The Second Call for Papers of the Series on Machine Learning in Communications and Networks has continued to receive a great number of high-quality papers covering various aspects of intelligent communication systems. In addition to those already published, we include in this issue 27 articles that have been submitted to the call. In the following, we provide a brief review of key contributions of

Future wireless communication networks are expected to fulfill the unprecedented performance requirements to support our highly digitized and globally data-driven society. Various technological challenges must be overcome to achieve our goal. Among many potential technologies, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) and artificial intelligence (AI) have attracted extensive attention, thereby leading

The millimeter wave (mmWave) multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems with discrete lens arrays (DLA) have received great attention due to their simple hardware implementation and excellent performance. In this work, we investigate the joint design of beam selection and digital precoding matrices for mmWave MU-MIMO systems with DLA to maximize the sum-rate subject to the transmit

Specific emitter identification (SEI) is a promising technology to discriminate the individual emitter and enhance the security of various wireless communication systems. SEI is generally based on radio frequency fingerprinting (RFF) originated from the imperfection of emitter’s hardware, which is difficult to forge. SEI is generally modeled as a classification task and deep learning (DL), which exhibits

Machine learning (ML) starts to be widely used to enhance the performance of multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) receivers. However, it is still unclear if such methods are truly competitive with respect to conventional methods in realistic scenarios and under practical constraints. In addition to enabling accurate signal reconstruction on realistic channel models, MU-MIMO receive algorithms

MU-MIMO and OFDMA are two key techniques in IEEE 802.11ax standard. Although these two techniques have been intensively studied in cellular networks, their joint optimization in Wi-Fi networks has been rarely explored as OFDMA was introduced to Wi-Fi networks for the first time in 802.11ax. The marriage of these two techniques in Wi-Fi networks creates both opportunities and challenges in the practical

This paper proposes a deep learning approach to the adaptive and sequential beamforming design problem for the initial access phase in a mmWave environment with a single-path channel. For a single-user scenario where the problem is equivalent to designing the sequence of sensing beamformers to learn the angle of arrival (AoA) of the dominant path, we propose a novel deep neural network (DNN) that designs

Channel charting is a data-driven baseband processing technique consisting in applying self-supervised machine learning techniques to channel state information (CSI), with the objective of reducing the dimension of the data and extracting the fundamental parameters governing its distribution. We introduce a novel channel charting approach based on triplets of samples. The proposed algorithm learns

We propose a Bayesian deep learning framework for model driven online sparse channel estimation task in Multi-user MIMO systems. Tools from Bayesian neural network and stochastic variational Bayesian Inference are utilized to capture aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty estimates. We treat the network prediction as an auxiliary variable to allow inference performance to be unaffected by the stage of

This paper proposes a model-driven deep learning (MDDL)-based channel estimation and feedback scheme for wideband millimeter-wave (mmWave) massive hybrid multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, where the angle-delay domain channels’ sparsity is exploited for reducing the overhead. First, we consider the uplink channel estimation for time-division duplexing systems. To reduce the uplink pilot

The (inverse) discrete Fourier transform (DFT/ IDFT) is often perceived as essential to orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. In this paper, a deep complex-valued convolutional network (DCCN) is developed to recover bits from time-domain OFDM signals without relying on any explicit DFT/IDFT. The DCCN can exploit the cyclic prefix (CP) of OFDM waveform for increased SNR by replacing

This paper considers the blind recognition of the type and the encoding parameters of channel codes from the Gaussian noisy signals. Specifically, based on the recurrent neural network (RNN), the attention mechanism, and the residual neural network (ResNet), three universal recognizers are proposed to identify the type, rate, and length of the target channel codes, with a training set generated by

Semantic communications could improve the transmission efficiency significantly by exploring the semantic information. In this paper, we make an effort to recover the transmitted speech signals in the semantic communication systems, which minimizes the error at the semantic level rather than the bit or symbol level. Particularly, we design a deep learning (DL)-enabled semantic communication system

Offloading cellular traffic via Device-to-Device communication (or D2D offloading) has been proved to be an effective way to ease the traffic burden of cellular networks. However, mobile nodes may not be willing to take part in D2D offloading without proper financial incentives since the data offloading process will incur a lot of resource consumption. Therefore, it is imminent to exploit effective

Congestion control is a fundamental mechanism for TCP protocol, which has been extensively studied in the past three decades. However, our experimental evaluations show that the state-of-art congestion control algorithms such as Cubic and BBR are far from optimal: they have unresolved issues such as insufficient usage of available bandwidth, inadaptable to dynamic bandwidth variants, and compromising

While Deep Reinforcement Learning has emerged as a de facto approach to many complex experience-driven networking problems, it remains challenging to deploy DRL into real systems. Due to the random exploration or half-trained deep neural networks during the online training process, the DRL agent may make unexpected decisions, which may lead to system performance degradation or even system crash. In

In delay-sensitive industrial internet of things (IIoT) applications, the age of information (AoI) is employed to characterize the freshness of information. Meanwhile, the emerging network function virtualization provides flexibility and agility for service providers to deliver a given network service using a sequence of virtual network functions (VNFs). However, suitable VNF placement and scheduling

In this paper, we spotlight vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications in 5G cellular networks. Cellular V2X (C-V2X) communications in 5G enable more advanced services with requirements of ultra-low latency and ultra-high reliability. How to make full use of the limited physical-layer resources is a key determinant to guarantee the quality of service (QoS). Therefore, resource allocation plays an essential

This paper investigates asynchronous reinforcement learning algorithms for joint buffer-aided relay selection and power allocation in the non-orthogonal-multiple-access (NOMA) relay network. With the hybrid NOMA/OMA transmission, we investigate joint relay selection and power allocation to maximize the throughput with the delay constraint. To solve this complicated high-dimensional optimization problem

The increasing number of wireless devices operating in unlicensed spectrum motivates the development of intelligent adaptive approaches to spectrum access. We consider decentralized contention-based medium access for base stations (BSs) operating on unlicensed shared spectrum, where each BS autonomously decides whether or not to transmit on a given resource. The contention decision attempts to maximize

When running in Parameter Server (PS), the Distributed Stochastic Gradient Descent (D-SGD) incurs significant communication delays and huge communication overhead due to the model synchronization. Moreover, considering the heterogeneity of computational capability among workers, traditional synchronization modes incur under-utilization of computational resources because fast workers have to wait for

Network function virtualization (NFV) is critical to the scalability and flexibility of various network services in the form of service function chains (SFCs), which refer to a set of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) chained in a specific order. However, the NFV performance is hard to fulfill the ever-increasing requirements of network services mainly due to the static orchestrations of SFCs. To tackle

Federated Learning (FL) is an emerging decentralized learning framework through which multiple clients can collaboratively train a learning model. However, a major obstacle that impedes the wide deployment of FL lies in massive communication traffic. To train high dimensional machine learning models (such as CNN models), heavy communication traffic can be incurred by exchanging model updates via the

We propose a novel formulation of the “effectiveness problem” in communications, put forth by Shannon and Weaver in their seminal work “ The Mathematical Theory of Communication ”, by considering multiple agents communicating over a noisy channel in order to achieve better coordination and cooperation in a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework. Specifically, we consider a multi-agent

Radio frequency fingerprint identification (RFFI) is an emerging device authentication technique that relies on the intrinsic hardware characteristics of wireless devices. This paper designs a deep learning-based RFFI scheme for Long Range (LoRa) systems. Firstly, the instantaneous carrier frequency offset (CFO) is found to drift, which could result in misclassification and significantly compromise

The time and monetary costs of training sophisticated deep neural networks are exorbitant, which motivates resource-limited users to outsource the training process to the cloud. Concerning that an untrustworthy cloud service provider may inject backdoors to the returned model, the user can leverage state-of-the-art defense strategies to examine the model. In this paper, we aim to develop robust backdoor

Machine learning (ML), especially deep learning (DL) techniques have been increasingly used in anomaly-based network intrusion detection systems (NIDS). However, ML/DL has shown to be extremely vulnerable to adversarial attacks, especially in such security-sensitive systems. Many adversarial attacks have been proposed to evaluate the robustness of ML-based NIDSs. Unfortunately, existing attacks mostly

Malicious data manipulation reduces the effectiveness of machine learning techniques, which rely on accurate knowledge of the input data. Motivated by real-world applications in network flow classification, we address the problem of robust online learning with delayed feedback in the presence of malicious data generators that attempt to gain favorable classification outcome by manipulating the data

Presents the table of contents for this issue of the publication.

Presents a listing of the editorial board, board of governors, current staff, committee members, and/or society editors for this issue of the publication.

The Second Call for Papers of the Series on Machine Learning in Communications and Networks has continued to receive a great number of high-quality papers covering various aspects of intelligent communication systems. In addition to 23 original contributions in response to the first call for papers, we include in this issue 5 articles submitted to the second call for papers. In the following, we provide

We provide the reader with an accessible yet rigorous introduction to Bayesian optimisation with Gaussian processes (BOGP) for the purpose of solving a wide variety of radio resource management (RRM) problems. We believe that BOGP is a powerful tool that has been somewhat overlooked in RRM research, although it elegantly addresses pressing requirements for fast convergence, safe exploration, and interpretability

With the increasing development of Internet of Things (IoT), the upcoming sixth-generation (6G) wireless network is required to support grant-free random access of a massive number of sporadic traffic devices. In particular, at the beginning of each time slot, the base station (BS) performs joint activity detection and channel estimation (JADCE) based on the received pilot sequences sent from active

While massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) has achieved tremendous success in both theory and practice, it faces a crisis of sharp performance degradation in moderate or high-mobility scenarios (e.g., 30 km/h), due to the breach of uplink-downlink channel duality. Such a “curse of mobility” has spurred the research on channel prediction in high-mobility scenarios. Instead of predicting channel

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS), which consists of a large number of tunable reflective elements, is capable of enhancing the wireless propagation environment in a cellular network by intelligently reflecting the electromagnetic waves from the base-station (BS) toward the users. The optimal tuning of the phase shifters at the IRS is, however, a challenging problem, because due to the passive nature

The recent development of deep learning methods provides a new approach to optimize the belief propagation (BP) decoding of linear codes. However, the limitation of existing works is that the scale of neural networks increases rapidly with the codelength, thus they can only support short to moderate codelengths. From the point view of practicality, we propose a high-performance neural min-sum (MS)

In this paper, we present a learning scheme for Joint Source-Channel Coding (JSCC) over analog independent additive noise channels. We formulate the learning problem by showing that the minimization loss function from rate-distortion theory, is upper bounded by the loss function of the Variational Autoencoder (VAE). We show that when the source dimension is greater than the channel dimension, the encoding

In this paper, we develop a knowledge-assisted deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm to design wireless schedulers in the fifth-generation (5G) cellular networks with time-sensitive traffic. Since the scheduling policy is a deterministic mapping from channel and queue states to scheduling actions, it can be optimized by using deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG). We show that a straightforward

The explosive growth of machine-type communications (MTC) devices poses critical challenges to the existing cellular networks. Therefore, how to support massive MTC devices with limited resources is an urgent problem to be solved. Bursty traffic is an important characteristic of MTC devices, which makes it difficult for agents to learn useful experience and has a negative impact on model convergence

A distributed machine learning platform needs to recruit many heterogeneous worker nodes to finish computation simultaneously. As a result, the overall performance may be degraded due to straggling workers. By introducing redundancy into computation, coded machine learning can effectively improve the runtime performance by recovering the final computation result through the first $k$ (out of the total

Due to the big size of data and limited data storage volume of a single computer or a single server, data are often stored in a distributed manner. Thus, performing large-scale machine learning operations with the distributed datasets through communication networks is often required. In this paper, we study the convergence rate of the distributed dual coordinate ascent for distributed machine learning

The cache-enabled multicast content pushing, which multicasts the content items to multiple users and caches them until requested, is a promising technique to alleviate the heavy network load by enhancing the traffic offloading. This, in turn, has called for the optimization of content pushing strategy while considering both the transmission and caching resources, which jointly result in the complicated

Using RF signals for wireless sensing has gained increasing attention. However, due to the unwanted multi-path fading in uncontrollable radio environments, the accuracy of RF sensing is limited. Instead of passively adapting to the environment, in this paper, we consider the scenario where an intelligent metasurface is deployed for sensing the existence and locations of 3D objects. By programming its

Accurate human mobility prediction is important for many applications in wireless networks, including intelligent content caching and prefetching, network optimization, etc. However, modeling mobility patterns has been a challenging problem due to the complicated human mobility patterns influenced by the long-term correlation with historical trajectories and context information, and the long time interval

High-accuracy localization technology has gained increasing attention in gesture and motion control and many diverse applications. Due to multi-path fading and blockage effects in indoor propagation, 0.1m-level precise localization is still challenging. Promising for 6G wireless communications, the Terahertz (THz) spectrum provides multi-GHz ultra-broad bandwidth. Applying the THz spectrum to indoor

Recent 5G trials have demonstrated the usefulness of the Network Slicing concept that delivers customizable services to new and under-serviced industry sectors. However, user mobility’s impact on the optimal resource allocation within and between slices deserves more attention. Slices and their dedicated resources should be offered where the services are to be consumed to minimize network latency and

Cyber attacks are becoming more sophisticated and, hence, more difficult to detect. Using efficient and effective machine learning techniques to detect network anomalies and intrusions is an important aspect of cyber security. A variety of machine learning models have been employed to help detect malicious intentions of network users. In this paper, we evaluate performance of recurrent neural networks

Prospective authors are requested to submit new, unpublished manuscripts for inclusion in the upcoming event described in this call for papers.

Prospective authors are requested to submit new, unpublished manuscripts for inclusion in the upcoming event described in this call for papers.

There is an ever-increasing demand for higher data traffic volume to be handled in wireless networks. Data-intensive applications such as high-resolution video and 3-D experience are emerging fast, and a variety and a high number of new devices with extended functionalities, sensing capabilities, and intelligence are introduced and adopted. As a consequence, next-generation wireless networks need to

Recent developments in nanotechnology herald nanometer-sized devices expected to bring light to a number of groundbreaking applications. Communication with and among nanodevices will be needed for unlocking the full potential of such applications. As the traditional communication approaches cannot be directly applied in nanocommunication, several alternative paradigms have emerged. Among them, electromagnetic

One of most important techniques for enabling the sixth-generation (6G) mobile wireless network lies in how to efficiently guarantee various stringent quality-of-service (QoS) performance-metrics to support the emerging massive Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications (mURLLC) in 6G. Correspondingly, finite blocklength coding (FBC) has been developed as an effective technique to significantly improve

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) and sub-Terahertz (THz) frequencies are expected to play a vital role in 6G wireless systems and beyond due to the vast available bandwidth of many tens of GHz. This paper presents an indoor 3-D spatial statistical channel model for mmWave and sub-THz frequencies based on extensive radio propagation measurements at 28 and 140 GHz conducted in an indoor office environment from

In this paper, a novel three-dimensional (3D) space-time-frequency (STF) non-stationary geometry-based stochastic model (GBSM) is proposed for the sixth generation (6G) terahertz (THz) wireless communication systems. The proposed THz channel model is very general having the capability to capture different channel characteristics in multiple THz application scenarios such as indoor scenarios, device-to-device

Wireless communications in the low terahertz band (0.1 THz–1 THz) is a promising candidate to enable ultra-high-rate vehicular networks beyond 5G. The successful design and adoption of such systems require a deep understanding of the low THz channel specifics in complex vehicular scenarios. In this paper, a comprehensive measurement campaign is reported with the aim of analyzing the wave propagation

Terahertz (THz) communication is widely considered as a key enabler for future 6G wireless systems. However, THz links are subject to high propagation losses and inter-symbol interference due to the frequency selectivity of the channel. Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) along with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) can be used to deal with these problems. Nevertheless, when

The radio frequency (RF) impairments of analog devices have been regarded as an important factor degrading the performance of Terahertz (THz) communications, where in-phase/quadrature (IQ) imbalance and phase noise (PN) are the two typical RF impairments at THz transceiver. In this paper, we investigate the channel estimation (CE) and equalization for THz receiver in the presence of wideband IQ imbalance

In this paper, we address a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication system based on generalized spatial modulation (GSM) and dual-polarized (DP) antennas in sub-TeraHertz (sub-THz) bands to improve the Spectral Efficiency (SE) while reducing the spatial correlation effect and the space occupancy. Moreover, the joint Maximum Likelihood (ML) detector and a Modified Ordered Block Minimum Mean-Squared

Terahertz (THz) wireless communication is envisioned as a promising technology, which is capable of providing ultra-high-rate transmission up to Terabit per second. However, some hardware imperfections, which are generally neglected in the existing literature concerning lower data rates and traditional operating frequencies, cannot be overlooked in the THz systems. Hardware imperfections usually consist

Wireless communication in the TeraHertz band (0.1–10 THz) is envisioned as one of the key enabling technologies for the future sixth generation (6G) wireless communication systems scaled up beyond massive multiple input multiple output (Massive-MIMO) technology. However, very high propagation attenuations and molecular absorptions of THz frequencies often limit the signal transmission distance and