Grant-free (GF) random access has emerged as a promising solution for massive machine-type communications (mMTC). However, the non-uniform distribution of user equipment (UE) and real-world limitations on base station (BS) placement lead to random access imbalance among BSs and heavy access collisions in some cells. To this end, an unsupervised learning-based location-aware random access (ULL-RA) scheme is proposed in this paper to select the accessing BSs and channels simultaneously. Specifically, ULL-RA adopts a deep learning model named ULL-RA-Net, comprising parameter-shared feedforward neural network (FFNN) layers that enable each active UE to select a BS and an access channel to maximize the achievable rate. The model is trained in an unsupervised manner to maximize a designed differentiable objective, mapping UE locations to channel access probabilities. Notably, we propose a rate-collision loss tailored to the model architecture, which combines a collision-free channel capacity term and a sparsity-inducing collision penalty term to reduce access collisions and enhance the achievable rate. Experimental results using the Deep-MIMO dataset indicate that ULL-RA outperforms conventional GF access in both the average achievable rate and the access success rate.

Federated learning (FL) is a promising paradigm for multiple devices to cooperatively train a model. When applied in wireless networks, two issues consistently affect the performance of FL, i.e., data heterogeneity of devices and limited bandwidth. Many papers have investigated device scheduling strategies considering the two issues. However, most of them recognize data heterogeneity as a property of individual devices. In this paper, we prove that the convergence speed of FL is affected by the sum of device-level and sample-level collective gradient divergence (CGD). Device-level CGD refers to the gradient divergence of the scheduled device group, instead of the sum of the individual device divergence. Sample-level CGD is statistically upper bounded by sampling variance, which is inversely proportional to the total number of samples scheduled for local update. To derive a tractable form of the device-level CGD, we further consider classification tasks and transform it into the weighted earth moving distance (WEMD) between the group distribution and the global distribution. Then we propose FedCGD algorithm to minimize the sum of sampling variance and WEMD on classification tasks by device scheduling and bandwidth allocation, within polynomial time. Simulation shows that the proposed strategy increases classification accuracy on the CIFAR-10 dataset by up to 4.2% while scheduling 41.8% fewer devices, and flexibly switches between reducing WEMD and reducing sampling variance.

Federated edge learning (FEEL) enables collaborative model training across distributed clients over wireless networks without exposing raw data. While most existing studies assume static datasets, in real-world scenarios, clients may continuously collect data with time-varying and non-independent and identically distributed (non-i.i.d.) characteristics. A critical challenge is how to adapt models in a timely yet efficient manner to such evolving data. In this paper, we propose FedTeddi, a temporal-drift-and-divergence-aware scheduling algorithm that facilitates fast convergence of FEEL under dynamic data evolution and communication resource limits. We first quantify the temporal dynamics and non-i.i.d. characteristics of data using temporal drift and collective divergence, respectively, and represent them as the Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) of class distributions for classification tasks. We then propose a novel optimization objective and develop a joint scheduling and bandwidth allocation algorithm, enabling the FEEL system to learn from new data quickly without forgetting previous knowledge. Experimental results show that our algorithm achieves higher test accuracy and faster convergence compared to benchmark methods, improving the rate of convergence by 58.4% on CIFAR10 and 49.2% on CIFAR-100 compared to random scheduling.

Collaborative perception (CP) is emerging as a promising solution to the inherent limitations of stand-alone intelligence. However, current wireless communication systems are unable to support feature-level and raw-level collaborative algorithms due to their enormous bandwidth demands. In this paper, we propose DiffCP, a novel CP paradigm that utilizes a diffusion model to efficiently compress the sensing information of collaborators. By incorporating both geometric and semantic conditions into the generative model, DiffCP enables feature-level collaboration with an ultra-low communication cost, advancing the practical implementation of CP systems. This paradigm can be seamlessly integrated into existing CP algorithms to enhance a wide range of downstream tasks. Through extensive experimentation, we investigate the tradeoffs between communication, computation, and performance. Numerical results demonstrate that DiffCP can significantly reduce communication costs by 14.5-fold while maintaining the same performance as the state-of-the-art algorithm.

Although semantic communication (SC) has shown its potential in efficiently transmitting multimodal data such as texts, speeches and images, SC for videos has focused primarily on pixel-level reconstruction. However, these SC systems may be suboptimal for downstream intelligent tasks. Moreover, SC systems without pixel-level video reconstruction present advantages by achieving higher bandwidth efficiency and real-time performance of various intelligent tasks. The difficulty in such system design lies in the extraction of task-related compact semantic representations and their accurate delivery over noisy channels. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end SC system, named VideoQA-SC for video question answering (VideoQA) tasks. Our goal is to accomplish VideoQA tasks directly based on video semantics over noisy or fading wireless channels, bypassing the need for video reconstruction at the receiver. To this end, we develop a spatiotemporal semantic encoder for effective video semantic extraction, and a learning-based bandwidth-adaptive deep joint source-channel coding (DJSCC) scheme for efficient and robust video semantic transmission. Experiments demonstrate that VideoQA-SC outperforms traditional and advanced DJSCC-based SC systems that rely on video reconstruction at the receiver under a wide range of channel conditions and bandwidth constraints. In particular, when the signal-to-noise ratio is low, VideoQA-SC can improve the answer accuracy by 5.17% while saving almost 99.5% of the bandwidth at the same time, compared with the advanced DJSCC-based SC system. Our results show the great potential of SC system design for video applications.

With the arrival of 6G, the Internet of Things (IoT) traffic is becoming more and more complex and diverse. To meet the diverse service requirements of IoT devices, massive machine-type communications (mMTC) becomes a typical scenario, and more recently, grant-free random access (GF-RA) presents a promising direction due to its low signaling overhead. However, existing GF-RA research primarily focuses on improving the accuracy of user detection and data recovery, without considering the heterogeneity of traffic. In this paper, we investigate a non-orthogonal GF-RA scenario where two distinct types of traffic coexist: event-triggered traffic with alarm devices (ADs), and status update traffic with monitor devices (MDs). The goal is to simultaneously achieve high detection success rates for ADs and high information timeliness for MDs. First, we analyze the age-based random access scheme and optimize the access parameters to minimize the average age of information (AoI) of MDs. Then, we design an age-based prior information aided autoencoder (A-PIAAE) to jointly detect active devices, together with learned pilots used in GF-RA to reduce interference between non-orthogonal pilots. In the decoder, an Age-based Learned Iterative Shrinkage Thresholding Algorithm (LISTA-AGE) utilizing the AoI of MDs as the prior information is proposed to enhance active user detection. Theoretical analysis is provided to demonstrate the proposed A-PIAAE has better convergence performance. Experiments demonstrate the advantage of the proposed method in reducing the average AoI of MDs and improving the successful detection rate of ADs.

This paper studies an internet of things (IoT) network where a fusion center relies on multi-view and correlated information generated by multiple sources to monitor various regions. Each region possesses hard age of correlated information (AoCI) constraints for information update, and accordingly we propose a scheduling policy to satisfy such needs and minimize the required wireless resources. We first approximate the problem to a dual bin-packing problem. Secondly, efficient scheduling policies are identified when the age constraints possess special mathematical properties, where the number of channels at most required is analyzed. Optimality conditions of the proposed policies are presented. For general constraints, a two-step grouping algorithm for multi-view (TGAM) is proposed to establish scheduling policies. Under TGAM, the constraints are mapped into a combination of the special constraints. To quickly identify an optimized mapping from a vast solution space, TGAM heuristically groups the regions according to their constraints and then searches for the optimal mapping for each group. Numerical results demonstrate that, compared to a derived lower bound, the proposed TGAM requires only 1.07% more channels. Additionally, the number of regions that can be served by TGAM is significantly larger than the state-of-the art algorithm, given the number of channels.

Diffusion models have been extensively utilized in AI-generated content (AIGC) in recent years, thanks to the superior generation capabilities. Combining with semantic communications, diffusion models are used for tasks such as denoising, data reconstruction, and content generation. However, existing diffusion-based generative models do not consider the stringent bandwidth limitation, which limits its application in wireless communication. This paper introduces a diffusion-driven semantic communication framework with advanced VAE-based compression for bandwidth-constrained generative model. Our designed architecture utilizes the diffusion model, where the signal transmission process through the wireless channel acts as the forward process in diffusion. To reduce bandwidth requirements, we incorporate a downsampling module and a paired upsampling module based on a variational auto-encoder with reparameterization at the receiver to ensure that the recovered features conform to the Gaussian distribution. Furthermore, we derive the loss function for our proposed system and evaluate its performance through comprehensive experiments. Our experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in pixel-level metrics such as peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and semantic metrics like learned perceptual image patch similarity (LPIPS). These enhancements are more profound regarding the compression rates and SNR compared to deep joint source-channel coding (DJSCC).

Leveraging the computing and sensing capabilities of vehicles, vehicular federated learning (VFL) has been applied to edge training for connected vehicles. The dynamic and inter-connected nature of vehicular networks presents unique opportunities to harness direct vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, enhancing VFL training efficiency. In this paper, we formulate a stochastic optimization problem to optimize the VFL training performance, considering the energy constraints and mobility of vehicles, and propose a V2V-enhanced dynamic scheduling (VEDS) algorithm to solve it. The model aggregation requirements of VFL and the limited transmission time due to mobility result in a stepwise objective function, which presents challenges in solving the problem. We thus propose a derivative-based drift-plus-penalty method to convert the long-term stochastic optimization problem to an online mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem, and provide a theoretical analysis to bound the performance gap between the online solution and the offline optimal solution. Further analysis of the scheduling priority reduces the original problem into a set of convex optimization problems, which are efficiently solved using the interior-point method. Experimental results demonstrate that compared with the state-of-the-art benchmarks, the proposed algorithm enhances the image classification accuracy on the CIFAR-10 dataset by 4.20% and reduces the average displacement errors on the Argoverse trajectory prediction dataset by 9.82%.

Federated learning (FL) is a promising approach to enable the future Internet of vehicles consisting of intelligent connected vehicles (ICVs) with powerful sensing, computing and communication capabilities. We consider a base station (BS) coordinating nearby ICVs to train a neural network in a collaborative yet distributed manner, in order to limit data traffic and privacy leakage. However, due to the mobility of vehicles, the connections between the BS and ICVs are short-lived, which affects the resource utilization of ICVs, and thus, the convergence speed of the training process. In this paper, we propose an accelerated FL-ICV framework, by optimizing the duration of each training round and the number of local iterations, for better convergence performance of FL. We propose a mobility-aware optimization algorithm called MOB-FL, which aims at maximizing the resource utilization of ICVs under short-lived wireless connections, so as to increase the convergence speed. Simulation results based on the beam selection and the trajectory prediction tasks verify the effectiveness of the proposed solution.

Powered by deep learning, semantic communication is an intelligent communication paradigm, aiming to transmit useful information in the semantic domain. In most existing work, robust semantic features can be learned against wireless channel degradation, and directly transmitted in an analog fashion. However, analog semantic communication raises various challenges to the existing system from hardware/protocol to encryption issues. In this paper, we propose a novel non-linear quantization module to efficiently quantify semantic features. A sparse scaling vector is further incorporated to reduce the dimension of transmitted semantic features. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed nonlinear quantization achieves better performance than the linear quantization method, and the performance of the digital system achieves better performance.

Vehicle-to-Everything network enabled connected autonomous driving has been regarded as a promising solution to realize advanced autonomous driving. However, non-ideal factors in wireless communication and localization severely limit the development. In this work, we propose MoRFF, a Mobility-robust Regional Features Fusion framework for multi-terminal multi-view object detection to realize wireless cooperative perception. To conquer the limited communication bandwidth, stochastic latency, and inaccurate positioning caused by wireless links and mobility, our method features a universal two-stage detection paradigm with deep metric learning, matching the same object from different viewpoints directly on the regional feature maps, and thus helps to greatly reduce the data size to transmit. Our proposed architecture only requires image data without any additional information such as geo-positions, sensor poses, or point clouds from LiDAR, and thus conducive to the promotion of connected autonomous driving. Experimental evaluations show that the proposed algorithm successfully benefits from other viewpoints, increases the detection precision of barely visible objects by 13.42%, and achieves tenfold promotion in communication bandwidth requirements. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm is robust under various communication delays.

We consider collaborative perception (CP) systems where a fusion center monitors various regions by multiple sources. The center has different age of information (AoI) constraints for different regions. Multi-view sensing data for a region generated by sources can be fused by the center for a reliable representation of the region. To ensure accurate perception, differences between generation time of asynchronous status updates for CP fusion should not exceed a certain threshold. An algorithm named scheduling for CP with asynchronous status updates (SCPA) is proposed to minimize the number of required channels and subject to AoI constraints with asynchronous status updates. SCPA first identifies a set of sources that can satisfy the constraints with minimum updating rates. It then chooses scheduling intervals and offsets for the sources such that the number of required channels is optimized. According to numerical results, the number of channels required by SCPA can reach only 12% more than a derived lower bound.

Cloud gaming is promising yet poses big challenges to wireless communications, due to its stringent requirements for low response delay and high reliability. In this paper, we propose a predictive frame transmission scheme (PFT) in cloud gaming, to predict and pre-transmit future game frames to users. The PFT scheme takes full advantage of good network states to transmit the predicted frames, which consequently reduces the frame loss rate (FLR) against the network dynamics. We first model a FLR minimization problem in the single-user system with the PFT scheme, which allocates packets to carry the predicted frames. The upper and lower bounds of FLR are derived, respectively. Then, we study the system with Markovian property, and derive the optimal packet allocation policy via Markov Decision Process. A near-optimal policy is also proposed with low-complexity. The PFT scheme is further extended to the multi-server multi-user scenario, in which the users are adaptively scheduled to multiple servers based on their different requirements. Finally, we extend the policy to fit the scenario without direct knowledge of the network state by exploiting the packet loss rate estimation. We set up a practical testbed to evaluate the proposed PFT scheme, showing the capability of decreasing the mean FLR from$7\%$to$1\%$.

Cooperative perception of connected vehicles comes to the rescue when the field of view restricts stand-alone intelligence.While raw-level cooperative perception preserves most information to guarantee accuracy, it is demanding in communication bandwidth and computation power.Therefore, it is important to schedule the most beneficial vehicle to share its sensor in terms of supplementary view and stable network connection.In this paper, we present a model of raw-level cooperative perception and formulate the energy minimization problem of sensor sharing scheduling as a variant of the Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem.Specifically, volatility of the neighboring vehicles, heterogeneity of V2X channels, and the time-varying traffic context are taken into consideration.Then we propose an online learning-based algorithm with logarithmic performance loss, achieving a decent trade-off between exploration and exploitation.Simulation results under different scenarios indicate that the proposed algorithm quickly learns to schedule the optimal cooperative vehicle and saves more energy as compared to baseline algorithms.

Federated edge learning (FEEL) is a promising distributed machine learning (ML) framework to drive edge intelligence applications. However, due to the dynamic wireless environments and the resource limitations of edge devices, communication becomes a major bottleneck. In this work, we propose time-correlated sparsification with hybrid aggregation (TCS-H) for communication-efficient FEEL, which exploits jointly the power of model compression and over-the-air computation. By exploiting the temporal correlations among model parameters, we construct a global sparsification mask, which is identical across devices, and thus enables efficient model aggregation over-the-air. Each device further constructs a local sparse vector to explore its own important parameters, which are aggregated via digital communication with orthogonal multiple access. We further design device scheduling and power allocation algorithms for TCS-H. Experiment results show that, under limited communication resources, TCS-H can achieve significantly higher accuracy compared to the conventional top-K sparsification with orthogonal model aggregation, with both i.i.d. and non-i.i.d. data distributions.

Machine learning and wireless communication technologies are jointly facilitating an intelligent edge, where federated edge learning (FEEL) is emerging as a promising training framework. As wireless devices involved in FEEL are resource limited in terms of communication bandwidth, computing power and battery capacity, it is important to carefully schedule them to optimize the training performance. In this work, we consider an over-the-air FEEL system with analog gradient aggregation, and propose an energy-aware dynamic device scheduling algorithm to optimize the training performance within the energy constraints of devices, where both communication energy for gradient aggregation and computation energy for local training are considered. The consideration of computation energy makes dynamic scheduling challenging, as devices are scheduled before local training, but the communication energy for over-the-air aggregation depends on the$l_{2}$-norm of local gradient, which is known only after local training. We thus incorporate estimation methods into scheduling to predict the gradient norm. Taking the estimation error into account, we characterize the performance gap between the proposed algorithm and its offline counterpart. Experimental results show that, under a highly unbalanced local data distribution, the proposed algorithm can increase the accuracy by 4.9% on CIFAR-10 dataset compared with the myopic benchmark, while satisfying the energy constraints.

In a vehicular edge computing (VEC) system, vehicles can share their surplus computation resources to provide cloud computing services. The highly dynamic environment of the vehicular network makes it challenging to guarantee the task offloading delay. To this end, we introduce task replication to the VEC system, where the replicas of a task are offloaded to multiple vehicles at the same time, and the task is completed upon the first response among replicas. First, the impact of the number of task replicas on the offloading delay is characterized, and the optimal number of task replicas is approximated in closed-form. Based on the analytical result, we design a learning-based task replication algorithm (LTRA) with combinatorial multi-armed bandit theory, which works in a distributed manner and can automatically adapt itself to the dynamics of the VEC system. A realistic traffic scenario is used to evaluate the delay performance of the proposed algorithm. Results show that, under our simulation settings, LTRA with an optimized number of task replicas can reduce the average offloading delay by over 30% compared to the benchmark without task replication, and at the same time can improve the task completion ratio from 97% to 99.6%.

Federated learning (FL) enables workers to learn a model collaboratively by using their local data, with the help of a parameter server (PS) for global model aggregation. The high communication cost for periodic model updates and the nonindependent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) data become major bottlenecks for FL. In this work, we consider analog aggregation to scale down the communication cost with respect to the number of workers, and introduce data redundancy to the system to deal with non-i.i.d. data. We propose an online energy-aware dynamic worker scheduling policy, which maximizes the average number of workers scheduled for gradient update at each iteration under a long-term energy constraint, and analyze its performance based on Lyapunov optimization. Experiments using MNIST dataset show that, for non-i.i.d. data, doubling data storage can improve the accuracy by 9.8% under a stringent energy budget, while the proposed policy can achieve close-to-optimal accuracy without violating the energy constraint.

Coded distributed computing framework enables large-scale machine learning (ML) models to be trained efficiently in a distributed manner, while mitigating the straggler effect. In this work, we consider a multi-task assignment problem in a coded distributed computing system, where multiple masters, each with a different matrix multiplication task, assign computation tasks to workers with heterogeneous computing capabilities. Both dedicated and probabilistic worker assignment models are considered, with the objective of minimizing the average completion time of all tasks. For dedicated worker assignment, greedy algorithms are proposed and the corresponding optimal load allocation is derived based on the Lagrange multiplier method. For probabilistic assignment, successive convex approximation method is used to solve the non-convex optimization problem. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms reduce the completion time by 80% over uncoded scheme, and 49% over an unbalanced coded scheme.

In a vehicular edge computing (VEC) system, some vehicles with surplus computing resources can provide computation task offloading opportunities for other vehicles or pedestrians. However, the vehicular network is highly dynamic, with fast varying channel states and computation loads. These dynamics are difficult to model or to predict, but they have a major impact on the quality of service (QoS) of task offloading, including delay performance and service reliability. Meanwhile, the computing resources in VEC are often redundant due to the high density of vehicles. To improve the QoS of VEC and exploit the abundant computing resources on vehicles, we propose a learning-based task replication algorithm (LTRA) based on combinatorial multi-armed bandit (CMAB) theory, in order to minimize the average offloading delay. LTRA enables multiple vehicles to process the replicas of the same task simultaneously, and vehicles that require computing services can learn the delay performance of other vehicles while offloading tasks. We take the occurrence time of vehicles into consideration, and redesign the utility function of existing CMAB algorithm, so that LTRA can adapt to the time varying network topology of VEC. We use a realistic highway scenario to evaluate the delay performance and service reliability of LTRA through simulations, and show that compared with single task offloading, LTRA can improve the task completion ratio with deadline 0.6s from 80% to 98%.

Vehicular cloud computing (VCC) is proposed to effectively utilize and share the computing and storage resources on vehicles. However, due to the mobility of vehicles, the network topology, the wireless channel states and the available computing resources vary rapidly and are difficult to predict. In this work, we develop a learning-based task offloading framework using the multi-armed bandit (MAB) theory, which enables vehicles to learn the potential task offloading performance of its neighboring vehicles with excessive computing resources, namely service vehicles (SeVs), and minimizes the average offloading delay. We propose an adaptive volatile upper confidence bound (AVUCB) algorithm and augment it with load-awareness and occurrence-awareness, by redesigning the utility function of the classic MAB algorithms. The proposed AVUCB algorithm can effectively adapt to the dynamic vehicular environment, balance the tradeoff between exploration and exploitation in the learning process, and converge fast to the optimal SeV with theoretical performance guarantee. Simulations under both synthetic scenario and a realistic highway scenario are carried out, showing that the proposed algorithm achieves close-to- optimal delay performance.

Merging mobile edge computing with the dense deployment of small cell base stations promises enormous benefits such as a real proximity, ultra-low latency access to cloud functionalities. However, the envisioned integration creates many new challenges and one of the most significant is mobility management, which is becoming a key bottleneck to the overall system performance. Simply applying existing solutions leads to poor performance due to the highly overlapped coverage areas of multiple base stations in the proximity of the user and the co-provisioning of radio access and computing services. In this paper, we develop a novel user-centric mobility management scheme, leveraging Lyapunov optimization and multi-armed bandits theories, in order to maximize the edge computation performance for the user while keeping the user's communication energy consumption below a constraint. The proposed scheme effectively handles the uncertainties present at multiple levels in the system and provides both short-term and long-term performance guarantee. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme can significantly improve the computation performance (compared to state of the art) while satisfying the communication energy constraint.

Merging mobile edge computing (MEC) functionality with the dense deployment of base stations (BSs) provides enormous benefits such as a real proximity, low latency access to computing resources. However, the envisioned integration creates many new challenges, among which mobility management (MM) is a critical one. Simply applying existing radio access-oriented MM schemes leads to poor performance mainly due to the co-provisioning of radio access and computing services of the MEC-enabled BSs. In this paper, we develop a novel user-centric energy-aware mobility management (EMM) scheme, in order to optimize the delay due to both radio access and computation, under the long-term energy consumption constraint of the user. Based on Lyapunov optimization and multi-armed bandit theories, EMM works in an online fashion without future system state information, and effectively handles the imperfect system state information. Theoretical analysis explicitly takes radio handover and computation migration cost into consideration and proves a bounded deviation on both the delay performance and energy consumption compared with the oracle solution with exact and complete future system information. The proposed algorithm also effectively handles the scenario in which candidate BSs randomly switch ON/OFF during the offloading process of a task. Simulations show that the proposed algorithms can achieve close-to-optimal delay performance while satisfying the user energy consumption constraint.

To provide the paradigm shift of green cellular communications, Hyper Cellular Architecture (HCA), has been proposed, in which the common control functionalities are decoupled from the data service functionalities at base station (BS) level so that the traffic BSs can be more adaptive to the temporal and spatial traffic fluctuations. In this paper, we develop a system level simulator (SLS) for HCA to evaluate the HCA performance under temporal and spatial traffic fluctuations. The SLS enjoys low complexity, open interface and completed functions through the carefully tuned modeling on long-term large-scale traffic model, the separation architecture and the resource allocation strategies. Simulation results show that even with some basic BS sleeping algorithms, HCA can achieve up to 45% energy efficiency (EE) gain over conventional cellular architecture with macro BSs only or heterogeneous network during the low traffic period, and about 36% EE gain on average for a typical daily traffic pattern.