Distributed inference techniques can be broadly classified into data-distributed and model-distributed schemes. In data-distributed inference (DDI), each worker carries the entire Machine Learning (ML) model but processes only a subset of the data. However, feeding the data to workers results in high communication costs, especially when the data is large. An emerging paradigm is model-distributed inference (MDI), where each worker carries only a subset of ML layers. In MDI, a source device that has data processes a few layers of ML model and sends the output to a neighboring device, i.e., offloads the rest of the layers. This process ends when all layers are processed in a distributed manner. In this paper, we investigate the design and development of MDI when multiple data sources co-exist. We consider that each data source has a different importance and, hence, a priority. We formulate and solve a priority-aware model allocation optimization problem. Based on the structure of the optimal solution, we design a practical Priority-Aware Model- Distributed Inference (PA-MDI) algorithm that determines model allocation and distribution over devices by taking into account the priorities of different sources. Experiments were conducted on a real-life testbed of NVIDIA Jetson Xavier and Nano edge devices as well as in the Colosseum testbed with ResNet-50, ResNet- 56, and GPT-2 models. The experimental results show that PA-MDI performs priority-aware model allocation successfully while reducing the inference time as compared to baselines.

Reaping the benefits of multi-antenna communication systems in frequency division duplex (FDD) requires channel state information (CSI) reporting from mobile users to the base station (BS). Over the last decades, the amount of CSI to be collected has become very challenging owing to the dramatic increase of the number of antennas at BSs. To mitigate the overhead associated with CSI reporting, compressed CSI techniques have been proposed with the idea of recovering the original CSI at the BS from its compressed version sent by the mobile users. Channel charting is an unsupervised dimensionality reduction method that consists in building a radio-environment map from CSIs. Such a method can be considered in the context of the CSI compression problem, since a chart location is, by definition, a low-dimensional representation of the CSI. In this paper, the performance of channel charting for a task-based CSI compression application is studied. A comparison of the proposed method against baselines on realistic synthetic data is proposed, showing promising results.

Botnets could autonomously infect, propagate, communicate and coordinate with other members in the botnet, enabling cybercriminals to exploit the cumulative computing and bandwidth of its bots to facilitate cybercrime. Traditional detection methods are becoming increasingly unsuitable against various network-based detection evasion methods. These techniques ultimately render signature-based fingerprinting detection infeasible and thus this research explores the application of network flow-based behavioural modelling to facilitate the binary classification of bot network activity, whereby the detection is independent of underlying communications architectures, ports, protocols and payload-based detection evasion mechanisms. A comparative evaluation of various machine learning classification methods is conducted, to precisely determine the average accuracy of each classifier on bot datasets like CTU-13, ISOT 2010 and ISCX 2014. Additionally, hyperparameter tuning using Genetic Algorithm (GA), aiming to efficiently converge to the fittest hyperparameter set for each dataset was done. The bioinspired optimisation of Random Forest (RF) with GA achieved an average accuracy of 99.85% when it was tested against the three datasets. The model was then developed into a software product. The YouTube link of the project and demo of the software developed: https://youtu.be/gNQjC91VtOI

Learning-based congestion controllers offer better adaptability compared to traditional heuristic algorithms. However, the inherent unreliability of learning techniques can cause learning-based controllers to behave poorly, creating a need for formal guarantees. While methods for formally verifying learned congestion controllers exist, these methods offer binary feedback that cannot optimize the controller toward better behavior. We improve this state-of-the-art via C3, a new learning framework for congestion control that integrates the concept of formal certification in the learning loop. C3 uses an abstract interpreter that can produce robustness and performance certificates to guide the training process, rewarding models that are robust and performant even on worst-case inputs. Our evaluation demonstrates that unlike state-of-the-art learned controllers, C3-trained controllers provide both adaptability and worst-case reliability across a range of network conditions.

Motivated by applications in service systems, we consider queueing systems where each customer must be handled by a server with the right skill set. We focus on optimizing the routing of customers to servers in order to maximize the total payoff of customer--server matches. In addition, customer--server dependent payoff parameters are assumed to be unknown a priori. We construct a machine learning algorithm that adaptively learns the payoff parameters while maximizing the total payoff and prove that it achieves polylogarithmic regret. Moreover, we show that the algorithm is asymptotically optimal up to logarithmic terms by deriving a regret lower bound. The algorithm leverages the basic feasible solutions of a static linear program as the action space. The regret analysis overcomes the complex interplay between queueing and learning by analyzing the convergence of the queue length process to its stationary behavior. We also demonstrate the performance of the algorithm numerically, and have included an experiment with time-varying parameters highlighting the potential of the algorithm in non-static environments.

Pervasive and high-accuracy positioning has become increasingly important as a fundamental enabler for intelligent connected devices in mobile networks. Nevertheless, current wireless networks heavily rely on pure model-driven techniques to achieve positioning functionality, often succumbing to performance deterioration due to hardware impairments in practical scenarios. Here we reformulate the direction finding or angle-of-arrival (AoA) estimation problem as an image recovery task of the spatial spectrum and propose a new model-driven deep neural network (MoD-DNN) framework. The proposed MoD-DNN scheme comprises three modules: a multi-task autoencoder-based beamformer, a coarray spectrum generation module, and a model-driven deep learning-based spatial spectrum reconstruction module. Our technique enables automatic calibration of angular-dependent phase error thereby enhancing the resilience of direction-finding precision against realistic system non-idealities. We validate the proposed scheme both using numerical simulations and field tests. The results show that the proposed MoD-DNN framework enables effective spectrum calibration and accurate AoA estimation. To the best of our knowledge, this study marks the first successful demonstration of hybrid data-and-model-driven direction finding utilizing readily available commodity 5G gNodeB.

Cable broadband networks are one of the few "last-mile" broadband technologies widely available in the U.S. Unfortunately, they have poor reliability after decades of deployment. The cable industry proposed a framework called Proactive Network Maintenance (PNM) to diagnose the cable networks. However, there is little public knowledge or systematic study on how to use these data to detect and localize cable network problems. Existing tools in the public domain have prohibitive high false-positive rates. In this paper, we propose CableMon, the first public-domain system that applies machine learning techniques to PNM data to improve the reliability of cable broadband networks. CableMon tackles two key challenges faced by cable ISPs: accurately detecting failures, and distinguishing whether a failure occurs within a network or at a subscriber's premise. CableMon uses statistical models to generate features from time series data and uses customer trouble tickets as hints to infer abnormal/failure thresholds for these generated features. Further, CableMon employs an unsupervised learning model to group cable devices sharing similar anomalous patterns and effectively identify impairments that occur inside a cable network and impairments occur at a subscriber's premise, as these two different faults require different types of technical personnel to repair them. We use eight months of PNM data and customer trouble tickets from an ISP and experimental deployment to evaluate CableMon's performance. Our evaluation results show that CableMon can effectively detect and distinguish failures from PNM data and outperforms existing public-domain tools.

AI becomes increasingly vital for telecom industry, as the burgeoning complexity of upcoming mobile communication networks places immense pressure on network operators. While there is a growing consensus that intelligent network self-driving holds the key, it heavily relies on expert experience and knowledge extracted from network data. In an effort to facilitate convenient analytics and utilization of wireless big data, we introduce the concept of knowledge graphs into the field of mobile networks, giving rise to what we term as wireless data knowledge graphs (WDKGs). However, the heterogeneous and dynamic nature of communication networks renders manual WDKG construction both prohibitively costly and error-prone, presenting a fundamental challenge. In this context, we propose an unsupervised data-and-model driven graph structure learning (DMGSL) framework, aimed at automating WDKG refinement and updating. Tackling WDKG heterogeneity involves stratifying the network into homogeneous layers and refining it at a finer granularity. Furthermore, to capture WDKG dynamics effectively, we segment the network into static snapshots based on the coherence time and harness the power of recurrent neural networks to incorporate historical information. Extensive experiments conducted on the established WDKG demonstrate the superiority of the DMGSL over the baselines, particularly in terms of node classification accuracy.

In modern wireless network architectures, such as Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN), the operation of the radio access network (RAN) is managed by applications, or apps for short, deployed at intelligent controllers. These apps are selected from a given catalog based on current contextual information. For instance, a scheduling app may be selected on the basis of current traffic and network conditions. Once an app is chosen and run, it is no longer possible to directly test the key performance indicators (KPIs) that would have been obtained with another app. In other words, we can never simultaneously observe both the actual KPI, obtained by the selected app, and the counterfactual KPI, which would have been attained with another app, for the same network condition, making individual-level counterfactual KPIs analysis particularly challenging. This what-if analysis, however, would be valuable to monitor and optimize the network operation, e.g., to identify suboptimal app selection strategies. This paper addresses the problem of estimating the values of KPIs that would have been obtained if a different app had been implemented by the RAN. To this end, we propose a conformal-prediction-based counterfactual analysis method for wireless systems that provides reliable error bars for the estimated KPIs, despite the inherent covariate shift between logged and test data. Experimental results for medium access control-layer apps and for physical-layer apps demonstrate the merits of the proposed method.

Evolving next-generation mobile networks is designed to provide ubiquitous coverage and networked sensing. With utility of multi-view sensing and multi-node joint transmission, cell-free is a promising technique to realize this prospect. This paper aims to tackle the problem of access point (AP) deployment in cell-free systems to balance the sensing accuracy and user rate. By merging the D-optimality with Euclidean criterion, a novel integrated metric is proposed to be the objective function for both max-sum and max-min problems, which respectively guarantee the overall and lowest performance in multi-user communication and target tracking scenario. To solve the corresponding high dimensional non-convex multi-objective problem, the Soft actor-critic (SAC) is utilized to avoid risk of local optimal result. Numerical results demonstrate that proposed SAC-based APs deployment method achieves $20\%$ of overall performance and $120\%$ of lowest performance.