-AE), featuring a trainable RSRP-to-CAPS encoder, a learnable sparse codebook quantizer, and a physics-informed decoder based on the Localized Statistical Channel Model. On recognizing the limitations of naive training scheme, we propose a novel Pretraining-Initialization-Detached-Asynchronous (PIDA) training scheme for CSG-AE, ensuring stable and effective training by systematically addressing the common pitfalls of the naive training paradigm. Evaluations reveal that CSG-AE excels in CAPS estimation accuracy and clustering quality on synthetic data. On real-world datasets, it reduces Active Mean Absolute Error (MAE) by 30\% and Overall MAE by 65\% on RSRP prediction accuracy compared to salient baselines using the same data, while improving channel consistency, cluster sizes balance, and active ratio, advancing the development of gridization for large-scale network optimization.
User Head Movement-Predictive XR in Immersive H2M Collaborations over Future Enterprise Networks
The evolution towards future generation of mobile systems and fixed wireless networks is primarily driven by the urgency to support high-bandwidth and low-latency services across various vertical sectors. This endeavor is fueled by smartphones as well as technologies like industrial internet of things, extended reality (XR), and human-to-machine (H2M) collaborations for fostering industrial and social revolutions like Industry 4.0/5.0 and Society 5.0. To ensure an ideal immersive experience and avoid cyber-sickness for users in all the aforementioned usage scenarios, it is typically challenging to synchronize XR content from a remote machine to a human collaborator according to their head movements across a large geographic span in real-time over communication networks. Thus, we propose a novel H2M collaboration scheme where the human's head movements are predicted ahead with highly accurate models like bidirectional long short-term memory networks to orient the machine's camera in advance. We validate that XR frame size varies in accordance with the human's head movements and predict the corresponding bandwidth requirements from the machine's camera to propose a human-machine coordinated dynamic bandwidth allocation (HMC-DBA) scheme. Through extensive simulations, we show that end-to-end latency and jitter requirements of XR frames are satisfied with much lower bandwidth consumption over enterprise networks like Fiber-To-The-Room-Business. Furthermore, we show that better efficiency in network resource utilization is achieved by employing our proposed HMC-DBA over state-of-the-art schemes.
Agentic Satellite-Augmented Low-Altitude Economy and Terrestrial Networks: A Survey on Generative Approaches
Gao, Xiaozheng, Wang, Yichen, Liu, Bosen, Zhou, Xiao, Zhang, Ruichen, Wang, Jiacheng, Niyato, Dusit, Kim, Dong In, Jamalipour, Abbas, Yuen, Chau, An, Jianping, Yang, Kai
The development of satellite-augmented low-altitude economy and terrestrial networks (SLAETNs) demands intelligent and autonomous systems that can operate reliably across heterogeneous, dynamic, and mission-critical environments. To address these challenges, this survey focuses on enabling agentic artificial intelligence (AI), that is, artificial agents capable of perceiving, reasoning, and acting, through generative AI (GAI) and large language models (LLMs). We begin by introducing the architecture and characteristics of SLAETNs, and analyzing the challenges that arise in integrating satellite, aerial, and terrestrial components. Then, we present a model-driven foundation by systematically reviewing five major categories of generative models: variational autoencoders (VAEs), generative adversarial networks (GANs), generative diffusion models (GDMs), transformer-based models (TBMs), and LLMs. Moreover, we provide a comparative analysis to highlight their generative mechanisms, capabilities, and deployment trade-offs within SLAETNs. Building on this foundation, we examine how these models empower agentic functions across three domains: communication enhancement, security and privacy protection, and intelligent satellite tasks. Finally, we outline key future directions for building scalable, adaptive, and trustworthy generative agents in SLAETNs. This survey aims to provide a unified understanding and actionable reference for advancing agentic AI in next-generation integrated networks.
Distributed Machine Learning Approach for Low-Latency Localization in Cell-Free Massive MIMO Systems
Kumar, Manish, Chou, Tzu-Hsuan, Lee, Byunghyun, Michelusi, Nicolรฒ, Love, David J., Zhang, Yaguang, Krogmeier, James V.
--Low-latency localization is critical in cellular networks to support real-time applications requiring precise positioning. In this paper, we propose a distributed machine learning (ML) framework for fingerprint-based localization tailored to cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, an emerging architecture for 6G networks. The proposed framework enables each access point (AP) to independently train a Gaussian process regression model using local angle-of-arrival and received signal strength fingerprints. These models provide probabilistic position estimates for the user equipment (UE), which are then fused by the UE with minimal computational overhead to derive a final location estimate. This decentralized approach eliminates the need for fronthaul communication between the APs and the central processing unit (CPU), thereby reducing latency. Additionally, distributing computational tasks across the APs alleviates the processing burden on the CPU compared to traditional centralized localization schemes. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed distributed framework achieves localization accuracy comparable to centralized methods, despite lacking the benefits of centralized data aggregation. Moreover, it effectively reduces uncertainty of the location estimates, as evidenced by the 95% covariance ellipse. The results highlight the potential of distributed ML for enabling low-latency, high-accuracy localization in future 6G networks. The next-generation 6G mobile communication is expected to revolutionize wireless communication systems, with integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) playing a key role in enabling advanced connectivity.
PRATA: A Framework to Enable Predictive QoS in Vehicular Networks via Artificial Intelligence
Mason, Federico, Zugno, Tommaso, Drago, Matteo, Giordani, Marco, Boban, Mate, Zorzi, Michele
Predictive Quality of Service (PQoS) makes it possible to anticipate QoS changes, e.g., in wireless networks, and trigger appropriate countermeasures to avoid performance degradation. Hence, PQoS is extremely useful for automotive applications such as teleoperated driving, which poses strict constraints in terms of latency and reliability. A promising tool for PQoS is given by Reinforcement Learning (RL), a methodology that enables the design of decision-making strategies for stochastic optimization. In this manuscript, we present PRATA, a new simulation framework to enable PRedictive QoS based on AI for Teleoperated driving Applications. PRATA consists of a modular pipeline that includes (i) an end-to-end protocol stack to simulate the 5G Radio Access Network (RAN), (ii) a tool for generating automotive data, and (iii) an Artificial Intelligence (AI) unit to optimize PQoS decisions. To prove its utility, we use PRATA to design an RL unit, named RAN-AI, to optimize the segmentation level of teleoperated driving data in the event of resource saturation or channel degradation. Hence, we show that the RAN-AI entity efficiently balances the trade-off between QoS and Quality of Experience (QoE) that characterize teleoperated driving applications, almost doubling the system performance compared to baseline approaches. In addition, by varying the learning settings of the RAN-AI entity, we investigate the impact of the state space and the relative cost of acquiring network data that are necessary for the implementation of RL.
From Cell Towers to Satellites: A 2040 Blueprint for Urban-Grade Direct-to-Device Mobile Networks
In 2023, satellite and mobile networks crossed a historic threshold: standard smartphones, using unmodified 3GPP protocols, connected directly to low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites. This first wave of direct-to-device (D2D) demonstrations validated the physical feasibility of satellite-based mobile access. However, these systems remain fallback-grade--rural-only, bandwidth-limited, and fully dependent on Earth-based mobile cores for identity, session, and policy control. This paper asks a more ambitious question: Can a complete mobile network, including radio access, core functions, traffic routing, and content delivery, operate entirely from orbit? And can it deliver sustained, urban-grade service in the world's densest cities? We present the first end-to-end system architecture for a fully orbital telco, integrating electronically steered phased arrays with 1000-beam capacity, space-based deployment of 5G core functions (UPF, AMF), and inter-satellite laser mesh backhaul. We analyze spectral efficiency, beam capacity, and link budgets under dense urban conditions, accounting for path loss, Doppler, and multipath. Simulations show that rooftop and line-of-sight users can sustain 64-QAM throughput, while street-level access is feasible with relay or assisted beam modes. The paper outlines the remaining constraints, power, thermal dissipation, compute radiation hardening, and regulatory models, and demonstrates that these are engineering bottlenecks, not physical limits. Finally, we propose a staged 15-year roadmap from today's fallback D2D systems to autonomous orbital overlays delivering 50-100 Mbps to handhelds in megacities, with zero reliance on terrestrial infrastructure.
Digital Twin-Assisted Explainable AI for Robust Beam Prediction in mmWave MIMO Systems
Khan, Nasir, Abdallah, Asmaa, Celik, Abdulkadir, Eltawil, Ahmed M., Coleri, Sinem
In line with the AI-native 6G vision, explainability and robustness are crucial for building trust and ensuring reliable performance in millimeter-wave (mmWave) systems. Efficient beam alignment is essential for initial access, but deep learning (DL) solutions face challenges, including high data collection overhead, hardware constraints, lack of explainability, and susceptibility to adversarial attacks. This paper proposes a robust and explainable DL-based beam alignment engine (BAE) for mmWave multiple-input multiple output (MIMO) systems. The BAE uses received signal strength indicator (RSSI) measurements from wide beams to predict the best narrow beam, reducing the overhead of exhaustive beam sweeping. To overcome the challenge of real-world data collection, this work leverages a site-specific digital twin (DT) to generate synthetic channel data closely resembling real-world environments. A model refinement via transfer learning is proposed to fine-tune the pre-trained model residing in the DT with minimal real-world data, effectively bridging mismatches between the digital replica and real-world environments. To reduce beam training overhead and enhance transparency, the framework uses deep Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) to rank input features by importance, prioritizing key spatial directions and minimizing beam sweeping. It also incorporates the Deep k-nearest neighbors (DkNN) algorithm, providing a credibility metric for detecting out-of-distribution inputs and ensuring robust, transparent decision-making. Experimental results show that the proposed framework reduces real-world data needs by 70%, beam training overhead by 62%, and improves outlier detection robustness by up to 8.5x, achieving near-optimal spectral efficiency and transparent decision making compared to traditional softmax based DL models.