Telecommunications
SoftBank to help fund and lead Trump-backed Stargate AI project, a 500 billion venture
SoftBank Group, OpenAI and Oracle are forming a half-a-trillion dollar venture in the United States that will develop artificial intelligence infrastructure with warp-speed-type support from the U.S. government. SoftBank Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son will be the chairman of Stargate, the new company being formed, while SoftBank will be responsible for financial management of the venture. Arm Holdings, a Nasdaq-listed subsidiary of SoftBank, will provide chip technology. Microsoft, Nvidia and Oracle will also be key vendors.
Offline Critic-Guided Diffusion Policy for Multi-User Delay-Constrained Scheduling
Li, Zhuoran, Chen, Ruishuo, Zhong, Hai, Huang, Longbo
Effective multi-user delay-constrained scheduling is crucial in various real-world applications, such as instant messaging, live streaming, and data center management. In these scenarios, schedulers must make real-time decisions to satisfy both delay and resource constraints without prior knowledge of system dynamics, which are often time-varying and challenging to estimate. Current learning-based methods typically require interactions with actual systems during the training stage, which can be difficult or impractical, as it is capable of significantly degrading system performance and incurring substantial service costs. To address these challenges, we propose a novel offline reinforcement learning-based algorithm, named \underline{S}cheduling By \underline{O}ffline Learning with \underline{C}ritic Guidance and \underline{D}iffusion Generation (SOCD), to learn efficient scheduling policies purely from pre-collected \emph{offline data}. SOCD innovatively employs a diffusion-based policy network, complemented by a sampling-free critic network for policy guidance. By integrating the Lagrangian multiplier optimization into the offline reinforcement learning, SOCD effectively trains high-quality constraint-aware policies exclusively from available datasets, eliminating the need for online interactions with the system. Experimental results demonstrate that SOCD is resilient to various system dynamics, including partially observable and large-scale environments, and delivers superior performance compared to existing methods.
Data-and-Semantic Dual-Driven Spectrum Map Construction for 6G Spectrum Management
Liu, Jiayu, Zhou, Fuhui, Liu, Xiaodong, Ding, Rui, Yuan, Lu, Wu, Qihui
Spectrum maps reflect the utilization and distribution of spectrum resources in the electromagnetic environment, serving as an effective approach to support spectrum management. However, the construction of spectrum maps in urban environments is challenging because of high-density connection and complex terrain. Moreover, the existing spectrum map construction methods are typically applied to a fixed frequency, which cannot cover the entire frequency band. To address the aforementioned challenges, a UNet-based data-and-semantic dual-driven method is proposed by introducing the semantic knowledge of binary city maps and binary sampling location maps to enhance the accuracy of spectrum map construction in complex urban environments with dense communications. Moreover, a joint frequency-space reasoning model is exploited to capture the correlation of spectrum data in terms of space and frequency, enabling the realization of complete spectrum map construction without sampling all frequencies of spectrum data. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method can infer the spectrum utilization status of missing frequencies and improve the completeness of the spectrum map construction. Furthermore, the accuracy of spectrum map construction achieved by the proposed data-and-semantic dual-driven method outperforms the benchmark schemes, especially in scenarios with low sampling density.
Personalized Federated Learning for Cellular VR: Online Learning and Dynamic Caching
Tharakan, Krishnendu S., Dahrouj, Hayssam, Kouzayha, Nour, ElSawy, Hesham, Al-Naffouri, Tareq Y.
Delivering an immersive experience to virtual reality (VR) users through wireless connectivity offers the freedom to engage from anywhere at any time. Nevertheless, it is challenging to ensure seamless wireless connectivity that delivers real-time and high-quality videos to the VR users. This paper proposes a field of view (FoV) aware caching for mobile edge computing (MEC)-enabled wireless VR network. In particular, the FoV of each VR user is cached/prefetched at the base stations (BSs) based on the caching strategies tailored to each BS. Specifically, decentralized and personalized federated learning (DP-FL) based caching strategies with guarantees are presented. Considering VR systems composed of multiple VR devices and BSs, a DP-FL caching algorithm is implemented at each BS to personalize content delivery for VR users. The utilized DP-FL algorithm guarantees a probably approximately correct (PAC) bound on the conditional average cache hit. Further, to reduce the cost of communicating gradients, one-bit quantization of the stochastic gradient descent (OBSGD) is proposed, and a convergence guarantee of $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{T})$ is obtained for the proposed algorithm, where $T$ is the number of iterations. Additionally, to better account for the wireless channel dynamics, the FoVs are grouped into multicast or unicast groups based on the number of requesting VR users. The performance of the proposed DP-FL algorithm is validated through realistic VR head-tracking dataset, and the proposed algorithm is shown to have better performance in terms of average delay and cache hit as compared to baseline algorithms.
A transformer-based deep q learning approach for dynamic load balancing in software-defined networks
Owusu, Evans Tetteh, Agyekum, Kwame Agyemang-Prempeh, Benneh, Marinah, Ayorna, Pius, Agyemang, Justice Owusu, Colley, George Nii Martey, Gazde, James Dzisi
This study proposes a novel approach for dynamic load balancing in Software-Defined Networks (SDNs) using a Transformer-based Deep Q-Network (DQN). Traditional load balancing mechanisms, such as Round Robin (RR) and Weighted Round Robin (WRR), are static and often struggle to adapt to fluctuating traffic conditions, leading to inefficiencies in network performance. In contrast, SDNs offer centralized control and flexibility, providing an ideal platform for implementing machine learning-driven optimization strategies. The core of this research combines a Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT) for accurate traffic prediction with a DQN model to perform real-time dynamic load balancing. The TFT model predicts future traffic loads, which the DQN uses as input, allowing it to make intelligent routing decisions that optimize throughput, minimize latency, and reduce packet loss. The proposed model was tested against RR and WRR in simulated environments with varying data rates, and the results demonstrate significant improvements in network performance. For the 500MB data rate, the DQN model achieved an average throughput of 0.275 compared to 0.202 and 0.205 for RR and WRR, respectively. Additionally, the DQN recorded lower average latency and packet loss. In the 1000MB simulation, the DQN model outperformed the traditional methods in throughput, latency, and packet loss, reinforcing its effectiveness in managing network loads dynamically. This research presents an important step towards enhancing network performance through the integration of machine learning models within SDNs, potentially paving the way for more adaptive, intelligent network management systems.
Harnessing Generative Pre-Trained Transformer for Datacenter Packet Trace Generation
Today, the rapid growth of applications reliant on datacenters calls for new advancements to meet the increasing traffic and computational demands. Traffic traces from datacenters are essential for further development and optimization of future datacenters. However, traces are rarely released to the public. Researchers often use simplified mathematical models that lack the depth needed to recreate intricate traffic patterns and, thus, miss optimization opportunities found in realistic traffic. In this preliminary work, we introduce DTG-GPT, a packet-level Datacenter Traffic Generator (DTG), based on the generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) architecture used by many state-of-the-art large language models. We train our model on a small set of available traffic traces from different domains and offer a simple methodology to evaluate the fidelity of the generated traces to their original counterparts. We show that DTG-GPT can synthesize novel traces that mimic the spatiotemporal patterns found in real traffic traces. We further demonstrate that DTG-GPT can generate traces for networks of different scales while maintaining fidelity. Our findings indicate the potential that, in the future, similar models to DTG-GPT will allow datacenter operators to release traffic information to the research community via trained GPT models.
Advancing Earth Observation: A Survey on AI-Powered Image Processing in Satellites
Duggan, Aidan, Andrade, Bruno, Afli, Haithem
Advancements in technology and reduction in it's cost have led to a substantial growth in the quality & quantity of imagery captured by Earth Observation (EO) satellites. This has presented a challenge to the efficacy of the traditional workflow of transmitting this imagery to Earth for processing. An approach to addressing this issue is to use pre-trained artificial intelligence models to process images on-board the satellite, but this is difficult given the constraints within a satellite's environment. This paper provides an up-to-date and thorough review of research related to image processing on-board Earth observation satellites. The significant constraints are detailed along with the latest strategies to mitigate them.
Sequence Spreading-Based Semantic Communication Under High RF Interference
Barka, Hazem, Kaddoum, Georges, Bennis, Mehdi, Alam, Md Sahabul, Au, Minh
In the evolving landscape of wireless communications, semantic communication (SemCom) has recently emerged as a 6G enabler that prioritizes the transmission of meaning and contextual relevance over conventional bit-centric metrics. However, the deployment of SemCom systems in industrial settings presents considerable challenges, such as high radio frequency interference (RFI), that can adversely affect system performance. To address this problem, in this work, we propose a novel approach based on integrating sequence spreading techniques with SemCom to enhance system robustness against such adverse conditions and enable scalable multi-user (MU) SemCom. In addition, we propose a novel signal refining network (SRN) to refine the received signal after despreading and equalization. The proposed network eliminates the need for computationally intensive end-to-end (E2E) training while improving performance metrics, achieving a 25% gain in BLEU score and a 12% increase in semantic similarity compared to E2E training using the same bandwidth.
Chat3GPP: An Open-Source Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework for 3GPP Documents
Huang, Long, Zhao, Ming, Xiao, Limin, Zhang, Xiujun, Hu, Jungang
The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) documents is key standards in global telecommunications, while posing significant challenges for engineers and researchers in the telecommunications field due to the large volume and complexity of their contents as well as the frequent updates. Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in natural language processing tasks, but their general-purpose nature limits their effectiveness in specific domains like telecommunications. To address this, we propose Chat3GPP, an open-source retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework tailored for 3GPP specifications. By combining chunking strategies, hybrid retrieval and efficient indexing methods, Chat3GPP can efficiently retrieve relevant information and generate accurate responses to user queries without requiring domain-specific fine-tuning, which is both flexible and scalable, offering significant potential for adapting to other technical standards beyond 3GPP. We evaluate Chat3GPP on two telecom-specific datasets and demonstrate its superior performance compared to existing methods, showcasing its potential for downstream tasks like protocol generation and code automation.
A Comprehensive Insights into Drones: History, Classification, Architecture, Navigation, Applications, Challenges, and Future Trends
Singh, Ruchita, Kumar, Sandeep
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as Drones, are one of 21st century most transformative technologies. Emerging first for military use, advancements in materials, electronics, and software have catapulted drones into multipurpose tools for a wide range of industries. In this paper, we have covered the history, taxonomy, architecture, navigation systems and branched activities for the same. It explores important future trends like autonomous navigation, AI integration, and obstacle avoidance systems, emphasizing how they contribute to improving the efficiency and versatility of drones. It also looks at the major challenges like technical, environmental, economic, regulatory and ethical, that limit the actual take-up of drones, as well as trends that are likely to mitigate these obstacles in the future. This work offers a structured synthesis of existing studies and perspectives that enable insights about how drones will transform agriculture, logistics, healthcare, disaster management, and other areas, while also identifying new opportunities for innovation and development.